Scott Horton > Quotes

“Most significantly, it sends a clear message to would-be whistleblowers: We will destroy you. You will lose your pension, your savings, your house. You won't be able to send your children to college or find a job commensurate with your education and experience. We will make your life a never-ending hell. And the courts and your attorneys will be powerless to help you in any way.”
― Scott Horton

“Biden did not just support the war. He served as Bush and Cheney’s Senate gatekeeper and whip, guaranteeing a majority vote for the war in the upper chamber while controlled by the opposition party. If Biden had any moral courage at all, he could have stopped that war.”
― Scott Horton, Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism

“Funding the Enemy by Douglas Wissing.”
― Scott Horton, Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism

“Provoked is manna from heaven for anyone who wants to know where the extreme Russophobia in the West came from, as well as the central role the United States played in causing the Ukraine war. Horton provides a detailed account of America’s foolish and dishonest behavior toward Russia in the years since the Cold War ended.” —John J. Mearsheimer, R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service
Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago”
― Scott Horton, Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine

“The Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), a special unit of the North Carolina-based Special Operations Command (SOCOM), existed before Rumsfeld, but its mission, profile, and budget dramatically expanded during his tenure as secretary of defense in the Bush administration. It effectively became Rumsfeld's clandestine service. JSOC operatives did not necessarily wear uniforms, dispensed with many aspects of normal military protocol, and adopted secrecy as their byword. Consequently, the boundary lines laid down in 1947 were breached on both sides: the CIA got its own army and air force, and the Pentagon got its own CIA.”
― Scott Horton, Lords of Secrecy: The National Security Elite and America's Stealth Warfare

“On September 11, 2001, there were no more than a few hundred al Qaeda members hiding out in Afghanistan. Three months later, when the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) paramilitaries, U.S. Army Delta Force and U.S. Air Force finished bombing them, and Osama bin Laden had escaped to Pakistan, there were not enough of the terrorists left alive to fill a 757. Now, 20 years after that brief, one-sided victory, there are tens of thousands of bin Ladenite jihadists thriving in lands from Nigeria to the Philippines. Recently, and for almost three years, some even claimed their own divinely ordained caliphate, or Islamic State, temporarily erasing the border between Iraq and Syria. Local chapters of their group keep popping up all over the region. The State Department consistently reports a vast increase in the number of global terrorism incidents compared to the pre-September 11th era. Al Qaeda, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and their “lone wolf” copycats have carried out multiple, deadly attacks in more than a dozen major Western cities in the past decade, including Brussels, Paris, Berlin, London, San Bernardino, Orlando, New York City, Pensacola and Corpus Christi. Something must be wrong. The problem is that our government is ignoring and misrepresenting the real causes of the terrorists’ war against the United States.”
― Scott Horton, Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism

“The bomb was 'born secret,' as Daniel Patrick Moynihan said. The atomic bomb marked a powerful turning point in America's stewardship of national security affairs. After its arrival, Garry Willis argues, 'the power of secrecy that enveloped the Bomb became a model for the planning or execution of Anything Important, as guarded by Important People.' But the first stop was a radical restructuring of the government itself, to account for the development and expansion of a nuclear arsenal requiring special means, staffs, oversight, and a stringent and novel regime of peacetime secrecy. The national security state was born.”
― Scott Horton, Lords of Secrecy: The National Security Elite and America's Stealth Warfare

“For years before the September 11th attacks, bin Laden told the world precisely what his grievances were, what he would do about them and how he expected his plan to work. As he told Robert Fisk of the Independent, Peter Bergen and Peter Arnett of CNN, Abdel Bari Atwan of the newspaper Al Quds al-Arabi in London and others, his problem was U.S. military intervention in the Middle East. His plan was to wage war against the United States to force our military out of the region, thus making it possible to achieve al Qaeda’s long-term goals of carrying out revolutions in their own countries without American interference. John Miller, an ABC”
― Scott Horton, Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism

“As Krauthammer put it in his rejoinder to Kirkpatrick in The National Interest, denouncing the more conservative Russell Kirk[17] and Pat Buchanan,[18] who urged a return to normalcy, the U.S. now ruled “a super-sovereign West economically, culturally, and politically hegemonic in the world. . . . I suggest we go all the way and stop at nothing short of universal domination.”[19] He later added, “We are living in a unipolar world. We Americans should like it—and exploit it.”[20]”
― Scott Horton, Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine

“Their strategy was to goad the United States government into helping accomplish their goals for them: destabilization, radicalization and revolution in their countries.”
― Scott Horton, Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism

“Another part of al Qaeda’s public case justifying its war against America was U.S. support for corrupt dictatorships in the Middle East, which included Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, Yemen and Egypt. This support, bin Laden complained, came with the condition that these regimes keep oil prices artificially low and spend their profits on large purchases of American arms instead of using it for the people’s benefit. Is it a surprise then that all the September 11th hijackers were from countries with governments friendly to our own—Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates—and that none of them were from America’s designated enemy states of Iran, Iraq or Syria? Osama”
― Scott Horton, Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism

“Just weeks after taking office, in February 2009, Obama began his escalation, ordering an increase of 17,000 soldiers and marines[10] on top of the 6,000 President Bush had sent in on his way out of office.[11] By March, 17,000 had grown to 21,000.[12] Then in October, he sent 13,000 more.[13]”
― Scott Horton, Fool's Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan

“Powell-Weinberger six-point doctrine”
― Scott Horton, Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism

“Former leftists and Cold War Democrats, the neoconservatives were highly ideological about the beneficence of American military power and, in many cases, close to the nationalist Likud Party in Israel.[12] As neocon columnist Charles Krauthammer put it in Foreign Affairs in 1990, without the USSR in the way, it was America’s “unipolar moment” and opportunity to remake the world as our leaders saw fit.[13] Popular television commentators simply call it “leadership”; neoconservative think tank ringleader and former editor of the Weekly Standard, Bill Kristol, and his writing partner Robert Kagan labeled it “benevolent global hegemony.”[14] Zbigniew Brzezinski, the Jimmy Carter-era national security adviser from the “realist” school, called it “primacy,” “preeminence” or “predominance,”[15] while the technocratic liberal interventionist Michèle Flournoy, undersecretary of defense for policy in the Barack Obama years, referred to America’s political and military posture as “Full-Spectrum Dominance.”[16]”
― Scott Horton, Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine

“Layla al-Attar.”
― Scott Horton, Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism

“The way he framed the conflict was that America was at war with Islam; that the U.S. was out to destroy Muslim people, occupy Muslim lands, devour Muslim resources and humiliate Muslim men—that we hate them for their freedom.”
― Scott Horton, Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism