Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 12/6/23: Bibi Shouted Down By Freed Hostages, Tapper Spars With Israeli Rep, Putin Meets With MBS, Pakistan Deepfake Smear Of The Intercept, Tuberville Folds On Military Hold Up, GOP Pushes To Impeach Biden, And How The CIA Helped Assassinate Lumumba

Episode Date: December 6, 2023

Ryan and Emily discuss Bibi being shouted down by freed hostages, Jake Tapper spars with Israeli rep on civilian casualties, AIPAC tries to offer AOC campaign cash, Putin and MBS meet, Pakistan deepfake smearing The Intercept, Tuberville backs down on military blocks, Republicans push to impeach Biden, and Stuart Reid joins to discuss how the CIA helped assassinate Lumumba.   BP Holiday Merch LIVE NOW (Use code BLACKFRIDAY for 15% off Non-Holiday Items): https://shop.breakingpoints.com/collections/breaking-points-holiday-collection  To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. But there were some dark truths behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. Enter Camp Shame, an eight-part series examining the rise and fall of Camp Shane and the culture that fueled its decades-long success. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus.

So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. Over the years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned no town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend. I've heard from hundreds of people across the country with an unsolved murder in their community.

I was calling about the murder of my husband. The murderer is still out there. Each week, I investigate a new case. If there is a case we should hear about, call 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I've seen a lot of stuff over 30 years, you know. Some very despicable crime and things that are kind of tough to wrap your head around. And this ranks right up there in the pantheon of Rhode Island fraudsters.

I've always been told I'm a really good listener, right? And I maximized that while I was lying. Listen to Deep Cover The Truth About Sarah on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you have your support. But enough with that. Let's get to the show. Good morning and welcome to CounterPoints. I'm Emily Drushinsky, joined today from the West Coast at a very early hour by my co-host, Ryan Grimm, who's in the middle of a book tour for his fantastic new book, which is out this week. Ryan, how's it going? It's funny being out here in Los Angeles. It is such a failed experiment. In? Like the cars just don't move. It's hilarious. In just everything.

I mean, the weather is absolutely wonderful, but I think I spent more time just sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic yesterday than doing anything else. I thought you were about to say— Everything is just a one-story house. It was a failed experiment in democratic socialism. I thought we had you for just a moment. Let's go with that. Yeah, sure.

Okay. Well, you have been busy on, for example, CNN. We're going to play a clip of that. Your book has made news across the media. There's a lot to talk about. And actually, as we have been discussing, there's a lot to talk about when it comes to our first story today, which is Israel. So we're going to get to some of the reports from your book as we discuss the news out of Israel this morning. We're going to talk about Vladimir Putin meeting with the Saudis and the UAE today. That's huge news, obviously has big implications.

You'll notice that we're almost in an American election year. So there's probably some important details to get to when it comes to those negotiations, which are supposed to be about oil. They're going to be about Israel and Ukraine as well. According to spokesman for Putin, we're going to talk about what Ryan has dubbed a shallow fake, not a deep fake, but a shallow fake as it relates to his reporting on Imran Khan with his colleague Murtaza Hussein over at The Intercept. Tommy Tuberville, senator from Alabama, has officially dropped his hold on military nominations. So that's been going since March.

Huge news on the Hill, and there's a lot to talk about there, too. We're going to be talking about the news that came out just yesterday, that House Republicans, they don't really have much going on, of course. You know, there's nothing to do. They don't have to fund the government. But they will be starting their impeachment inquiry formally next week. We'll talk about what it means that it's going to be formally open. There's certainly a lot to deal with when it comes to Hunter Biden. There's no shortage of potential avenues for

investigation. We're also excited to talk to Stuart Reid, who's the author of a new book called The Lumumba Plot about the CIA's role in the assassination of Lumumba. If you don't know this story, please stick around and watch the interview because Stuart Reid's book is so interesting and important and relevant now. Ryan, we should get to the news. Let's do it. Since some of the hostages have been released, they've been pressing hard to meet with Netanyahu's war cabinet. And Netanyahu finally agreed to meet with them yesterday. And it sounds like there were fireworks. Yeah, let's put the first element up on the screen. I've actually, in my notes, bolded some of the key quotes from these meetings. This is an article that we're

reading from the Times of Israel yesterday. Just the headline says so much. Chaos and yelling, freed hostages, family members clash with Netanyahu in meeting. So a markedly tense meeting, the Times says, was held Tuesday between a group of recently released hostages as well as family members of those still in Gaza and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as well as other members of the war cabinet. Now, one interesting detail that the Times of Israel is reporting is Netanyahu showed up late for the meeting. So they were supposed to start at 3 p.m. and Netanyahu and people showed up at 3.45 p.m.

And the quote is, they let us get mad, from a source, and fight amongst ourselves. I left in the middle. It's not acceptable. As Ryan said, they have been demanding this for a long time. This came after, on the heels of all of those demands, some of the audio from the meeting leaked. Netanyahu could be heard telling the families, as the Times says, quote, there's no possibility right now to bring everyone home. Can anyone really imagine that if that was an option, anyone would refuse it? He also said that they are, he said something to the extent of, these are demands that even you wouldn't take. That's Netanyahu, I'm paraphrasing him there.

But that's, yeah, he said, basically, you know, even you, the people who are former hostages or whose family is still held hostage or recently released hostages, even you wouldn't take this deal. The numbers, by the way, of hostages are also, I mean, we're now, how many have been released? About 105, I think, have been released. 105 civilians released from Hamas captivity. That's 83 Israelis, 23 Thai nationals, and one Filipino. So they think right now about

138 hostages remain in Gaza, including around 20 women. One other statement I want to read before I get your thoughts on this, Ryan. This is from more of the leaked audio. It was a recording actually aired by Channel 12. Quote, I was there. I know how hard it is. It's hard in captivity every day. You don't know. She says, you have no idea what you're doing there.

And I know the conditions they're holding the men in are worse, worse for the women. Another one went and talked about sexual abuse. And then another said, quote, you have no idea what's even going on there at all. You claim that you have intelligence, but the fact is we were bombed. Huge, hugely consequential meeting for Netanyahu. Don't you think, Ryan? Yeah, I thought that in particular was quite striking. Because as this ceasefire went on, every day there would be a trickle of hostages released. And you can only imagine from the Israeli family's perspective what that must be like. You're just holding your breath, hoping that in the next release will be some of your loved ones or all of your loved ones. And as a day goes by and your family members

are not in that, then you're praying that the ceasefire goes so that there's another day. So this kind of cruel lottery can continue to unfold where you're hoping against hope that eventually they'll be released. And those Israeli families are some of the people that I thought about first when Israel resumed the bombing, because that must have been just such a crushing blow, because that hope that the next day their family might come home is dashed by the resumption of the

bombing and the end of these talks. And then to find out from these hostages that they were getting pounded by bombs the entire time or a significant amount of time as well is that much more poignant. And one of the hostages told Netanyahu, Hamas slept through your airstrikes. They kept us awake at night. They rattled us, but they just slept through it. They mean nothing to you,

which gets in then to this question of negotiations. Netanyahu hasn't said what Hamas is demanding in exchange for this. Hamas has floated a permanent ceasefire in exchange for release of the hostages. I suspect that he's wrong and that the families would actually agree to that. What was your read on it? Yeah, I mean, especially because the Biden administration is now pressuring Netanyahu

reportedly saying that their target for the end of the sort of assault on Gaza is the beginning of the new year. So that's a matter of weeks. And as these numbers show, there's still a lot of hostages in Gaza. So if Netanyahu's saying that his primary goal here is to eradicate Hamas and get back all of these hostages, and Israeli media is blanketing the airwaves with these quotes and in leaked audio. I mean, something as visceral as the leaked audio of people being unhappy with Netanyahu questioning the strategy of their own government. Again, it gets to something, this is a point I think is excellent that you make all of the time. It's actually criticism of Netanyahu and of the Israeli government is often much more pitched in Israel from either the right or from the left than you're sort of allowed to operate within the kind of boundaries in the United States. If the U.S., we talked about this last week, President Biden, at least from his statements,

says that he's been sort of taking public stances that allow him to negotiate with Netanyahu privately. So if he is trying to end the conflict earlier than the Israeli government would like to, and you have hostages questioning the strategy and that being blanketed on Israeli media, that's a huge, I mean, obviously a huge problem for Netanyahu, who is already under a huge amount of pressure to answer questions about how the attack, how the security was breached on October 7th in the first place. And he's cross-pressured, like you say, and there might be apparently apparently there is kind of more pressure uh coming from the the wing of the israeli public that that wants vengeance and netanyahu seems to be just exploiting that anger in order to not save his political career because he might be

finished but just extend it he's just living to fight another day. He also, making the situation that much more bizarre, has these corruption charges hanging over his head so that if and when he ever does leave office, he has to confront those corruption charges. And so he has this extra incentive to just do whatever he can, kind of take a step forward day by day. And the number one song,

and this is just an indication into how much kind of thirst there is for vengeance right now among the Israeli public. The number one, have you seen this? The number one rap song is this like insane, like genocidal hip hop song that even by the end of the song is like calling for like Bella Hadid to get wiped out. It's like, people can kind of Google it and find this song. I would, you can find like a rough translation of it, but it's just wild. And it's, but it's a real window

into kind of the politics on the ground and what Netanyahu was dealing with. As the ceasefire was going on, if you remember, Ben-Gavir, I mean, I believe Smotrich as well, were both hinting, like, if this war doesn't resume soon, that we're going to bring the government down. You had some of his right-wing cabinet members at the very beginning saying,

we have to not, what did he say? We have to not consider over much the life of the hostages. We have to be very brutal in our calculations here. It's unfortunate, but we're just going to have to, you know, they will also be kind of collateral damage in this bombing campaign against Hamas, which has now picked up with a renewed ferocity. Yeah, and I don't think anybody would make the argument, of course, that Netanyahu was in some sort of like easy position either before October 7th or after

politically, practically. I mean, no matter what, it's a difficult situation, but nobody is happy with him. And for very good reasons, he's basically lost public support. And that's in so many ways his own fault. And when you're losing public support, I mean, even the Israeli left was upset. Some parts of the Israeli left were upset with talk that there was going to be an indefinite ceasefire and were interested in what Ben-Gabir had been saying about bringing down the government because they were so outraged by the way Netanyahu has handled the war and by how negotiations have gone. And public opinion is just so crucial. Public support in Israel and in the West is so crucial. And this is not helpful, obviously. Right. And Netanyahu's been in power,

you know, basically since the 1990s with a couple of breaks. And he's been able to basically enact his idea about how to handle the occupation. And he has consistently said, I'm the guy who can prevent a Palestinian state from forming and what I will do instead is divide the Palestinians and I will manage the conflict. And we will kind of very slowly, de facto, and then eventually legally, well, quote unquote legally, annex more and more Palestinian land.

And that you can do that and be secure at the same time that was his promise to the israeli public he's had an opportunity to kind of enact that vision and you know we've seen it um you know blow up blow up in his face uh which is why you're seeing so much blowback from him and now you're seeing so much blowback from them, and now you're seeing so much of it kind of blow back at the Palestinian population. Should we talk about the way that it's kind of unfolding in the Western press with this kind of fascinating Jake Tapper interview? Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight-loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies were often unrecognizable when they left. In a society obsessed with being thin, it seemed like a miracle solution.

But behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children was a dark underworld of sinister secrets. Kids were being pushed to their physical and emotional limits as the family that owned Shane turned a blind eye. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. In this eight-episode series, we're unpacking and investigating stories of mistreatment and re-examining the culture of fat phobia that enabled a flawed system to continue for so long. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. DNA test proves he is not the father. Now I'm taking the inheritance.

Wait a minute, John. Who's not the father? Well, Sam, luckily it's your not the father week on the OK Storytime podcast. So we'll find out soon. This author writes, my father-in-law is trying to steal the family fortune worth millions from my son, even though it was promised to us. Now I find out he's trying to give it to his irresponsible son instead. But I have DNA proof that could get the money back. Hold up. So what are they going to do to get those millions back? That's so unfair. Well, the author writes that her husband found out the truth from a DNA test they were gifted two years ago. Scandalous. But the kids kept their mom's secret that whole time. Oh my God. And the real kicker, the author wants to reveal this terrible secret, even if that means destroying

her husband's family in the process. So do they get the millions of dollars back or does she keep the family's terrible secret? Well, to hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder. I'm Catherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case. They've never found her. And it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills

I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never gotten any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Yeah, we should definitely move on to this clip from CNN. You see Jake Tapper pressing a representative from Israel actually on tragedy that happened to a CNN producer. Let's roll this thought.

The IDF really has done everything that is humanly possible to try to safeguard innocent civilians. It's very hard to believe that, especially on a day when one of our producers lost nine members of his family, nine members of his family who are not members of Hamas, not members of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, not members of any group, just nine people just trying to live their lives? First of all, I extend my sorrow to him and my sympathies. But if I saw your report correctly and please correct me if I said something wrong, that happened in northern Gaza, in Gaza City, where a month ago we already asked all the civilians

to leave. And most of them did if there was like 1 million 200 000 people there there was only a couple of tens of thousands left and one has to ask yes they had ample opportunity to leave i don't know what happened i don't have the specific circumstances i know there's deadly combat going on now in the north still between these idf and and andas terrorists, yes? And we don't want to see anyone caught up in the crossfire, but why didn't they heed the advice and leave the area? You can't blame them. I don't blame them. But you can't, there's fighting in the south now. I mean, I've been asking this since October 7th,

where are these people supposed to go? The point about fighting in the south is absolutely critical there, Ryan. Yeah, and I think, you know, let's assume, let's imagine a world in which the IDF had given, you know, ample warning, had provided genuine safe corridors for passage, had provided places for people to go where they could guarantee that they would be safe and that their humanitarian needs would be met and that they guaranteed that once this was over, they would have the right to return to their homes. In that situation, you could say,

look, people who didn't take that warning um were taking on some serious risk but none of those conditions uh were were met uh they you know the israeli the israelis did not offer a safe corridors those those corridors were often often struck themselves uh they did not offer kind of safe places where they could go. They've bombed kind of UN places. They've been bombing Khan Yunus and the Rafah Crossing, you know, since the very beginning. These are the places in the south where they've told people to go. Everyone in Gaza knows somebody who evacuated the north, went to the south, and was either killed on the way or killed in the South.

And they also are not providing for the humanitarian needs of people in these places. They are instead making sure that the civilian infrastructure has been basically eradicated so that sewage treatment is nonexistent, disease is rampant. If they're lucky, 100 trucks with humanitarian supplies are getting in on a daily basis for 2 million people, cutting off water, taking the already low calorie counts significantly down. And so you can imagine why in that situation, people might say, if those are all of the options,

we're just going to try to hunker down right here. And I thought it was interesting, curious for your take on this, that the IDF spokesperson there sort of seemed to forget that he's talking to a Western audience. Like, his original answer, my condolences, I'm deeply sorry for this, good. The second answer might be better for an Israeli audience, but not for an American audience. The second answer of, well, why were they there? It kind of sounds like their fault. And it lands, you can see how poorly it lands with Jake Tapper there. You know, it's interesting because there is truth that, you know, Israel provides warnings, has provided warnings in the past, but there's

also in this conflict been proof that that's not happened. And in fact, we've seen the Israeli government concede at certain points that it hasn't happened and, you know, and actually defend that it hasn't happened. We've seen obviously bombings in the South. So it's, you know, to your point, Ryan, even if you're not in front of a Western audience, I mean, I don't know what else he could have said there, to be honest. I don't know what else there is other than saying what we've heard from Netanyahu and others, that this is the terrible cost. When we heard early in the conflict that they were invoking Dresden and other just awful things. That seems to me like the only honest defense that you can offer because nothing else is especially persuasive in light of that evidence. You know, we're,

what, two months in now. These answers are not quite cutting it in the West, that's for sure, to your point. And, you know, maybe it's even more effective for them, sadly, to make the argument that they were making earlier. Maybe people will believe that they actually believe it, because I don't think it's believable when you say things like, you know, it was in the North, right? I mean, it doesn't cut it anymore. So no, I agree with you. And I think we should, let's roll this. This is the first of two Aaron Burnett clips we'll play from CNN in this segment. One will actually feature Ryan himself. But this is with, of course, Israeli army spokesman Jonathan Konrikis on CNN talking about the ratio

of civilian casualties. So it's two civilians for every terrorist. Can you confirm that? I can confirm the report and I can say that if that is true, and I think that our numbers will be corroborated, if you compare that ratio to any other conflict in urban terrain between a military and a terrorist organization using civilians as their human shield and embedded in the civilian population, you will find that that ratio is tremendously positive and perhaps unique in the world. I understand that there are civilian casualties, and I understand that footage and coverage goes towards emotions and to cover those civilian casualties. But what I want to say is that we will get those figures out, and they will be official and on record by the IDF with the name behind it. And then we will be able to say and to back up afterwards with names and numbers

that we are indeed targeting the terrorists. We are not after the civilians. Okay. So what he just said was important because if you look at the New York Times, and we talked about this last week, tabulated recently the ratio, and this is from Hamas numbers and they're using UN numbers as well. And I understand people have concerns about the numbers, but women and children make up 69% of the deaths in the 2023 war, but 41% of 2021 fighting, 38% of the 2014 war, and 39% of the 08-09 war. So by these numbers, and again, you know, I look forward to the IDF's numbers because I think it is helpful to be able to compare the data. But Ryan, to your point, these numbers could even be underestimating. You know, there's an argument that Israel seems to imply, repeatedly implies that they're overestimating the level of death. But in some cases, there's been an argument

they're actually underestimating it. So we should have numbers to compare. If we're not supposed to trust the Hamas numbers, and I understand the reasons for that argument, but then we need numbers to compare that to because these numbers are really, really bad. These ratios, even compared with Israel's previous handling, are bad, even by their own measures. Yeah, and the Ministry of Health numbers have proven to be accurate in the past, and even Israel in past conflicts, when they've put out their numbers after a conflict, they've mostly matched what the Ministry of Health has put out. And what I would add to those is that there's also, like if you throw in the elderly, you push that number well into the 70 percentages.

And also as a non-combatant male, I'd like to put in a good word for non-combatant males. Like we always kind of get tossed into this bucket of potential combatants. You know, they'll say, well, I guess we're left with 30% of people who are Hamas. And it's like, well, we know for a fact that so far, they've killed 73 journalists.

A significant number of them were men, not all of them, but a significant number were. I know of, you know, through people I've interviewed, significant numbers of men, even fighting age men, who had absolutely nothing to do with Hamas. And so once you throw them in, you're getting even further down. We can just talk about this based on kind of the Israeli figures. You heard the spokesperson there say that they're killing two civilians for every, you know, one Hamas fighter that they kill. Now, I would take that with a grain of salt as well. If that's what they're saying publicly now, I suspect we'll find

the ratio to be significantly higher. But what's so disturbing about that is that he says that if you look at previous combat, if you compare us to perfection, well, of course we fall short. But if you compare us to previous combat, then actually we're doing quite well. If you compare that to October 7th, they're not doing well. And October 7th is a useful comparison because all of us recognize that as a horrific atrocity and as something that should be condemned kind of top to bottom. But if you look at the military to civilian casualty rates, you're looking at a roughly two to one civilian to military personnel, military police personnel. And so if we all agree, and we do, that that was a horrific atrocity and a war crime that should be prosecuted,

how can the IDF then say, with roughly the same proportion, that they are actually conducting themselves in an ethical fashion? Doesn't that put them in a pretty tough bind and expose what's going on? Yeah, it does. And, you know, as somebody who probably disagrees with you on a lot of different aspects of this conflict, sort of on the more foundational level, my position is Hamas should release the hostages. If Israel's goal is the eradication of Hamas and that's what's justifying the sort of continued conflict, I mean, I'm not seeing evidence that there's concrete steps that are going to be taken seriously towards that end goal, that that is a kind of—in

some ways you can have a similar conversation about Ukraine. Ukraine is going to reclaim every inch of the Donbass. And until that, all of the blood will continue to be spilled. And, you know, the eradication of Hamas is just an impossible goal, an understandable and important goal. But I think, you know, that it's just not good enough two months into the conflict as a sort of end while these numbers continue to stack up. And let's put the next element up on the screen. This is an estimate of the number of Hamas fighters that have been killed so far. According to a report, Israeli intelligence, their latest estimate is that they've killed

around 5,300 Hamas terrorists. The New York Times reports that the estimate is there are about 30,000 Hamas terrorists embedded in the 2 point something million, about 2.2 million person population of Gaza. So 5,300 Hamas terrorists, we don't know. That's almost impossible to confirm at the same time. That will factor into those calculations, Ryan. Does that sound to you like a plausible number? I mean, who knows? There's been so much killing in Hamas, I mean, in Gaza, that certainly,

even just by chance, you're going to hit a number of Hamas fighters. And even if the IDF spokesperson is saying, look, we think we have a two to one civilian ratio, the fact that that makes them look so bad suggests that there's probably a little bit of truth to it, even if they're counting a number of people who they suspect were Hamas fighters who actually were not. We have another CNN clip here talking about one particularly troubling case. We can roll that now. What happened on October 7th was an absolute atrocity, was a thousand atrocities. I think at the same time we condemn those atrocities, we have to condemn the atrocities that happen every day to Palestinians in the West Bank. You mentioned sexual violence. I was part of the human rights vetting process for arms going to Israel, and a charity called Defense of Children International Palestine

drew our attention at the State Department to the sexual assault, actually the rape, of a 13-year-old boy that occurred in an Israeli prison in Moskobia in Jerusalem. We examined these allegations. We believed they were credible. We put them to the government of Israel. And you know what happened the next day? The IDF went into the DCIP offices and removed all their computers and declared them a terrorist entity. I think it is

vital that atrocities not happen to anyone, not sexual violations, not any kind of gross violation of human rights. We are looking at a situation where there is so much dehumanification happen to anyone. Not sexual atrocities, not sexual violations, not any kind of gross violation of human rights. We are looking at a situation where there is so much dehumanification, where people are not seen for the value that they have. And I think that's true whether you're talking about those who are attacked on their kibbutz or those who are attacked in their homes in Gaza or in the West Bank. What we really need is to center the human beings who are at the core and who are suffering so much in this conflict. So that was Josh Paul. He's a State Department official that resigned over the sending of weapons to Israel. If you were listening to that and didn't see it on the screen,

that's who he was. He was talking to Christiane Amanpour. Let's put this next element up on the screen as well. This is a headline from Al Monitor that says, the growing U.S.-Israel rift over Gaza war timeline, will Netanyahu budge? Ryan, that's basically what we've been talking about in this entire segment, is how are the mounting pressures from the mounting tragedies in Gaza ultimately going to influence Netanyahu himself, the decision makers behind Israel and the Israeli military, as the U.S. has reportedly, again, this timeline of their target date for an end of the invasion being sometime around January 1, 2024. What do you make of that? Yeah, so Al Monitor's sources are saying, yeah, basically telling Israel that they have through the end of this month to wrap up this military campaign.

But then they report, quote, this is not a deadline, but a target during a war. Target dates can shift. And so you have this combination of American, either public or private rhetoric pushing in one direction with then the immediate kind of implication that you can consider this just a suggestion. It's reminiscent a little bit of Tony Blinken, there are reports of Tony Blinken meeting, you know, about a week ago with Israeli military officials and, you know and the war cabinet,

and they were laying out their war plans that lasted several months. And he told them, you don't have that much credit. And that was the quote that made it into the press, telling them, this needs to be wrapped up. At the same time, you see this kind of loosening of it at the very end. And the reason that you see them, saying that you're running out of credit, I think is the people like Josh Paul kind of breaking through in the global media and bringing attention to not just what's going on in Gaza, but what's happening more generally with the occupation. That story he told was, I think, controversial on an American television show because he's equating Palestinian lives with Israeli lives.

And you're just not supposed to do that. You're not supposed to. When Pramila Jayapal called for, quote-unquote, balance in how we talk about this, she was pilloried for a couple of days over that. But for Josh Paul to say, look, I was involved in a specific case of an allegation, a credible allegation of the rape of a 13-year-old boy, which should make a lot of people pause and be like, well, wait a minute. Why was there a 13-year-old boy in prison to begin with?

And then he follows up with, when they alerted the Israeli authorities, they, thank you for the tip, we appreciate that. And they raid the offices of the human rights organization, seize their computers and designate them as a terrorist organization. That's the kind of thing, I think, that is drying up Israeli credit. On the other hand, it doesn't seem like Israel cares that much at this moment. What the White House says, as long as what the White House says doesn't translate into them actually doing anything. I mean, just the amount of representatives that they send into American media every day, Western media in general every day, tells me that they are conscious of how important American public opinion is to their continued support.

Although at the same time, you're right, Ryan, American public opinion could go in one direction and the Biden administration could still be doing a lot to help behind the scenes while saying something maybe that is more appealing to the American public in public forums. So, I mean, I do think that's interesting. And I think Israeli civilians aren't going to be served and protected by an extended conflict either. I think that's really important, again, from the perspective of somebody maybe on the other side, is that the Israeli civilians, before October 7th and after October 7th, I think we all agree, the security situation is not ideal. It's far from ideal. There was no resolution to it before October 7th and October 6th, and the security situation has only worsened. And so with the

end goal of eradicating Hamas and no, I would say, plausible, viable plan as to what would fill that vacuum if this impossible end was actually achieved, and what will fill the vacuum after it is partially, likely, partially achieved, I don't think we have confidence or can have confidence that Israeli civilians are going to be much safer after, let's say, that January 1 target is hit. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies were often unrecognizable when they left. In a society obsessed with being thin, it seemed like a miracle solution.

But behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children was a dark underworld of sinister secrets. Kids were being pushed to their physical and emotional limits as the family that owned Shane turned a blind eye. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. In this eight-episode series, we're unpacking and investigating stories of mistreatment and re-examining the culture of fatphobia that enabled a flawed system to continue for so long. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free

on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. DNA test proves he is not the father. Now I'm taking the inheritance. Wait a minute, John. Who's not the father? Well, Sam, luckily it's your not the father week

on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This author writes, My father-in-law is trying to steal the family fortune worth millions from my son, even though it was promised to us. Now I find out he's trying to give it to his irresponsible son instead. But I have DNA proof that could get the money back. Hold up. So what are they going to do to get those millions back? That's so unfair. Well, the author writes that her husband found out the truth from a DNA test they were gifted two years ago.

Scandalous. But the kids kept their mom's secret that whole time. Oh my God. And the real kicker, the author wants to reveal this terrible secret, even if that means destroying her husband's family in the process. So do they get the millions of dollars back or does she keep the family's terrible secret? Well, to hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast hell and gone,

I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case. They've never found her and it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've

never gotten any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Well, Ryan, you were talking about a lot of this because your book is out this week on CNN. So you joined Aaron Burnett, and we have a clip of your appearance on Aaron Burnett's show on CNN last night. Yours too. They caught me reading your texts. I was actually reading your notes because you were reading from

quotes. But I did joke on Twitter that I was reading Ryan's text from the CIA. Here is Ryan's appearance on CNN. Here is part of his exchange with journalist Ryan Grimm. Members of the squad have tweeted out from the river to the sea. But the answer, I'd allow him to say it, but I wouldn't sit there quietly. I'd point out that you are calling for, once again, the extermination of millions of Jews. As I'm sure you know, though, in Likud's platform, it says, from the river to the sea, there will only be Israeli sovereignty. Are they suggesting genocide of all Palestinians? Of course not.

Exactly. So if they're not, why is the other suggesting genocide? Because that's what Hamas supports. We've had a defense minister, Galant, we will eliminate everything. An IDF spokesperson, our focus is on damage, not on precision. Another former Knesset member, there is one and only solution, which is to completely destroy Gaza before invading it. I mean destruction like what happened in Dresden and Hiroshima without nuclear weapons. Would you join us in condemning that as well? So I condemn nothing that the Israeli government is doing. I stand with the people of Israel.

Talk to me about that moment. What did that say to you when you were sitting there having that exchange with him? I thought at least he would condemn some of the things that the Israeli government had already condemned. You don't have to get in front of them. For instance, the minister who floated the idea of nuking Gaza was roundly rebuked by other members of the Netanyahu cabinet. So it was striking to me that Cruz couldn't even go as far as members of the very far right Netanyahu cabinet. I was just trying to, in that interview, find some common moral plane because anytime you have anybody on who's remotely critical of Israel, the interview starts with, you know, will you condemn what Hamas did on October 7th? Today is December 5th. We're still having news cycles organized

around that question from two months ago. So then it follows that, well, let's also get on the same moral level and condemn the kind of collective punishment of Palestinians as well. And then we can talk about a way forward, but he wouldn't go there. And that was kind of collective punishment of Palestinians as well. And then we can talk about a way forward, but he wouldn't go there. And that was kind of, once he didn't, you're like, okay, well, I've got, if you condemn nothing, then there's nothing I can tell you that's going to move. I mean, it really was, I hope everyone will watch. It was a fascinating exchange. We take back all the things we said about CNN. Well, I actually think that's, it's fairly interesting to me that they ran the, I mean, a huge chunk of the clip in that exchange. Because I think one of the benefits of that exchange, as we talked about last week, was having some time to, A, let these discussions breathe a little bit, and having, on the other hand,

so point B is that Ted Cruz sitting down with somebody who's sort of openly an ideological opponent, not a lawmaker, not an elected official, and not a hack, but somebody who's actually going to engage on the issue. And so I think it's actually really heartening that people watch that and came away with this was really sort of insightful.

It's the advantage of a longer interview, too, right? Cable is so – they do it to themselves. There's no federal law that says they have to keep every segment to like two and a half or three minutes. But they have conditioned themselves to believe that the public won't be able to kind of keep up with anything more than that. But if you do that, then, right, you can't kind of draw out the more interesting takeaways from conversations like, I condemn absolutely nothing, up to and including things that even that Yahoo's cabinet would condemn.

And that goes to what we were talking about earlier, this stark difference between how this conversation unfolds here in the United States revenge after October 7th there that the Israeli government is much more open about what it's doing. They don't want to sugarcoat anything that they're doing in Gaza because if they sugarcoat it, then the public and some of the cabinet will demand, no, no, no, we want more than that. And there's enormous sensitivity, obviously, you know, as there is in Israel, but in the United States about anti-Semitism and about there's this sort of Western anti-Semitism as opposed to sort of radical Islamic anti-Semitism. And so we have these standards that create sort of an impossible condition for discourse on this particular issue. And I do think it's unfortunate the extent

to which people are afraid, for example, when you read what you read, as we just watched again, that people feel as though they have no flexibility to kind of honestly reckon with some serious points there. And there are, we could have gone much longer in that interview, and I think we both wanted to. But yeah, I thought that was the best part of the interview, the most helpful part of the exchange. I want to also put this element on the screen from HuffPost because it's more reporting from your book. And the book, you've mentioned this before, is so timely. It turned out to be so timely because it ended up, as you were digging into kind of the evolution of the squad, so much of it is sort of revolving around AIPAC and around the question of Israel. So this is the headline, top pro-Israel group offered Ocasio-Cortez $100,000

of campaign cash per new book. Ryan, you also reported this week that the, I think you said like the Murdoch empire, it just utterly twisted parts of the book in an effort to make Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the squad in general and sort of the green agenda look foolish. I was really like, I mean, not, I shouldn't say surprised, but taken aback by, I think, how egregious the coverage of things from your book has been. Daniel Marin's article is not among them. He is reporting, based on your report, that AIPAC actually reached out to Ocasio-Cortez with, quote, a whole lot more than an olive branch. Right, yeah. So we've talked earlier about that 2018 interview that she did with Margaret Carlson on the firing line.

It's like three weeks after she won her primary. She'd been nailing every single interview. And then she gets hit with questions about Israel-Palestine. And I actually rewatched it with Hassan Piker on his stream yesterday. We kind of went down memory lane on that interview. And her answers are actually fine for the most part. Her problem is she starts to visibly betray a kind of lack of confidence that she's getting these questions right.

And by the end, she just taps out and says, look, I'm not an expert on this. We didn't talk about this much at my Bronx dinner table. I'm going to talk to more people about this. Let me step away from this question because I'm dying inside here. That's basically what you can see on her face as she's getting asked about her use of the phrase, quote, occupation of Palestine, or equating of Palestinian lives being taken by the IDF with protesters getting shot in Puerto Rico or protesters getting shot in Ferguson, Missouri. Like Carlson seems to like really object to this equating of Palestinian lives and American lives

because the Middle Eastern dynamics are so different. And so she just kind of taps out at the very end. And so what I wrote in the book is that about a week later, when she and Bernie are in Kansas campaigning for a candidate out there, her Corbin Trent, her communications director, gets a call and says, "'Hey, we saw the interview. I'm with APAC. I've already

bundled together a good $100,000 to start the conversation with AOC. We can help to educate her to make sure that she doesn't have another face plant interview like this again. And it was for her team, her and her team team a real window into kind of how washington works and that if you were a normal member of congress who had just won a primary uh and had not instantly become you know bizarrely and uniquely this kind of global celebrity which comes with it all this campaign cash you'd be like oh a hundred thousand dollars i desperately need a hundred thousand000. And also, I need talking points on this issue because I didn't run on this question. I don't want it to become a huge political liability. She was in a position where she could and did say, thanks, but no thanks.

She was happy to meet with groups on all sides, but didn't want to kind of get hooked in with this first offer of $100,000 with the pledge that there was lots more behind it. Instead, you're now seeing tens of millions and potentially up to $100 million being spent against the squad in the next cycle to wipe them out as a political entity. And tell us about how your book was covered by, I believe it was the Daily Mail and the New York Post. Which, yeah, and Daily Mail, I'd forgotten for some reason. Daily Mail's not Murdoch-owned, but it's part of that, like,

you know, right-wing ecosystem. It's been kind of surreal to watch. Basically, you know, they got some early copies of the book and took quotes by people who were quoted in the book, attributed them to me, and then kind of elevated. Like, for instance, there was one where one person for Sunrise said that one element of the Green New Deal rollout was a cluster.

And instead of quoting that person, they attribute to me and they say that I report in the book that the entire Green New Deal was a giant cluster. And the whole thing was just wild. Green New Deal was a giant cluster. And that the whole thing was just wild to watch. You know, like, none of these things are in the book. I didn't say these things at all.

There are some criticisms in the book, but they come from, you know, when Ernest plays, like, what lessons can be learned. One of the other funny and funny isn't the right word, but funny examples was, you know, I say that, you know, she became like a pariah and closed off to all these donors without, closed off these big donors, without adding the context that her decision to be closed off to these major donors is a good thing and is a function of the squad's ability and the Bernie Sanders wing's ability to kind of raise so many small dollars. And that then appears to be a threat to the rest of the caucus. And they kind

of flip that on its head into whatever weird cynical kind of framing they put on top of it. So, yeah, it's, you know, I've obviously seen the kind of Murdoch empire do that for years, but it was kind of surreal to, like, be in the middle of it. And probably for you, too, since you actually had read the book and you read these pieces, and you're like, hmm, no, that's not right. I mean, yeah, I think someone probably read it really quickly and just kind of ran with the vibe. Yeah. And they're like, this will click. Yeah. Let's just slap this up. And then the next thing you know, it's like,

just absolutely everywhere in conservative media. It's like bizarre, just utterly bizarre. Ryan Graham, conservative media darling. All right, let's move on to the Middle East and Vladimir Putin's trip to the Middle East. Vladimir Putin actually just landed in the UAE a couple of hours ago as we're speaking here. Now, remember, the sheik of the UAE, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, actually was the one who sort of positioned himself to negotiate the release of Brittany Griner. So there's so many interesting dynamics. Putin is going later today to Saudi Arabia. According to Russian government spokesmen, they're going to be talking about the war in Ukraine. They're going to be talking about the war in Gaza.

And of course, they're going to be talking about oil production. So in Saudi Arabia in particular, we can put the element up on the screen. While the kingdom has made a voluntary oil production cut of 1 million barrels a day, the New York Times reports, Russia has contributed smaller cuts to its exports, but not its production, despite Saudi attempts to convince Russian officials to take more action. Another important thing here, Putin is actually on Thursday in Moscow hosting the Iranian president. And he hasn't, Putin himself has not traveled beyond China, Iran, and some former Soviet states, actually, since he first invaded Ukraine back in February 2022. So he's doing UAE, Saudi Arabia

in one day, and then hosting Iran in Moscow the next day, and set to negotiate over oil. Actually, a pro-Russian government daily paper, as the New York Times notes, reported on Tuesday that Russia would not oppose conducting talks with Ukraine in a European country like Hungary. So with these sort of three fronts, talking about Ukraine, talking about Israel and Gaza, and talking about oil, Ryan, you've made some really interesting points about a Trump-Biden matchup in 2024 and oil in particular, when you have the Saudi royal family very close to Jared Kushner and very close to the Trumps, what could potentially happen on that front? When you talk about how the American election could potentially affect the conflicts and U.S. support, military support for

the Ukrainian military and Ukrainian government and for the Israeli military and the Israeli government. That's all on the line in the next year, which we are rapidly careening towards. So pretty interesting timing for this trip. Yeah, exactly. When Trump was president, you know, he twice publicly, you know, browbeat Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia to manipulate gas prices for electoral purposes. First in 2018, he wanted gas prices down for those midterms. And then in 2020, the collapse of gas prices was threatened to create its own economic crisis by triggering all kinds of weird defaults if you remember there was a time where uh oil was

selling it like below zero dollars a barrel on and and that can like just call that can cause like mayhem in in markets and so he urged you know mbs to kind of you know pull back on uh production to kind of rescue and did it every time as Biden Biden has, you know, pushed MBS, he's had, you know, much less success. The reporting and the analysis that I've seen is pretty strongly indicative of the fact that, you know, MBS would love to see Republicans, you know, come back in office.

Saudi Arabia has become more aligned with Republicans. There's been some reporting that, you know, Putin thinks that, you know, he might be able to get a better deal with Trump than with Biden. So you do have this interesting situation where, you know, the elections are so organized around gas prices sometimes that you end up kind of outsourcing power over moving the needle of our electoral dial to people like, you know, MBZ, MBS, Putin, et cetera. And also I can confirm out here in Los Angeles,

they want like $6 a gallon for gas. I thought they were making that up. I'm like, there's no way. Blame Gavin Newsom. No, Gavin Newsom, incredible. Blame Ryan Grimm's green agenda. The Grim green agenda. That's true. We have a failed state out here. Tell you what. But actually, in the vacuum of what's perceived as U.S. leadership,

other countries have started trying to negotiate sort of peace deals in Ukraine and in the Middle East, which has been kind of fascinating to watch because we really haven't seen that seriously in a matter of years, perhaps a matter of decades, really. And Business Insider's headline about the Putin trip is that he, quote, seeks to humiliate Biden by showing him that attempts to isolate Russia have failed. I mean, I don't know that that's his primary goal, but that is definitely, I think, probably an intended outcome from Vladimir Putin in this case, that he hasn't traveled outside of Russia, Iran, China since the invasion. And now that there's another hot conflict, two hot conflicts that the U.S. is waging almost as proxy wars, obviously as a proxy war in Ukraine and arguably as a proxy war

in Israel and in Gaza. And precisely, by the way, with this axis of evil formulation, we've heard this from Netanyahu, we've heard this from other people about the alliance between Russia, Iran, and China, and then Iran's relationship with Hamas and Hezbollah. That's sort of been precisely the justification for US involvement and for a broad Western sort of brick of support in this region. And this is in some ways bolstering those sort of claims. But on the other hand, if you have the Saudis squeezed between Trump and Biden and Putin, I mean, these dynamics are just so, it's a very fragile ecosystem.

I mean, a very fragile ecosystem. Yeah, and congratulations, I guess, to Iran for making it, being the only country to make it into both axis of evils over the last 20 years. Poor North Korea and Iraq, you know, didn't make the finals this time, replaced, I guess, by Russia and China. But the U..s you know has everything it seems like everything the u.s has done over the last several years has just you know uh hurt the u.s's own standing you know vis-a-vis a lot of these a lot of these countries

uh the abraham accords you know were intended to kind of lock down you know u.s alliances with with israel uh saudi arabia the uae Bahrain, the rest of the Middle East, by basically cutting peace deals and ignoring the fact of the Palestinians. That hasn't worked. Now it threatens to kind of drive a wedge in between Israel, Saudi Arabia, UAE, and others, which it seems like Putin is happy to kind of waltz into and see if he can capitalize on that. The other US strategy was to rip up the Iran deal, and then Biden failed to get back into it, which has then further isolated Iran and has done nothing, obviously,

to reduce its support for its proxies around the world. You know, Hamas, its clients in the Iran-backed Houthis, whether the Syrian or Iraqi militias or Hezbollah. And so, and then that then further kind of pushes them closer to China and to Russia. And so you just constantly see a receding of resistance to the Russian invasion, that we were going to, you know, dramatically weaken Russia's military capacity. You know, it appears like, you know, Russia's military capacity in 2022 was actually pretty weak. You know, they collapsed, you know, pretty quickly. But two years later, under the strain of actual combat,

it seems like in some ways we've actually kind of strengthened them as well as tightened their relationships with other global South countries as well. So even on its own terms, it doesn't seem like any of the belligerence that the US has engaged. is engaged with is actually even benefiting the United States, let alone all of the collateral damage that it's doing. That is such an important point, because even on the sort of hawkish terms, when you're looking

at what the war in Ukraine and now the war in Gaza have done to, A, public support for militarism abroad, but b and most importantly from Putin's perspective to our military industrial base. So a whole lot of people are arguing that the war in Ukraine, a whole lot of I guess neoconservative war hawks are arguing that the war in Ukraine has just emboldened the U.S. industrial base that we are getting back to 1945 and the thriving military industrial complex that we so badly need. And it's just bringing the American economy into full bloom. And actually, that's not what's happening. If you look at people who are particularly concerned, even hawkish people that are particularly concerned about Taiwan, that are particularly concerned about how long it's going to take to onshore chips manufacturing in the United States, even with the CHIPS Act, all this has done has depleted our capacity to, again, even by sort of hawkish terms, support Taiwan in the case of an invasion. And we have heard Xi Jinping, who's allied with Vladimir Putin, talking very clearly about the sort of, he usually says like the peaceful, the peaceful unification process as it relates to Taiwan and everything like that. But the reality

is the United States relies on Taiwan for national security, for a huge, huge chunk of our economy and our ability to sort of function with the technological necessities that we've come to depend on. And so if these two conflicts are affecting public support for militarism and if they're affecting our actual ability to engage in a military conflict elsewhere, you can see very clearly how Putin would be finding allies in places like Iran and China and how those relationships would be shored up because there's a sort of mutually beneficial outcome of pushing the U.S. to burn more and more resources in Ukraine. And Putin obviously has his own problems. He's lost tens of thousands of people

in battle and was not initially as successful as they sort of expected to be in Ukraine. But this is, I think it's such an important point, even by the standards that the hawks purport to be seeking, they're falling wildly short, and the Biden administration is falling wildly short. And just I'm reminded of what Jake Sullivan said before October 7th about the Biden administration's sort of perpetuation of the Abraham Accords, although some conservatives would argue that its relationship with Iran had undercut its approval for the Abraham Accords, Jake Sullivan said, you've never seen such peace in the Middle East. They just keep getting sort of smacked left and right by reality. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight loss camps for kids,

promised extraordinary results. Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies were often unrecognizable when they left. In a society obsessed with being thin, it seemed like a miracle solution. But behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children was a dark underworld of sinister secrets. Kids were being pushed to their physical and emotional limits as the family that owned Shane turned a blind eye.

Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. In this eight-episode series, we're unpacking and investigating stories of mistreatment and reexamining the culture of fatphobia that enabled a flawed system to continue for so long. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. DNA test proves he is not the father.

Now I'm taking the inheritance. Wait a minute, John. Who's not the father? Well, Sam, luckily it's your not the father week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This author writes, my father-in-law is trying to steal the family fortune worth millions from my son, even though it was promised to us. Now I find out he's trying to give it to his irresponsible

son instead, but I have DNA proof that could get the money back. Hold up. So what are they going to do to get those millions back? That's so unfair. Well, the author writes that her husband found out the truth from a DNA test they were gifted two years ago. Scandalous. But the kids kept their mom's secret that whole time. Oh my God. And the real kicker, the author wants to reveal this terrible secret, even if that means destroying her husband's family in the process. So do they get the millions of dollars back or does she keep the family's terrible secret?

Well, to hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case. I've never found her. And it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try.

She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never got any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaking of the Global South, a bizarre little development we can talk about for a minute here over in South Asia. So, you know, people who have been watching the show know that over at The Intercept and here we've been doing a bunch of reporting both about the U.S. role in the ouster of Imran Khan in Pakistan and also about India's now sprawling

kind of global assassination program. And these stories are not exactly related, but one thing that they have in common is that you know we've we've been reporting on them and we've drawn kind of on documents that we've gotten from sources and uh you know let's say uh let's just leave it at sources uh from over there uh which has drawn the attention now of what appears to be uh the the uh either pakistani uh intelligence apparatus or military apparatus is one of the most bizarre and kind of pitiful attempts to counteract reporting that I've seen. But we played this little clip from this kind of account, I think it's called TTI Insider, which is broadly understood in Pakistan to be kind of a front for the kind of Pakistan military establishment.

What we're about to play for you is alleged, and this is not a parody. As you're listening to it, you're going to think this is a parody. It's alleged to be a leaked conversation between my intercept colleague, Murtaza Hussain, and his alleged Indian CIA handler, the Indian CIA is called the RAW. So they call him something absurd, almost like Mr. Sharma. So let's play a little clip. So this was leaked and basically in pakistani uh social media hello mr sharma how are you i'm fine thank you i hope it is safe to talk yes yes please go on right well uh i already can read my worries on how people have started to question the sources of

my information and stories okay you know now even my close aides have started to question the sources of my information and stories. Okay. You know, now even my close aides have started to question the authenticity of my information. Yeah, fine by me. I just wanted to run it by you. It's good if you have taken the stock of the whole picture. Okay. I'll keep you posted. Yes, sure, sure. Thank you.

Thank you. All right. All right. Take care. Just utterly incredible. And just for fun, let's play a very brief clip of Martaza himself. He's appeared on CounterPoints, appeared on BreakingPoints. Let's do some voice analysis here. Let's see how effective they were at creating this fake. Well, it's a very curious relationship because in many ways, Saudi Arabia is dependent on U.S. security guarantees.

They're dependent on political guarantees from the U.S. They have very close ties with U.S. I like that that clip was before Sagar went full beard. It's such a different era. It's a real throwback. Sounds pretty close to me. What's so wild is that in the era of AI, I think you could probably do a pretty convincing one

if you even tried. Because he hosts the podcast Intercepted. There's no shortage of his voice out there on the internet that they could input into some AI and then spit out. It just seems like they don't even care. That's what I was going to ask you. Do they even care? I mean, it's just so flagrantly bad.

Right. I think with bots amplifying it, it's still going to get hundreds of thousands of views throughout social media. And the aim of some of that propaganda is just to give critics something to point to so you can muddy the water and say, oh, yeah, remember there was this thing you can't trust the reporting because it's actually you know coming from uh the kind of indian intelligence agency so therefore uh you know these these reporters are actually just uh just agents of india so you shouldn't shouldn't trust them yeah but it was just um uh so that that that experience coupled with uh the uh the kind of murdoch empire, you know, reading and distorting the book.

It's like, this is a weird world that we're kind of stepping into in this kind of post-whatever-truth environment we're in. Can you give us the 30,000-foot view on why sort of strategically this shallow fake, as it's been dubbed, is something that you can kind of, from the raw strategic tactical standpoint, if people are, you know, behind on the reporting you guys have done

about Imran Khan, what's, from their perspective, the strategic value of getting Murtaza to sound like this? Yeah, so first of all, people have to understand that Pakistan and India have this absolutely intense rivalry. In Pakistani internal documents, they refer to REW constantly as hostile nation intelligence agency. They won't even kind of name the country. They just call it hostile nation. That's kind of how much hostility there is. And so if anything that you can kind of taint in the public with Indian influence, they hope then the public is going to dismiss. There's an election that's going to be happening in Pakistan, which Imran Khan so far is not being able to participate in.

He's in prison facing completely trumped up charges. And so the U.S. has been saying out loud that, you know, Pakistan needs to allow free and fair elections and that everybody should be able to participate, but they don't act, they aren't pressuring Pakistan to require the most popular politician in Pakistan, who is Imran Khan, to be on the ballot. And I think that there's a lot of concern in Pakistan about the reporting that we've done because it has exposed the role of the Pakistani military and the Pakistani military establishment

in collusion with the United States in helping to push him out of office related to his refusal to give full-throated support to Ukraine and to the US's effort to arm the Ukrainians. In the wake of his ouster, Pakistan has become a critical supplier of artillery shells for Ukraine. You've also seen now Israel ramping up its demand for artillery shells. And so there aren't a whole lot of places where all of these low-grade munitions can be made. And so Pakistan's kind of democracy became something that could be sacrificed for the altar of the production

of these artillery shells. Another good reason to stick around for the last block of the show today, which is an interview with author Stuart Reid on the Lumumba plot, his new book, because these things continue to be relevant. Yes, right. And it's a very good point

because Lumumba was, you know, we'll talk to Stuart about this, in the CIA crosshairs, basically being neutral, same as Imran Khan, not necessarily for siding against the United States, but not being full-throated in support. Yes. Interesting how little changes. Many such cases. Absolutely. Let's move back to the United States here to talk about a very big development yesterday, which is that since March, Alabama Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville has been holding up hundreds of military nominations because the Pentagon insists on a policy, a post-Dobbs

decision policy that pays for employees, mostly in blue states, to travel to get abortions. Republicans, I think, have a pretty good case arguing that that's illegal because there's obviously a ban on taxpayer funding of abortions. But the Pentagon can say it's not funding for abortions, it's funding for the travel. So you can sort of get into the legal weeds on that question. But Tommy Tuberville, as negotiations for funding the government and the end-of-year scramble to meet all of these deadlines is coming up. Topper Tuberville agreed yesterday to drop most of the holds, but not all

of the holds. Let's put this up on the screen. This is from The Hill. You see right there the headline, Tuberville releasing holds on hundreds of military promotions. If I were writing this headline for even for a sort of centrist or purportedly neutral publication, I think it's really, really important to note, and I would probably put it in the headline, as the Hill writes, quote, a hold will remain in place for the roughly 10 nominations for four-star generals and officers. So yes, it's true that hundreds of other promotions are now going to move really quickly through the Senate. But to have 10 four-star nominations continue to be held up actually is still a very big deal because that continues to put pressure

in some of the highest stake decisions and approvals over this Pentagon policy. And I want to put the next element up on the screen. This is a story from one of my colleagues at The Federalist. This is our headline. Don't blame Tuberville for dropping his Pentagon abortion protest, blame his feckless GOP colleagues. And why this is interesting is my colleague Sean Fleetwood has some more reporting on the intraparty dynamics that never really showed up in the kind of neutral corporate media. As Sean mentions, Tuberville actually had enough votes to include a provision nuking the Pentagon's illegal abortion policy, as Sean puts it, in the 2024 NDAA. Chuck Schumer, however, gutted that provision before the measure could be considered by the upper chamber. So word got

to Schumer. If you talk to sources with knowledge of the situation, word gets to Schumer is the assumption. And he says, we're not voting on this. So Tuberville does everything to get the votes to say, if Joe Biden and the Pentagon are not going to withdraw this policy on their own, we're actually going to pass it through Congress and we're going to get Democrats support for it because there is this provision against prohibition on tax fair funding for abortion. And he did. He had that. But Chuck Schumer outmaneuvered him because obviously Democrats control the Senate and the White House. And they wanted to actually move something through the Rules Committee. He had a resolution he was going to pass the Rules Committee that if it was approved by 60 senators would have,

as Sean puts it, effectively allowed their parties to circumvent Tuberville's protest and permit the Pentagon's policy to go unchallenged. And the worry there from even the staunchest pro-life anti-abortion senators was that is setting a terrifying precedent for how the Senate would operate in the future. So as Sean puts it again, this left Tuberville with no good options. This is on everyone who sold them out, a Hill staffer, a senior Hill staffer told the Federalist, and not on Tuberville himself. This was a huge rallying moment for the conservative movement over the course of the last year. But as the attack on Israel on October 7th happened, and then as actually you started to see, like, for example, Ohio, the results come in from issue one in Ohio, more and more pressure hit Tommy Tuberville,

who basically shocked his Republican colleagues. Nobody expected him to have a strong ideological position on abortion. Nobody expected him to be so hostile to leadership and to become sort of a conservative stalwart. Who knows where this goes on other issues? But again, from my read of the situation, kind of talking to people in these circles, is Tuberville was furious by the way he was treated by the Republican establishment. And this is, all of their attacks on him made him handle this or made him continue this from March until now instead of, you know, caving at any given point because of the way Republican leadership treated him. And it's interesting because he got a taste of how Republican leadership has treated people who take serious conservative positions in line with their voters' positions but not in line with sort of the beltway Republican lobbying circle's positions. And we've talked about this many times, you know, parallels between the Freedom Caucus and the

squad, parallels between how Dem leadership and Schumer operates compared to McConnell, operates compared to McCarthy. There's all kinds of interesting dynamics about how both parties have handled populism. But Ryan, I just want to ask you about that question of how this coverage has been handled. Because again, my headline wouldn't have been Tuberville caves. It would have been Tuberville blackmailed by Republicans into dropping, you know, popular conservative position. I just, I think the media got the story really wrong since March, basically. And so people understand the Senate dynamics and rules here. What an individual senator can do is you put a hold on a nominee,

and the Senate can override that. If you have 60 votes, you can override a hold. But that takes almost a week of floor time to do that. And so, as you saw, there were hundreds, eventually thousands, kind of of nomination. The guy wants to become a captain or a appointed colonel. That promotion, bizarrely to me, kind of has to go through the Senate for approval. And so, there just isn't enough floor time to handle each each individual one so you had uh you know all you know all of these promotions just hanging in limbo people you know couldn't

move couldn't you know deploy it was causing you know all you know it's causing a lot of organizational you know problems throughout throughout the military across the board uh and and so finally there was so much frustration that schumer was saying all right we're going to change the rules and we're going to take away this power to do this hold in this in this circumstance and the senate is becoming so much like the house that they saw like a senator saw oh like if we lose this one privilege remaining that we have, then what is our role here other than just to support leadership? And so just so I understand, so your reporting is that Tuberville had 60 votes to kind of overturn the Pentagon's abortion policy so that you would have had almost 10 or more Democrats willing to go along? And why, you know, the Democratic caucus is pretty pro-choice at this point.

Why do you think that they were willing to go along with it just to end the blockade of all of these nominations? Yeah, I think it's exactly that. It gives them a talking point to say that they worked to end the blockade and to, you know, bolster national security. And then on the other hand, taxpayer funding of abortion is, I mean, A, I think there's a pretty good argument that the policy was illegal to begin with, but B, not super popular across the board. So their constituents, I mean, I think that's a pretty easy sell for their constituents, especially if they can wrap it in the packaging that they helped,

you know, secure military readiness, which is another really interesting point, by the way, because the corporate media has unsurprisingly run with the Pentagon's narrative and the Biden administration's narrative. And it's been interesting to see the confluence of the sort of pro-choice left and Defense Department, Pentagon talking point here, which is that it is absolutely essential to national security. They won't tell you how many times the policy has been used over the course of the last couple of years, but they do say that it's absolutely essential to national security to have this policy and that Tommy Tuberville, his hold has severely damaged military readiness. And the corporate press has really run with that line in a way to kind of make Tommy Topperville look like a rube.

To like this, you know, Alabama redneck cares more about his religious fanaticism than he does about the military. So there are all kinds of like interesting cross sections here. But why that's interesting is if military readiness was really on the line, this is a policy that probably affects maybe at most like a couple dozen people a year. You know that the Pentagon would have dropped the policy immediately if military readiness were actually like really a big concern here. What this is about is them not wanting to get smacked around by Republicans. They have had that relationship on lock for decades. And what they don't want is to give into, you know, what they think of as the crazy wing of the Republican Party. It's just as simple as that.

And from their perspective, understandable strategy, because they thought if they gave in, that they would be vulnerable to cuts to Ukraine, to cuts to all kinds of different things, their powers, surveillance powers, et cetera, et cetera. I think, Ryan, at least that's what ultimately their fear was. There's also an interesting political realignment going on within the officer class of the military,

which I don't know if it played into this or not, but I think it's useful context, just as the parties have become polarized around education. If you have a college degree or higher, as the parties have become polarized around education. If you have a college degree or higher, you're more likely at this point to vote Democratic. If you don't, you're more likely to vote Republican. Officer class, those are basically college graduates,

almost across the board. And as a result, they have been driven by the same kind of polarization around education. And you kind of think in a vulgar way, military, they must be conservative, they must support Republicans. But the officer class leans pretty heavily at this point, Democratic in their preferences. Now, they're very staunchly kind of apolitical as, you know, as military men and women. They're not burning people. They're not burning people. No, no.

And they're also not, you know, they're not actively like lobbying in the way that like, or running the country the way that Pakistan's military is. There is a very strong culture of, you know, separating the military and civilian affairs. But personally, a lot of separating the military and civilian affairs. But personally, a lot of them are becoming voters for Democrats. Yeah, absolutely. Post-Trump. Because again, Trump was campaigned basically on the problems with the military industrial complex, the Pentagon. And that's, again, I think ultimately what this is about. They're at loggerheads. They feel very threatened by a Republican party. And that's, again, I think ultimately what this is about. They're at loggerheads. They feel very threatened by a Republican Party. And of course, Joni Ernst and Dan Sullivan and Mitch McConnell. Mitch McConnell criticized Tuberville immediately, like basically right out of the gate

within the first couple of months of the hold. Because what is more sacred to, we talked about this when the Dobbs decision was announced. It's, I think, again, a big misconception in the media. What is more sacred to elite Republicans who run the GOP than abortion? Oh, the military and low taxes, and I could keep going. A million other priorities other than social conservatism. And so I think this was a real test of that. And I think the McConnells and Sullivans of the world are genuinely afraid of the post-Trump cracks in that consensus about the MIC and all of that. So ultimately, I think that's what this was about. And I'm glad we got a chance to talk about it because I think the rest of the media missed the story. It's fascinating to watch this unfold, that's for sure. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight loss camps for

kids, promised extraordinary results. Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies were often unrecognizable when they left. In a society obsessed with being thin, it seemed like a miracle solution. But behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children was a dark underworld of sinister secrets. Kids were being pushed to their physical and emotional limits as the family that owned Shane turned a blind eye. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. In this eight-episode series,

we're unpacking and investigating stories of mistreatment and re-examining the culture of fatphobia that enabled a flawed system to continue for so long. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. DNA test proves he is not the father. Now I'm taking the inheritance. Wait a minute, John. Who's not the father? Well, Sam, luckily it's your Not the Father Week on the OK Storytime podcast. So we'll find out soon. This author writes, my father-in-law is trying to steal the family fortune worth millions from my

son, even though it was promised to us. Now I find out he's trying to give it to his irresponsible son instead. But I have DNA proof that could get the money back. Hold up. So what are they going to do to get those millions back? That's so unfair. Well, the author writes that her husband found out the truth from a DNA test they were gifted two years ago. Scandalous. But the kids kept their mom's secret that whole time. Oh my God. And the real kicker, the author wants to reveal this terrible secret, even if that means destroying her husband's family in the process. So do they get the millions of dollars back or does she keep the family's terrible secret? Well, to hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on

the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast hell and gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder. I'm Catherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case. They've never found her. And it haunts me to this day.

The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never gotten any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

House Republicans announced this week that they're actually going to be moving forward on the impeachment of Joe Biden next week. That's their plan. Itista said at the beginning of the show saying, like, oh, basically they have nothing to do, which was a little glib. But it is actually true that in addition to now an open impeachment inquiry that they say they have the votes for, Speaker Mike Johnson actually mentioned that on the Sunday shows this week. He says he has enough votes. Now that George Santos is gone, they have a three vote majority. So that means basically every Republican is going to have to vote to open an impeachment inquiry formally. It's something that Kevin McCarthy didn't have just a couple of months ago.

He said that they were going to start opening this impeachment inquiry, but whether they had enough votes to formally do that was a different question. So Jim Jordan has come out, we can put this first element up on the screen, and said he hopes that the House would vote, quote, as soon as possible and as early possibly as this week. It looks like it's going to be next week. Now, he says, we think it's helpful to have that vote because we do think that someone will take us to court. Constitutionally, it's not required. I think another important part of that is, he says, Republicans have not yet made a decision on what the charges against President Biden would be. As NPR puts it, Jordan said he still wants to talk to roughly 10 people over the course of six to seven weeks. And those witnesses would include Hunter Biden, James Biden, Frank Biden, and some of their business associates, probably just James Biden.

And also following up on the whistleblower claims that there was slow walking of this at the DOJ and potentially at the IRS as well. Ryan, this comes as the amount of time versus the amount of work that has to be done to fund the government by different deadlines at the end of the year. Republicans, I don't think, I don't think Republican leadership is super eager to have to deal with this. But also, maybe they also think, like McCarthy did just a couple of months ago, this will make it easier for their voters to sort of swallow the pill of potentially bad deals on end-of-year funding. I don't know. Right. It's like kind of short-term stability, trading for kind of long-term stability, which we're going to talk about later with Stuart Reid and the Lumumba plot, the way that the U.S.

would think about some of this stuff abroad. It's like the House Republicans are creating all sorts of future problems for themselves so that they can just get through the next day or the next week. But this comes after Kevin McCarthy just announced that he was going to do an impeachment inquiry, didn't put it onto the floor in the way that you're supposed to. It's an impeachment inquiry, so therefore we have the official powers of impeachment. And this is sort of an acknowledgement by Johnson that, okay, actually that didn't work because, you know, their ability to kind of get some of the records and documents and interviews that they wanted, you know, has not met with the kind of impeachment level. But at the same time, they don't have, like you said, they don't have charges. They're just kind of

vaguely saying we're going to launch an inquiry. In the past, in order to vote to impeach, you actually had to have some pretty significant evidence. Now they're saying we're going to vote to launch this impeachment inquiry to go find the evidence. And that's a new thing and probably undermines kind of the potency in general of impeachment, which is mostly, it seems like at this point, drained of any of its power. It's just a partisan tool at this time to feed to, you know, whichever base is upset that its agenda is not being enacted, so at least we can impeach the guy. And, you know, you've actually covered the pretty serious evidence of corruption against the Biden family in the past. So it's not, you know,

we both, I mean, I think we both see that as a very serious thing. And, you know, I don't begrudge Republicans for doing this at all, to be perfectly honest, because the former president has been indicted four times. And some of those are much stronger cases than others. Maybe one of them is a much stronger case than the other three. There's clearly political lawfare going on, and the Biden family is clearly corrupt. Now, the degree of that corruption is a different question, and that's what Republicans are right now trying to prove. Jim Comer came out on Monday. What I saw referred to in some corners of the conservative press as, quote, a smoking gun. And that's the kind of rub, is that the evidence was regular payments were coming from, I actually

have how NPR put it because I found it very amusing. House oversight chairman Jim Comer posted a video on social media on Monday laying out allegations, including reporting that bank records the panel has indicate that Hunter Biden set up an account that sent monthly payments to his father in 2018. And then NPR goes on to say, but press reports indicate that the payments were related to Hunter repaying personal loans from his father. It looks like it was a truck, that these were payments about like a Ford Raptor. And NPR saying, oh, but it was just a personal loan when we know at the time from records that Hunter Biden is flush with cash from business deals in China, specifically China at that time, and around the world and saying that none of this could have anything to do,

but it's just personal. I thought that sort of hand-waving from NPR was like incredibly unhelpful and sort of exactly why Republicans are saying, screw it. If the media is going to dismiss all of this and is going to, you know, sort of do the Biden family's bidding by being dismissive of what does appear to be serious influence peddling, all while saying that Donald Trump was an influence peddling on behalf of the Russians for years in daily news cycles, you're going to understand, you know, on both levels, A, the level of like, there's probably corruption here, or there was definitely corruption here, and B, the media's not talking about it. I don't think the sort of Democrats do themselves.

If they want to, you know, kind of get the country back to some semblance of normalcy and defeat the scourge of right populism, they're not doing any favors by pretending none of this is serious. And so to try to keep up with this stuff, so whose truck was it? Is it, like, who was driving the truck? Is this Hunter's truck? Hunter's, yeah, it was Hunter's truck.

And he's paying, but if Hunter's paying for the truck and Hunter's driving the truck, well, why is, I must be missing something because why is that a payment to Joe Biden or are they saying that they arranged to like a payoff through a fake loan or like, is that the, I'm trying to keep up with the Hunter gate. Yeah, the problem is that Hunter at the time is, he sets up this account that has the monthly payments to Joe Biden, and Joe Biden purchased the car, but Hunter's setting up this account likely with money that's coming in from his Chinese influence peddling or his other foreign influence peddling. Therefore, the account that he's using to pay his dad back is, the money he's

using to pay his dad back is coming from the influence peddling. So the smoking gun. But if it's just a loan, Joe Biden is, yeah, he's getting dirty money because it's from overseas, but he's only getting paid back his own money, which he got in a dirty way through, like the University of Delaware or the University of Pennsylvania or whatever, but we can put that aside with this weird no-show job

that he had up there. But that's the more normal kind of soft corruption that we do, post-political life for politicians. So, yeah, I think they've got to have a higher bar for their smoking guns. Exactly. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And that's where, like, again, that's the rub. The media is doing a terrible job. I think Democrats are ignoring some of this at their peril.

But then there is a serious risk for overreach. And obviously impeachment, opening a formal impeachment inquiry at a very, very busy time in Congress when government funding is on the line and Republicans always get blamed for that. It's an easy political football for sure for Democrats. There's no question about it. They claim that witnesses aren't cooperating, and that's what Jim Jordan is saying. If the witnesses aren't cooperating, you need to have a formal impeachment inquiry open in order to sort of force legally cooperation or to have a stronger hand at forcing

cooperation legally. And I think there's some real merit to that, but just an interesting development to add and an interesting part of the negotiations for funding the government too, because I do really think Republicans know if they don't do this and they, you know, they give their constituents a hard pill to swallow going into 2024 with a potential government funding deal that relates to Ukraine, that relates to maybe the Pentagon and all of that, at least they'll have this to cling to, I guess. Yeah. At the same time, if they shut the government down while they're also seen to be focusing on this, it's going to make them look pretty silly. Yeah. At the same time, if they shut the government down while they're also seen to be focusing on this, it's going to make them look pretty silly. Yeah.

But so up next, though, we've got Stuart Reid talking about his new book, The Lumumba Plot. Excellent book. Emily, thank you for suggesting we have him on. Let's move to Stuart next. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies were often unrecognizable when they left. In a society obsessed with being thin, it seemed like a miracle solution. But behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children was a dark underworld of sinister secrets. Kids were being pushed to their physical and emotional limits as the family that owned Shane turned a blind eye. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. In this eight-episode series, we're unpacking and investigating stories of

mistreatment and re-examining the culture of fat phobia that enabled a flawed system to continue for so long. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. DNA test proves he is not the father. Now I'm taking the inheritance. Wait a minute, John. Who's not the father? and subscribe today. He's trying to give it to his irresponsible son instead. But I have DNA proof that could get the money back. Hold up. So what are they going to do to get those millions back? That's so unfair. Well, the author writes that her husband found out the truth from a DNA test they were gifted two years ago. Scandalous.

But the kids kept their mom's secret that whole time. Oh, my God. And the real kicker, the author wants to reveal this terrible secret, even if that means destroying her husband's family in the process. So do they get the millions of dollars back or does she keep the family's terrible secret? Well, to hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast hell and gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder. I'm Catherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of. No town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend.

I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case. They've never found her. And it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking.

Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never gotten any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145.

Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ryan and I both are excited to be joined this morning by author Stuart Reid, who is out with a new book

called The Lumumba Plot. We can put it up on the screen here. The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination. Fantastic book. Stuart, thank you so much for joining us this morning on CounterPoints. Thanks for having me. Of course, we actually teased this segment a little bit in a block that we did about Ryan's reporting on Imran Khan and how U.S. has manipulated situations in other countries for our preferred outcomes in a kind of proxy sense. But maybe if we could just stay at 30,000 feet as we start this conversation. Before we began, you answered a question from Ryan that you spent about six years of your life on this book.

So you're very intimately familiar with the Lumumba plot, obviously. But for those who aren't, could you just give a brief overview of with the Lumumba plot, obviously, but for those who aren't, could you just give a brief overview of what the Lumumba plot is, what happened to Lumumba, and what your reporting tells us about how the U.S. sanctioned the operation? Sure. So Patrice Lumumba was the first prime minister of the country now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo. When it became independent from Belgium in 1960, he was at the helm as prime minister. And immediately there was a crisis in the country where there was a mutiny, a province seceded, total chaos. And so Lumumba eventually, after knocking on the door of the Americans for help,

turns to the Soviets and asks for military aid to help put his country back together. And in the context of the Cold War, this was seen as an unforgivable sin. And so that's when the CIA set in motion this bizarre assassination plot involving poisons that were flown to the Congo that the CIA station chief was supposed to put in the food or toothpaste of Lumumba. That poisoning plot ended up not coming to fruition, but the CIA was involved in a different way. It helped overthrow Lumumba. It helped support the man, Joseph Mobutu, later known as Mobutu Sese Seku, who took power in a military coup and replaced Lumumba. And then, crucially, when Lumumba was sent to his death in January 1961, the CIA

station chief on the ground essentially gave a green light for that operation. And on January 17th, 1961, Lumumba was shot dead in the breakaway province of Katanga, executed by a Congolese firing squad commanded by Belgian officers who were answering to the secessionist leaders of that province. But the CIA played a key role in greenlighting Lumumba's transfer to a place where everyone knew he was going to die. Yeah, and it came after excruciating torture that you detail. And one of the things that struck me about the book was just kind of how little I knew about Patrice Lumumba going into it. Up until practically just before he becomes prime minister almost,

he's an apolitical guy. He is a beer salesman, like one of the most popular beer salesmen in the city, who then kind of actually recruits Mobutu into the push for independence. Mobutu was a journalist who didn't want to become involved in politics. And obviously, that's such a poignant detail that he would have recruited his friend into politics, then his friend

eventually helps usher in his own assassination. Can you talk a little bit about who Lumumba was and why Congo would be in a situation where so many people who were not that involved in politics would come to the forefront as soon as this rapid independence unfolds? Yeah, so rapid is the key word there. The Belgians did basically no preparation for independence at all. In 1955, there was a Belgian academic who released a plan called the 30-year plan for the independence of the Belgian Congo. The idea being that by 1985, Congo would finally be ready for independence. He almost lost his job because this was seen as way too fast and aggressive a plan. Events intervened, and then suddenly in the beginning of 1960, the Belgians realized they had to offload their colony, that this was not a sustainable enterprise. So what that meant is that you got the politicians in power after independence had no experience being politicians because political activity was outlawed before independence.

So Lumumba is, as you mentioned, a beer salesman. He had been a postal clerk working for the colonial administration. And it was in Leopoldville, the capital of the Congo, as a beer salesman that he really dove into politics headfirst and co-founded a political party, the National Congolese Movement. And then in elections, parliamentary elections held in the spring of 1960, his party won the most votes. And that's why he was asked to form a government and become prime minister. And I mean, the key thing about Lumumba that distinguished him was that he was incredibly charismatic. Even his bitterest foes recognized

that, that he really had a way with words. He was also a skilled political organizer, and he was peddling a message that was appealing, which is that the Congo had to be strong, united, and independent, truly independent after independence. Yeah, and this is a key point because, you know, as we saw with, you know, Arbans in Guatemala or Sukarno in Indonesia, there's this argument, especially coming from the Dulles kind of faction of U.S. foreign policymakers, that these were Soviet satellite states that, you know, you can't distinguish between a Lumumba and a Castro. Do it at your own peril, essentially. But ideologically, Stuart, there are huge

distinctions. And in fact, the hostility from the U.S. may have pushed people kind of closer to the arms of the Soviets where they may not have ever wanted to go and in fact definitely didn't want to go. What's the kind of ideological approach that Lumumba was taking to A, that kind of broader world conflict that certainly wasn't on the minds of his constituents in DRC, that kind of broader world conflict that, you know, certainly wasn't on the minds of his constituents in DRC on a kind of daily basis, but also that sort of question of global communism or what in an industrial society the right way to run a government is. One of the things that struck me in my research was how pro-American Lumumba was. So, for instance, he spoke of sending Congolese children to American schools, not Russian

schools. He signed a multi-billion dollar deal with an American entrepreneur to hand over his country's mineral and hydroelectric resources to an American. And when he traveled to Washington, D.C. in July 1960, he even called on the U.S. government to send American troops to the Congo. So none of that would suggest any sort of pro-Soviet orientation. It was only after he got rebuffed by the Americans for help that he, as you said, was driven into the arms of the Soviets and asked for military help. The irony here is that if you read the American cables at the time, the CIA, the State Department

cables, it's full of talk about what the Soviets are up to in the Congo. After the Cold War, when the archives were, the Soviet archives were opened, it turned out there wasn't that much on the Congo in them at all, because the Soviets didn't really care about the country. They viewed it as a faraway place where Moscow was never going to have much influence. It was a heavily Catholic country, not amenable to communism. And in 1960, the Soviet Union was not particularly powerful and didn't have a great ability to project power far abroad. Yet from the American perspective, they saw Soviet ghosts everywhere. And this is one of the great tragedies of the story, I think, is that Lumumba was fundamentally misread by

Washington, and they couldn't understand that he, in fact, wanted to stay neutral in the Cold War and simply wanted help putting his country back together and having his government and country survive. You see so many cases of that around the world where the U.S. firmly believed that the Soviets were orchestrating gigantic insurgencies or political plots within a country, acted on those suspicions by assassinating people or otherwise taking action, and then only to find out later that either the Soviets were actually encouraging people, like in Indonesia, not to engage in any type of violence or revolution, saying the conditions weren't right for it, or like you said, just completely ignoring it, with no sense from the Soviets that they had any entry into Congo. You write at one point that Kasavubu, who was kind of the more

radical revolutionary, was at least a little bit more interesting to the Soviets. But even in that case, there wasn't much they could do that and it's like and lumumba winds up as this such a tragic figure because he seemed to really believe the rhetoric that was coming you know from the united states about democracy and self-determination and from the united nations and you've got these moments where kind of he's reaching out to the united nations saying you know it's basically like calling the manager like, hey, here are the values that the world says it upholds. I share those values.

I'm trying to implement those values here in Congo. What's going on? Why am I being ousted? So can you talk a little bit about the role of the UN and how this unfolded? Yeah, so at the height of the crisis, Lumumba desperately calls on the United Nations for help. And the UN orchestrates this massive peacekeeping operation in the Congo, really a remarkably fast operation. In a matter of days, there are thousands of troops on the ground in Congo. And the UN has never done anything like this before.

It's supervised ceasefires and truces, but not been responsible for restoring order to an entire country. Dag Hammarskjöld is the Secretary General of the UN at the time. He responds with alacrity and sets up this peacekeeping mission. But then very quickly, the UN peacekeeping mission doesn't do what Lumumba wants it to do, namely to reintegrate that breakaway province, the province of Katanga, which had announced its secession. So the UN goes into Congo imagining it can be a neutral mediator. But what it discovers pretty quickly is that there are actually important

political choices that have to be made where it's going to anger one side or the other. So the UN refuses to go into Katanga at first, and Lumumba is extremely frustrated with this fecklessness on its part. And it's then that he tries the Americans, gets rebuffed, and only after that does he go to the Soviet Union. Can you talk real quickly about how the U.S. viewed this as a success and what the implications were for its kind of regime change policy over the next half century or more? Yeah, so in narrow Cold War terms, the anti-Lamumba operations that the CIA was undertaking, funding his enemies, bribing Mobutu to take power, organizing fake street protests against him, and so on. In narrow Cold War terms, this was a success because you got rid of a potentially pro-Soviet leader in Lamumba,

never mind that that's an exaggeration, and you installed in his place a supposedly pliant American, pro-American dictator in Joseph Mobutu. Never mind that he turned out to be far less pro-American than American officials hoped. So by that sense, it worked. If you broaden the scope even just a little bit to include, for instance, the plight of the Congolese people, it becomes a failure. You have Mobutu in power for 30 plus years, nourished by American aid nearly to the very end, ran the country into the ground, extraordinarily kleptocratic, repressive, and so on. And his regime's implosion kicked off a massive civil war that killed millions. And also, I would argue,

you didn't even need to get rid of Lumumba to have a country that was not communist and not pro-Soviet. There's no world in which Lumumba was about to, after having thrown off the Belgian colonial yoke, was going to turn around and allow his country to be dominated by the Soviets. Yet within the CIA, this was viewed as a success.

Larry Devlin, the CIA station chief, got promoted for his work in the Congo. He won at least one award for it. And then throughout the rest of the Cold War, as you know, there's this pattern of yet more instances where the CIA is intervening on behalf of a friendly tyrant and against the wishes of the democratic impulse of the broader population. So this was not something that was invented in Congo, but I would argue it was really perfected and most shown as a success, quote unquote, in Congo in 1960 and 1961, and would be a pattern that would continue

throughout the rest of the Cold War and arguably to this day. Yeah. And if people are watching the show out of order, they should go check out the block we did on Imran Khan, because to that point, to this day, there are still sort of strategic approaches that in some ways mirror this. Maybe not exactly, but in some ways mirror this. Maybe not exactly, but in some ways. Stuart, do you actually have thoughts on that before we wrap as to how this, you do see that sort of creeping, that mentality continue to sort of privately as we get reporting, but also in some ways it's almost a public stance of the U.S. government in certain cases that this is a mentality that makes sense. I mean, take the case of Africa today. If you look

at U.S. policy on the continent, it's very much security-heavy, counterterrorism-focused. There's still this idea that the goal should be stability above all else and short-term stability above long-term stability. So you see across the Sahel, for instance, America having sort of supported building up the military institutions in various countries at the expense of civil institutions. So there's that tendency that continues.

I think the broader lesson of 1960 and 1961 in the Congo is the danger of paranoia and that Americans were obsessed with what the Soviets were seemingly up to and invented all sorts of apparitions in their head. And so the lesson is that your geopolitical rival is often not 10 feet tall, perfectly competent. And today you see a lot of hyperventilation about what China and Russia are up to in Africa. But if you actually sort of look at the facts and what's really happening, it becomes less alarming. If you like books like Devil's Chessboard and Chaos,

you will like The Lumumba Plot. Make sure to pick up a copy. Sure, Stuart, it makes a great holiday gift as well. Stuart Reid, author of The Lumumba Plot. I would agree. Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. This is fun.

Absolutely. We'll be back with more right after this. Well, Ryan, actually, there were a couple of developments that happened as we were taping the show this morning. One would be that Norman Lear passed away. And I wanted to acknowledge that because it's a huge sort of cultural development. And he had so much influence and did so much to shape American political culture, American family culture. So it's very, very sad to hear the news that Norman Lear passed. Did you big All in the Family fan?

Yeah, that was great. Yes. You are a meathead. That's right. Yeah. R.I.P. Norman Lear. Yeah. Incredible show. The way that Archie Bunker was supposed to be designed to be like a parody of the worst of the impulses of kind of America's white working class and ended up becoming kind of a hero rather than an antihero for so many people. Very kind of foreshadowed the Nixon kind of resentment and the rise of the Reagan Revolution, yeah. Yeah, sort of a hero, but also, you know, while people still laughed at his politics, and people still laughed at his ignorance, but found the empathy. You found the capacity to sort of empathize with him in the sort of changing world,

and understand where he was coming from, while at the same time laughing at the ignorance in sort of a way that was like, whoa, this is not okay, which is sort of interesting. Yeah, that might be one that our younger viewers are just not familiar with. And I would encourage them, you know, just dive into YouTube. I'm sure you can find a bunch of those clips, search all over the family. It's a real window into the time. Yeah, I was going to say, if you haven't seen it and you're younger, it's going to be one of those things. If you watch a clip on YouTube, you're going to be like, this was on network television in prime time. People said this stuff. Do people know what prime time is even anymore? So prime time was a thing, you know, so there were only a couple of channels that you could watch and those channels would produce television shows.

And the entire country, tens of millions of people would sit down and at a particular time, sit there and every week watch this show at a designated time, not when they wanted to and not one after the other, just that one. Another thing that broke while we were taping is that The Federalist and The Daily Wire are actually being joined by the state of Texas in suing the State Department, sort of a kind of a similar to Missouri v. Biden thing, but suing the State Department for censorship for its funding of, through different initiatives, groups that seek censorship. So using taxpayer dollars basically to censor,

you know, news sites that are critical, journalism that's critical of the administration, not just the Biden administration. This was happening during the Trump administration as well. So we'll obviously follow that story because my full-time job is at The Federalist. But I wanted to mention that as well, Ryan, because Missouri v. Biden has, you know, gone all the way up. This is going to be a landmark. The Missouri v. Biden is already in, you know, clearly going to be a landmark. Missouri v. Biden is already in, you know, clearly going to be a landmark case about how the government is able to sort of exercise its powers over speech, over social media, over journalism. And this case is actually

really testing that as well. It'll be interesting to watch. And so less people think, by the way, that I was foisting my kind of left-wing agenda on Emily. Emily is the one that suggested that we have Stuart Reid to talk about the Lumumba plot. I'm glad that you did. And I'll be back in Washington next week. Looking forward to seeing everybody. Yeah, we're looking forward to that, Ryan. And if you're watching the debate tonight, remember there is a debate tonight. I will be carrying the coverage right afterwards on SiriusXM between Megyn Kelly getting off the stage and getting back to her microphone on SiriusXM. So you can tune in for that. I'll be on the full spin room show with her after that as well. But if you're looking for debate coverage between the debate, I'll be over

on SiriusXM channel 111. Ryan, any appearances for the book that people should be on the lookout for? Well, if you're in LA, you can come to Love It or Leave It tonight. I think that's like a pod save in the pod save universe. That'll be tonight in Los Angeles and a bunch of other stuff. But yeah, looking forward to getting back to regular work. Sounds great. We will see you all back here with Ryan in the studio next week. Have a great one, everyone. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight-loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results.

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