07/09/12 – Eric Margolis – The Scott Horton Show

Dang, times are rough when Eric Margulies is quoting Joe Stalin.
Welcome back to the show, Eric.
How are you doing, man?
Thank you, Scott.
I'm alive and kicking, thank you.
And I do quote Stalin from time to time.
He had some great zingers.
Yeah, no man, no problem.
I guess that means killing people is really effective to me, it seems.
That was one of his favorite lines.
And I must say, it's a practice that seems to have come even to our own country, where knocking people off who are a problem seems to be the preferred solution these days.
Yeah, well, just ask Barack Obama.
He murdered that guy Anwar al-Awlaki's 16-year-old son.
That's called collateral damage.
No, I think he was the target, actually.
And both of them American-born American citizens there.
Yeah, that's right.
I was being facetious.
Oh, right.
Yeah, no, he was directly targeted by the president, a 16-year-old kid.
Anyway, so, this article, no man, no problem.
In this case, you're referring to Yasser Arafat.
Arafat, murdermostfoul at ericmargulies.com.
And for all I know, it's running at Lou Rockwell and everywhere else.
I hadn't had a chance to look around this morning.
So, by the way, let me sell your books here for a second.
War at the Top of the World and American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
Eric's been trotting the globe writing about this and that, armed group all over the place for decades.
And so, you know, as you know from listening to the show, he's worth paying very close attention to.
Take us back to 2004 and the death of Yasser Arafat.
When we last saw him, he was penned in in his headquarters, surrounded by tanks and machine guns in Jenin, in the West Bank.
I think it was Ramallah, but close by Jenin.
You know a lot.
I don't know where Ramallah or Jenin are.
Well, they're towns on the West Bank of the Palestinian area.
And the Israelis had Arafat penned in.
Nobel Peace Prize winner Arafat penned into his compound in Ramallah, which was surrounded by Israeli armored vehicles and troops.
The Israelis controlled his electricity, his food, his water, virtually everything coming in and out of the compound.
It was house arrest.
The Israeli leader then, Ariel Sharon, had tried to kill Arafat many times.
But the Americans, who were still hoping to impose some kind of peace agreement for Palestine, wanted him alive.
So they kept saying to Sharon, no, you just can't go in and kill him.
But one day Arafat got tremendously ill.
He looked completely different from the Arafat I'd known.
He gravely ill.
He was flown to a French military hospital outside of Paris, where he died a few days later.
And the French said, for reasons unknown.
So that's the genesis of the story.
Yeah, you weren't the only one.
I thought that at the same time.
I think a lot of people did.
Like, boy, he looks gaunt all of a sudden, don't he?
Something's going on there.
I've been watching him for a long time, Scott.
I knew there was something tremendously wrong with him.
Well, the thing is, you could say maybe he had stage four cancer or something, but they didn't say that.
They said, I don't know.
Well, the Israelis were spreading the story that he had HIV.
But there was some kind of earthquake going on inside the man.
But I was amazed that the French kind of suppressed it, covered it up.
They never really dug too deep.
I wrote at the time that Arafat had probably been poisoned.
And Arafat's wife, Suha, turned down requests for autopsies, foolishly, and had the body buried.
And there things stood.
You know, he probably died from some kind of cerebral hemorrhage was the story.
But everybody in the Middle East was pretty well convinced that he was poisoned.
Now, what happened just recently, the Al Jazeera network gathered together a lot of Arafat's personal possessions from the time they took them to the highly esteemed Swiss Forensic Institute in Lausanne, Switzerland.
And there they found, amazingly, they found traces of polonium-210, a nuclear particle, in Arafat's clothing and things that had been stained by his sweat, his hat, his undergarments, his shirt.
There was polonium all over it.
Polonium does not occur naturally in nature, except in infinitesimal amounts.
You don't pick up polonium from where polonium has to be put into you.
And so the chances are very high that it was, in fact, polonium poisoning.
And Suha, Arafat's wife, has just given agreement for the body to be finally exhumed, because the Swiss believe that they will still find traces of polonium in the teeth and bones.
Well, now quickly, I want to get back to Arafat, I guess, in the next segment, or hey, maybe here in just a second, but what do you think of the implications for the assassination of Alexander Litvinenko in England, which was blamed on Russia at the time?
He's the only other guy we've heard of being poisoned by polonium lately, right?
Does that mean anything or not?
Well, it's certainly very curious.
Polonium is a horrible way to die, because it progressively destroys your internal organs and makes you violently ill.
Litvinenko was killed.
I've written about this, too, because Alexander Litvinenko, he was a former FSB, that's the successor to the KGB, FSB agent.
He wrote a book in which he claimed that in 1999 there was a series of apartment bombings across Russia that produced widespread national panic.
And he wrote that the FSB was behind these bombings and actually caught a group of FSB agents planting bombs in one of the apartments.
And the net result of these explosions, the panic, and the scream, everybody went terrorism crazy in Russia, and Vladimir Putin was swept to power.
Litvinenko wrote this book, and then he fled to England, where he was apparently assassinated by another former FSB agent who slipped polonium into his tea, and he died.
I add a point that polonium can only be produced by a small number of highly sophisticated nuclear reactors.
In 2004, when Arafat was poisoned, there were no such reactors in the Middle East, with the exception of one country, which was Israel.
That doesn't mean Israel did it, but it does mean that the polonium had to come from some country with an advanced reactor.
So you wouldn't necessarily bet that the polonium must have come from the same place for both hits?
And by the way, the whole thing about the apartment bombings, that was in the Austin American-Statesman, which was probably just reprinted in the New York Times, that the cops caught the agents red-handed and that they were going to ramp back up the war in Chechnya to enhance Putin's prestige on the eve of the soft coup of New Year's 2000.
Come on, everybody knew that back then.
That wasn't even a conspiracy theory.
That was in the freaking Times.
Yeah, but nobody paid attention to it.
See, that's always my mistake, is paying attention.
And Litvinenko's crime, of course, was publishing a book in Russia on this topic.
It didn't matter what people in Hackensack, New Jersey thought, but when Russians read this, anyway, he was murdered.
Polonium apparently leaves no signature.
It doesn't set off radiation detectors, so it can be transported in a little vial across borders.
Well, either the polonium came from Russia or it came from Israel.
Or one thing I postulated in 2004 is that a large number, considerable number, the KGB had a very large poison department.
They were experts in making untraceable poisons.
Russians loved using poisons.
And a number of these Russian scientists emigrated to Israel.
So it's possible that they brought the technology with them.
Yeah, you cite in the article quite a few examples of enemies of Israel taken out that way, killed that way.
Sorry, I'm trying to be euphemism-free on this show.
We'll be right back with Eric Margulies.
EricMargulies.com is his website.
The piece is Arafat, Murder Most Foul, and we'll get right back to that in a sec.
Hey, y'all, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Eric Margulies.
Oh, yeah, I should remember all the time to say.
The website is ScottHortonShow.com.
ScottHortonShow.com, 2,500 interviews going back to 2003.
Arafat, Murder Most Foul at EricMargulies.com.
And you have a few examples in here of the Israeli spy services, as they call them, going around and poisoning people to death.
So, you know, just to bolster your speculation that Mossad was behind this one.
And then, I don't know, further, if you feel like, go ahead, say whatever you like about your speculation about Russian scientists who emigrated to Israel being, you know, even more specifically, behind these assassinations.
Well, it's speculation.
They may have brought the technology.
But Israel has the Middle East's most advanced biowarfare head center near Haifa.
And they have very advanced science in Israel.
So they're also quite capable of making their own toxic products, like the attempt to kill Hamas leader Khalid Mashal, where agents, Israeli agents, squirted some kind of poison into his ear.
That began killing him until the Americans got really...
Bill Clinton called up the Israelis and told them to get an antidote immediately to Amman, where it happened, which the Israelis were forced to do.
It's a very nasty business.
And I'll tell you, the tragedy of the Arafat murder was that Ariel Sharon had vowed to murder, to kill Arafat.
He was set on that.
And for two reasons.
Number one, he just had a personal vendetta.
But secondly, Arafat was the only Palestinian leader likely to bring all the factions together and produce a comprehensive peace agreement between Israel and Palestine.
And Sharon did not want that.
In other words, he was the only one who could have been able to create an actual credible state on the West Bank, as we're saying.
That's right.
Because so many Palestinians opposed this crappy little state that they were being given on a portion of land and all the best land taken away and everything else.
But it's the best that they could get.
And Arafat would have been able, I believe, to convince them.
But Sharon and the extreme right-wingers in his government, his backers, didn't want Arafat to do that.
They don't want any Palestinian state.
You're saying the Israelis didn't want him to be able to convince the other factions to come together to go ahead and capitulate on some great part of the argument, the land in question.
And that they didn't want the capitulation.
They didn't want the peace deal on their terms.
They would rather have continued conflict.
Yes, that's my cynical interpretation.
And remember the Israeli leader, Yitzhak Rabin, who also became a very strong promoter of the peace deal that was first enunciated at the Oslo Accords.
And he was murdered.
So it looks like the partisans of greater Israel don't want any compromise.
They just want to keep plugging away until they have all the territory.
And that really is the name of the game, right?
Is just building one more apartment complex until there's just nowhere left for a Palestinian, Muslim, or Christian to live on the West Bank anymore.
That's what Sharon was advocating.
And that is what is going on now.
And partly funded by American taxpayer money.
Well, you know, I think you can donate directly to the IDF or friends of the IDF or something and write it off on your taxes.
Yeah, and there are all kinds of different charitable groups operating in the West Bank and things that you can give money to.
The Treasury Department just closes its eyes.
Well, that's an amazing thing.
Alright, so now speaking of Israel, a guest I was talking with last week, maybe it was the week before, I don't know, I can't keep track of these things, was opining that Israel doesn't have a whole lot to do with this war in Syria and that they don't really even want it.
Because after all, you'd have to be an idiot to really want a regime change and the bloodbath that's going to come after the regime falls and the shares of power are re-divided among the different factions in that country.
And so, you know, they'd have to not just be bad on these issues, but really stupid and crazy to support something like this.
So therefore, they must not be.
Also, they don't seem to be talking about it very much.
It's not like we hear Netanyahu daily saying Assad must fall at the top of his lungs kind of thing.
But so, I wonder if you think that that's really right, that now that the lacunics are getting the fall of the Assad regime like they always wanted, they're thinking twice, or they're just laying low because the French and the Americans and the Turks and everybody else, the Saudis and Qataris are doing such a great job at taking the lead.
That's partially true.
You know, the Israelis got along with the Assad regime for a long time, even though Israel still holds Syria's Golan Heights, which is a major issue between them.
But, you know, he was a dictator they could do business with.
Assad, you mean?
You said Arafat, but we know what you meant.
Sorry, Assad was a dictator they could deal with.
And so the official policy of the Israeli government is to keep a very low voice on the issue.
However, comma, Israel's lobby in the United States, particularly the neocon lobby, are beating the war drums against Syria.
They've taken up the lead and are pushing hard as they can for war against Syria, not to stop the killing or to liberate Syria or any stuff like that, but because the road to Tehran is alleged to run through Damascus, and knocking off Syria is believed to be a major blow to Iran.
Yeah, well, that certainly makes sense.
It just seems like, and we've talked about this for years, you would have to be at least pretty heartless to want to be pushing a regime change like this from the outside.
I mean, it seems like if people in Syria can somehow secede from the power over them, that's all to the great.
But if it's because Israel and the United States and the king of Saudi Arabia all conspired to set them free, then it doesn't sound to me like freedom is going to be the most likely outcome at all.
It sounds like it's going to be a giant bloodbath as the formerly powerful become formerly.
This is pure colonialism.
Washington, which has no interest in Syria whatsoever, historical or actual or strategic, has determined, I mean, that Hillary Clinton keeps saying, you know, Assad must go.
It sounds very strange, but the U.S. is increasingly militant that it's got to go.
And yet, last week, or even worse, Hillary Clinton actually threatened Russia, which has over 2,000 nuclear warheads pointed at the United States.
She said Russia will bear the consequences and will pay consequences for trying to block the intervention, you know, in the Security Council.
God dang, I missed that one.
Really, she said that?
Yes, the United States.
So Hillary Clinton thinks that we ought to risk going to war over Syria with the Russians.
What are we going to do?
What are the consequences?
Are we going to bomb Moscow because the Russians won't play ball?
Now, wait a minute.
You said this, but let's be perfectly clear.
You're saying there is no American imperial interest in Syria.
It's just that Israel would like to weaken Iran, and this is one way to do it.
That's it.
Well, America has been monkeying around in Syria since 1948, and has staged a number of attempted coups, some successful, some unsuccessful, in Syria.
But Syria is not really within the American sphere of influence.
It's not essential to the American Raj, or the American empire, as I call it.
Syria is stuck out because of its disobedience.
It's a rogue state.
It doesn't do what it's told by the West.
But really, is it worth bombing Moscow and losing Washington over Damascus?
I don't think many Americans would think so.
Yeah, no, certainly not.
But then again, I mean, look how far they expanded NATO.
I mean, Poland is in NATO now, right?
Right there on Russia's border.
That's right, and I don't know, the Kentucky or someplace like that, National Guard is flying into Estonia, I think, or flew in last weekend staging war exercises there.
I bet they're all breathing a sigh of relief, right?
Back doorstep.
So we're taking very provocative actions.
We've done it with Georgia.
I wrote about this recently.
Now we're involved in some imbroglio over Azerbaijan and other squalid little oil dictatorship.
We seem to be be needling the Russians.
And it's interesting, Hillary Clinton blasted, and that awful woman at the UN we have, Susan Rice, blasted Russia for vetoing resolutions.
How horrible.
The U.S. has vetoed 2,400 resolutions against Israel.
All right, we got to go.
EricMargulies.com, everybody.
ScottHortonShow.com.
Thanks, Eric.
Pleasure, Scott.
See you all tomorrow.