On Thursday's show, John
joked about you and him being shills for Isreal, which would be a fine
enough joke, but then the blunder occurred when he presented to you and
everyone listening an MIC swamp monster extraordinaire with deep ties to
the Isreal lobby as a respected expert on Middle East affairs.
A simple book of knowledge review would have sent up many red flags:
As per the book of knowledge: David Wurmser has
a PHD in international relations from Johns Hopkins University. He
worked in navy intelligence. And he was the Middle East advisor to Dick
Cheney and special assistant to John Bolton. This alone should be enough
to make anything he says suspect.
Dig a little deeper though and we
find that while he was working as an advisor to Dick Cheney, he was
invesigated by the FBI for espionage for passing classified information
to "a US lobbying group allied with Isreal" (AIPAC?).
In
that WaPo article we also learn he was co-author to the infamous 1996
policy paper for Netanyahu’s first term as Prime Minister, titled "a
clean break: a new strategy for securing the realm" in which it was
argued that “not
through peace accords will the great questions of the day be
decided — that was the great mistake of 1978 (at Camp David) and 1993
(at Oslo) — but by 'divide and conquer' and regime change. By wars both
aggressive ('preemptive') and 'dirty' (covert and proxy).”
The paper slated Iraq, Syria and Iran for regime change. Lebanon was key to this strategy.
Then we learn that Wurmser was key to lying us into the Iraq war:
https://archive.ph/2017.06.09-010543/http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2004/01/lie-factory/
“Just
after September 11, 2001, Feith and Rhode recruited David Wurmser, the
director of Middle East studies for AEI, to serve as a Pentagon
consultant.
Wurmser would be the founding
participant of the unnamed, secret intelligence unit at the Pentagon,
set up in Feith’s office, which would be the nucleus of the Defense
Department’s Iraq disinformation campaign that was established within
weeks of the attacks in New York and Washington. While the CIA and other
intelligence agencies concentrated on Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda as the
culprit in the 9/11 attacks, Wolfowitz and Feith obsessively focused on
Iraq. It was a theory that was discredited, even ridiculed, among
intelligence professionals.
[..]
In short, Wurmser, backed by Feith and Rhode, set out to prove what didn’t exist.”
There is much more, but this alone
is enough to realize nobody should ever listen to him for expert
analysis on Middle East affairs.