YouSaid · the spoken record

Scott Horton

lines on the record: 802
first: 2025-08-24
most recent: 2025-08-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“That was real tragedy. It really is. They could have negotiated and they could have killed them, and the whole thing really could have been over by Christmas. And by the way, Gary Bernson said that. He said that to the reporter Michael Hirsch in 2016. He said it's really sad when you think about it, how this thing could have all been over by Christmas.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so before we get too far into Iraq War II and the neoconservatives. We need to decide whether we want to talk about the Afghanistan war now or whether we want to come back and talk more about Afghanistan later or maybe not even at all or whatever. You've got to make that call because there's plenty to talk about there as a hugely important thing. On the other hand, of course, and this is the same dilemma I faced when I was writing enough already, it's like, how much can I tell you about Afghanistan before I got to bring you to Iraq, which is the heart of the story that everybody's so interested in, where most of the action takes place. It's on the other side of Iran, from Afghanistan and Afghanistan remained on the margin throughout the whole thing, even though it's in itself it was its own huge thing. But I leave that to you, to like how far you want to get into that and win.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, so bad. And look, his first article was about the Kosovo War in 1999, and he goes after the neoconservatives right then and there from the very get-go. He used to love to quote this guy, um, I believe David Tall in the weekly standard said about Slobodan Milosevic that he better do what we say or he knows we'll kick their skulls in. And he's like, yeah, this is who the neoconservatives are, dude. They're barbarians, essentially Bill Crystal's men.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Justin was from Queens and he was from that era, you know, raised in the 1950s and 60s. He was a crusty old paleocon in his way. And that was why he was so good. And when I first started reading him, I remember saying even to my friends, how does this guy know all this stuff? It's just unbelievable how plugged in he is. He lives out in San Francisco, but he knows everything happening at every important think tank in Washington, and he knows the difference between them all. He knows who all these guys are and what their role is and who is whose mentor and student and all of these things in a way is just unbelievable. And he had the Neocons number, man. And yes, a Rock War II was their war. And it was mostly for Israel.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Humor. You know what he was? He was a big gay Pat Buchanan. His big gay Archie Bunker from San Francisco, right? He was a right-winger and a paleo libertarian, but like Buchananite leaning, he gave Pab Buchanan's nomination speech for the Reform Party in 1999. And he's a right-wing libertarian, but he is what he is. He's at where he's at. And so it sounds kind of ironical or whatever. Why would a gay guy like Pat Buchanan so much? And it's because Pat Buchanan at that time, his reputation was very much the culture war and very much like gay people should still stay in the closet and things like that. And so Justin was like, I don't care about that. What matters is the world empire. And then even here, he's a right-winger too. It's not that he's a liberal and he found a right winger that he likes. It's that Patrick Buchanan is like the perfect kindred spirit, even though you might think not.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thing. Get yourself a rainy day. You can stop about halfway through Obama, probably. But man, at this time, he was the most important writer for America, has neglected as he was. There was nobody better at what was happening to this country at that time.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What conservatism is big business, right? I don't know what else. What I knew who Bill Crystal was, but I didn't know who he was. I knew there was the weekly standard. I knew they were crazy after Saddam Hussein. I didn't know why and I didn't look enough into it leading up to then.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Had a long time ideological axe to grind and personal enemy relationship with these neocons. You know, us libertarians, we really are their polar opposite on so many things. And he called it the axis of crystal there, the little lenon of the neoconservative movement. And he's here citing benevolent global hegemony as the actual quote. He kind of got that little wrong. It's Bill Crystal and Robert Kagan wrote this article in Foreign Affairs in 1996 toward a neo-Reaganite foreign policy where they say we have to have benevolent global hegemony. And that's what he's talking about there. And he's talking about the few people. And I have to tell you, man, I was really interested in foreign policy politics and all these things for many years leading up to this. But if you just ask me, what's a Republican, I would have said Houston, right? James Baker III, right? Dark Lord of the Sith, lawyer for Exxon.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wrecker the saboteur out there, the danger who could still kill you. He's not gone yet. W. Bush used to love to say, imagine Saddam Hussein, Bin Laden's hijackers, chemical weapons. Imagine September 11th, only this time armed by Saddam Hussein. Well, bin Laden's already dead, and the American people by and large believe that that's what you get for messing with us, pal. We win, you lose, and it's over by Christmas. Well, then how the hell are we going to go to Baghdad? That's in take us a year and a half to build up the forces and to make people's mom and dad scared enough to think that we need to do this. We have a massive propaganda campaign to wage here. And here's where we get right back into the neoconservatives. Again, in March of 2002, justin Romondo wrote a piece at antiwar.com, and it's called Our Hijacked Foreign Policy. Neocons Take Washington. Baghdad is next. And Justin was a brilliant genius. And because he was a libertarian,”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they were told to stand up. And they were not allowed by Donald Rumsfeld and the military to go further. And even we have W. Bush and Dick Cheney both implicating this too in that Suskin book where they, and Bernston, I believe, talks about this in his book too, where Thomas Greer is the guy who wrote Kil bin Laden and was on 60 Minutes. He was the Lieutenant Colonel in the Delta Force in charge there. And then Gary Bernstein was the guy on the scene who wrote the book Jawbreaker. And then his boss was Henry Crumpton. And he was the guy who had laid the map out onto Bush's desk and said, we need more men and was denied by Bush himself. So it might be nice to blame just Rumsfeld, but it was the president himself who refused to commit the forces necessary to get bin Laden then. And it is just a circumstantial case. I don't have a direct quote of any of these people saying this, but it seems pretty clear to me that they decided that they would prefer that bin Laden go so that like in the book 1984 they would have Emmanuel Goldstein, the enemy.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because they were expected to come. They were not allowed to cross the border and give chase. And Dalton Furious, man, this is amazing too. And maybe someone in your audience can find the full thing. But I went on a deep dive trying to find the full 60 minutes episode with Dalton Fury, and I can only find severely edited ones. But his name is Thomas Greer is his real name. And he's wearing a disguise and everything, and he does a thing with Scott Pelley. And man, they edit it because the important part that I'm looking for is where he says we had all these plans to follow them into Pakistan. We have Chino helicopters. We were going to go over them and then meet them coming back the other way. We were going to drop landmines and there are only three valleys out of there that they could have taken. We were going to drop mines. That was going to slow them down.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Delta Force is not allowed to chase them. Why? They always say the same thing. I bet you do like a Lexis Nexus thing from back then and find how many times I use the term bin Laden and his men slipped across the border. And then once that happened, it's like they jumped into hyperspace and got away. Once that happened, they crossed this semi-permeable membrane that only terrorists can cross, but that the delta force top tier army special operations forces cannot cross into a friendly Allied country of ours. Pakistan, and where we know from Robert Gernier, the CIA station chief in Islamabad and his book eighty eight Days to Kandahar, he had already made arrangements with the Pakistani Army and Frontier Corps that we expect the bin Ladenites to come fleeing across the border and we expect Americans to be hot on their tail in pursuit, and so they set up deconfliction so that the Pakistanis would not accidentally kill the Americans.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Writes about this too that they showed Bush the map and said we need more men for this and they were denied the men that they needed. And then what? And think about this your whole life ever since then. Talk about confusing narratives from that time. How about this one, dude? How about as soon as Bin Laden and his friends cross the border into Pakistan on December the seventeenth?”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then they were like 40 miles away. Yeah, it's mountains. So what? Right? And they were not allowed to go and to seal the border. And the CIA and the Delta Force are like, man, we got them cornered on three sides. The fourth side is the Pakistani border. They're going to get away. We need more men. In the military they did a congressional investigation. They had a plan. It's called block and sweep. Make sure you get everybody in between here and here, right? And that's exactly how you do it. And the Delta Force guys and the CIA guys, namely Thomas Greer, aka Dalton Fury in his book Kill Bin Laden and Gary Bernson in his book Jawbreaker. Talk about how they just could not understand why they could not get the support that they wanted. And Bernson talks about how his boss at CIA went and laid out the desk in the map on the desk. And Ron Suskin.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In order to go. And so if we kill bin Laden now, or even if we do, we want to make sure the American people know that the war is not over yet. And I believe and I make the case in both books and probably better in the second one. Fool's error enough already that they let Bin Laden go. The CIA and the Delta Force on the ground were begging for reinforcements and reinforcements were available. There were tens of thousands of rangers, or at least what, ten thousand rangers or something at Bogram Air Base north of Kabul, the Green Berets were fighting the Taliban up in Mazari Sharif, the seventy fifth Airborne Rangers who are top tier special operations forces considered right with Delta and Navy SEALs were available in Kandahar province. And General Mattis was there with 10,000 marching marines. And he could have told them ten hook, go now, and they had helicopters.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Occam's Razor answers You can't read the guy's mind. There's so much circumstantial evidence about the thinking at the time. And this was going to what I was saying about CIA and Rice said we should just bomb Al-Qaeda and not the Taliban. Donald Rumsfeld overruled them. Said no, we need to take the bite to the Taliban. We need to keep the Afghan war going on because we want the American people to understand. He actually proposed that we should bomb Baghdad now, so that the American people understand the war on terrorism is not over if we kill bin Laden. And it ain't lost if we don't. The war is much bigger than him and is going to take place over a vast space and a vast period of time. And we want the American people to know that this is not ending any time soon. We're going to Baghdad. It's going to take a while to build up the force in Kuwait and they hope. Turkey, which didn't work out.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To Virginia. Give me a break, right? Nope, not good enough. Then he started bombing on December 8th, and the Taliban said, okay, we have no more conditions. We're willing to give him up if you'll just stop the bombing, Bush said too little, too late, no, and kept the war going then. Why?”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then the Americans would pound their fist on the table and say, We said, hand him over. When that's what he just said, was go ahead and kill him. He's outside of our protection right now, and if you were to murder him, it would not be our fault. Take your best drone strike, take the best hint. That's Milton Bearden talking about. That's where I got this from, okay? Taliban hated this dude. He was nothing but trouble and they wanted rid of him. And remember what Bush said? No negotiations. Hand him over. They said, well, come on, give us some evidence, and we'll hold a proceeding here. And said, no way, give em over. And Colm Pal at one point said, well, we'll come up with evidence. We will accuse him of this. We'll show you. And then they're like, nope, no evidence. The Taliban said, well, tell you what, let us give them over to any Muslim country in the world, which of course you know could be Malaysia or Indonesia or Jordan or Egypt who are going to do exactly what they're told by the United States. He's going to land on the tarmac and he's going to go.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The United States, and bin Laden had promised him that he wouldn't and then kept attacking anyway. And so Mullah Omar, this is the dictator of the Taliban ruling regime in Afghanistan. Milton Bearden said that the Taliban would tell the CIA, Oh, bin Laden? Jeez, you know, we lost track of him today. He's out falconing in the countryside somewhere. We don't know where he is.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In fact, it's very important. Tommy had tried to warn us that the attack was coming and were essentially turned away. They warned the UN in Pakistan and they sent a guy to the United States and he was denied a meeting at State Department at all and went home. And they only knew it was true because an attack was coming because they had learned it from a Tajik jihadist or a, I believe Ataji who was one of their informants basically told them bin Laden didn't tell Mullah Omar. In the summer of 2001, Mullah Omar had told Arnaud Desbargrav from the Washington Times, he said, bin Laden is like a chicken bone stuck in my throat. I can neither swallow him nor spit him out. And Milton Bearden, who had helped run the Sikova Ore in the nineteen eighties, told the Washington Post, We've been negotiating with Mullah Omar over bin Laden since ninety eight, after the Africa Embassy attack, Omar said I gotta get rid of this guy, and he ordered bin Laden, don't you do any more attacks against him?”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Well, so on Afghanistan, it's clear that the CIA and Connolly's arise, and we know this not that Bob Woodward is really trustworthy, but he published supposedly verbatim transcripts from the National Security Council meetings in his book Bush at War. And so we know from those National Security Council meetings that Connolly's arise and the CIA were advising that we try our best to divide the Taliban from Al-Qaeda. And let the Taliban know we don't have a fight with you. We're just after these Arabs that hit us.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They conflated them together so powerfully that then this became a reason why people were just so doubtful about the entire narrative because they're going, what do you mean a bunch of cavemen from the town of Bedrock out there in Kandahar province? Did this to us because they don't like that we have a bill of rights? Like that obviously is not true. So what is the truth? And then people come up with endless answers other than the obvious one, which is America has a really bad Middle East policy and Israel is a real big part of that. That's the answer is blowback. Again, Egyptians volunteering for a Saudi to kill Americans as revenge for what Israel is doing to the Lebanese. It's a little bit complicated, but not that complicated if you want to be honest. At the end, what is it? It's all George Bush's father's and Bill Clinton's fault. Right, and so what are they going to do?”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People might not remember this, but boy did they push it that fall that the Taliban had done it. Al Qaeda was the Taliban. The Taliban was Al-Qaeda.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Why are the Iranians burning our flag? Why are the bin Ladenites crashing into our towers? Somebody tell us'cause we don't know, and when the answer is well, it's actually all our fault. Then the security force, our national government, will not tell us that, in fact. They'll make up a lie and say Islam makes them hate us because we love our mamas and Jesus so much. And then people go, oh man, what a terrible psychopathic. I didn't realize Islam was that bad of a religion. We better have to fight all of them now if that's what it does to you. It's radical Islam. See, once you believe in Islam hard enough, it turns you into a suicide bomber. It makes you hate North Americans. There is no other cause and effect that you guys need to be aware of.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, geez, I guess I don't know what's behind this. Someone explain it. It's just like Tabula Rasa, man. Go ahead and let me know what I'm supposed to think about this. I'm shocked and I'm completely surprised, said, you know, of course people who knew a lot about this were very worried about it, of course. But for the average American, and this was the meaning of the term blowback, by the way, as Chalmers Johnson explained, and it was coined in Donald Wilbur, who was a CIA historian in his after action report about the coup in Iran. He said CIA officer is going to have to be very careful about blowback coming down the line from operations like this. And then, as Johnson explained, what it really meant was not just consequences, because you can just have a funny term for consequences. But blowback meant the long-term consequences of secret foreign policies, so that when they come due, the American people don't understand what it means.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of like to harp on this. Not that I ever really studied psychology more than a couple semesters in junior college, but it seems probably meaningful, right? In the images, the planes literally come out of the clear blue sky.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think that they thought that losing a couple of towers full of a couple of thousand people would be a small price to pay. I think they weren't imagining that level of consequence. But after all, they did have to hijack our airliners to have something to crash into anything. We are talking about a stateless group of essentially penniless bandits, right, who have millions of dollars, not billions, much less trillions, right? These are these were criminals, right? Outlaws, terrorists. So they had no ability to truly bring us down. They had to, and of course the analogy to Pearl Harbor is perfect because 3,000 people died in a sneak attack. What more do you need to know?”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the Cold War segment here, but that's part where these stories overlap a bit. No, so it's important to bring up too that during this time The cliche in the Pentagon among the joint staff who are the most important policy planners for the Pentagon. They had a cliche that said terrorism is a small price to pay for being a superpower. Right. What are they going to do? They're going to set off a truck bomb here or there. They're going to kill a few hundred people here or there. Look at the African embassies. There's mostly Africans who died.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wanted to see an outright victory against the Northern lines because they wanted the Taliban to have total control, a monopoly on the entire state so they could build an oil pipeline from Tajikistan across Afghanistan to Pakistan. Now they abandoned this project after'98 after the embassy bombings of'98. People sometimes say that's why Bush invaded in 01 or whatever. No, that wasn't it. But that is why Bill Clinton supported the rise of the Taliban in 1996 in the first place. And they said, well, we figured there will be an emir and no parliament and lots of Sharia law. We can live with that. That was the Bill Clinton administration's what they said about that, right? And Ahmed Rashid's book, The Taliban has all that stuff in it. And I quote him at length in my books. And so what was the point of that? Screwing the Russians, figuring out a way to get hydrocarbons out of the Caspian Basin without having to go through Russia or Iran. And so that was part of that whole game, which we'll have to talk about that later.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On what the idea, well, God will sort them out. They'll go to Paradise if they believe well. And so who cares about them? Which was something that was a big problem with Mullah Omar, where Mullah Omar, despite the narrative, actually hated and feared Osama bin Laden and wanted rid of him and was trying to negotiate to get rid of him because as Murray Rothbard says, a radical becomes a conservative the day he captures the capital city, right? And so Molahomar didn't want a world revolution like you know Osama bin Lenin, right? He wasn't interested in that. He was interested in holding down Afghanistan. He'd already won most of the country, hadn't finished winning it all yet. And he wasn't trying to get in a fight with America, which Bill Clinton had supported the rise of the Taliban in 1996, had encouraged Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to encourage the Taliban to go all the way to Kabul, and in fact wanted them to not even settle with the Northern Alliance.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Get the irony of the whole thing? How is a group of four hundred bandits hiding out in Nangahar province supposed to bring down the empire? The answer is you give the empire an excuse to exploit. It's not that George Bush is stupid and innocent, it's that he's stupid and guilty. Right? You know, it's not that Bin Laden thought, oh, here's a guy who's such a super patriot that he'll go the extra mile. He looked at Bush said, here's a guy who's a corrupt, evil, narrow minded, short sighted idiot of a criminal who will exploit a crisis to the nth degree if I give him one. And that's what I'm trying to do, and which, by the way, consider the collectivism of Osama bin Laden, who considers that there's no limit apparently on the number of Afghans that he can get killed and his plan here when he ain't from there, right? He's trying to provoke a war with the superpower against a regime that's allowed him to stay and against a people who did nothing to him or to us, right? A people hate that, but some people, millions of people, who did nothing to us whatsoever, and he put them in our crossing.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“His son, bin Laden's son, gave an interview to Rolling Stone in 2010 where he says, I was in Afghanistan with my father. And when Bush was elected in 2000, my father was so happy. He said, this is the kind of president he needs, one who will attack and spend money and break the country. He said, This is in twenty ten, so bin Laden's still alive, he says. Bill Clinton sent missiles after my father and didn't get him. But now you spent ten years in Afghanistan and you still haven't gotten him. America used to be smart, not like the bull that runs after the red scarf. So that was the strategy was to get America to kill itself, to get us to strap on the suicide vest.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And in the whole time they're saying exactly why they're doing this. So we know their motive, and they're also saying their strategy. Their strategy is to provoke us into invading Afghanistan. They're going to replicate. They're going to give us our own Afghanistan the way we gave the Soviets their own Vietnam in Afghanistan. And bin Laden said repeatedly, the point was to provoke us and to overreacting, to bog us down, lead us to bankruptcy, break our empire on the rocks of Afghanistan the same way we had helped them do to the USSR. And so then W. Bush, when he was elected.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bin Laden who did it, and the FBI agent in charge, John O'Neill, knew that it was them who did it. His enemy, Michael Schoyer from the CIA, also knew that it was bin Laden who did it, and bin Laden himself bragged about it to Abdel Bari Atwan, the editor of all Kuds al Arabi in London, and named the names of the martyrs and celebrated them and said, That's exactly right. Are you listening now in all of these things about it? It was Al-Qaeda that did that. Then in 1998, they hit the African embassies. And in 2000, they hit the USS Cole. They had failed on an attack against the USS, the Sullivans, the dinghy sank. And then they hit the coal, killed 17 sailors in Aiden in 2000. So this is these attacks are building up. These are building up and building up in the run-up to September 11th.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And killed Americans training the Saudi National Guard. And in 1996, they blew up the Kobar Towers in Daran, Saudi Arabia. And that was a truck bombing that killed 19. American airmen who were stationed there to bomb Iraq. And that was who was the target. But then what happened was the Saudi kingdom in alliance with the corrupt criminal Louis Free, of course the director of the Federal Intelligence Bureau of Investigation. They who were in charge, not CIA, they had the mandate to treat all these Al-Qaeda taxes crimes as they are crimes under federal code. So his FBI took the lead at that time. And Louis Free wanted to believe the story that somehow it was Iranian-backed Shiite Saudi Hezbollah that had done the attack because, of course, the Saudi monarchy hates their Shiite majority and they just happen to live right on top of where all the oil is and they didn't want to blame it on bin Laden, who was adjacent to the royal family and who they wanted to take care of themselves, et cetera. And so they blamed it on Iran.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then also two days later, the ATF raided the branched dividends, and thus began a six weeks long siege of this religious group a hundred miles up the road from here, who, ultimately the FBI and the Army Delta Force massered on april nineteenth, ninety three. So the American people's attention was just completely diverted, and Clinton's too. This is his whole first hundred days. It's all bogged down in Waco and this kind of thing. And who wants to learn a bunch of ARAB names and all of this stuff? It just to the FBI agents, they didn't do a very good job of following up and preventing the same group from carrying out things. Now, they had, I think, I don't really know enough about this. I need to go back and reread about the Holland Tunnels plot, the UN building, and all that. I think that was the setup where they were trying to get the rest of these guys in a sting, basically, on that part of the plot. But in 1995, the bin Ladenites attacked.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The real bomb, the real terrorist who came in. And again, almost topple one tower over the end of the other. Problem is a couple of things. Only six people died. That's a lot of people if you're one of the six or the survivors of the six, right? I'm not saying that, but I'm just saying in the imagination of the American people, it was kind of just not that big of a deal. And New York City's pretty far from here, and just people were not feeling it nearly as much as, say, for example, both of them collapsing with 3,000 people inside still, right?”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he had been recruited by them, and he allowed them to recruit him to be the bomb maker. You can trust me, I'm a military guy. I can make the bomb, he said. Then he went to the FBI, said I've been recruited by some terrorists to make a bomb. And there were two agents who believed him Floyd and Antisef. Nancy Floyd and John Antisev, where the agents work in the case. And the plan was they were going to use him to use an inert powder, make a fake bomb, and it'd be a perfect sting. But the thing is, their boss was a guy named Carson Dunbar, and he would not, he, in fact, a man they cut his pay, the informant's pay from five hundred to three hundred dollars a week, and demanded he wear a wire on the floor of the mosque where he, you know, I stand. He's sleeping on the floor of the mosque with these guys. He can't wear a wire, right? So he ends up bugging out and says, I think the FBI's on to me and bugs out. Then they brought in Ramsey Youssef, the guy who built the bomb.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, and then from there into more and more towers, who knows there could have been tens and tens and tens of thousands of people killed, and they almost worked. And the thing is about that, a couple of things. First of all, the CIA had allowed these guys into the country when INS wanted to keep them out because they said, we know these guys, they're our friends from the Afghan war. We don't mind them and let them in. So they're all living in Brooklyn in dangerous terrorists. Then the second thing was that the FBI had to walk in and form it, a guy named Imad Salem, who was an Egyptian Army intelligence officer or a former one.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Advocated for the extermination or expulsion of all Palestinians from all of historic Palestine, and his party had been banned by the Israeli Supreme Court for being fascist and was banned from Israeli politics. But he was a radical rabbi, lived in New York, I believe, and he was assassinated in 1990 by a guy who was part of Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Now, that was their first hit. In 92, they hit us at a hotel in Aden, Yemen. Then in 93, they did the first World Trade Center attack. Now, as we're dwelling on this one for a second, because Bill Clinton had just been present for a month and a week. It was the end of February's february twenty sixth, nineteen ninety three. And the truck bomb, they parked it in the wrong place. It could have toppled one tower over into the other. It could have just that truck bomb without another one if they had put it in the wrong place. It could have toppled one tower over into the other at five o'clock in the afternoon. Right.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In Is it Begovic's office, the president of Bosnia in Sarajevo in 1990, I guess four. And his men fought there and Bill Clinton knew it. And Richard Holbrook said we could have never won without their help and all these kinds of things. I got all the sources and the latest book provoked. I go into much further detail about this, even than in the Terra War book enough already. And the same was true in Chechnya too. Essentially, and as we've seen, and you know this from just your own recent memory, right, that as we've seen in Syria as well, that as long as the bin Ladenites are killing Serbs or Russians or Shiites, then it's cool. And that's what America and Britain and Saudi use them for. And so even though their first attack in the United States was Rabbi Kahane in 1990, the leader of the Koch party, who's a very right-wing Israeli rabbi who”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wait, let's stay on Bill Clinton in the 90s for a minute because we were talking about the neocons got brought up in the sense that they did help to encourage Iraq War I, although I don't think they were the real kingpins behind it or whatever in the way that they were in Iraq War II. And then the doctrine of global dominance that Wolfowitz developed in 92 that became more or less the standard for foreign policy thought through the 90s. But during the Clinton years, it's really important to mention that Bill Clinton backed the Munjahideen, even though they were already attacking us in the United States and American targets overseas. Bill Clinton kept backing them in Bosnia, Kosovo, and in Chechnya. And to a greater degree than I understood. Now, mostly this means working with the Saudis and the Brits. to support them, including bin Laden himself was seen by at least four credible journalists.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Molissau, even if I just met him that day, like everything out of his mouth was some kind of twisted back. Like, yes, there was a Cobar Tower attack, but you're going to blame that on the Ayatollah when it was bin Laden that did that, and we all know that that's true. So sit here and try to give me some pro-Israel my truth. There's only the truth. And Mark Dubowitz is not associated with it. He has an agenda. But you're right that I should have made that clear, that what this is, is this is a foreign lobbyist trying to get America to serve a foreign nation. And I am the guy from America and anti-war.com trying to fend him off. And look, and I accept too that I ain't so mature for a 49-year-old, whatever. 48 then. I was a very immature 48 at the time, but I lose my temper very quickly when people lie. I just can't stand it. I just don't have time to listen to people being willing.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Regrets that Americans died on September 11 because of what Israel was doing? He would hide behind no, they hate us because we're free. No, maybe he'd say they were mad about our presence in Saudi Arabia, but he would never say, yeah, but that's because Martin Indick said so, and that's and the conna massacre helped motivated Mohammed Ata. He just elied that point. Just like all Israel lobbyists would. How could they justify? You know?”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's true that the thing did really turn into an argument at that point. I mean, he called Jim Lowe of all people a vicious anti-Semite, which is just completely hilarious considering how Jewish Jim Loeb is and what an extraordinarily sweet and kind and decent gentleman he is. It's the most ridiculous thing in the world. When we were on the curb outside arguing, he said JJ Goldberg of the Jewish Daily Forward also is a vicious antisemite because he wrote something that explained the difference between Netanyahu and Ariel Charon's positions on Iraq and Iran. In other words, Mark Dubious is very dubious. He is not a serious man. He's in a sense not really a man as much as just a foreign agent representing a position on behalf of a foreign power. And as I said in that debate, do you think, and I mean this honestly for anyone listening, you don't have to answer, but does anyone think that Mark Dubowitz really...”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this is something very important that we have to grapple with as a country, that we're not just talking about Israel being a nice Jewish boy minding its own business over there, kind of like in some cliche or narrative. We're talking about an absolutely ruthless state that is in the process of trying to get rid of millions of people they wish they hadn't kidnapped back in 1967. We can do a whole bit on that. They are put themselves in a very difficult position. And so they need our help to a very great degree. Now, from all that we've discussed here today, does this sound like I'm saying the Israelis and their lobby are behind every single thing in American policy and what we're doing here? Like, that's not all what I'm talking about. It's a big New Brasinsky, it's not the Israel lobby at all. He's Rockefeller's guy. And that's a separate group of guys, right? And so go ahead.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My very good response to that went to the cutting room floor. And so I Was waiting to hear back from you where we're going to make up for that by doing this interview. And so I was like, yeah, I'm kind of disappointed. Now it's nearly August and I hadn't heard from the dude and I thought we were going to do that. And so and because it is important that, and it goes to my overall point that I'm trying to make here, is obviously the American empire is very much against the interests of the American people, but also and most especially, our support for Israel, the great albatross around our neck, you know, what they do are millstone is maybe better, right? Albatross was a symbol of good luck before you shot it down. But Israel's interests are vastly different than America's interests. And people try to lie even to themselves and say that that's not true. But they are very different. For example, when Israel killed those women and children in Kana in 1996, that's what brought our towers down, right?”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And yet, my response was completely deleted. But him saying that against me was still in there, and I thought like on one hand it's completely silly and stupid, but on the other hand that's also like a pretty ruthless and horrible thing to try to do to somebody, not you him, to try to put those words in my mouth and say all those facts that you just heard for four hours. Nah, this guy just hates Jews, so if you're on my side, you don't have to listen to him, you don't have to believe him, anything like this. And then our discussion about that's not true, dude. Just because I was talking about the neoconservatives doesn't mean I was talking about the Jews, because, for example, Jinker Patrick and Jim Woolsey are Presbyterians and Michael Novak. And what's his name are Catholics? And Francis Fukayama's, I guess it's a Buddhist, and Zame Khalilzad is a Muslim. And so I didn't say the Jews at all, did I? I was talking about this and that.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're all just going to be friends here when that just was never going to really last. And part of that is look, I'm just, I'm Luke from Empire. I'm not quite all the way grown up, Return of the Jedi Skywalker here myself. So I get angry and say angry things. So as far as how bad it went, I take my responsibility for my part of that, except the reality was it was just because I was up against horrible foreign agent lying his ass off trying to get my fellow Americans killed and their dollars wasted and I got a problem with that. And now on the edit though, this is where we had a problem, and I do accept from you that this part was inadvertent. I know that you didn't mean to do it this way. What happened was there were two instances of him saying, oh, Scott Horton thinks the Jews control everything and dictate everything and blah, blah, blah, which I never said at all. And he said twice.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I really had thought about this beforehand. I really should have rejected your terms at the beginning where we're all friends here having a friendly discussion. I had already kind of rehearsed in my mind what I wanted to say to you was actually no, right? This is just business. And I know that I really do regret that. And I'm sorry to you personally for that because what I should have said was this is just business. What's going to happen here is he's going to lie the whole time because he has to. And so then I'm going to spend all of my time telling you why what he just said isn't actually true and how you can go verify that for yourself, et cetera, which is what ended up happening. But it made it much more acrimonious because it was like, and for you, it was more frustrating because you're trying to hold things in the conception that you had it where...”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source