All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and our next guest on the show today is Jack Hunter, the Southern Avenger.
He's a radio show host in, I think, Charleston, South Carolina, right?
And writes for the American Conservative magazine as well.
Welcome to the show.
Good to be with you, Scott, as always.
And yes, it is Charleston, South Carolina.
All right, good.
I like it when I get things right.
That's better than screwing them up.
All right, so is John McCain Al-Qaeda agent, double agent for Ayman al-Zawahiri?
Well, Scott, in fact, we learned, breaking news, last week we learned, without a doubt, that John McCain supports al-Qaeda.
No insans or buffs about it.
He supports al-Qaeda.
He was very explicit about it.
All right, well, prove it.
Well, John McCain flew to Libya.
He met with the Libyan rebel leaders, and he had this to say, quote, I have met with these brave fighters, and they are not al-Qaeda.
To the contrary, they are Libyan patriots who want to liberate their nation.
We should help them do it.
Now, the problem with John McCain's statement, he says they're not al-Qaeda, is who says the Libyan rebel leaders are al-Qaeda?
Libyan rebel leaders.
Reported in the UK Telegraph out of London just a week before John McCain flew to Libya and made his statement.
They were discussing and reporting on a gentleman who was one of the prominent Libyan rebel leaders.
His name is Abdel Hakim al-Hassadi.
Reported the Telegraph, quote, Mr. al-Hassadi insisted his fighters are patriots and good Muslims, not terrorists, but added that the members of al-Qaeda are also good Muslims and are fighting against the invader.
Later in the article, Mr. al-Hassadi admitted that within his ranks of the Libyan rebels, there are plenty of al-Qaeda members.
My point is that there is more evidence at this point.
Linking John McCain to al-Qaeda than there ever was linking Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda.
Now, I'm a talk radio jerk.
I'm a conservative columnist.
And I'm here to tell you that John McCain supports al-Qaeda.
If you think that is being duplicitous or an intellectual stretch, you have a short memory.
Because in 2003, we went to war based on part by the Bush administration telling the American people that Saddam Hussein was linked to al-Qaeda.
So if you think I'm being ridiculous, I want everybody out there to remember that we just went to war with a country that had never attacked us, had nothing to do with 9-11, based on something far more ridiculous than I'm saying right now.
There quite literally is more evidence linking John McCain to al-Qaeda than Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda.
So I stand by my statement.
Without hesitance, John McCain supports al-Qaeda.
Yeah, well, I'm with you there, too.
I mean, there's been a lot of different reports, a couple of things in Counterpunch, too, I guess, about the number of Eastern Libyans who traveled to Iraq to fight with that very small percentage of the Sunni-based insurgency known as al-Qaeda in Iraq or the Islamic State of Iraq, about 2% of the Sunni insurgency back in the days of the Civil War there.
And they're veterans of fighting against American soldiers there.
And these are now the guys that not only Barack Obama's backing, but that John McCain is insisting that Barack Obama escalate his support for these men.
That's exactly right.
And I believe that even after the invasion of Iraq by the United States in 2003, the insurgency, one in four our intelligence found came from Libya, many of which are now the Libyan resistance.
Well, one in four of the foreign fighters, not of the insurgents themselves.
Exactly, the foreign fighters, excuse me.
Thanks for correcting me.
And look, we're not being apologetic for Qaddafi here.
The point is that today's allies are tomorrow's enemies and vice versa.
And when you or I or Pat Buchanan or Ron Paul makes this point, John McCain and his friends are the quickest to call us isolationists for even daring to point that out.
Well, I'm going to be quick to call him a terrorist.
Because I'm using George W. Bush, what he said after 9-11, if I'll remind everybody.
Quote, we will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.
Well, what was John McCain doing last week?
Well, what was he doing a year and a half ago?
He was over there supporting the dictatorship of Muammar Qaddafi and calling him a great partner in the war on terrorism and trying to finalize and shake hands and get the final ink on the documents to sell him a bunch of armored personnel carriers and equipment so that he could repair his C-130s.
That's exactly right.
I think it's worth, Scott, re-examining.
I made the claim that we have more evidence linking John McCain to al-Qaeda than we had linking Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda.
Let's re-examine that evidence.
In December of 2001, Dick Cheney said it was, quote, pretty well confirmed that there was a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq.
In 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said there was, quote, bulletproof evidence of ties between al-Qaeda and Iraq.
Making his case for war in 2003, President George W. Bush said in the State of the Union Address, quote, Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of al-Qaeda.
If you did not believe him then, in 2004, Bush reconfirmed his position, saying, quote, the reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al-Qaeda is because there was a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda.
Now, that last statement, that 2004 statement, was in reaction to the 9-11 commission report.
It also provoked guffaws from the press corps in the cabinet room at the time.
It did, because they knew that they were going to.
An assertion like that.
It was a great little topology there.
That's exactly right.
Well, let's remind everybody what the 9-11 commission report said.
It said, quote, to date, we have seen no evidence that these or the earlier contacts ever developed into a collaborative operational relationship.
And this is key here.
Nor have we seen evidence indicating that Iraq cooperated with al-Qaeda in developing or carrying out any attacks against the United States.
Now, that piece of information from the 9-11 commission report was backed up by the CIA, the FBI, the National Security Council, and virtually the entire intelligence community.
It was completely discarded.
That's why I'm telling you today that there's more evidence linking John McCain to al-Qaeda than Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda.
And I'll get into that evidence as soon as you want, Scott.
Do we need to take a break or anything?
No, we've still got a couple of minutes.
Go right ahead.
OK, well, let's do it.
Here's the evidence for John McCain's links to al-Qaeda.
Besides the obvious, I'm just going to Libya.
I want to make the case that the Libyan rebel leaders are al-Qaeda.
We've already heard from Mr. al-Hassadi, who is a Libyan rebel leader, and says not only that al-Qaeda are in his ranks, but that they are patriots and good Muslims.
Well, The Telegraph reported, quote, that Mr. al-Hassadi was a member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, or LIFG.
Even though the LIFG is not part of the al-Qaeda organization, the US military's West Point Academy has said that the two share an increasingly cooperative relationship.
Earlier this month, al-Qaeda even issued a call for supporters to back the Libyan rebellion.
Now, last Saturday, we saw a headline in The Telegraph that read, quote, al-Qaeda among Libyan rebel leaders, NATO chief fears.
So who said there's evidence of a link between Libyan rebels and al-Qaeda?
US and British intelligence, NATO leaders, and the Libyan rebels themselves.
Who says there is not a link?
John McCain, who even called the rebels heroes.
Once again, John McCain supports al-Qaeda, and there is more evidence of that than Saddam Hussein ever even having a link to al-Qaeda, no matter how you cut it.
Yeah, he sure sounds guilty to me.
Well, so how about we just declare him an unprivileged enemy belligerent and lock him in the gulag in Guantanamo Bay, dose him up with a bunch of psychosis-inducing malarial drugs, I don't know, time and stress positions, keep him up for a few weeks until he confesses.
We need to evade John McCain.
He points his finger at other people who are not guilty or what.
That's exactly right.
The point of this exercise, and people out there, some people out there are probably thinking that I'm being completely ridiculous.
The point is, even if I'm being ridiculous, what I'm saying is less ridiculous than what took this nation to war.
And what's even more tragic than that, some people still believe that.
I'll talk to some of my fellow conservatives, who still have one leg stuck in that Bush era, who will say, well, Jack, there were links to Saddam, who say, no, there wasn't.
Your government lies to you.
They lie to you on a regular basis.
They lie to you about domestic policy and heaven.
Who would have guessed that they would lie to you about foreign policy as well?
Well, when it comes to, as long as the question is providing aid and comfort to the enemy and things like that, there's nothing that John McCain could have done for al-Qaeda better than supporting the war in Iraq, which he was just basically, mouthing whatever Bill Kristol said in the entire run-up to that war and got us into that war, which, as Michael Shoyer said, was the hoped-for but unexpected gift to al-Qaeda.
And they at least were able to train a bunch of new recruits to go home to Libya to fight another day, at the very least.
That's where these guys came from.
John McCain gave them their training ground.
That's exactly right.
And even in the 2008 campaign, al-Qaeda endorsed John McCain, if any of you remember that.
Well, and I bet you if we go back in the 1980s, he was all about supporting the Mujahideen in Afghanistan against the Russians, too.
You know it.
John McCain is a traitor to America.
I'm in Al-Zawahiri's secret sleeper agent, I think.
All right, hold tight, everybody.
It's Jack Hunter, the Southern Avenger from the American Conservative Magazine and South Carolina Radio.
We'll be right back.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
And listen, I keep forgetting to find time to say this, so let me just get this out of the way.
If you're one of those people, one of those Americans who's interested in keeping up with this whole royal wedding in England, I suggest you find a board and drive a couple of nails through the end of it and then beat yourself in the head with that until you don't care anymore about the royal wedding over there in England.
I'm pretty sure that's the solution to your problem.
Sorry, but that's the way I feel about it.
All right, so now back to our guest.
It's Jack Hunter, the Southern Avenger.
He's a writer for the American Conservative Magazine and does radio there in Charleston, South Carolina.
And you know what?
I'm almost done with this John McCain nonsense.
I just can't stand to talk about him for this long in a row, really, Jack.
But one more thing before we change gears here.
You know the real big story of the day we got to talk about.
But along the lines of what we were saying about how the Iraq War was the hoped for but unexpected gift to al-Qaeda, the best thing that ever happened to them, sustained them, made them seem right to a lot of people for a long time there.
That's the exact same thing we're doing in Libya now is invading another Sunni Arab country.
Of course, whether they get rid of Qaddafi sometime soon or not, they're going to end up having to put ground troops there and hold bogus elections and train up an army and they'll stand up and we'll stand down and all this nonsense like Afghanistan and Iraq.
There's no way out of it now other than Obama saying, you're right, I'm the worst president ever.
I lost a war and whatever before the next election, which isn't going to happen.
And so here's John McCain on the ground, not just directly doing the dirty work for these al-Qaeda guys, but helping to create a situation which over the long term is really going to help them a lot, especially if you take into account how many Libyans went to Iraq to fight in the last war.
Well, that's exactly right.
John McCain, who likes to portray himself as a great soldier and patriot, is basically asking Americans to help the people in Libya that they're asking our troops to fight in other countries.
The insanity is mind-boggling.
And let me ask you this, when John McCain's good buddy, Lindsey Graham, said over the weekend, we need to cut the head off the snake in Libya, which basically means ousting the Qaddafi regime.
All right, let's say we do that.
Nobody likes Qaddafi.
You don't like Qaddafi.
I don't.
McCain does it.
Whatever.
Sure.
Not anymore.
Right, exactly.
They used to about a year ago.
Let's say we do that.
The Libyan rebel leaders take hold, and in part, is an al-Qaeda-influenced regime.
Is that good for the United States?
The point is, you don't help Qaddafi.
You don't help the Libyan rebel leaders.
You stay out.
John McCain wants to be involved in as many conflicts as possible.
If you'll remember, a few years ago, when they had the situation with Russia and the nation of Georgia, John McCain was the first to say, we're all Georgians now.
Now, what Americans thought that?
Nobody, just John McCain.
He wanted to get us involved there.
He wants us to be in Libya.
He wants us to be in Iran.
He wants us to be in Korea.
He wants us to be in Pakistan, Yemen, you name it.
He is a neoconservative through and through, and is getting a lot of help from the liberal internationalists in the Obama administration, Hillary Clinton and Obama himself, who have the same Wilsonian vision and is not good for America.
These people are the enemies of America.
I want you to understand that.
When they tell you they are protecting us from the enemies of America, we need to protect ourselves from America's enemies who are in Washington, DC.
That's our true enemies.
Indeed.
All right, now let's talk about the good news.
Today's the day.
Ron Paul's announcing he's running for president.
Yes, they're very excited.
But of course, Ron Paul's crazy, because he suggests we shouldn't get involved in Libya or any of these countries, and even suggests that we're doing that, creates the terrorist threat, which gives guys like John McCain the justification for going over there.
Heaven forbid we'd reassess the craziness we just described it as American foreign policy.
Well, that's my favorite part of this thing, is that his name is synonymous with the America was at war in the Middle East before 9-11, and it was a blowback consequence kind of thing.
And they're going to have to refight that fight over and over again over the next year and a half.
And this is a discussion that the logical, rational side still has not won yet at all.
The premise still stands in American society at large, I think, that they hate us because we're good, and their bad religion motivates them to hate good things.
And so we're defending ourselves.
Those planes came out of the clear blue sky.
You saw them.
And Ron is the only one who says, no, no, no.
We were bombing Iraq from Saudi Arabia from 1991 on, 1990 on.
Well, Scott, a significant portion of Americans, if not a majority, do indeed believe that.
But there's less to believe that than before.
Better yet, there's more that are willing to listen to the other side.
We had, in 2008, a Republican Party that was dedicated to being the war party.
Joe Lieberman was a great guy, and Ron Paul was showing the door.
2012 was a different situation.
Not only did most grassroots conservatives, despite what McCain and the neocons are doing, oppose this Libyan intervention.
I mean, listen to talk radio.
The big guys, they all oppose the Libyan intervention.
But the Tea Party out there aren't as gung-ho about Iraq as they once were.
A majority of Americans, including conservatives, per Grover Norquist's recent poll data, say that we need to get out of Afghanistan.
They certainly don't like Libya.
It's gonna be a different race this time when Ron Paul raises these foreign policy questions.
Not only for Americans in general, but more importantly, from my perspective, on the right.
Things are wide open.
Afghanistan is Barack Obama's war.
This is not about supporting a Republican president, his foreign policy nonsense.
It's about deciding between the neoconservatives and the liberals and their foreign policy nonsense, or real conservatives like Ron Paul, who not only make the case, we shouldn't be fighting these wars, but we don't have the money.
That's where the right focus is.
And that message is going to be very popular.
We can't borrow money from China to do this anymore.
Most conservatives agree with that.
Yep.
Well, and here's the other thing about it too.
You're right.
It's really, I guess, because of the change of the atmosphere of the whole thing.
Before, even through the whole season, really, Romney and Giuliani and McCain were able to sit up there and just laugh at Ron and pretend like he was ridiculous.
Remember John McCain told him, well, maybe you ought to read Adam Smith.
You ever heard of him?
And whatever, you know, they just treat him like he was ridiculous or whatever.
This time, they're actually going to have to engage the debate.
And the smartest guy they have is Newt Gingrich, who is the least likable person in all of North America.
And he hadn't even been in power in 15 years.
None of the rest of them know anything about anything.
I mean, Mitt Romney's ghost-written book is just nonsense and fluff and slogans and let David Petraeus lead us to the new age and bunch of crap in there.
None of these guys are going to be able to put up a fight against Ron Paul on individual liberties, the Bill of Rights, peace, and especially on economics.
They're just all just going to have to sit there and obviously get schooled along with the rest of the audience.
There's going to be no way for them to even pretend that they can really engage the discussion with him on his level at all.
Well, that's exactly right.
I had the unfortunate, I had to review Mitt Romney's book.
It is one of the scariest things I've read because he takes the worst of Obama and the worst of Bush and combines them into the Mitt Romney package.
A guy like Newt Gingrich, who is a hardcore neocon, is no dummy.
You're right, he's the most intelligent man as far as the smartest guy in the room.
But his Republican brand is yesterday's news as is his candidacy.
Here's a guy who really, his only attachment to the right at this point, it was the same as McCain's.
He wants to bomb the hell out of everybody.
He wants us to be in Korea with some sort of shockwave thing.
He wants to bomb Iran.
I'm pretty sure he wants to bomb Libya.
I can't imagine that not being the case.
But you know, here's a guy who got together with Hillary Clinton in 2005 to address the healthcare situation.
Here's a guy who flirted with the green energy and cap and trade and all that kind of stuff, not to mention if you're a socialist or a conservative, a guy who went through three marriages and so on and so on.
He's a weak candidate, no matter how you cut it.
And you're right, the rump of the Republican Party.
You're Rick Santorum, who is a detestable Bush Republican in every way that term could possibly be spun.
A guy like Tim Pawlenty, they are yesterday's news.
America is where Ron Paul is.
I don't care if it's foreign policy or domestic policy or the national debt, that's where the conservative movement is and that's where a broad spectrum of Americans are who are upset with Obama and don't like, still don't like what they saw with George W. Bush.
You're absolutely right, Scott.
So then what that means, just like with Libya, you speculate a couple of steps ahead where this goes.
That means that hopefully a lot of people are really going to learn the lesson about how completely and totally broken the American system is, not the Obama government, the American government, because Ron ain't gonna win.
Because the Republican Party will never in a million years let someone who believes in peace and liberty be their candidate.
It will not happen, no matter what.
If 200 million Americans demand it, he still won't get that nomination.
Well, anything can happen.
You know, nobody saw Obama coming from left field quite literally, and he did.
I always tell people in 1992, Bill Clinton wasn't even in the running for top tier candidates.
He was a nobody.
He won the presidency.
Things, there can be revolutions in this country.
We're already seeing it about how people think.
To quote David Axelrod, who was asked who will win the Republican nomination, he said that in the normal election cycle, it would have been Mitt Romney.
This is no normal election cycle.
If anybody's game, Ron Paul's message is the message where Americans and conservatives are at.
And Scott, I don't share your pessimism.
I'm a little bit more optimistic than that.
Is it likely that he'll get the nomination?
Probably not, because of the reasons you mentioned.
Is it possible?
It certainly is, and this is the year where it could be more possible than any other.
Yeah, well, I am optimistic in a sense, because I think it's going to be, again, the greatest speaking tour on behalf of peace and liberty ever, only, you know, to the millionth power this time compared to last time.
And I think a lot, I think even though he won't get the nomination, that's going to wake a lot of people up to just how broken this system is.
That it's not just Bush, it's not just Obama, it's the government itself, the empire itself completely out of control that's got to be confronted.
And I'm looking forward to that intellectual revolution, if not a practical one.
Absolutely.
Anyway, thanks very much for your time.
I really do appreciate it.
Good to talk to you, Scott.
Take care.
All right, everybody, that is Jack Hunter, the Southern Avenger.
You can read what he writes at the American Conservative Magazine.
You can hear what he writes at YouTube.com.
And you can hear him on the radio in Charleston, South Carolina.
