Welcome to Keith.

And I don't try to on anyone in the Libertarian Institute.

Today I'm joined by the director of the Libertarian Institute, Scott Horton, who is now launching the Scott Horton Academy.

It's already launched.

You can visit it.

Scott What is the Scott Horton Academy?

Thanks, Keith.

Well, what it is, is it's long form courses taught by me and a bunch of other great experts and including more and more all the time that we're adding, essentially focusing of course on foreign policy, but other libertarian topics as well.

And so to start, we have my very long course on America's Middle East wars, along with the great James Bovard on 40 years of investigative journalism, Ramsey Barud on the reality of the Israel Palestinian conflict from the point of view of a Palestinian refugee, and also William Bupert from the Institute on how America lost every war since 1945.

And it's really great stuff.

I'm working now on editing my course on the Cold War with Russia.

And then, but we also have all kinds of other great courses coming up, including CJ Kilmer on how Woodrow Wilson was the worst person, whoever lived, Adam Francisco on debunking Christian Zionism, and all other great stuff.

Looks like we're going to have a course from Bob Murphy on the Great Depression.

We're going to probably have Darryl Cooper do a course for us and all kinds of things.

So it's really a big deal.

It's the idea, Keith, was that, you know, as you know, when you go up against the Hawks, as you did a week or two ago there, we always win.

The problem is there's just not enough of us.

So my idea was see if we can get all the Scott Wharton Show fans out there and, you know, people who read my books and stuff, see if I can get them like really schooled on this stuff up to speed enough that they can now really join our movement too and be leaders too and take on these war Hawks and smash them themselves so that you and I can maybe take a week off or something sometimes or, you know, double our effort and and really make a difference out there.

So that's what's for it's Tom Wood, says Scott Horton slowed down taking you through and explaining all that you need to know about the Middle East wars and American imperial expansion in Eastern Europe and the rest.

So there you go, Scott Worden, academy.com and I'll send a note to Harley right now to make promo code Keith and people save 10% about that.

Terrific.

Yeah.

Bob Murphy's book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to the New Deal and Great Depression, I believe is the full title of the book.

That book is just mind blowing.

Every page, philosophically, empirically.

He is just terrific.

I cannot wait to read that.

So let's continue to take on the Warhawks.

Dick Cheney has passed away.

Unfortunately, we are all still mourning his death, but he has a book for us titled In My Time that you and I can respond to.

Let's start on page 330I stressed the importance of going after state sponsors of terrorism by holding them accountable for the acts of the terrorists.

We would begin to deny terrorists safe haven and bases from which to operate.

2 elements they needed to plot, plan and execute attacks.

When the NFC convened the next morning, September 12th, the subject was primarily Afghanistan, where Al Qaeda's leadership had plotted the attacks on the United States and trained those who carried them out.

Was 911 planned in Afghanistan and were the Saudis training in Afghanistan?

Possibly in part Mohammed Atta and Ramzi bin al Sheb certainly travelled there to meet with Osama bin Laden, as far as you know, if they were practicing their Muay Thai or whatever.

While they're, I don't know that I, I tend to doubt that.

And of course, most of their flight training and so forth took place in the United States, putting the lie to his entire claim here about the safe haven of Afghanistan.

We've seen since America withdrew from Afghanistan, we don't have terrorists launching international attacks out of there.

It was never the Taliban's interest for al Qaeda to do that.

And they had attempted to prevent al Qaeda from doing so for a long time and, of course, failed in that effort, not leading to our war there.

But of course, you know, a terrorist attack can be plotted by one man inside his own skull or by three or four guys taking a walk in the park or sitting around in an apartment, right?

There's we have, like, for example, Ramsey Ben Alshi was not allowed in the country.

So he apparently helped to organize the plot from Spain.

There's nothing special about Spain that makes it a safe haven other than its land where a man's feet were standing.

But he could have been anywhere else to do the same thing.

And so he's mixing the safe haven myth there, you know, with essentially, he's bringing that up to already try to launder and justify attacking Iraq, to pretend that somehow there's a safe haven for bin Ladenites in Saddam Hussein's country that could be used as a base then against the United States.

We know there's absolutely a lie that Saddam Hussein was terrified of Osama bin Laden, that the story that the Iraqi diplomat Al Ani had met with Muhammad Atta in Prague in the Czech Republic, and according to the Israelis, received a flask of anthrax from him and everything was a total hoax and a lie, never true.

That was what they, you know, hung their whole argument on.

Doug Feith even briefed W Bush on that lie in the Oval Office.

Most of the administration refused to peddle it, but the neocons and Dick Cheney certainly did.

And Cheney specifically continued to bring up that fake connection over and over again.

And what's ironical, of course, about all this is I was just reading a thing this morning that was a submission to the military commissions court in down in Guantanamo Bay that the journalist Kit Klarenberg linked to.

And it's, of course, all about the real story behind 9/11, which was that you had al Qaeda guys who were tracked by the CIA directly from a meeting with leaders of the bin Laden movement in Malaysia.

And who many of those same people went on to blow up the USS Cole in the year 2000.

And they tracked two of these men to Bangkok, Thailand, and then directly to LAX, and then where a Saudi intelligence officer gave them a place to stay down in San Diego and where they lived in this country for a year and a half.

And these are the pilots that crashed Flight 77 into the Pentagon.

And it's clear from your journalism that's been done over this time and from material that's been leaked from the lawyers who are suing Saudi Arabia in court for their responsibility for this.

The CIA was using the Saudis and attempting to recruit these men as double agents inside al Qaeda.

And then when that failed, they didn't do anything and they didn't tell the FBI boy, you better find these guys and wrap them up and get rid of them for us out of this country.

They didn't do that.

They kind of walked away whistling with their hands in their pockets and hoped everything would be OK.

And it wasn't.

These guys were part of the September 11th attack.

And who was it that helped them do it?

Literally, Saudi intelligence working with the CIA now figuratively is more important because the question then is why?

And I don't think that it's fair for people to just leap to the conclusion that, yeah, because Dick Cheney and the CIA wanted September 11th to happen so badly.

And if you look at the actual evidence of how all this played out, that doesn't actually seem to be the case.

It seems more like the CIA and the FBI were, well, particularly the CIA were doing an extremely lousy job where they put these, the people at Alex Station who are all analysts and not covert operatives in charge of trying to recruit these men.

And they didn't know what they were doing and they failed and the attack happened on their watch.

And of course there's a major cover up 'cause these men had been in the country for a year and a half.

And of course the CIA knew who they were and it kept their identities from the FBI, which they tried to lie about and then was proven over and over again.

Doug Rossini is the most famous former FBI agent who's testified numerous times, including in Tucker Carlson's recent documentary about how the CIA refused to allow him to share information on these hijackers, these future hijackers, with the FBI anyway.

So these are essentially Saudi, mostly Saudi and Egyptian mercenaries who are run by the CIA, the Brits, MI 6 and the GRD, Saudi intelligence for use in Afghanistan, in Bosnia, in Kosovo and in Chechnya.

And then when they came to the United States, the Americans, I think the CIA concerned about what they were doing here and, and their focus on attacking the United States tried and failed to infiltrate their plot and wrap it up.

So the simplest Occam's razor type answer to why Prince Bandar and Prince Turkey, the ambassador and the head of Saudi intelligence would allow this plot to continue to unfold.

While even directly supporting some of these men through the embassy and through other back channel means, including that Prince Bandar's wife sending them checks in San Diego and this kind of thing.

That it would make sense that they were doing that If it was part of an operation to try to infiltrate Al Qaeda.

That would be a much simpler explanation then 'cause they were committing the greatest act of treason in all of human history.

But it would also go to show why they would have to go to great lengths to cover up their failure there.

And you know, I would just say on that, there's so many 9/11 theories and all that.

But you know, there's the famous, should be more famous Sherlock Holmes mystery story called The Purloined Letter.

Now someone stole a letter from somebody and they're looking all over for the thing and it's laying right there on the counter with the rest of the mail.

It's kind of crumpled up and, you know, inconspicuous, sitting there in the pile.

And there it is, the all important letter that has the important information.

Well, so the purloin letter in the case of September 11th is the 28 pages or the 29 pages of the original congressional investigation where the FBI testified to Congress.

Here's what we know about what the Saudis knew and what they did.

And they covered that up for years and years and years.

It wasn't till our friend Brian Mcglinchey and others worked so hard to get those that section released what I guess back 6-7 years ago now.

And if you go through there and see that's what it's all about, is the role of Saudi intelligence in the Saudi Embassy in working with the CIA, or at least adjacent to the CIA on running these guys.

So anyway, to Dick Cheney's point, he's just trying to direct all your attention from there and say, well, what we decided then was, you know, these states that support terrorism need to be crushed.

And then, like he always did, would be deliberately vague about that point and sort of pretend that, well, if you're gonna bomb one Muslim country over there somewhere, then you might as well bomb a different one because what difference does it make if it ends with AQ or ends with an N or what, you know?

Well, and just the arrogance of he doesn't even care to cite his own source in this.

There's no sources.

He just says it like we know this.

It's coming from the mouth of me.

All right, that's enough of a source.

I've been expected to cite my sources and show my work mathematically since I was in like 4th grade.

But the vice president can't be bugged with what?

With doing anything like that, anything more on Saudi Arabia before we move on, do you think there?

Well, he he says one more thing about Afghanistan.

On November 11th, 2001, the town of Harat fell to the Northern Alliance.

Kabul followed on November 13th and Jalalabad on November 14th.

The last Taliban stronghold, Kandahar, fell on December 7th.

Karzai led the Pashtun troops who took Kandahar.

He was inaugurated on December 22nd, 2001 as chairman of the new interim Afghan authority.

In a little over three months, working with the Northern Alliance and allies in the South, we had overrun the Taliban and liberated 25 million people.

Is that were they claiming victory at the end of 2001?

I was 5.

I don't know.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Yes, It was the they immediately conflated al Qaeda in the Taliban.

So that killing the Taliban would be good enough for you, Keith.

That was exactly the point.

And then so, yes, I mean, just to read that whole thing is absolutely hilarious.

What's happening during that time frame that he describes there?

Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri and their couple of 100 friends are getting away.

They're cornered by the Delta Force and the CIA and the Air Force at Tora Bora, which is in the White Mountains in Nangarhar province in far eastern Afghanistan.

They're surrounded on three sides, with the 4th side being the Pakistani border.

And the Delta Force and the CIA are begging over and over and over again for reinforcements.

They've got thousands of Rangers at Bagram.

They've got the 75th Rangers down in Kandahar.

They've got Green Berets up in Missouri Sharif.

Everybody's doing everything except help fight al Qaeda.

And they're mostly focusing on a regime change against the Taliban.

And we know from the notes that they released from the White House minutes there that the CIA and the national Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice, we're saying we ought to focus on just bombing Arabs and to show the Taliban that we don't actually want to attack you.

We would like for you to turn these Arabs over to us.

Make this easy for us, and we'll spare you.

And they were shouted down by the Defense Department and by Donald Rumsfeld.

And the reason why was because he wanted to do a regime change against the Taliban.

He wanted to extend the war not just against al Qaeda, but against the entire Taliban regime and the nation state of Afghanistan so that the war could be bigger and longer.

Even though he wanted to do his excuse was light and fast was why not to devote the troops necessary to actually killing bin Laden.

But then when it came to the rest of it, he wanted to launch a massive long term occupation because they knew, Keith, that it was going to take a year and a half to build up their forces in Kuwait strong enough to go ahead and invade.

They wanted to invade from Turkey as well, but that didn't work out.

But they knew it was going to take a year and a half to get ready to invade Iraq.

And so they wanted the war to be bigger and longer.

They didn't want the Taliban to be in a position where they could just hand over the enemy.

And we know from Jawbreaker, for example, Gary Bernsen, the CIA officers book, that the Taliban were absolutely willing to separate from the Arabs and turn them over.

And he talked about accepting the surrender of a Taliban commander whose forces were being decimated by the US Air Force.

And he got him on the radio and said, do you have any?

And the guy was saying, I want to surrender, please let me surrender.

He said, well, do you have any Arab fighters with your group?

And the guy said, well, yeah.

And he said, kill them.

And the guy said, OK, the Taliban command said, OK, And you can hear in the background, rat tat, tat, tat, tat, tat, tat, as he took all his Arabs and lined him up and shot him.

And then Gary Burns and said, OK, now I'll accept your surrender and accepted the surrender of only Afghans and a bunch of dead Arab corpses.

So they absolutely were willing to turn on the bin Ladenites to save their own skin.

At that point.

The Americans did not want that.

They wanted to fight the Taliban, Keith, instead of al Qaeda because they wanted bin Laden escape.

And I don't have a solid proof of this, but it's the severe implication of all of this.

They wanted him on the loose so they could tell your mom and dad bin Laden's still out there somewhere, and Saddam Hussein could give him chemical weapons.

And so that's why we have to do this.

If they'd killed him good and dead, the American people would have thought, hey, we won.

That's what you get from messing with us, dude.

You're dead by Christmas, and then we come home and celebrate and it's fine.

But they escaped on December the 17th, a date that Dick Cheney's miraculously leaves out of that paragraph.

And we know now, and I didn't know this until 21.

In December of 21, a guy wrote a thing in Task and purpose.

He was the Air Force controller there at Tora Bora and you know, special operations forces and in charge of all air traffic control and bombing runs.

And there been a friendly fire incident elsewhere in the country.

And so all air operations were called off in Afghanistan temporarily until they could figure out their command and control system better working with the Brits, I think it was Americans and killed some Brits on the ground.

Miscommunication kind of thing.

So this one special operations officer at Tora Bora embedded with the Delta Force, he had control over every American and British plane and or whatever allied plane.

If there were French planes, he had control over every allied plane over Afghanistan, all of them.

And he was using them to bomb the crap out of Tora Bora.

And then he just writes in the article.

Yep.

And then on December the 8th, I was called out of there and they ended all air operations on December the what, December the 8th?

But Osama bin Laden and Iman al Zawahiri didn't escape for 9 more days.

Keith Rumsfeld called off all air operations against bin Laden's hideout in Nangarhar province 9 days before he escaped.

So, yeah, it you got to read between the lines to see the cynicism of Dick Cheney there, right?

Like, what's he really doing to you as he's writing that that paragraph, he's saying to himself, how do I pull the wool over Keith's eyes?

How do I get Keith to be good and confused about what's going on here?

And what should have been?

What the hell do you care if they overthrew the Taliban in Kabul?

It wasn't the Taliban that attacked us.

It was the bin Ladenites.

And so just right there, he's lying to you and to your family.

Take it personal.

He goes on to discuss the motives of the terrorists.

Only in one section does he actually do this.

Hold on to your seat.

I stress to Prime Minister Blair that the United States would certainly remain engaged in attempting to find a solution to the Israeli Palestinian crisis, but we would not do so at the expense of the War on Terror.

I believe then and I do now, where the Israeli Palestinian crisis solved tomorrow, the terrorists would simply find another rationale for continuing jihad.

Other than that, he doesn't go into bin Laden's motives at all.

What do you think about that?

This was a point that Coleman Hughes brought up to Dave Smith.

He goes, yeah, that's what they say publicly, and that's how they rile people up.

But if they didn't have this, they would just come up with some other excuse.

How do you respond to that?

Well, Bin Laden always made it clear that what he wanted was revolution in Saudi Arabia and Egypt so that he or someone like him would take over instead to get rid of the corrupt sock puppet kings and emirs and dictators of the region and create Islamic Holy Caliphate.

That was always the end.

Why do they hate the Americans?

Because the Americans are in the way.

That's the whole argument about the near enemy and the far enemy.

That as long as the far enemy, the United States is here to back up every sock puppet dictator over there, then what's the point of waging a revolution?

The superpower will come and destroy it again.

And of course, we just proved that Obama built the caliphate and then blew it back up again, right?

You can't.

Even if we build a caliphate for you, we'll still go, oh, whoops, that's too much, and then blow it back up.

So that was Wahri's argument was you have to bankrupt and destroy the United States first, force the American empire out of the region first, then we can have our local revolutions create our caliphate, liberate Jerusalem and whatever, whatever the rest.

So yes, that's the plan.

If that's their point, that that was what bin Laden always wanted, fine.

Point being, of course, that's absolutely harebrained nonsense.

He had no ability to carry that out whatsoever to create a caliphate over there, to overthrow the government of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iraq, or anybody else over there in the region.

So we're that, were those his aims?

Sure.

But again, when we're talking about Tora Bora, we're talking about 400 men, right?

They had no ability to accomplish any of these things other than infiltrate a small special operations team into our country and get America to go over there and radicalize the region, destabilize the region, radicalize everybody's politics and economics and religion and every other thing, you know, in order to create a cataclysmic fight that he thought would benefit his side of the argument there as far as pointing at the Israeli occupation of the Palestinians and of at that time in the 1990s, southern Lebanon and now again, southern Lebanon.

This was absolutely how they recruited people.

So they, you're saying that they concede that, right?

That's what Cheney and Coleman Hughes are conceding here, OK.

They said they were motivated by Israel's violence against their helpless captives.

Like, that's probably not true.

Or if it is, they'll just come up with another reason, except that, of course, this is a major reason why they would want to create that caliphate to go and liberate Jerusalem, right?

This is a part of that whole thing is protecting fellow Muslims and especially Arab Sunni Muslims, as the Palestinians are.

And so, you know, Michael Schroeder pointed out years ago that bin Laden never really talked about the Turkish persecution of the Kurds.

Well, they're Sunni Muslims, but they're not Arabs.

Bin Laden was really more of a Arab nationalist in that way, never really bothered talking about the Kurds at all and wasn't really his issue.

So, but the point being that, yes, this was the, the the shtick that bin Laden used to recruit people was also, yes, his motive too, as discussed by the leadership of al Qaeda over and over again.

And that was primarily American occupation of Saudi Arabia in order to bomb and blockade Iraq and American support for Israel and their occupations of the Palestinians and the Lebanese.

And then just right in there with that is support for the dictatorships primarily in the Gulf and in Egypt, you know, who rule over them.

And then after that was pressure on those dictators to keep the oil price artificially low, to subsidize our economy at their expense, and supposedly turning a blind eye to Russia, China and India and Kazakhstan's violence against Muslims, when that's not really true.

But that was at least the way that they put it.

And so the argument was that America is at war with the people of the Sunni Muslim Arab world.

And but the problem is we fight through proxies like the Israelis or through the various local police states.

So they were saying, let's force a confrontation.

Let's force America to invade the Middle East where we can fight them personally, get them bogged down and within rifle range.

And so that's why Michael Scheuer, who had been the former chief of the CIA's bin Laden unit, who I think was exiled to the library at the time of 911 for cursing out Sandy Berger.

But he said that, look, all bin Laden wanted was for America to invade Afghanistan.

When America went to Iraq, that was the hoped for but unexpected gift to bin Laden.

And right before the invasion of Iraq, bin Laden put out a message saying to the Iraqi people that they should all rise up and overthrow the socialist infidel Saddam Hussein and then prepare to fight the coming American occupation next.

And so it was.

America was playing right into bin Laden's goals there.

So one, yes, these were his motives.

2 yes, this was how he successfully recruited suicide bombers to end their own lives in order to help to accomplish his goals.

And then, yes, it's true that our government might as well have been working for him this whole time because they did exactly what he wanted to do what what he wanted them to do, what he was betting that they would do, which is cynically exploit the crisis and take advantage in order to start more wars, which were the same ones that he wanted, especially again, Afghanistan and Iraq.

And so, and now look at us after, after W Bush came Obama move the entire jihad another few 100 miles West into Syria, where now you got the bin Ladenites seized in the Mediterranean coast at Ladakia.

I mean, it's completely nuts and it and it's essentially all Dick Cheney's fault.

George W Bush let him drive and and call these shots.

So just as there was a deliberate attempt by National Security Advisor Burzynski to hopefully get the Soviets to invade Afghanistan in hopes of bleeding them dry, Bin Laden was attempting to bleed the US dry by getting them into Afghanistan and Iraq.

That's right.

Here is a great lesson in propaganda on page 352 there was a tragic reminder of the threat Islamist terrorism represented the next morning, March 11th, 2004, when 10 bombs exploded on trains in Madrid, Spain, killing 191 people and wounding more than 1500 that.

Was done by one of Obama's heroes in Syria who went on to lead the jihad in the Syrian war.

That's some of those same dudes.

The state prosecutor in Spain, Olga Sanchez, actually did a report on this.

Here's The Independent from November 2006.

Her report says the attacks were inspired by a televisioned message by the al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in October 2003 in which he threatened prompt and severe actions against the countries that participated in the war in Iraq, including Spain and Britain.

In the speech transmitted by Al Jazeera television, bin Laden said, quote, we reserve the right to respond at the opportune time and place in all the countries that are participating in the unjust war, in particular United Kingdom and Spain.

So again, he leaves out the motive just and just mentions this as a here's the another example of that thing that no one can have any control over.

Oh, what I wanted to ask you.

So is a the reason that the Saudis were surveilling and trying to infiltrate Al Qaeda because bin Laden explicitly like wanted a coup in Saudi Arabia.

He wanted to overthrow King Fahd's regime ever since his 95 letter.

OK, so one thing I want to address real quick, just because I meant to say earlier I'll go right back to that, was that Dick Cheney himself said in his first interview with Tim Russert on Meet the Press after September 11th was the reason bin Laden did this is because they want us to withdraw from that part of the world, which of course we're not going to do.

And then later in that interview, he goes, oh, I mean, you know, they hate democracy, Democracy, right?

But at the beginning, he made it clear that he understood exactly what was going on here.

This was blowback from the Bush in the Clinton years.

No question about that.

He understood that perfectly well.

And again, when he cites Palestine, when you say, oh, this is all he mentions about the motive, that's actually more than I would expect him to concede in his book that Osama bin Laden told his would be suicide bombers, that this is what we're trying to avenge.

This is what we're trying to fight and to stop.

And that was what worked to recruit people to kill Americans.

And that is a big deal that he would concede that you know, in any context now as.

Far and didn't.

And didn't Wolfowitz say something about how the benefits?

Can you remind me of that?

Yeah, so so, Wolfowitz said.

I'm almost certain that this off the record statement is him, but he's definitely on the record in Vanity Fair saying virtually the same thing.

There was an anonymous statement where he says that bin Laden's whole gripe really was America occupying Saudi Arabia to contain Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

Now, remember, Wolfowitz was one of those who said that we should have gone all the way to Baghdad back in 1991.

So if al Qaeda is attacking us because we're in Saudi still to contain Saddam, then in a way that's vindicates his argument that we should have gone all the way to Baghdad back then.

Understand.

So he's willing to make that criticism.

And he says that if we hadn't done that, if we'd gone all the way to Baghdad or if we weren't occupying Saudi Arabia now, then bin Laden would probably be just sitting around telling tales of the old days in Afghanistan.

He'd be sitting somewhere in the Khyber Pass, spinning tails of the old days rather than being a threat to the United States.

So I'm, I'm almost certain that that was Wolfowitz talking because it's so close to the other statements that he's given on this, including to, I forget the guy's first name, but it's Tennenhouse at Vanity Fair.

And this is the the famous interview with Vanity Fair were Wolfowitz says that we said weapons of mass destruction because that was the one thing that everyone could agree on as the reason to do the war.

So for bureaucratic reasons, we settled on weapons of mass destruction.

That's what the famous quote came out of that interview.

But there's another quote in that interview where, again, he says that the reason that al Qaeda was attacking the United States was because, as bin Laden had put it, in which he took at face value, of course, was because America was occupying Saudi Arabia.

So now one of the major benefits of invading Iraq is that now we can move those bases out of Saudi Arabia and into Iraq and so that way to no longer have them in the land of the two holy places and provoking this al Qaeda war against us.

So he was taking like the Ron Paulian argument that like occupying Saudi is causing blowback against us and he's saying that's why we need to invade Iraq now, so we can move those bases out of Saudi and into Iraq instead.

No one will mind that.

That'll be fine.

No one will suicide bomb us over that, Keith.

We won't have to worry about that.

And so, yes, again, major concession from the guy in charge.

Now as far as why Saudi intelligence back these guys, I think it is a matter of protection, right?

As I document especially it's in both books, enough already and provoked, but especially in provoked, America, Britain and Saudi reusing these terrorists to fight first in Afghanistan and then very quickly after that in Bosnia, then later in Kosovo and Chechnya.

And they're using these terrorists and they think that they're clever.

And then so now, like major support for the bin Ladenites in Kosovo and Chechnya, that didn't start till 99.

But we know that Prince Turkey Al Faisal met with bin Ladenites at a hotel in Paris, France, in 1996 and made an agreement with them that Saudi would finance their activities.

Just stay out of the Kingdom.

And maybe what they meant to say was and also don't attack our patrons, the Americans, but they didn't say that.

They said just don't attack the Kingdom and we'll give you protection money essentially.

So even though overthrowing Riyadh was bin Laden's top goal, first of all, they had no ability to do that whatsoever.

And then secondly, Riyadh's willing to pay them to just stay away.

And so that seems to have been the arrangement.

So I think, you know, it's easy for people to assume, and I could whatever, I have an imagination, it's easy for people to assume that America, Britain and Saudi just own these men and just control them like automatons and tell them what to do and what to think and how to behave at all times.

And I really don't think it's like that.

I mean, from the wide and varied things that I've read about this movement over the years, the command and control does not seem that tight.

It's much more like we have a movement of jihadi holy warriors and, and the CIA and MI 6 and the Saudis, you know, intelligence, they just kind of move them around.

They just kind of move them around to wherever they want, you know, hoping that it'll be useful to, you know, put them on planes, send them to Bosnia and then let Izip Begovic run them.

He's got an army.

Let him take control of the guys and use them for his purposes, whatever it is.

So I, it makes sense to me again, I, I recommend that people and Kit Klarenberg, he's a little bit more conspiratorial about this than I am, but I don't care.

It's a great article.

Should he's a great journalist very, very far to the left of me, but he's a, a really great journalist.

He's got a great sub stack and he wrote a piece about this recently about the Saudi role in in bankrolling these guys.

And, you know, it seems like maybe a mix to me.

Oh, and I'm sorry.

And he has the link in there to this, this giant testimonial by I believe it's Adia, pardon me, DEA agent who was assigned like cross agency investigation, something to look into September 11th.

And it's, you know, the whole thing is about information he's gotten from talking with FBI agents who were at the highest rank in the loop and stuff like that.

And it really goes to show that the Saudis were helping these guys along.

It doesn't show the motive, right?

And it, it, you know, in the Saudis, when there are Saudi nationals in the country, the Saudi Embassy will pay their way in the school, whatever flight school or whatever engineering or college or whatever they're doing, help them open a business, help them get their papers and whatever.

I mean, they do that for a lot of people.

So the fact that they did that for the hijackers, you have to take it in context that they do that for Saudi nationals all the time.

And so, and then especially if they're working with the CIA to try to recruit these guys, then, you know, I'm not trying to let anybody off the hook, but I'm also trying to not jump to conclusions that are unwarranted as so many people are so apartment to do on this issue.

You know, there are simpler explanations been the greatest act of treason in all history, such as security being a government program and these people being really lousy at it.

You know, another thing is Greg Palast from the BBC, He's an old friend of mine.

I guess I haven't talked to him in a wallet.

He had a story I think in November of O one for the BBC about how FBI agents came to him and told him they had been told to back off the Saudis and that wasn't because they were trying to help September 11th happen.

And these FBI agents were not at all suspicious of that.

That's not what they were coming to Greg Palast to complain about.

They're coming to complain about was that Saudi money in the United States is very closely tied to Saudi actors in Houston, TX, and Saudi actors in Houston, TX are close to Republicans and Republican oil firms and major things that on paper look like conflicts of interest.

There was once probably not Osama, but a bin Laden may have helped.

You know, they argued about whether these funds were the exact funds or not.

But there was a question for a while whether this guy, I believe was James R Bath, that he took money from a bin Laden and invested that in one of W Bush's companies.

So even if that wasn't like exactly clear, you could see how they just were trying to tell the FBI, hey, whatever you guys are doing, looking into Saudi money in the country, back off.

But that included al Qaeda money in the country that included, you know, something very important.

But they were just worried about covering their asses from looking bad for for negative associations.

They ended up abetting the attack.

Let's move to the new Cold War with Russia.

Cheney mentions the 2008 crisis in Georgia.

The fighting had been centered initially in two breakaway republics inside Georgia, S Ossetia and Abkhazia.

These territories, though part of Georgia geographically, had large Russian populations and had been trying to assert their independence.

In August, S Ossetian forces under the command of Russian commanders fired on Georgian villages in South Ossetia.

Mikhail Saakashvili, the president of Georgia, had ordered a response, which seemed to give Russian leader Vladimir Putin the excuse he'd been looking for to launch an aggressive military action against the Georgians.

They moved with the kind of speed that strongly suggested significant advance planning, leaving the impression that Putin had been planning an attack for some time.

What is?

Is any of that true?

Well, there may be a kernel of truth to the thing that the Russians were prepared for this, but that just means that they weren't fools.

I mean, the the tensions had been escalating there for a while.

Shakashvili also had a long term plan to invade and try to conquer S Ossetia, just as the Russians, as I show in the book, as they explain, I think in their own media that yes, they had had a long term plan for exactly that eventuality as well on the other side.

So that doesn't prove anything like that.

The whole thing was a pretext the way that he puts it.

There's another kernel of truth in there that I don't mind conceding because it doesn't really bolster his case, which is that there was fire from South Ossetia.

They weren't bombing villages inside Georgia.

That's an absolute lie, and I disprove that lie, citing eyeball and earball witnesses from the OSCE who were stationed there to monitor all of this.

That did not happen.

The Georgian government lied about that.

There had been very small artillery exchanges across the border between troops right on the border over the preceding days, but no one had been killed.

And it was like the IT wasn't really a provocation or an escalation.

It was just tit for tat, nothing.

And then what happened?

Was on the night of August the 7th, Georgia just launched a surprise attack on South Ossetia.

And as I show in the book, the European Commission did a whole investigation and proved that that was the case.

And the New York Times got it right the next day.

Then they got it wrong the day after that.

And then in November, a few months later, they did another follow up and said, yeah, it really was true that Georgia started the war.

Now at antiwar.com, I just happened to have a good memory for this stuff.

We were all up late that night.

We all were covering this.

The, the, the European papers were all announcing Georgia attacks, Ossetia.

And all of this happened on the night of the 7th of August.

And we all saw it for ourselves.

It wasn't really, I think it was John McCain was the first one who pretended that it was Russia who had started the war.

And we know that the vice president's office had been giving mixed signals, potentially through John McCain's advisor Randy Scheueneman to the Georgians, that maybe we will come to protect you if the Russians jump in.

And so they were taking that bet.

All of this was, of course, a direct reaction, as Cheney neglects to point out there to George W Bush at Victoria Newland and Dick Cheney's recommendation and insistence, giving a promise, not a real membership action plan, but a promise to Georgia and Ukraine that they were on the course now to be brought into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

And so Shakashvili, who had been put in by a coup run by the United States in 2003 and was an American sock puppet, he saw this as his opportunity to solve this ongoing border dispute.

You can't join NATO if you have an ongoing border dispute.

You have to have settled borders.

And Abkhazia and S Ossetia were these breakaway provinces that were officially still part of Georgia.

And based on the made-up international law after the end of the Cold War, they decided that, yes, Georgia can break away from the Soviet Union, of course, but Abkhazia and S Ossetia may not break away from Georgia.

So they were in this kind of like stasis kind of area or whatever, this unsettled sort of position where they had Russian peacekeepers occupying the place under a deal that was brokered with the European Union in order to allow them to be there to prevent Georgia from taking the breakaway territory back by force, which is exactly what they did.

And in their initial attack, they killed Russian peacekeepers as well as bombed apartment complexes and killed hundreds of innocent people.

And so then, yeah, the Georgians came for me.

The Russians came over the mountains and under the mountains, through the Rokie Tunnel, under the Caucasus Mountains, where, as I show in the book, it was Dick Cheney and or others on his staff who were demanding that W Bush fire missiles into the Rokie Tunnel and attempt to collapse the tunnel and kill Russian troops and prevent them from coming through there, which could have started a war with Russia.

And I have the anecdote in the book about how none other than Fiona Hill, who you might remember as the British, American Russia expert who testified against Trump at his Ukraine gate impeachment, she was stationed by National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley to sit in a chair outside the vice president's office.

And if the vice president ever went to go and talk to George W Bush, she was to immediately call Stephen Hadley.

So that Hadley or his deputy could then rush to Bush's side to prevent Dick Cheney from convincing him of anything and because of this particular danger.

And and so that was what they did in this case.

And so by the time Dick Cheney came to counsel that that Bush should strike, he had already been warned against it by Stephen Hadley.

And Hadley had even gone around and talked to everybody and said, I'm going to ask for a show of hands and you're going to keep your hand down.

And everybody said, OK.

And then he said, OK.

Then Bush said, OK, who agrees with Vice that we should attack the Russians?

And nobody raised their hand and they let it die.

But that was because of Stephen Hadley running full interference to protect George W Bush from Dick Cheney getting us into a war with Russia at that point.

And, and quite frankly, the fact that Stephen Hadley, who is a neoconservative hawk, was acting to restrain Dick Cheney at that point speaks volumes as to Cheney's insanity and Hadley's then hard learned reluctance to go along with his harebrained schemes at that point.

On page 513, Cheney says for some time there have been growing tension between the government in Moscow and President Saakashvili's government in Tedisilli.

Saakashvili, who had studied in the United States and wanted to Orient Georgia toward the West, made no secret of his view that Georgia should join NATO.

Putin viewed this as a direct threat to Russia inside what he considered Russia's sphere of influence.

Are you familiar with that conspiracy theory that NATO expansion has potential downsides?

Yeah, it's crazy talk.

I don't know.

I denounced Russia's invasion of Georgia and its heavy-handed dealings with Poland and the Czech Republic.

As for Georgia and Ukraine, the time had come, I said, to begin action to make them members of NATO.

I was glad to see my successor, Vice President Joe Biden, endorse the idea of NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine, but progress in achieving that has been disappointingly slow.

Any final words for the recently deceased vice president?

Well, you know, there's a few things there.

Key.

I think maybe my overall take would be that, like, you see how your overlords really are not special people at all, right?

There's nothing profound about Dick Cheney's understanding about the world.

He's just a typical Republican hawk.

He's just a doofus.

He might as well be your next door neighbor who listens to talk radio and thinks he knows anything and know anything.

Oh, well, the Russians are kind of pushing the Georgians around.

So I said, well, what we ought to do is we ought to bring George into NATO.

Then that'll show him.

But and then his context in isn't any deeper than that.

Could this lead to a war?

Could even beginning this process lead to a war between US and Russia?

And might that be so costly that we would always regret it?

Those of us who survived, Nah, whatever.

We don't think about that or talk about that.

You know, there's quotes of, in fact, you know, the day he died and.

And I tweeted a thing about it, I think.

Yeah.

It was on Twitter, the GIF.

I just went to search for a GIF of Dick Cheney.

And it was him saying, yeah, I don't really spend much time thinking about past decisions I made or something like that.

You know what I mean?

Which is exactly what George W Bush says, too.

They're like, oh, decisions, Decisions are things that you make.

And once you make them, well, there's no point in second guessing or or reviewing, you know, what you decided to do.

That's just that's in the past.

What?

The past don't exist anymore.

Who cares?

You know what I mean?

Like, yeah, that's how they both are.

That's how they both are.

So, in other words, this, and you'd have to be old enough to really remember back, but there was a profound level of faith in these men as the most competent administrators of the American empire that you could ever hope to have.

I mean, they had group photos of Bush and his principles committee standing there all posing like a Vanity Fair, you know, Annie Leibowitz type photo or maybe even literally by her of them all standing there.

And they all seem so competent and in agreement, right.

And then.

But if you know anything about how the Bush administration operated, you know, they were all at each other's throats constantly, that even, you know, Rumsfeld had been Cheney's mentor before.

They were totally at odds, refusing to accept responsibility for their own spheres of of responsibility whatsoever.

Condoleezza Rice was the national security advisor.

Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Dick Cheney, no one respected her.

So she was in no position whatsoever to whip them in a shape and say, OK, now listen, you know, Powell Rumsfeld, I need you guys to work together on this.

No, the State Department's war in Iraq was an entirely different word than the Defense Department's war in Iraq.

And the Defense Department's war in Iraq had nothing to do with the CIA's war in Iraq.

And, and the people in charge, the principles of these agencies and departments hated each other and refused to even talk to each other.

They'd have like an all important cabinet meeting and Rumsfeld wouldn't even show up for the damn thing.

He just said Wolfowitz in his place, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

That's how they they were the whole time when the American people didn't even really get a clue to that because of the media running cover for these people.

You would have thought that they were Barack Obama and Joe Biden the way the media ran cover for them.

And it and the mythology of their, you know, ultimate competence didn't break until Hurricane Katrina, which was two years and a few months into the Iraq war.

And then, but after Hurricane Katrina, it was days and days and days and days and days and days going by.

And no helicopters are coming.

And the, and the rescuers, just regular people who are going to rescue, are being turned away by the police.

So people are just baking to death on the roofs.

They're they're dying of dehydration in their attics.

No one's coming.

George W Bush is not coming.

And the National Guard of Louisiana is in Afghanistan and the National Guard of Arkansas and and Mississippi and Missouri, they're all in Iraq.

Nobody's coming and nobody's even trying.

And Bush is just laughing about it.

Oh, everything's going great, don't worry.

And meanwhile, it's like Sunday afternoon and there's still no helicopters.

And finally, Anderson Cooper and Geraldo Rivera are crying their eyes out, bawling their eyes out on TV.

Thousands of people are dying and they're not doing anything.

And finally, it was like a magic spell, like a Grimm fairy tale.

This evil spell just broke.

And the American people were actually able to look at George W Bush just threw their own plane eyeballs at this guy's an idiot.

This guy's IQ is probably 98.

And and on top of that, though, he's just completely incurious.

He doesn't care at all.

He doesn't think at all.

Knowing.

Does he not have a vision for how things are supposed to be?

He doesn't know that he's supposed to have one.

He doesn't know anyone who has one.

And if he does, it's Paul Wolfowitz.

But he doesn't know what Wolfowitz's vision is.

He wouldn't know how to ask him.

This guy doesn't deserve to be the world emperor.

This guy is nothing.

This guy's beneath you.

This guy is beneath the worst person that you know.

And he's the one in charge.

And he's the one who put Dick Cheney in charge.

And Dick Cheney is what?

He's just John McCain.

Just absolutely no nothing.

Know it all.

Pretend tough guy.

Same crap.

You know you'd like the thing.

Yeah, well, you know, Dick Cheney, he a lot of times will be quiet, keep his own counsel, not say much.

So then like, well, there must be something deep going on in there.

Nope.

He's just making sure that all y'all get in trouble for taking responsibility for things while he stays in the back.

That's how clever he is, is to make everything be somebody else's fault instead of his.

But as far as like, oh, has he really thought through what's going to happen when we do what we do?

Of course not.

I mean, hell, we talk about Iraq all the time in this context, but usually just in the context of Bush and the neoconservative.

But just focus on Dick Cheney here.

If I tell you that, like Keith W Bush had said like a couple weeks before the war, what is all this about?

Sunnis and Shiites?

I thought they were all Muslims.

Then you go, yeah, well, W Bush, God Dang it, You know, what an idiot.

But what's Dick Cheney's excuse for not knowing the first thing about it?

How is it that him and Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz can sit in a room and go, OK, now we're overthrowing the secular Sunni regime here on behalf of the Super majority Shiites?

Now, Paul, you talked to David Wormser, and you guys are certain this is going to work, right?

We're not just turning Iraq over to Iran.

But that's all they were doing.

They were picking up.

They were reversing their own 1980s policy of supporting Saddam Hussein to contain the Iranian revolution.

Remember when the Shiites rose up in 1991 at George Bush Senior's bidding, They changed their mind and stabbed them in the back and let Saddam keep his tanks and helicopters and crush their insurrection.

Why?

Because Iraqis who've been living in Iran for 10 years, we're now coming across the border to lead the revolution.

Well, same thing again.

So, you know, invading Iraq wasn't just criminal, it was a mistake.

It was stupid and wrong.

And again, Dick Cheney, just like W Bush.

Oh, things that I've done, well, I don't really like question stuff that I did before.

I don't really look back and wonder whether things that I did were the right thing or not, because you know, who wants to deal with my hassle like that, I guess.

And so then that's it.

The guy gets to ruin the world and die at peace.

There's so many gems in this thing when he's quoting Colin Powell, my colleagues, Powell said.

Every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources.

These are not assertions, but we're giving you our facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.

End Quote.

Later, when it turned out that much of what Powell said about the weapons of mass destruction was wrong, I think embarrassment caused him and those around him to lash out at others.

That's there are a number of gems in here on that.

Point there's there's I forgot the source for this now, but I believe there's two sources, you know, 2 two sources for the quote of him saying to Powell, you can afford to take the hit because revealing the absolute premeditated lies in that thing that they knew that whoever goes out and gives the UN speech is going to get hammered for it later when it all proves to be untrue.

But you're Mr.

Popularity Colon.

So you go out there and you're the one who has to take the hit and and give the speech.

And of course we know that his right hand man Scooter Libby tried to force Colin Powell to include every absolute ridiculous harebrained thing about advanced nuclear weapons programs and flasks of anthrax being given to Mohammed Atta by Iraqi intelligence and Prague and all the rest of this stuff that that Colin Powell absolutely threw in the trash.

He threw Scooter Libby's draft of the speech away and made George Tenet start over from scratch and only used claims that came from CIA and nothing from the Pentagon and the Vice President's office alone was included in that speech, as wrong as it still was.

So when Cheney was trying to get him to lie.

Even worse than that, in fact.

He quotes George Bush.

The British government, he had said, has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

Some on, he goes on to say.

Well, it turns out the evidence wasn't exactly there.

Some on the president's senior staff believe that if we issued an apology, the story would go away.

I strongly oppose the idea.

An apology would only fan the flames.

And why apologize when the British government had, in fact, reported that Iraq had sought a significant amount of uranium in Africa?

The 16 words were true.

It's.

Like, it's like Charlie Savage at the New York Times.

But Scott, it's a fact that there was a completely unfounded rumor going around that the Russians were paying the Taliban to kill Americans in Afghanistan.

And so all I did was report the fact of this ridiculous, unsubstantiated rumor.

Now, look, Keith, we all know Saddam Hussein had a giant locker, a storage facility full of yellow cake uranium in Iraq that was under IAEA seal, even though the IAEA and the entire UN inspections regime had been kicked out of the country by Bill Clinton, not by Saddam Hussein in 1998.

And that if he wanted any yellow cake uranium, he could have just walked down the street and got it out of the storage locker where it was all sitting there in, you know, casks in barrels.

Oh, no.

But instead, they took this ridiculous forgery that the IAEA director, Mohamed El Baradei, and his staff debunked in 30 minutes using Google.

The documents were complete forgeries.

They had people who hadn't been in office in a decade serving in positions that they never served in.

And this kind of thing was absolute trash documents.

And we know that they had attempted to funnel this into the intelligence stream over and over again.

And it had been rejected by the CIA over and over again.

And the Pentagon and vice president's office specialized in it.

And that they had tried to include this statement in George Bush's speeches 14 times and had been prevented 14 times by the CIA from including it in the speech as they debunked it.

They were not.

This did not come from them and they were not standing by it.

This came through the Neo Con stove pipe.

And then on the 14th try or the 15th try, somebody was asleep at the switch at 3:00 in the morning or whatever, and they let it get into the State of the Union speech.

But if you go back and look at Bush's Cincinnati speech where he makes insane claims, he doesn't include that one.

And there's all kinds of nuclear stuff in there and whatever.

They've been trying to put that in and it was excluded from his speeches by the CIA over and over again.

So they knew they were lying in advance.

The whole thing was a setup.

They're just trying to come up with as many little scraps of information as they possibly could to try to make a in case they didn't care whether it was true or not.

They only cared whether you believe it today so they can have their war tomorrow.

Check out Scott hortonacademy.com.

Scott, thank you for your time.

Thank you, Keith.