Danny Jones Podcast - #213 - CIA Spy Breaks Down What's REALLY Happening in Israel | John Kiriakou

Episode Date: December 11, 2023

John Kiriakou is a former CIA analyst, case officer & chief of counterterrorism in the Middle East. EPISODE LINKS http://johnkiriakou.substack.com https://twitter.com/JohnKiriakou SPONSORS: https://marekhealth.com/danny - Use code “DANNY” to save 10% off. https://factormeals.com/DJP50 - Use CODE: DJP50 for 50% off. FOLLOW DANNY JONES https://www.instagram.com/jonesdanny https://twitter.com/jonesdanny JOIN ON PATREON: https://bit.ly/koncretepatreon OUTLINE 00:00 - Prisoner exchanges 07:45 - American Privacy 12:45 - Joeseph Goebells on privacy 16:51 - How Mossad communicates with agents 18:16 - Does the US gov REALLY spy on its citizens? 20:20 - Newsguard & the Pentagon 32:26 - Intelligence officials who run Newsguard 35:02 - Code Pink 41:38 - How do you stay ontop of Intelligence? 47:00 - Exposing a FAKE black-ops guy 49:58 - Billy Waugh 53:04 - How Billy Waugh caught Carlos the Jackal 01:06:17 - Abu Zubaydah is NOT who we thought he was 01:13:12 - How Abu Zubedah's story will end 01:15:14 - Khalid Sheikh Mohamad 01:19:07 - Saudi Arabia 01:21:15 - The history of Ukraine & Russia 01:28:43 - NATO 01:36:11 - China / Taiwan 01:42:35 - What would a US v China war look like? 01:44:29 - Israel Hamas Conflict Dynamics 01:54:41 - Israel Iran Saudi Geopolitical Hatred 01:58:08 - How China Becomes Powerful 02:01:02 - Isreal relationship w/ Jordan 02:12:18 - Russia / Iran relationship 02:19:36 - Story of covert CIA meeting about Iran invasion 02:24:41 - DOD powerplay against CIA leading up to Iraq war 02:26:30 - How the Pentagon used a fake informant to invade Iraq 02:40:55 - Kiriaku's experience with Bill Clinton in the 90's 02:45:18 - Meeting HIllary Clinton 02:51:51 - Next Presidential Candidates? 03:03:47 - Working on the BRUNO movie in the middle east Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We'll just, we'll start it right here. Okay. So Maria Butina came to the United States to go to grad school at American University. And she's a, I know Maria. She's, she's very cool. But she's a gun nut. And she just loves, loves, loves guns of all kinds. And so she founded in Russia this small group that is,

akin to a little mini version of the of the NRA. Right. And so she took it upon herself to reach out to the NRA when she got here and said, hey, I'm the head of this Russian gun club and we want to have relations with you. And they said, okay, that sounds great. Come and look at our museum. They have this, it's actually a very cool museum out in, Vienna, Virginia.

And so she became kind of a woman about town. You'd run into her at the Metropolitan Club, at the Army Navy Club. She would be at different think tanks or the Heritage Foundation. And then she started dating the guy who was the founder of Overstock.com. Okay. Right? And, next thing you know, the FBI arrests her. And they charge her, and this is the important part here,

they charge her with failure to register as a foreign agent. Now, the key words are foreign agent. You and I probably have a very different view of what those words mean than what a guy down the street thinks they mean. All that means, this is something called a process crime or a process felony. All it means is that you failed to fill out a form online. Right. I'll give you an example. About 15 years ago, I was hired by the Abu Dhabi Chamber of Commerce to write three op-eds saying, Abu Dhabi's great and they don't have any taxes and everybody should do business there. Right? And they gave me $1,200. But I went online. to the Justice Department's FARA website, the foreign agent registration act website.

It's like FARA.gov or Fara.Justis.gov or whatever it is. And I filled out this form. It took about 10 minutes. And I said, I've accepted money from a foreign entity called the Abu Dhabi Chamber of Commerce. They gave me $1,200. And this is what I did for the $1,200. and I attach my three op-eds. Done.

Right. Okay. Nobody ever asked me about it ever in the last 15 years. All she had to do was to go online and fill up this form and say, I take money from the Russian version of the NRA and I set up a meeting with the American NRA and we would like to have a cooperative arrangement. That's all she had to do. but they arrested her because she didn't fill out the form. Now, technically, this is a felony. Until about five years ago, this felony was never prosecuted.

Never. Most Americans didn't even know that you have to fill out the form if you're taking money from a foreign entity. But about five years ago, for whatever reason, the Trump Justice Department, and this is the same thing with the Biden Justice Department, this is not a partisan thing, They decided, you know what, it's easy to get convictions on this.

We're going to start nailing people on this. And so the federal sentencing guidelines for a first offense, you've never been convicted of a crime before, is zero to six months in a federal prison, zero to six months. Now, if you've never been arrested before, you didn't realize you were supposed to fill out this form. you're going to get like a $5,000 fine, right? They gave her 18 months in solitary confinement, and the Russians were outraged. And so they said, oh, okay, so this is how you're going to treat us?

We're going to grab this basketball player. See how you like that. Yo, guys, I just wanted to drop in to say thank you to everyone who's been subscribing on the videos. It's been helping a lot. The numbers have been growing. and we're going to keep doing these podcasts because I can't reiterate this enough. If it wasn't for you guys, we would not be able to do this.

So thank you all to everyone who's watching, everyone who's subscribing, sharing. It all makes such a huge difference. And that's it. I love you guys. Back to the show. And they gave her 10 years for having a little bit of cannabis oil. I wrote a little song to remind you, Choice Hotels, gets you more of the experiences you value. The Cambria Hotel's got it all

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Live the game like never before with Game Changer. And then we were like, okay, then we're going to arrest Putin's nephew in Rome. going to charge him with money laundering. And they said, oh, yeah, then we're going to arrest the Wall Street Journal reporter, and we're going to charge him with espionage. So how do you like that? This is where we are now. It's like a child's game.

And then what's going to end up happening? And the Russians actually said this in public just about a week ago. They said, there's going to end up being another prisoner exchange like we used to do during the Cold War, where you meet on the bridge. in Berlin and, you know, their guy walks halfway across and our guy walks halfway across and, you know, just like in the movies. That's what's going to happen again. So the last time we gave them Victor Boot and they gave us Brittany Griner, now we're going to end up

giving them somebody else and they're going to give us Evan Gerskowitz from the Wall Street Journal. And then, you know, Paul Whelan, who's in jail in Russia 10 years for, you know, drunken disorderly or something. I saw an interview with Vladimir Putin one time, and it was an American journalist, asked him, what about Paul Whelan? This guy's been in jail for like five years. And I was surprised at the frankness of Putin's response.

He said, this is a guy who got shit-faced and who attacked a cop. And he's in jail because he deserves to be in jail. Okay. Well, you know what? If you get shit-faced and you... He was like a Marine or something, right? Yeah, exactly. then you're going to give the guy, you know, 30 days.

Not 10 years at hard labor and just hold them until you can, you can trade him for somebody better. Right. But this is where we find ourselves now. Is there like an overall sort of plan or strategic objective to all this? No. It's a tit for tat. Just a, wow.

Yeah. Like, you know, you go to work every day and you hope that that we don't, or that they don't arrest somebody because then we're going to have to arrest somebody. And then if we do, then they're going to arrest somebody else. And then we have to arrest somebody else. And so it's just not a way to carry out foreign policy.

Do you speak full Russian? No, I don't speak any Russian. No, none at all. I speak Greek and Arabic. Okay. So I wanted to have you back. You're one of the best guests I've ever had on the show. Thank you.

Pleasure is mine. You always have some of the best outlooks on what's going on around the world. So I wanted to get you back because it's a pretty crazy time around the world right now. It is indeed. So when it comes to everything, what specifically are you looking at right now most interested in or most concerned about with everything going around? Like with the wars that are happening in Ukraine, Israel, all of it. Yeah.

I'm pretty heavily focused on Israel and on Ukraine. but I'm also pretty focused on privacy issues right now. You know, the government is just, the American government is just pushing and pushing and pushing into areas of press freedom and individual liberties. I never considered myself to be, you know, terribly concerned about government overreach. And now I'm very, very concerned about government overreach. And again, this is not a partisan issue. This is not something where you can say, oh, you know, the Democrats, all they want to do is control the news that we get to see or the Republicans, they don't want you to know. That's not it at all.

It's when you allow government entities to push the envelope into areas that may or may not be legal, or even if they're legal, may or may not be ethical, they're never. going to willingly concede those gains, they're never going to say, you know what, we shouldn't have done that. We should back off. Right. Never. Nobody's ever going to say that in the intelligence community or in federal law enforcement. I'll give you an example.

Patriot Act. Exactly. That's exactly what I was going to say. So we've got Section 702 of the Patriot Act. We didn't even know Section 702 existed until Ed Snowden told us that it did. We all believed, because this is what the founding fathers told us to believe, 250 years ago, practically, we believed that the government could not infringe on your liberty without the appropriate court authorization to do that or authorities to do that, right?

You have to have probable cause. You have to have a warrant. well now with section 702 they don't have to have anything and it's even worse than just section 702 I'll get to that in a second but 702 means if if you are on

the phone on a text message thread or an email thread and somebody else on that thread it doesn't matter who is a foreign national you have no expectation of privacy and the government can intercept everything that you're doing

and saying now you've not been accused of a crime. The government hasn't gone to court and said, hey, this Danny Jones guy, we think he's up to something. We need a warrant. No warrant. They just take it. Whether you like it or not, whether you know it or not.

They just take it. And NSA not just takes it and holds it. They offer it up to the FBI. And they say, hey, we've intercepted these communications. We don't know if they're important or not, but you know you might be interested in them and they just turn them over well there are no courts involved in any of this this all came from the patriot act um another thing now is the fbi i or really any law enforcement organization has to get a warrant from a court to collect your metadata now you can

you can figure out a lot about a person just from the metadata who are you calling who are you meeting are you calling an abortion clinic, right? Are you calling a criminal defense lawyer? You don't even need to know what the substance of the conversation is. Just who you're in touch with. Okay, so the FBI, they need a court order, a warrant to get that information. Actually, they don't. Now they can just purchase it from the phone company or from Twitter or Facebook or Verizon or anybody else.

or anybody else because all of it is bundled and sold. Now, it's supposed to be sold for advertising purposes, but the FBI is not using it for advertising. Right. And the Supreme Court's never made any kind of decision on something like this. So why would they go to court and lay out their hand and risk the information leaking to you or to the media when they can just buy it from big tech?

And that's what they're doing. I've heard the argument against this before, or the pushback against this, is like when it comes to things like the San Bernardino shooting, and I remember there was a big stink with the Apple and the FBI, Apple didn't want to give up the phone. Absolutely right. But there's the argument like, look, if the FBI could have had access to this guy's phone, maybe they could have stopped something like that. And if every American can just be okay with the fact like, okay, no, the FBI and the CIA, they don't. care about what porn you're watching. They don't care if you're cheating on your wife. They don't care about all this, you know, normal everyday sort of like drama. But they need the oversight to be able to weed out people like that and to save people's lives. Boiling that down,

what you're saying is, if you haven't done anything wrong, then why worry? Why worry? Do you know who the first person was to offer up that rhetorical question in a public venue? It was Joseph Gerbils. in 1933 that's what we have to be careful of that's the slippery slope that we have to stay away from I haven't done anything wrong

so sure the FBI can have my stuff what was the context of that Germans didn't want to didn't want to report on things that their neighbors were doing and Gerbil said why not if you're not doing anything and they're not doing anything

the information's just a not Then what do you care? And then they started rounding people up now do I believe the American government's going to round people up? Of course not Mm-hmm. But what I do believe and I I believe this because of firsthand experience is if the government decides to target you for Whatever reason they don't like your politics they don't like your face They thought maybe you were involved in something else they couldn't get you on they'll try something else something different Then there's nothing you can do to protect yourself. Nothing.

Now, getting back to the San Bernardino shooter, you're right. They couldn't crack that iPhone, and Apple refused to help them. And it went to court, and Apple won. They ended up turning it over to an Israeli company. And the Israeli company charged the FBI $6 million, and they cracked it. But the information that would have disrupted the attack didn't come from the phone. Wait, Apple never turned it. over to the FBI?

Apple wouldn't open the phone for the FBI. Really? No, no. They would not. They were staunch about it. Okay. In fact, the FBI director complained later that it was $6 million of the taxpayers' money that otherwise didn't need to be spent. Well, actually, yeah. To protect our civil liberties, yes. Yes. Apple did the right thing. But the information that would have disrupted that attack did not come from the phone. it came from the game system.

Have you ever seen the Netflix series Fauda? No. F-A-U-D-A? No, I haven't. It is one of the best TV series I've ever seen in my life. Really? It's an Israeli series, but... Sure, F-A-U-D-A or F-A-W-D-A, I can't remember.

But anyway, it's an Israeli series, but it was made by... a group of guys who were former shinbet and former Mossad, but it really does give you a balanced view between the Israelis and the Palestinians. It's shocking that they were able to even make something like this. Yeah. Yeah. Like you're going to you're going to you're going to have sympathy

for both the Israelis and the Palestinians in this. Like you're going to want both sides to win, which doesn't make any kind of. a logical sense. But anyway, in the most recent season, there's this ongoing thing that they do where they only communicate with each other through a backgammon app, right? Because the Americans, the Russians, the Chinese, the Israelis, the French, the British, everybody's intercepting everything, right? Phones and emails and text messages and intercepting everything. nobody's looking at backgammon apps.

And, you know, all of these game apps that we have, they all have little chat functions when you're playing live. Right. Right. I have a backgammon app on my phone. I play against Lebanese and Turks and Syrians all the time. I do. It's fun.

And you can chat. So that's how Mossad and Shinbet communicate with their agents because they know it's not going to be intercepted. And even if it is intercepted, No human beings ever going to see it. It's just game chat, right? But it's not game chat. It's very serious operational planning.

That's what the San Bernardino shooter was doing. He was communicating over like a Wii or whatever it was, a Twitch or Switch or what I don't even know anymore. My kids are beyond that now. But that's the danger. the danger is in is in gaming systems like when it comes to the government looking into like private communications of people is it just like how much attention are they really paying yeah that's a good question is it just a big catch-all zero attention normally yeah it's a big catch-all um you know nsa built this facility in the in the in the desert in utah right and uh they started building it right after

the 9-11 attacks. And there's enough computer memory there to save every phone call, every text message, and every email from every American for the next 500 years. Right. That's how much space they have, how much memory they have. No human being is going to listen to 99.999% of any of that stuff. It's just being vacuumed up. by these, you know, Cray computers or whatever those super computers are called these days. And it's being held in case someday, law enforcement needs to go back to it for leads

or for information about a crime that has been committed to build a case. Okay. Which is great. Well, it's not great, but, you know, if it's not going to be used against somebody for, for unethical purposes, I can understand it,

provided that they get a warrant. It's not just, well, you know, we're going to collect on everybody now. No, NSA's, first of all, federal law says NSA can't do this. Secondly, NSA's own charter says that it can't do this. And they're like, well, 9-11 changed everything. Well, you know what? Okay, then change the law. Don't just pretend that the law doesn't exist.

Which is what I've been saying about torture for 20 years. Right. Yeah. You want to torture people. Okay. You and I can agree to disagree on this, but you got to change the law. You can't just pretend that the law says something that it doesn't. Right. Now, this sort of gets back to the story, the recent story or article that you wrote about, what was the article about Newsweek and the Pentagon Cyber Command? Or not, what was it? News Guard. News Guard and Consortium News. And what was the story there? Yeah. So there's this organization called NewsGuard that was founded a few years ago. by two media professionals. One was the founder of Court TV and the other is the former publisher of the Wall Street Journal.

And they decided to hire a bunch of young recent college graduates with degrees in journalism and have them analyze literally every independent news organization that's out there on the internet. Everything. And assign a score to every one of these news organizations. Now, the score is from zero to 100, 100 being absolutely reliable, associated press, 100, right, to zero, which is like Alex Jones has a zero. Okay. Okay. So you think he's an agent.

And he's too stupid to be an agent. You can't keep his mouth shut. Yeah. I know a lot of people who think he's an agent. No, or a useful idiot. Oh, he might be a useful idiot. But in terms of being like a witting agent, no, he's too,

he's too stupid. Right. Okay. Sorry to interrupt. No, that's okay. And so, what they've done is they,

they immediately politicized the, the process. And when I say politicized, what I mean is they took a position on Ukraine. They took a position on Syria. And if you aren't in line with that position, they knock you down to below 60%. Well, if you're below 60%, you get a warning. Not you.

You don't get the warning. Their subscribers get a warning saying, whoa, warning. This website's not reliable. It's fake news. How do they get to their subscribers? Yeah. So most of their subscribers are governmental entities. And most of them are in the Pentagon.

So what they do is they provide an extension. on the website. And so if I go to Alexjones.com or whatever that website is, their extension will give me, until a couple of months ago, it was either red or green. It'll give me a red, and it'll say,

warning, there's a little warning that comes up, warning, this is a fake news site. Now they'll give you a numerical figure, and it'll say, you know, 10% warning, this is a fake news site. Okay. But how do they determine what's fake news? Well, what they did with consortium news, and this started a year ago, is they sent an email to the editor-in-chief of consortium news, and they said,

Hi, we're looking at consortium news, and you have such interesting articles on consortium news, but we have a couple of questions that our clients would like to know the answers to. First of all, who are the members of your board of directors? And do you have the board of directors listed on the website? Okay, yeah, here are the board of directors. It's right there on the masthead. Right, it's easy to see. And that's kind of an innocuous question.

Second, what's your policy for issuing corrections? Okay, our policy is we say, hey, we realized something we said was incorrect. Here's the correction. Why did you say on October the 10th, 2021, that there were

neo-Nazis in the Ukrainian military? Well, because they wear patches with swastikas on them and they pledge fieldy to a guy who heads the Ukrainian Nazi party.

like nobody's saying the ukrainian government is nazi government nobody's saying that you know zelinski's a closet nazi but there are you know well-identified neo-nazis who are members of the ukrainian military it's it's fact right they don't like that that's that's fake news well you know somebody should tell cnn because they did an entire documentary about it. So that's fake news. Another thing is, why did you publish an article in 2016 that said that the evidence was not clear that Bashar al-Assad used gas on his own people? Well, because eight whistleblowers from the United Nations came out and said, we don't believe Assad did this. We believe Al-Qaeda did it. See, but Al-Qaeda is now allied with the Pentagon.

Because this is bizarre a world that we live in now. The Nusra Front used to be called Al-Qaeda. Now we armed them to help them overthrow the Syrian government. But they don't like talking about that. When did this happen? A couple of years ago. Okay. Yeah.

So there are like 20,000 articles. in the, maybe it's not 20, maybe it's 10,000 articles in the consortium news archives, they objected to four because they didn't like the, they didn't like the analytic line. Well, as it turns out, these four were written by Christopher Hedges. Now, Chris is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, lifelong journalist for the New York Times,

and he was the New York Times Middle East Bureau Chief. So that's the guy that you're going to accuse of spreading fake news? A two-time Pulitzer Prize winner. So they went after consortium. Then they started going after others. The Gray Zone is another one. The Gray Zone is published by Max Blumenthal, the son of Sydney Blumenthal, also of the New York Times, confidant of the Clintons. And Max is a cutting-edge journalist.

I don't agree with all of his positions on things. things, but by God, he does his research. So he said, he's not even going to fight it. He wears this red mark from NewsGuard as a badge of honor, he said on the Jimmy Doorshow. Then they went after anti-war.com, which is a libertarian, kind of conservative, it's like a Republican anti-war site. Okay.

But highly respected in the independent journalism community went after them. then they went after the Shear Post. I write for the Shear Post. Bob Shear's a friend of mine. Bob Shear spent almost 30 years at the Los Angeles Times as an investigative reporter. He's been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize 11 times. You're way too young to remember. You weren't born yet.

But he's the one who got presidential candidate Jimmy Carter to admit that he lusted in his heart. Right? He was an evangelical Christian. You can't think about other women. You're a married man. Oh my God. He lusted in his heart. Right. It was a big scandal in 1980. Seriously. This is how far we've come. And they decided, oh, no, no, they don't like his position on Ukraine. This is unacceptable. He's calling for peace in Ukraine. We have to stand up to the Russian bear. And Putin, you know, Putin's crazy. Isn't that what we always say about foreign leaders we don't like? They're crazy. Right. So now, they're going after the sheer post. And so,

somebody's got to stop these guys. About a month ago, Consortium News hired a constitutional attorney who filed a suit against Newsguard and against the Pentagon. Now, why the Pentagon?

Because, as it turns out, the only client that NewsGuard has that matters is the Defense Department's cyber command. It's only getting every customer's order right. It's only a point-of-sale system connected by Spectrum fiber-powered business internet, helping you track hundreds of secure transactions. And it's all backed by 24-7 U.S.-based customer support and local technicians.

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Okay. Leadership. And so they're suing saying that, first of all, this is government interference in the press. It's a clear, direct violation of the Constitution's First Amendment. Secondly, it's not up to NewsGuard, just like it's not up to DOD, to decide what's true and what's not true, or what analytic line the American people should see or should not see. You know, if I don't want to read Alex Jones, I just don't read Alex Jones. It's as simple as that.

But now you've got people, you know, ruining businesses and ruining people's lives just because they don't like your position on Ukraine. Who are some of the people that are running that company news? Yeah. Their board of directors would make your hair stand up. The board is made up of people like Michael Hayden, the former director of both the CIA and the NSA. During 9-11, right? During 9-11, he was the head of NSA, and then he oversaw the torture program at the CIA. Tom Ridge, the first secretary of Homeland Security.

The guy who defended before the Supreme Court international rendition, kidnapping. Anders, what's his name? From Denmark, the former head of NATO, is another one. About a year ago, I started working with this company called Merrick. health. And I wanted to get a comprehensive breakdown of what was going on inside my body, from my vitamin levels to my lipid levels, to my hormone levels, etc. Using the most elaborate and cutting-edge testing on the market, they were able to advise me on a new diet, sleep, training, and supplement protocol designed to maximize performance and support longevity. I tell

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So you're saying that the intelligence community these people these intelligence community veterans are in charge of policing the news publications in our country. Can you imagine? It's kind of hard to swallow this is so Obviously illegal. Yeah, so what happened with the court case? It was just filed a month ago. I spoke with the attorney. I spoke with the attorney and when it was filed, just because I had some questions about the case of my own, questions of my own. And he said it could be a year, two years before they see the inside of a courtroom. And I'll tell you, another thing that could throw a wrench into all of this is they could just give consortium news a green light. And then consortium has no standing. So let consortium off the hook, but it wouldn't change anything for anyone else.

Right. And then, let's say the sheer post would have to sue, and that would take another two years. And then, no, you let them off the hook. And then Max Blumenthal would have to sue. Yeah, this is a real uphill struggle. This coming on the heels of something like the Twitter files, which we discussed last time. Right. Right. Right. And, you know, Word is still leaking out coming from the Twitter files.

We thought we knew all of it six, eight, ten months ago. What knew has come out? That there was an FBI agent who was still working for the FBI who was actually sitting in the Twitter spaces. Like for what reason? Like on headquarters?

That's terrifying. What was he doing there? Right. Where does all, like it's so scary to think about this. Like we were saying before, it's like David versus Goliath. How can anyone even like, I'm not even talking like,

I told you. you the story about my friend Jack Murphy, who wrote the story for one of the big publications about the NATO people who are pulling off operations in Russia and then the deputy director cabosh the story at the end of it, right? Right. So when you have like I'm not even like obviously the big publications are playing ball, right? But how can any smaller publication or even an independent journalist like myself or like yourself? Yeah.

How can we have a snowball chance in hell to to publish? real journalism in a world like that. And where does it go in 10 years? Yeah, man. There's no easy answer to that. I'm going to draw an analogy to answer your question. There's a peace group in Washington that's very active called Code Pink. And they disrupt congressional hearings a lot.

And they always get on the news. And it's just an absolutely wonderful group of women, a couple of men, mostly women. mostly women, just wonderful people. And its head, also one of its co-founders, is a woman by the name of Medea Benjamin. Medea can't even be five feet tall. And if she weighs more than 90 pounds, I'd be shocked. And she goes nose to nose with some of the biggest,

baddest people in the world. The Egyptian police broke her arm and shoulder once, manhandling her. She's been arrested. What's her name again? Medea Benjamin. Can you pull her up? Yeah.

Steve. Medea has been arrested. Well, I asked her two years ago how many times she had been arrested and she said she thought she'd been arrested 185 times. She's fearless. There she is. She is absolutely fearless. And whenever I doubt my ability to make change, I think of her. Because is she changing minds by disrupting the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing?

probably not. Maybe she is. But if she disrupts it 10 times or a hundred times, I'll tell you another story. When I was the chief investigator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, we were doing a hearing once and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was testifying. So I was sitting immediately behind John Kerry. He was the chairman of the committee. So if he needed anything, he could just turn his head and tell me, you know, get me a map of, you know, Somalia, which is one of the things he said that day. So, um, so I'm sitting right behind him. And he turns around and he says, John, you see these people in pink t-shirts in the front row? I said, yeah. He said, they're going to disrupt the hearing. Um, ask the cop to throw them out. Well, I'd never heard of code pink. So I got up. I went

through the ante room. I went all the way around to the back of the hearing room. I went to the cop and I said the chairman wants you to throw these women out because they're going to disrupt the hearing. So he comes up and he says, you have to leave. And he throws them out. It was perfectly peaceful. Well, there were like eight more that we couldn't see had pink t-shirts on under their jackets. So they got up and one of them shouted, no blood for oil. And she threw a hundred one dollar bills at the chairman of the joint chiefs. And they just kind of fluttered down. And he just sat there like a statue. And, you know, they were dragged out shouting no blood for oil. I was smiling because I thought, wow, that was really ballsy. I had never, and they're all like in their 60s, 70s and 80s.

Not all of them, but many of them. I thought, wow, that was really balsy. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and they throw like, like it's a, you know, two rappers going at it and a club where they throw money at each other for disrespect like throwing it at a stripper yeah so i'm smiling as i'm watching all this and carrie turns around and he says you think that's funny and i said i caught myself i said i think it's gutsy and he says keep your opinions to yourself so when the hearing was over he got up and walked out and i'm kind of cleaning up all the papers and stuff and Senator Gene Sheen from New Hampshire came up to me and she says John did you throw those women out and I said I did she says why I said the chairman told me to and he said she says well I'm from

New Hampshire and in New Hampshire we say live free or die learn some respect well now code pink they're my closest friends I go to all their marches all their events fundraising you know, whatever. These women do incredible work. And that's where I take my cue from that we can't stop fighting. Right? Yes, it's a David and Goliath thing, like we've both said. And maybe the change is going to be incremental.

Or maybe there won't be any change at all. But there's certainly going to be no change if you just sit home and say, wow, I wish I could change the system, but I can't. So I guess I'll just watch TV. No, you got to be out there fighting. And in my case, fighting means writing or broadcasting or marching or speaking at universities, which I do a lot of. You got to keep up the fight.

It's the only way you can make sure that these people are called on the carpet for the crimes that they're committing. And that's what's happening here. They're committing crimes against the American people. I'll give you another example. You know, there's this family out west. So in 2017, there was a standoff in. in Oregon. It was this family called the Bundy family.

Okay. And the Bundys were actually from Nevada. And they're constantly fighting the federal government because they graze their cattle on federal lands and they don't pay. Okay. Right? You have to pay the government.

Because their point is, look, it's federal land, which means it belongs to all the American people. And it wasn't up to the government to seize it in the first place. So we're not paying. And so they're constantly getting arrested and prosecuted and then one of the sons of clive bundy led the takeover of the visitor's center at a park in oregon and the FBI was sent and there's a standoff that them on horseback right there yeah that's them make that big steve oh holy crap yeah that's them okay so the conventional wisdom is like

These Bundy's are nuts. They're right-wing extremists, they're freaks. But you know what? Even if that's true, they're right. And they were acquitted in federal court. They were acquitted. Wow. Yeah.

I love that they're pseudonym as BLM. Yeah. It's funny, right? Bureau of Land Mansion. And it says, how could a scofflaw like Bundy who owes more than a million dollars in grazing fees? backed by hundreds of armed zealots managed to run off federal officials who were clearly in the right

for seizing Bundy's cows. God. Yeah, you see, this is what everybody's up against. That's crazy, man. So you just have to fight for what you believe in. It's really as simple as that. Yeah, I mean, like,

so when you are doing your research and you're, like, researching news stories that you're going to talk about or things that are happening in the news, where do you get your information? Oh, yeah, everywhere. Listen, I get up at 6 o'clock in the morning just so I can read

like everything. You have to read the mainstream media because you have to know what the government is saying, right? So I read every morning, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the L.A. Times, the Wall Street Journal. Then I go to CNN, Fox, MSNBC. Then I do drudge.

On the right, I do drudge and Gateway Pundit. and Daily Caller. And then I go to the left and I read raw story. And then I do Independence. Consortium News, Shear Post, Reader Supported News. Wow. There's so many of them.

The gray zone. Just to get a different angles on the stories. Yeah. And I like to think that I'm smart enough that I know what's, you know, what sounds right and what doesn't sound like. Some people will say like, you know, they'll just say, something outrageous and be 100% certain in their assertion and you just know because you've been doing this for a long time, you know that that's just not right. It's just, it's false or

there's a problem with the analysis. So, you know, this is what they taught us to do at the agency, ironically, when I started off as an analyst in January of 1990. You read absolutely everything. thing because after a while you become such an expert that you can separate the wheat from the chaff. So at the CIA, I'm going to read cables coming from CIA operations officers overseas, from American embassies and State Department officers working in those embassies, from they're called DODIR's, Department of Defense Intelligence Reports from defense attachés around the world, intercepts from NSA, just pulling stuff out of the air.

But then I'm also going to read the press. Now, much of the global media is shit. That's just a fact of life, right? Read the Pakistani media, for example, and try to find one true thing in it. Good luck. But you will have read so much from so many different places that you'll know what's true and what's not true. And I find that to be the case with the American media. you can figure it out interesting there are a couple that just a couple of sites that i'd say are

really exceptional um the associated press and pro publica pro publica yeah most most journalism outlets in the united states no longer do uh investigative journalism right because it's to expensive. It takes too long. It takes too long. You're going to dedicate a journalist or two to a story that's not going to be published for three months. Right. Right. So this journalist is going to write four or five pieces a year and you're going to pay them $150,000. So most everybody's phased it out. What ProPublica did then was they set themselves up as a nonprofit solely to carry out investigative reporting. And so, you know, they'll have pieces that are utterly disparate.

Like, they'll do a piece on solitary confinement. Right. And then they'll do a piece on price fixing in the egg industry, right? And then they'll do a piece on the falling education scores in the state of Kansas. stuff that nobody else is going to cover because they don't have the money to do it anymore. Right. And when you're doing it like that,

when you're doing these stories that take a long time to cover, it's hard to be relevant to stories that are like happening now. Exactly. That's right. I'm curious, when people do work on those types of stories with four big publications, right? Like my friend Jack who I was telling you about who was writing that story for a year.

And they come to a big public. publication with the story and they say, hey, I have 12 sources. Six of them are former CIA officers, other guys or former Army Rangers, whatever that might be. When they go and present their story with their, obviously they provide who their sources are. But does the editor of that publication by himself go and vet all these sources? They usually have a fact-checking staff who will call the sources and say, is it true that you said that 75% of X is Y? Is it true that in 1996 you were making $35,000? You know, everything that they're ascribing to you, the fact checker is going to make sure that it's correct.

And do they not only fact check the statements, do they also go and check these people's background and credentials? make sure they are who they say they are. They're supposed to. Organizations have been burned. You know, when I first started appearing on Fox News, I ran into a guy in the green room. And he was supposed to be this big CIA, you know, deep cover black ops. And he's talking about like black ops and wetwork. And I'm like, we don't use those terms.

They do in the movies. Right? So I said, so what director are you in? He said, I'm in ops. I'm in black ops. And I said, what, what's your division? I can't say. Okay, bullshit, number one.

Secondly, nobody says black ops. And if you call it the company, I'm going to punch you in the face, right? So I said to the producer after I went on, I said, this guy that you had on before me, I think he's faking it. And she's like, what? Why? And I said, he doesn't know the lingo. And he wouldn't tell me what division he was in.

And that's like your first brag is what your division was. You know, oh, I was special activities division. I was counterterrorism center. I was near East operations. Whatever. And she's like, okay, I'll look into it. And they did. And he made the whole thing up.

He had never been in the agency. he had never been anywhere. He had never been in the military, nothing. He just made the whole thing up. And he would go on Fox and he would talk with authority. And he ended up going to prison. He's probably still in prison because, you know, once you start peeling that onion, it's not just that he lied to Fox. He lied to the bank to get a mortgage saying he's a, I can't talk about it, But I'm Black Ops special wetwork, deep, deep cover. You guys really don't, you guys don't use the word wet works. No, nobody does.

So dumb. No. I had Rick Prado in here. He had the same, said the same thing. You know, Rick Prado, he was the guy who was down in Iran contract. Yeah. I sure do. You sure do.

Nicaragua. His wife doesn't like me. Oh, really? I wrote a review of Rick's book. Oh, really? Yeah, she took exception to it. I think I have it back here. I think I have it on the shelf somewhere.

Annie Jacobson wrote a book. I'm sure you're familiar with that one. When she wrote, it's called Surprise Kill Vanish. Right. All about Billy Waugh. Billy was a giant. You and I have talked about Billy Waugh. Have we?

Haven't we? Maybe we have. I'm sure we have. Oh, Billy. Billy was a great friend. He lived like 20 minutes from here. Yeah, he was in like Niceville, I think it's called. Yeah, yeah, right.

It was really close to Tampa. Niceville, yeah. I used to make fun of the name of the town. Oh, did you? Okay. Yeah, that's funny. Billy and I did a lot of stuff together Really?

Uh-huh So him and Rick worked together Oh for years, for years They were joined at the hip Yeah Uh-huh Billy was one of the most awesome people I ever met at the CIA

How did you meet him? He and I did a thing together in In I'm going to say the Middle East Okay It was a couple of months before 9-11 I'll tell you a funny thing Billy

Billy had the filthiest mouth of anybody I've ever encountered in my life He was just unable to control his His swearing And when you're in the Middle East These guys are all pious Muslims They're all cool guys and they want to hang out And maybe maybe they'll have a little

You know glass of wine once in a while Probably not But swearing Absolutely forbidden So We flew out together To train this Middle Eastern in service in counterterrorism operations.

We were out there for probably a month and a half or two months. And Billy was the lead. He was the lead lecturer. And then I would get up for, you know, specific questions. And I was kind of the logistics guy. And I taught the surveillance and surveillance detection portion. So the colonel that was in charge of this unit finally came up to me and he said, we're friends and I said yes we are what can I do and he said you've got to talk to Billy

and I said okay about what and he said please no more MF no more GD I'm going to have a heart attack and I said I honestly don't know if it's possible for him to not say those words I'll try So I asked him And he's like, no can do Can't do it And so he just swore like a sailor For the rest of the time They loved him

He was everybody loved him But he just couldn't control himself Funny thing too He used to listen He used to drive this gigantic Cadillac And when we were overseas He rented a Cadillac I'm like, how did you even find a Cadillac

in this country. Yeah, that's weird. And he would play this one cassette tape over and over. It was Roger Williams with a piano and the deep, you know, baritone. Yeah. Big, like, Liberace kind of. He just loved that stuff.

I think I told you the story about Carlos the Jackal and Billy, didn't I? I know that he was the one who captured him, right? Yeah. It's one of the most exciting stories I ever heard at the agency. You know, Billy had a tendency to embellish his stories, not this one. Really?

Yeah, this one was well documented. How did that one go down? Billy was in Sudan working for Kofar Black. Kofa Black was the... No, he was us. Oh, CIA. He was the senior... The term of art we're supposed to use is the senior CIA officer in country.

The CIA does not acknowledge any such thing as a station. So whenever we talk about working overseas, that person was the senior CIA officer in country. Okay. Okay. So Billy's off one day. Yeah, you said Kofar Black for some reason my brain without Louis Free. I don't know why. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay. He's off one day. And he decides to go down to the vegetable market and buy some vegetables for the week. He goes down with a buddy of his. also from the embassy. And, you know, they're the only two white guys in cartoon, they think. So they're in the vegetable market, and Billy looks, and he's looking at this guy, and he says to his friend, that's Carlos the Jackal.

And the guy's like, what? No, it's not. And Billy said, yeah, that's Carlos the Jackal. No, I don't think so, Billy. Billy said, I'm sure it is. They go back to the embassy. Kofer's in his office on a... What do you call this?

Eliptical machine? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He's on elliptical machine. And Billy walks in, he says, Koffer, I just saw Carlos the Jackal. Kofer says, get the fuck out of here. He said, no, I'm telling you. I was in the vegetable market,

and I saw him, and I'm sure it's him. And he's like, well, I think you're nuts, but if it's Carlos the jackal, we're going to have to confirm. How old was Billy at this time? Oh, he was in his 70s. Okay.

Yeah. Maniac. Late 60s, maybe. Wow. Yeah. Incredibly great shape. After having been shot more than a dozen times over the course of three wars. So he went back down to that vegetable market every single day for a month.

And then they saw Carlos again. So what they decided to do was they. They hired a couple of Sudanese guys to stage a fist fight. In Muslim countries, it's very, very unusual for you to ever witness physical violence between people. People don't, like, you know, we have videos on YouTube of Karens. They load a thousand new ones every day. Yeah. In the Middle East, no.

People don't do things like that. So they hired these two Sudanese guys that were just down there in the market. You know, you give them 10 bucks a piece and just tell them, duke it out. So they duke it out. And of course, everybody forms a circle around them because this is so unusual. And Carlos comes to the circle to watch the fight. And he's like craning his neck to try to get a better view. And Billy's got a camera.

Click, click, click, click, click, click, click. So he goes back to the embassy. They send the pictures to CIA headquarters. And they say, oh, my God, it's Carlos the jackal. Well, Billy had followed him back to his house. so they knew where he lived. And what they ended up doing, I'm not sure how much detail I should get in.

They ended up, Carlos had a dental problem. And so what you do is you get the dentist to say, hey, time for a checkup. Why don't you come on in? And then you give him gas. And then when he wakes up, he's on a plane on his way to France. Oh, my.

Wow. Yeah, that was Billy. Hero, with capital letters. hero didn't even have to touch the guy no just got to his dentist yeah that's it that's incredible sometimes the best operations are the simplest that's um so like billy i think i don't remember who told me i think rick told me the story but is it true that billy was in either cartoon i think it was cartoon and he was literally following bin ladd and taking photos of him yeah that's true too long time That's true too. The problem there was the Clinton administration wouldn't do anything about it.

Right. He was like he wanted to take him out, but they wouldn't let him. There were no criminal charges pending against him. Yeah. And that's because DOJ dropped the ball. The CIA had been telling the Justice Department in the White House since 1991. This is a very bad guy. He means us harm. We need to do something about it. And they're like, oh, yeah, well, we have to wait until. he actually commits a crime against an American. And then we'll go to court and we'll file charges.

And then 10 years later, we have 9-11. It's like, what have you people been doing for the last 10 years? Now, today, the CIA would send a team and they would take them out. They would today. Today, yes. Because post-9-11, there was a revision of executive order, 12, 3-33-3. You're saying post-9-11. Post-9-11.

But in the 90s, You know, one, two, three, three, three said, oh, no, you don't. Yeah. Times have changed. I love, I love Trump's speech. It was probably my favorite speech he's ever done where he walks out in front. Al-Baghdadi. He died like a loser.

The dogs came in and tore him apart. It was a terrible death. Oh, my God. He sat out there and freestyled for like 30 minutes. Yeah. how much of a loser he was and how bad he died. And he was just like, oh, God, that was a sight. That was, that was amazing to watch?

So was that the reason that they got him? Was that like the same thing you were talking about, the same law that they would have used to to have bin Laden? Yes. Okay. Yeah. Once 9-11 occurred, it was two, three, four days after 9-11, President Bush signed an executive order that altered executive order 1-2-333, which had been signed back in the

70s that said, among other things. It's a very long, extensive executive order that the CIA just can't assassinate people. And now they can. Wow. How much of that is going on right now? Like you think, like when I think of the CIA, like some people I have in here, they just say, oh, well, it's, you know, it's all boring. It's all, you know. A lot of it is.

A lot of it's just. And analytics. Yeah. And analysis, following people, you know, taking down Intel and goes through the funnel. But like how much of it in today's work. world is actually like capture kill or like I would say very very little really very little this is an unusual rare occurrence now they were doing it a lot in the immediate aftermath of 9-11 because we had so many people that needed to be taken off the street whether you're going to capture them

um render them to a third country or kill them you know you think the entire al-Qaeda leadership, for example. And then ISIS came out of that because al-Qaeda wasn't violent enough. ISIS was created. And then you have the Somalis and then you have the the Libyans and then you've got Humbali down in Indonesia or Malaysia or wherever it was that he was. So there were a lot of moving parts back then. And now not so much anymore. Also, think of it this way. It was a very big deal 20 years ago to use a drone, right? If we send a drone up to do something, we're all gathered around a screen at CIA headquarters to ooh and ah over what the drone is doing.

Now we have a thousand drones a day out there. We don't even pay any attention to what the drones are doing. So all the drones and this, I just did a podcast about this. I know I have some decent knowledge about the surveillance that goes on around the world. we have these surveillance drones as well as these satellites that are literally everywhere and that signals intelligence so we can like tap into anywhere we want anywhere in now or in the past right right and let me let me give you another example of how times have changed when iraq invaded Kuwait on august 2nd 1990 we made a decision the white house made a decision that day we're going to

liberate kuwait okay it's not there was no hemming and hawing we're going to go to the u.n and we're going to see what we can do. We're going to have negotiations. President George H.W. Bush said on August the 2nd, we're going to liberate Kuwait. So what took us so long? Why did we wait until February of 1991? Because that's how long it took to move the satellite that was over the Soviet Union to put it over Iraq. What? Can you imagine? And we're all like patiently waiting. Where's the satellite today? Oh, it's over Turkmenistan. It's on its way.

Why did it take so long for a satellite to get there? Because that's how long it took in 1990. Jesus. They moved like 17,000 miles an hour now. It's crazy. Yeah. And in the meantime, they're everywhere. They're everywhere.

The whole globe is covered. And now they're not even classified. Now you can buy Google Earth images. Right. Right. Yeah. Back then it was so highly classified. We couldn't even acknowledge that there were such.

things as satellites. We were watching a video a couple weeks ago on here of a company called, I want to say it was, I forget what it was called, but it was a company that was basically a sub-company of Lockheed Martin. And it was like a product promo of their satellite system that they have where they showed all these satellites that are surrounding every fucking section of the earth 24-7 and it was frightening. I was like if you want to give anyone, induce schizophrenia and anybody, just get him stone and show him that video. And it's like you're being watched 24 hours

a day by eye in the sky. It's, it was frightening. You know, 20 years ago or so, there was a Will Smith movie. I don't remember what it was like enemy of the state maybe or something like that, where where he's running through Georgetown in Washington. and he's chasing some guy and he's on the, he's on the radio with NSA and he's like, I need live video feed stat. And I was at the movie with a bunch of CIA people. And we all busted out laughing.

Like, what do you mean live video feed? What planet do you live on? And now, you know, now it's real. Now it's real. And this is only what, 15 years later? That's it. That's wild, man. So I want to talk a little bit about the Russia-Ukraine-NATO thing,

conflict that's going on right now. But first, I got a pee real quick. Sure. We'll jump right back in. Sounds good. I got a tiny bladder. I'm sorry. Not a problem.

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minutes, no prep, no mess. Head to FactorMeals.com forward slash DJP50 and you use the code DJP 50 to get 50% off. That's code DJP50 at factormeals.com forward slash DJP50 for 50% off. It's linked below. Now back to the show. Yeah, we were just off camera after the P break telling the story about how when you captured Abu Zabeda and he woke up from his coma and saw the sponge bob shirt, he knew the Americans had him. He knew the Americans had him all right. That was an incredible story.

And then so I remember you took him to the tarmac. They had to put him on a plane and you didn't have a need to know. You wanted to know where he was going, but they couldn't tell you. And you found out later he was in Guantanamo. No, I found out years later he was in Guantanamo. He ended up going to a series of secret prisons around the world. Somebody, I don't know who. There's an officer who's been accused of it, but she was never prosecuted.

But somebody leaked the existence of these secret prisons. Back in, I'm going to say it was like 2006 or 2007, the media have reported accurately on the locations of these prisons. These are these also black sites? Yes. Also called black sites. The CIA has never acknowledged their locations. So I can't say, oh, the prison was here. The black site was there.

I can't say it. But all you have to do is Google CIA black sites. it lists them. There have been multiple lawsuits coming out of this program. And in many cases, and this was always fascinating to me, these secret prisons or black sites tended to be handshake agreements between the director of the CIA and the director of whatever foreign service, foreign intelligence service.

In many of these cases, even the prime minister or president of the country didn't know that there was a CIA black side in his country. Isn't that amazing? That's wild. Talk about the potential for blowback. Right. Just, you know, if I were the prime minister or president of a country and I found this out, I would call the president of the United States and say, who do you think you are?

You don't even have the courtesy to tell me that you want to use my country for one of your torture chambers. And in several cases, this led to the collapse of these governments. governments, you know? Really? What kind of president are you? You don't even know there's a CIA black side in your country? Right. The Americans played you like a fool.

Yeah. So it was very controversial at the time. When you captured Abuza Beda and he got shot three times in the stomach, the leg, and the groin, that whole story about the hospital being, going under a barrage of gunfire and calling in a helicopter to get you guys out of there. Like, how many years has it been since you captured him? Almost 22. 22. And he was, do you remember how old he was? Yeah, to the best of my recollection, he was like 25 or 27, something like that.

He was very young. I remember being struck by his youth. I was young at the time. I was 30. Let me think. What was I? It was 37. Oh, wow.

Mm-hmm. And I remember thinking, wow, this is a, This is what we're so afraid of. You know, he's just a young guy. This episode is brought to you by Ultima Replenisher. Health is all about balance, like a salad with fries. So why not have balance in your hydration? With six essential electrolytes and no junk, Ultima provides balanced hydration you can enjoy every day.

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makes it even more fun to watch. Every shift matters and the personalities keep things lively. Watch the Stanley Cup playoffs on TNT, TBS, True TV, and HBO Max. One of the most wanted men in the world. And that was probably one of the most defining moments of your career in the CIA. Oh, it was. It was the defining event of my life, really. What would you say to him if you got to meet him again? And do you think there's a possibility?

would you ever want to go like have a meeting with him in Guantanamo and talk to him? Yeah, I'd like to. I've spoken to his attorney many times. You know, this is the reason why I'm still talking about this 22 years later. We believed at the time that Abu Zabeda was the number three in Al Qaeda, right? He was identified by, to us, by the White House, as the number three in Al Qaeda. He was identified in Time magazine, which was a major publication at the time as the number three in al-Qaeda. We knew that he had founded al-Qaeda's safe house in Peshawar, Pakistan,

called the House of Martyrs. And that's where people would stay as they were preparing to go to Afghanistan for training, terrorist training. Not only did he establish the House of Martyrs, he also established al-Qaeda's two training camps in southern Afghanistan in Helmand province and in Kandahar. So we knew this was a bad guy. If you, were already in the fight and you wanted to go home, Abu Zubeda would forge a passport and get you tickets home. If you wanted to join the fight, he would get you to the House of Martyrs, and then into Afghanistan, and then from Afghanistan,

he would get you to wherever it was you were supposed to go. So this was a bad guy, but he was not the number three in Al Qaeda. No. No. He had never joined Al Qaeda. He talked about it. it, but he had never sworn an oath to Osama bin Laden. So he was viewed by bin Laden and by the Al Qaeda leadership as an independent,

sort of a friendly independent. Like a guy, like that bin Laden wouldn't give him a wink and a nod of approval. Right. Okay. Now, the bigger problem for us at the CIA, and we didn't know this until 2005, was that Abu Zubeda had a first cousin who was also named Abu Zabeda. And so that Abu Zabeda was in Montana. And then when 9-11 hit, he said, oh, shit, I got to get out of here.

And he ran to Jordan. So our sister agencies are picking up intelligence here, there and everywhere, out of the air, out of the sky. Abu Zabeda is in Amman, he's doing this. Abu Zabedah's in Pakistan. He's doing that. Abu Zabedah's in Afghanistan. Abba's in Syria. It's like, oh my God, this is a terrorist Superman.

Right? But it was two of them. Two of them. We didn't know. And so we thought, well, if he's able to move from country to country and he's plotting all these different operations, we've got to stop this guy. We know that bin Laden's number one. We know that Aymanazuahdi is number two.

Muhammad Attef was number three. We killed him in October of 2001. So that means Abu Zabeda must be the number three, right? Because he's out doing all this different stuff. It turned out he wasn't, actually. So, you know, this is what makes this a sad story. And this is why I would be willing to talk to Abu Zabeda. And this is why I am willing to talk to his attorney.

Because, first of all, he was not the terrorist Superman we thought he was. He was a bad guy. So if he was a bad guy, he should have been charged with a crime and put on trial as the Constitution says that he should. And he should face his accusers in a court of law. Well, we know from the Senate Torture report that the CIA will never permit. him to be charged in a court of law. And in fact, the torture report tells us that the CIA has made a policy decision that Abu Zubeda will never leave Guantanamo ever.

And when he does die eventually, he'll be cremated and his ashes thrown into the Caribbean. So remember, this is a guy who has never been charged with a crime. So why hold him? right what is their reasoning or what is their explanation for that they fucked it up and they can't let any more get out into the public kiriaku was bad enough blabbing that you know we tortured him but then the senate torture report actually lays it all out blow by blow by blow what they did to him and then if we if we release him what he's going to be on every tv channel in the world talking about the torture that he underwent at the hands of the Americans. The CIA can't allow that. What would you say to him? I would say that I'm sorry for the way he's been treated. Nobody deserves to be treated this way. If he was the killer that we said he was, he should have been tried and convicted and punished accordingly. If he was not the killer that we said he was, he should be released. What is going on with the other guy at

Guantanamo who was in charge with orchestrating everything. That's a different case. That is Khaled Sheikh Mohammed. Yes. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is the, he is the earthly incarnation of Satan. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is a perplexing character because, you know, he was an exchange student here. He went to, he went to some state university in North Carolina, lived with an American family. He's utterly Americanized.

But he self-radicalized when he went back to. the Middle East or to Pakistan. He devoted many, many years to hatching plans or plots to kill as many Americans as he possibly could. Well before 9-11, there's something you and I have discussed in the past called the Bojinka plot. So the Bojinka plot was an idea that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed came up with in the Philippines. to hijack, it was something like 7-10-747s, and to fly them all into buildings up and down the West Coast of the United States.

He actually had a chance of that plot working. And he had all these papers laid out, maps, drawings, notes. And he left his apartment. And housekeeping went in to the apartment, to clean the apartment. And the housekeeper is looking at this like, what the heck is all this stuff? I better call the police. She calls the police. They said, this looks like the plans for a terrorist attack.

And so they set out to look for him. They didn't know his name. They only knew him by the name Muhtar, which I think you and I have talked about in the past. But he escaped. He escaped from Manila. so we knew that there was this very bad dude out there known as muhtar who was plotting this massive terrorist attack that would take place on the west coast so we knew that muhtar was involved in the planning for nine eleven as it turned out nine eleven was completely his idea but we didn't know who he was we

didn't know what his real name was and that was one of the two most important things that abuzebara gave us in his in his FBI uh interviews oh wow yeah he actually laughed at the FBI agent ali sufan uh when ali said we didn't know who muhtar was he's like how can you not know who muqtar was he's the most dangerous man in the world and he said we don't know oh it's Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was he was he the guy who was in the apartment that apparently there was some Saudi intelligence that were tracking him or knew about him that they didn't tell us about. Yes, that was one of the side stories to this. There's a book by, to the best of my recollection, it was a, it was a couple of journalists from the Los Angeles Times. And they said that the CIA

had a human source that led them to, to Khaled Sheikh Mahab. I was already working on Iraq at the time, so I wasn't involved in this thing. But it was a human source. It was not an intercept and it was not a foreign service that led us to Khaled Sheikh Mahmab. And the human source was Saudi?

I don't have any idea. The Saudis, listen, you can't trust the Saudis as far as you could pick one of them up and throw them. And this is a beef that I've had with with the Saudi government and the Saudi royal family really all of my adult life we profess to have this special relationship with the Saudis and they profess a special relationship with us it's just not true we don't like each other we don't trust each other but we buy their oil and they buy our weapons it's as simple as that it's transactional

when we captured a Bsabeda we also captured his his diary or what's known as his diary right right it's not really a dime but you and I have talked about that as well. Well, in this diary, he also had the names and cell phone numbers of two members of the Saudi royal family. And then when we approached the Saudis and we asked them, what's this all about? Next thing you know, one of them goes into the desert to go camping and he dies of thirst. Can you imagine? He dies of thirst.

The other one was killed in a spectacular one car accident in the desert. Oh my God. Yeah. Uh-huh. It's like, it's so crazy. It's like the, at the level of these nations, right? Like you have all these different levels of society. And at the very, very top, you have the nation states.

And above that, there's nothing. It's like lawless. It's the wild, wild west. When you're looking at America, Saudi Arabia, Iran, it's Russia, China. It's like, it's anarchy. Yeah. it is it's anarchy that's why I lament the death of of modern diplomacy you know because I think that as a matter of national policy we should always just let the diplomats do their job not send

carrier battle groups you know here and there and everywhere and with threats of you know you know why I oughta that kind of thing do you better not cross this line or you're going to get it right Right, right, right. We should let the diplomats do their jobs. And this whole thing about, you know, getting back to Ukraine for a moment. Yes, yes, I wanted to go into that. This whole thing about, oh, that evil Putin, he's crazy. He just invaded out of the clear blue sky.

Like, are you joking? Like, does nobody know the history of U.S. involvement in Ukraine? Right. The Maidan uprising. Orange Revolution. The Orange Revolution and Hillary Clinton involved in changing governments. Does nobody pay attention to these things? So this is...

Have you ever met Putin? No, but I'll tell you a funny story about that. I was invited to a dinner in Moscow to celebrate the 15th anniversary of the founding of RT, Russia Today, the big television network. And they sent me, it was actually an engraved, it's the first time in my life I ever received an engraved invitation. Right? Like it's the 50s. And all expenses paid. They're going to fly me to Moscow and they're going to put me in this hotel and I'm going to be at this VIP table of Americans.

And so I had just gotten out of prison. So I went to the judge and I said, hey, I'm invited to this really important dinner in Moscow. And she says, absolutely not. so I wasn't allowed to go well my first question once I get out of prison for a whistle blowing against the CIA to go to Moscow so this was the dinner

where general Flynn went Mike Flynn and Jesse Ventura and Jill Stein and Mike Maloof and all these like important outsiders

all sitting at the same table and then Putin walks in and sits down and shakes hands and they all get a big picture together and then Putin leaves. So at first I was like, damn it. It's like the only chance in my life I would ever have to meet Vladimir Putin. And then afterwards, you know, they arrest Mike Flynn. They open a grand jury on some of these other guys.

They called Jill Stein a traitor. I'm so glad I didn't go to that dinner. Oh my God. I have enough problems in my life. Do you think Putin wants to ever wanted to or currently wants to conquer Ukraine and Eastern Europe? Oh, no. I've never thought that. You know, looking back to, going back to the Clinton administration, when Putin first became president at the very tail end of Bill Clinton's presidency, he floated the idea of.

Russia joining NATO and Clinton said yeah I don't think we really like that I Russia yeah Russia joining NATO because the Soviet Union's gone we're all friends now right peace the peace dividend we're always talking about how are we gonna spend the peace dividend we don't need to spend money on defense anymore right hardy har har so Clint's like yeah we don't really like that idea very much and he said okay if you won't Russia and NATO at least don't allow any of the countries on our border to join NATO. And Clinton said, that we can agree to. Next thing you know, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Poland, all join NATO.

Directly on the Russian border. And he's like, hey, you promised us that you wouldn't let any of these countries join NATO. Sorry, we changed our minds. Right. You know, strategic planning and all. then when Obama becomes president at a summit with Putin Putin said I spoke with Clinton years ago

about Russia joining NATO it's something that we would like to explore who said this again Putin Putin to Obama and Obama said no we don't we don't like that idea we don't think that's going to happen and he said okay well you guys lied to me about these other countries joining NATO so don't allow Ukraine to join NATO this is going to be a serious problem otherwise and he's like okay okay we won't and then Joe Biden becomes president and he's like oh you know Ukraine would be a great addition to NATO

and the European Union and the Russians said we've had enough there was a pro-russian government in Ukraine that was overthrown at the urge of the United States in 2014, as if that wasn't bad enough, as soon as that happens, then they want to talk about Ukraine joining NATO. So the Russians said, we've had enough. That's the background to Ukraine. I don't think that the Russians have any, I don't think that they're expansionist as a matter of policy. They have a history of expansionism, certainly. Just like we do.

The Chinese do not. But we do and the Russians do. But we don't expand that way, right? We expand in a weird way of just gaining influence over the country. We don't make them party. Like, America is not a traditional empire. Like you look at the British Empire, right? Correct.

We just have these other countries that depend on us. And we basically control that we have all the influence in those countries. Yeah, but then the Libyans would say that's wrong. And the Afghans would say that's wrong. and you know the Chinese would say that's wrong because of what we're doing with the Taiwan now it's wrong and what's it's wrong that we do it or it's not true well it's not true oh look at look at Libya just as the easiest example um Steve Capas who was the deputy director of the CIA made a made a secret at the time not secret anymore trip to Libya in the immediate

aftermath of the start of the Iraq war and he said look said I'm Hussein has weapons of mass destruction, he's going to die. We know that you have weapons of mass destruction. So you can either give them all to us and we all live happily ever after or you can die. I'm paraphrasing, of course. And so for only the second time in the history of the planet with South Africa being the first, Libya voluntarily gave up its weapons of mass destruction program. And then we overthrew him anyway. You know, Hillary Clinton famously said,

said, we came, we saw, he died. What's that? Is our word worth nothing? Right. What sort of weapons did they have? They had a nuclear program? They did not have a nuclear program, but they had quite a robust chemical weapons program. Okay.

And a biological weapons program. But the thing with biological weapons is you can have a BW program just, you know, in your kitchen. You don't need gigantic laboratories or factories for, BW like you do for CW and then you need reactors and such for for nuclear. So what is Russia's concern with NATO? Why should Russia be concerned about NATO? The Russians really believe that we intend to someday invade them and overthrow their government. They really believe it. That's crazy to you and me. It doesn't seem crazy. But they really

believe it. And, you know, if you look at it, one of my best friends is also my attorney. He's a former deputy attorney general of the United States. And we talk every single day about these kinds of issues. And he told me the other day, very frankly, why the fuck is Montenegro in NATO? Like, are we going to actually, first of all, who's going to. who's going to invade Montenegro? And even if somebody does invade Montenegro, we're really going to commit our young men and women to defend to the death,

the government of Montenegro? Come on. He said, if you look at the NATO charter, the NATO charter was to protect member countries against the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union doesn't exist anymore. So why is there a NATO? And in the charter, it says it was too,

defend the member countries. So why did we have NATO troops in Afghanistan? Afghanistan's not in Europe and it's not a member country. Why do we have NATO troops in Syria or in Iraq or in Libya or in the Sahel? And that wasn't even revealed to the American people. That was revealed by accident. Why do we have NATO troops in these countries? They're not being threatened by the Soviet Union. So the Russians see this and they're like, dang, these NATO people, they're willing to do anything. This is frightening. Why won't any U.S. presidency or anybody in the U.S. consider Russia becoming a part of NATO? I don't know.

I never understood that. I never understood that because if Russia is asking for it, if Putin is asking for it, saying I want to be friends. Yeah. What is the real reason why we don't want to be friends? You know, I think in part, and forgive me if this is, if this sounds overly cynical, but I think in part that this policy is really determined by the defense contractors. Right. We have a permanent, we live in a permanent wartime economy post 9-11. Our defense budget is bigger than the next eight largest countries combined. right we can't make we we can't make payments on our national debt interest payments on the national

debt and and we're going to bankrupt social security because everything goes to defense but if we cut the defense budget it pushed the whole economy into recession right right right so you have to have an enemy to justify a budget like that what's this according to NATO Russia cannot be considered a partner due to its hostile actions and policies. Oh, there it is. It's because of its hostile actions and policies. NATO considers Russia to be a direct threat to the security of its allies, as well as to the stability of peace in the Euro-Atlantic area. NATO cities, NATO cites Russia's war in Ukraine as a reason for this. Yeah, I heard that in the beginning, maybe six months after the Ukraine war started, Ukraine had a really strategic victory.

victory over Russia. And a couple of generals were like urging or were saying publicly that like, this is the time to go to the negotiating table and exactly right. And negotiate peace with Russia because we just had a little bit of a win. Yes. Now's the time to from a position of strength. Now's the time to do it. And the White House said fuck no. The reason why we have not had any peace talks is because of the White House. The Russians say, okay, we're ready for peace talks. The Ukrainians say, well, we prefer not to, but in the interest of saving lives, we're willing to go to the table. And the Americans say, absolutely not. You remember this joke that started when the war began, that the White House was willing to fight to the last Ukrainian.

And it's true. We don't care if it keeps the Russians wrapped up. But the thing is, is there's a tipping point. And we've already seen that tipping point now. You know, we put sanctions on Russia that would bring most countries to their knees. And actually, the opposite happened with Russia. They so strengthened their relationship with the Chinese, with the Indians, with the Pakistanis, the Iranians, even in Latin America with those countries that they don't need the United States. and they don't need our banking system.

Right. You know, the price of Russian oil has gone up since the invasion, not down. You know, in the Indians, we were complaining to the Indians just a week ago. You have to stop buying Russian oil. Why? You're going to give us the oil at that price? Yeah, I didn't think so. So we forced them into the arms of the Chinese.

And there was a recent story, too, about the pipeline. Originally, there was a story that came out. Was it Noam Chomsky? No. No, it was Cy Hirsch. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Cy Hersch came up with the story that the CIA bombed the pipeline, the Nord Stream. But then recently some Ukrainian military special forces said that they did it.

They went out on sailboats and did it. Yeah, because of their... Without Zelensky's knowledge. Right. He didn't know anything about it. And they relied on their deep expertise in underwater demolitions, right? You know, when the pipeline was first blown up, I happened to be having dinner with a former boss of mine from the agency. And he's been retired for decades.

And he's ill now. So I like to hang out with him. And I said to him, who do you think blew this thing up? It had to be us, right? And he said, what? No. It was Putin. And I said, Putin, why would Putin blow up his own gas pipeline?

Right. So that he could blame us. And I said, come on, man. You don't really believe that, do you? And he said, well, truthfully, I don't really know what to believe anymore. Going back to, so you're talking about, we're talking about NATO and some of these countries that are in NATO. And they are a part of NATO because we have their back and we would apparently defend them. how does this translate to China and Taiwan?

And so a lot of people, including this guy, my friend Andy Bustamante, who was recently on here, he's predicted that China's going to invade Taiwan right in the lead up to the 2024 presidential elections. Not a chance. Not a chance. No way. So two parts to that question. Why is there not a chance?

and number two, why is Taiwan important to us? Why would America not want China to take Taiwan? For a couple of reasons. That's the easiest question to answer. I'll answer that one first. So Taiwan's important to us primarily because it keeps pressure on mainland China. But two, because the Taiwanese economy is so strong, it's been developed so well over the years like South Korea that as things stand right now, that's where we get all of our microchips.

The Taiwan semiconductor is the big, the big boy on the block. We're beginning now to transfer manufacturing to the United States, but we're starting from scratch. So most of our tech comes from Taiwan. You know, looking back historically, though, and I think this is really important, China does not have a history of expansionism with just a couple of exceptions. First of all, Tibet. That's a big one. They invaded and annexed Tibet.

But the Chinese truly believe that Tibet has always been a part of China, right? So they didn't invade and annexed. They just secured what was already theirs. In the late 1970s, they had a brief border skirmish with Vietnam, brief. And every once in a while, they'll fire shots across the border. border with India. That's it. They don't invade other countries.

It's just not a part of their foreign policy. And that's why they always use their veto in the UN Security Council, not always, but almost always, when the U.S. goes to the UN to ask for a use of force resolution. Because they just don't believe anybody should be invading other countries. Now, they're very upset with us over Taiwan. And I think for good reason. So the Chinese have what's called a one China policy saying that Taiwan is a part of China. It's always been a part of China, but it's separated right now from China since the Civil War,

1946 to 1949. And that one day they will be joined again and that day will come after successful negotiations. Okay, that's the position of both China and Taiwan. The United States, when it recognized mainland China as the representative of the Chinese people during the Carter administration, agreed to adopt the one China policy. So we don't have an embassy in Taipei. We have an interest section. It's massive and it's bigger than most of our embassies around the world. But it's called an interest section because there's only one China.

And the capital of China is Beijing. So our embassies in Beijing, not in Taipei. right okay okay okay now with that said the policies written in stone we recognize Beijing as the representative of the Chinese people we support the idea that the two will be joined through negotiations right so why do we send carrier battle groups there That's just a provocative action. Who are we going to fight? And for what reason?

You're saying we're sending carrier carrier battle groups? We have two aircraft carrier battle groups in the South China Sea right now to pressure the Chinese. Chinese don't need our pressure. We're the ones saying, oh my God, we should be careful. The Chinese are going to invade, they're going to invade Taiwan. If we're not careful, oh my gosh, we have to increase defense spending. Right? Otherwise, they're going to invade Taiwan. They never said they're going to invade Taiwan.

We're the ones that keep saying it. And then the Chinese say, hey, listen, remember, part of the agreement that we came to in 1979 was no official U.S. government visits to Taiwan, right? We're the representative of the Chinese people. So if an American government official wants to visit China, it goes to mainland China. So then why did Nancy Pelosi go? in the last two weeks of her speakership, she went to Taiwan. And then Kevin McCarthy went to Taiwan.

And then the governor of Indiana went to Taiwan. Why? Just to piss off the Chinese. So we can say, see, you can't tell us what to do. We can do whatever we want. And we like these Taiwan people. They make all of our microchips.

And you better not invade them. Maybe we should send nuclear carrier battle groups into the South China Sea just in case keep the honest people honest. It's a provocation. There's nooks on those battleships? Sometimes. We have nukes on the subs that sometimes accompany those battle groups.

Okay. Yeah. Okay. So, and why don't you think that China will invade Taiwan leading up to 2024 election? They get nothing out of it. Nothing out of it but bloodshed. They don't need to invade Taiwan. They have their own dialogue with Taiwan right now. They have robust trade going back and forth.

Robust. They are each other's biggest trading partners. Why put a torch to all that? It doesn't make any sense. Why go to war with your own people? Don't forget, just a few years ago, they negotiated these deals where people can go back and forth to see family members and they can stay for six months at a time.

Between China and Taiwan? Uh-huh. To reunite families. So why go to war with your own family and then just start killing everybody, crash both your economies, risk a nuclear attack from the Americans? For what? What do you get out of it? That doesn't make any sense. What do you think a conflict would look like between China and the United States if we went to war? Oh, wow. I think it would be highly technological. And when I say that, I mean, I think we would be bombarded by cyber attacks, the likes of which we've never seen.

And we would, of course, be doing the same thing. I mean, you wouldn't be able to get online. You wouldn't be able to do your banking. It would be brutal. But the real danger, of course, is a nuclear exchange. That's always going to be the big danger. Yeah. See, and this is another thing.

That's scary. The Chinese arsenal is not like the Russian arsenal where it's all rickety broken down, you know, 40-year-old technology. This is state-of-the-art stuff. We know that, right? Oh, yeah. We have people. Oh, yeah, because the Chinese have way more money than we do. Way more money.

The amount of knowledge they have of like what it's going to look like and still like the saber rattling that goes on when they know all. all these countries still have this kind of power. That's what I mean when I said, we should be letting the diplomats do their job, right? There's no reason to be engaged in this kind of brinkmanship all the time. And it's with both the Russians and the Chinese. Jane Hennon, the Secretary of Treasury, said the other day, in congressional testimony,

that, of course we can fight a two-front war. It's like, what planet do you live on? that you think we can fight a two front war. We couldn't fight Iraq and Afghanistan at the same time. And you think we can fight China and Russia at the same time? You know, just let the professionals do their thing. Okay, let's talk about Israel and Palestine conflict. Yeah, this is heartbreaking.

What is your opinion on what's going on over there? I know there's a lot of stuff. I've been watching some of Pierce Morgan's videos on it. I mean, I think he's doing a phenomenal job of having like balanced interviews with both people on both sides. Yeah, I've seen a lot of screaming going on. A lot of screaming, yeah. But, but it's, it's fascinating. And Israel is something I don't know a lot about the history of Israel.

I do know a lot about, I know their intelligence agency, you know, Mossad and Shimbet are like some of the most sophisticated in the world. In the world. Yeah. When it comes to intelligence and all that. How do you think this thing, how do you think this thing happened on October 7th? Is it? Yeah, October 7th. There are a couple different answers to that question.

In the immediate term, it turns out that it was an intelligence failure. You know, the Israeli settlers that live in the villages up and down the border with Gaza have been deputized by the government to report back to Shimbet on anything unusual that they see. We know now that for the last year, and we just learned this in the last couple of days, for the last year, they had been reporting back to Shinbet that something's up. They're hearing gunfire that indicated practice. They were watching people climb over the wall, also practicing. They were picking up a lot of chatter, indicating that there was some kind of planning for an attack. There was a lot of stuff.

And they were dutifully reporting this back to Shinbet. And Shinbet's response to them was, cut it out, the fight's going to be in the West Bank. It's not going to be in Gaza. And so they just wouldn't do anything about it. And then several months ago, they just decided to stop accepting the information. because they had convinced themselves, thanks to Idemar Ben-Givir, the new extreme right-wing minister of national security,

that the fight was going to be in the West Bank, not in Gaza. So they were asleep at the switch. That's the answer for what we've seen in the immediate term. Otherwise, this goes back generations. Right. And, you know, I'm somebody, who has always supported Israel's right to exist.

After the Second World War, I think the Jews needed a homeland. I think they deserved a homeland. At the same time, I'm a strong supporter of Palestinian human rights. I don't care when Israelis tell me the two-state solution's dead. Well, it shouldn't be dead. It's the only answer to this thing, right? There should be an independent Palestine with East Jerusalem as its capital. and you guys can live happily ever after.

The problem is one of many problems, but in my view, one of the most significant problems, is that the Israelis, especially under Benjamin Netanyahu, he's been prime minister seven times now, the Israelis have stolen more and more land every single day. They're driving more Palestinians off of their farms and out of their homes. They're setting their olive trees on fire and they're confiscating.

the headlands of the handful of rivers and creeks that run through the country so that they can control the flow of water. Well, that's a crime against humanity. You can't do that. Where a family has owned this farm and worked this farm for 100 years and a Jewish family from Brooklyn gets to move in. And then you're homeless. And they tell you, oh, emigrate to Jordan. Amigrate to Egypt. You're not welcome here anymore.

You know, in 2008, my mom called me one day. And she said, hey, I think I'm going to go to Ireland. I've never been to Ireland. And NPR has this trip. And I said, Ireland. I said, Mom, it's wintertime. What do you want to go to Ireland in the winter for? And she said, oh, I don't know.

I feel like I want to do something. I said, well, this priest at my church is getting a group of people together to go to Israel. And I said, you've never been to Israel. You've always said you wanted to go. She said, that's a great idea. That's what I'll do. So she went with a whole bunch of people who were friends of mine and are priest. And they went to Israel.

And the priest always works with this travel agency there. It's run by Palestinian Christians. Most people don't realize that in the West Bank, 7% of Palestinians are Christians. And in Gaza, still 2% of Gazans are Christians. They're Greek Orthodox. Almost all of them. Wow. There are a handful of Catholics still in, well, Bethlehem and Nazareth are both Christian towns.

And there are Christians in Haifa. Anyway, so she goes to Israel, has the time of her life. But she came back and she said there was one thing that traumatized me. She said, you're in Tel Aviv and you're looking around like this place is fantastic. Right? First world, palm trees, looks like Miami Beach, seriously. And then you go to a Palestinian. town and it looks like hell on earth. And there are these enormous walls, barbed wire at the

tops, mines along the bottoms of them to keep the Palestinians out of Israel. But the problem is that they keep settling more and more and more villages where they just steal the land from the Palestinians who have been working it for hundreds of years and then they add that to what is Israel proper. They've been doing that a lot in the West Bank. And she said, the worst part of it was they were going from Jerusalem to Nazareth. And you have to cross through a number of checkpoints, IDF checkpoints, Israel Defense Force. And she said, the driver had one of these drugstore pulp fiction novels with him. So when everybody would be, looking at the museum or looking at a church.

He would just be in the little bus reading his Pulp Fiction novel. So they stopped the bus at this checkpoint before they could get into town. And IDF came on the bus and wanted to see everybody's passport. They're all Americans. And then he grabs, he snatches the book out of the driver's hands. What is this? Pello propaganda? And the driver says, it's just a book.

and so my mom said the soldier opened the book and says no picture of Arafat on this page and tore the page out and threw it at him no picture of Arafat on this page and tore pages out and threw them at him again she said he tore all the pages of the book out

and threw them at the driver's face just because he could not for any other reason another thing too I've noticed this especially in the past several weeks as the Israelis and Hamas have engaged in hostage negotiations. Why is it that we call Jews being held by Hamas hostages, but Palestinians being held by Israel, detainees? Did you notice that?

Because these Palestinians have never been charged with a crime. The military just bust down the door of their house, grabs everybody, and throws them in a cage. How is that not being held hostage? What makes those people detainees? They're also civilians. In many cases, they're children. You know, 70 of the Palestinian hostages that have been released have been children. But we're laser-focused on the Israelis being held by Hamas.

Now, that's not to say Hamas isn't a bloodthirsty terrorist organization. I think that it is. As is Pidge, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. How long has Hamas been basically the ruling organization in Gaza? Right. Since 2005. They were formed around 1990 or 91, but they've actually run it since 2005, which is when the Israelis withdrew as the governing authority. Okay.

You know, funny thing, too, that strip of land until 1973 was administered by Egypt. You know, the West Bank was administered by Jordan, as was East Jerusalem. But Gaza was administered by Egypt. And then in the wake of the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt, brokered by Jimmy Carter, the Egyptian said, we don't want it back. You guys can have it.

It's nothing but true. We don't want it. And the Israelis were like, well, we don't want it. Well, we don't want it either. So the Israelis like, okay, we'll just let it sit there for a while. And then it got to be so much of a problem for them because it's very densely populated. It's one of the most densely populated places on earth. And it's restive. Then the Israelis had to go in as part of, I think it was the first Intifada. And then by 2005, they decided, we got to get out of here. There's too many Palestinians here. What is like the balance geopolitically of Israel, Iran, Saudi Arabia when it comes to this? Well, Hamas, that's a great question. And Hamas made a statement the other day just in the past week or so that what finally convinced them to launch this thing was the closeness of a diplomatic agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia.

Right. they had seen history just slipping through their hands, right? In these Abraham Accords that Donald Trump negotiated, while a great victory for Israel and for the Gulf Arabs, it was a punch in the throat to the Palestinians. Remember Trump in the campaign said, I'll fix the Israeli-Palestinian problem in one day. Yeah, you do that by fucking the Palestinians.

I mean, you didn't fix it. You just literally gave the Israelis everything that they wanted. That's not fixing it. It only made it worse. So there was this little heyday that lasted from, you know, 2019 to October the 7th where Israel opens relations with Morocco and Sudan and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. And I think I'm leaving somebody out. And they're this close to relations with Saudi Arabia,

which is going to be the crown jewel, really, of Israel. Israeli foreign policy and Hamas just decided. Iran does not want Saudi Arabia and Israel to have a relationship. Absolutely not. And the Iranians, because Iran's greatest enemy is Israel. Now, see, this is, this is part of the thing that makes this also complicated. Right. Iran and Saudi Arabia hate each other, like to the death.

They hate each other. going back to 1979 the Iranian revolution was in February of 79 in March I think it was March or April of 79 that's when the Hajj took place

in Mecca and Medina right the Iranians infiltrated the Hajj and they took over the holy Kaaba the big black granite cube that's that holds the rock that God gave Muhammad

so more than a thousand people were killed in the ensuing the takeover and then the reaction from the Saudi military and the Saudis broke relations with Iran and it was decades before they put it back together again so the Saudis even during the Iran-Iraq war the Saudis supported Iran because they were so afraid of I'm sorry the Saudis supported Iraq because they were so afraid of Right. And Saudi Arabia has a very large Shia Muslim population in its eastern province. Saudi Arabia is a Sunni Muslim country. Iran is a Shia Muslim country. But this little sliver of Saudi Arabia is Shia. And that just happens to be where all the oil is. Right. So they are perfectly happy to execute as many Shia Muslim Saudis as they need to to make sure that. everything remains calm.

And they do it a lot. They kill a lot of people there in the eastern province. So they've got this bad relationship with the Iranians, goes back decades. And then the Chinese come in beginning of this year. And they say, listen, we don't have a dog in this fight. But we like you and we like you. And we think you guys should get together. And it would be good for peace.

And we can fuck the Americans this way. And so, what do you say, we broker peace between you and the Saudis. send an ambassador to Tehran and the Iranians send an ambassador to Riyadh. And before we even realize what's going on, they announced the resumption of diplomatic relations. And we're like, oh my God, that's our sphere of influence. And the Chinese just screwed us out of it. So then we're like, okay, well, now what we're going to do is we're going to get the Saudis to recognize Israel.

and that'll screw the Iranians and it'll screw the Chinese because the Chinese won't have played a role in it. And so we start leaking these stories to the press. Oh, we're close. The Saudis and the Israelis, it's going to happen. It's coming together. Just another couple of weeks. There's going to be a big visit. The crown prince of Saudi Arabia is going to go to Jerusalem.

And Hamas says, oh, no, he doesn't. and they launch the attack. But doesn't the, I'm sorry, Iran is Shia. Shia. Isn't, aren't the main population of Hamas? Ah, that's a very important point. I'm glad you raised that. They're Sunnis.

Hamas is Sunni, 100% Sunni. Right. Right. So why would they even speak to the Iranians? Yes. Because that's how much they hate the Israelis. So it's. You know, they say in Arabic, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Right. They mean it. Right. They mean that. And so the Iranians have long help to finance Hamas just because they hate the Israelis so much that at least that is going to keep the Israelis bogged down and will serve to weaken them and bleed them a little bit. That's why the. Iranians support Syria.

You know, Bashar al-Assad is not, I mean, he's part of a sect that's neither Sunni nor Shia. But he gets great help from the Iranians. And the Qararis, the Qadiris are Sunni. They're not just Sunni, but they're Wahhabi Sunni, just like the Saudis are. And they have very close relations with Iran because the Qadiris hate the Israelis too. What about what is Jordan's role in all this? Poor Jordan.

I had a quick aside, I had a guy in here a couple weeks ago who was part of an Army Ranger camp who was in Jordan. He was telling me this crazy story about they were training Jordanians to kill. And he was saying that there's only two people Jordanians kill. I forget the first one, but the second one was Israelis. He was saying that Jordanians hated Israelis. Wow. And he was like, he's like, it wasn't our written objective. He's like, but we knew we were just training them to kill their Israelis.

I was like, that sounds crazy. It's not quite that clear cut. And he was also telling me stories about how the Mossad, when they're training the Mossad, they literally send them on missions to break into Jordan and do little operations and steal things or do things and go back and navigate back into Israel as part of their training. training exercises. The Israelis actually had to apologize to the Jordanian government because as part of their training exercises, they would move the border fence. So there's a fence dividing Israel and Jordan.

And they would move it only a couple inches at a time so that nobody would notice. Well, then over time, it's moved like 300 feet into Jordan. And they had to apologize and say, listen we stole 300 feet of yours yeah territory we'll give it back to you we're going to move the fence back um jordan is very complicated yeah fully i don't mean i don't mean to muddy the water no that's okay this is all this is all uh apropos of of the original issue um Jordan is fully 50 percent Palestinian right these are all refugees from the nakba from 1940 uh was it 47 48

they've never been treated as full Jordanian citizens. Even their passports are a different color. So if you're an ethnic Palestinian, you're not really Jordanian. You have most of the rights that a Jordanian has, but you can't vote, right? Wow. Yeah.

And you don't have the same economic opportunities that Jordanians have. There's a huge difference, too, between Jordanians and the Jordanian royal family. The Jordanian royal family, they're essentially all Americans, right? The king owns a condo in Georgetown at the four seasons. You were saying you saw him at the mall or something?

I saw him walking around the mall, Tyson's Corner. You're like, oh my God, that's King Abdullah. They can't be any more pro-American. Like, I mean that quite literally. There's nothing more that they can do that's going to make them any more pro-American. But that's not the average Jordanian. they don't like us and they don't trust us because we've screwed them so many times in the past

at the same time deep down they're afraid of the Palestinians in 1968 um there was a Palestinian group called black September and black September decided well if we can't have Palestine with Jerusalem as its capital we're going to take Jordan with Amman as its capital and they were literally fighting on the steps of the royal palace when the Jordanian military finally pushed them back. Thousands of people were killed in that fight. And King Hussein, the current king's father, said at the time that the Palestinians have to be cowed.

And so you don't allow them to integrate into society because if you do, they're going to try to overthrow the royal family and take the country again because they can't have their own country. So there's this resentment that's bubbling just beneath the surface. Right. You know, on paper, it looks like, oh, well, you know, Jordan and Israel, they've been at peace for 30 years and they travel back and forth and everybody's, you know, kumbaya. That's just not true. They don't like each other.

Right. They realize it's a dangerous neighborhood. They have to live with each other. But I think your friend's observations are mostly correct. Yeah. I don't think that, well, let me rephrase that. Every once in a while, and by that I mean, every decade or decade and a half, a Jordanian soldier will go nuts and just open fire on the Israelis. And they'll usually kill, you know, a couple.

And then the Jordanians apologize and they offer money to the family of the dead Israelis and the Israelis accept the apology and then they pretend everything's fine. but it's because things are bubbling up just beneath the surface. It's such a crazy part of the world. It is. It's fascinating. From when I was 15 years old, all I wanted to do was live in the Middle East and work on the Middle East. And you live there for a total of how long? I was there for five years.

And how long were you in Greece? Two years. Two years. So, okay, going back to the balance of power. over there and it seems like a big sort of proxy war between America and China, really. I mean, if you look at it. Yeah, it is. Yeah.

Yes. When it comes to Iran and Hamas and Saudi Arabia and Israel, where does Russia fit into this? Yeah. Because Russia and Iran are close, right? Yeah, Russia and Iran are close. I'm going to go back to 1995 when I was living in Bahrain. I was the senior economic officer in the American embassy. And this was the heyday of the Arab-Israeli peace process.

And so the United Nations announced peace talks between Israel and the Arab countries on the environment. And they were going to be held in Bahrain. So I was a delegate to the Arab-Israeli peace talks on the environment. What my instructions were the day we received the invitation from the State Department to deliver to the, the way it is, we're a superpower and Russia was a superpower. So we got this invitation and I was supposed to go with the Russian economic officer to the Minister of Foreign Affairs and say, your excellency, on behalf of the governments of the United States and the Russian Republic, we hereby invite you to host. the next round of the Arab-Israeli peace talks. These talks will be on the environment, right? It's this stupid diplomatic formality.

So I get the invitation. I called my Russian counterpart, Andre. Good guy. His wife was an Olympic figure skater. I still remember. Nice guy. A little lazy, but fun. And I said, Andre, I got my instructions today.

And he said, yeah, I got my instructions. I said, okay, I'll call over to the foreign minister's office and make the appointment for us. So I did. And they gave me an appointment for the next day. And so just as I was going to leave to go pick him up and then go to the foreign ministry, I get instructions from state, don't pick up the Russian. Just do it yourself.

And I'm like, why? This is a joint U.S. Russian peace initiative. So I went to the ambassador and I said, ambassador, I got this odd instruction from state. He said, yeah, I saw that. I said, what do I do? He said, well, you got to ignore the Russian. I said, that's going to make for an awkward lunch. So I drove over to the foreign minister's office.

I went to see him and I said, Your Excellency on behalf of the United States government. I would like to formally invite you, blah, blah, blah. My phone is blown up at the time. Well, my phone, it was like this big. So, you know, the size of a shoebox. And And Andre is like, where are you? And I said, Andre, I am so sorry. And I explained what happened.

He's like, come on, man. Like, what the fuck? I said, I'm sorry. It's some kind of power play in Washington. I don't even know what to say to you. I'm sorry. And after that, he was, you know, very cold to me. And he knew it wasn't me.

But the whole point of this is, historically, really, since the end of the Second World War, the Middle East is ours. It's not the Russians or the Chinese. It's ours. And so that's why we are so apoplectic about the Russians having troops in Syria. Because Syria is part of the Middle East and the Middle East is ours. And now all of a sudden the Chinese are involved negotiating peace between the Iranians and the Saudis.

Like where'd that come from? We're already worried about the Russians in Syria. And now we've got to worry about the Chinese in Saudi Arabia. Right. Another thing. Another thing. But last time I was in Djibouti, Djibouti is a little tiny country in Africa. Right. the only reason I went to Djibouti was because we have a military base there and I knew it was for it's like the worst kept secret in the world that's our drone base for Yemen right it's only 16 miles across the water from Djibouti to Yemen and Yemen was at the time that I was last there was one of the the headquarters of al-Qaeda so this was a base built by the French back in the 60s camp le Momeniere

it's called. So, like you see guys in the French Foreign Legion, they wear these stupid like short shorts and these funny hats. And they're walking around. They're always in Paris, walking around town in their little shorts. And so I went to the base and all I see is Chinese.

And I said to the military guy that I was working with, I thought this was a French base. And we had part of it. He said, oh, no, no. He said, the French sold it. a couple of years ago. I said they sold it. Not to the Chinese. He goes, yeah, it's the only foreign military base that the Chinese have.

And they share it with the U.S. military. How crazy is that? So, you know, what else was funny at the time? And I made a joke about it with the guy. There's literally a chain link fence that goes down the middle of the base. So on the left side is Chinese, and on the right side, it's American. So on the, and it's just a row, as far as the I can see, a row of hangers with this fence going down the center of it. And on the left, all the hangers are open.

The Chinese side? Uh-huh. They're all open. And on the right, the American side, all the hangers are closed. And I said, why are the hangers closed? What do we have in there? And he goes, come on, dude. I go, oh, I know what we have in there.

I'm just pulling your leg. Drones? All drones. Oh, my God. Whether it's a movie night or just midday, Skinny Pop is a salty snack that keeps on giving. Made with just three simple ingredients for an irresistibly delicious taste

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So what do you think the communication is between Russia and Iran trying to, with Israel being in the middle of all this? Are they, what do you think they want to see happen with this conflict? If you recall on October 7th and October 8th, virtually the first thing that came out of the Israeli government as soon as hostilities began was you need to help us bomb Iran. The Iranians did this. The Iranians are behind it. They gave Hamas the weapons. They gave Hamas the money. And the Iranians came out and said, look, we had nothing to do with this.

And then the White House leaked some intelligence saying the intelligence community is unable to confirm allegations that the Iranians were behind the Hamas attack. Which is true. The Iranians didn't do this. The Iranians probably hoped it was going to happen and are glad that it did happen. But we put our foot down. Yeah. Wow. Because ever since George W. Bush was president, Benjamin Netanyahu has begged us to attack Iran.

He's begged us literally. I mean, I was, I won't go into the details, but he's begged us multiple times. And we're not willing to go to war with Iran just, you know, as a favor to the Israelis. That's shocking. He thought that he could pull us into it on the. 8th of October and we said, our intelligence is not coming to the same conclusion that yours is. Well, there was no intelligence that the Iranians were involved. So the Iranians know that the Russians are preoccupied right now, which is, I think, what the Israeli calculation was.

The Israeli calculation was probably, look, the Russians are bogged down in Ukraine. If we can convince the Americans to hit the Iranians, even if it's just by launching cruise, missiles that's going to help us a lot. But then the Chinese are like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute. We have good relations with the Chinese and we don't have any intelligence, I mean, the Chinese with the, with the Iranians. And we don't have any intelligence to show that the Iranians were involved. China doesn't have any intelligence.

Right. And so we backed off. The Russians probably, you know, we're like, whew, that was a close one. And the Chinese are like, look at us and how power. We are in the Middle East all of a sudden. And I'll tell you one of the other thing that the Chinese have really done right Here we are spending all this money on military systems and hardware, right? And what are the Chinese spending their money on? Ports

Highways hospitals airports Loans to poor countries the Belt and Road Mm-hmm. It's brilliant and is it true that all of these airports and train stations and embassies that they're building and cargo ports all over the world, that these things can be converted into Air Force bases in the matter, no, no, no. I'll give you as an example. When the Greek economy collapsed in 2008, you know, it took actually yesterday, Standard & Poor's upgraded Greek bonds to investment grade for the first time since 2008.

So it's taken this long from 2008 to 2023. And in that time, the Greeks really, really, really needed the money. And so they sold the port of Piraeus to the Chinese. The port of Piraeus is the biggest cargo port in the world. And they sold the port of Thessaloniki and the port of Irakleone Crete, right, which is the biggest port in the Aegean. They sold all three ports to the Chinese. It killed them to have to do it. but for the first time all three ports are profitable.

Wow. See, for the Chinese, it's all about good relations. It's all about good relations and they buy good relations. You need money? No problem. What do you need? You need a new hospital? We can do that for you.

You need to upgrade your airport. Oh my God, your airport looks like it belongs in Africa. We'll give you a new airport. You know? Oh, you need a hospital. highway to go from Athens to Fessaloniki because the mountains are so high you know you don't have the money to

to blow the tunnels we'll do it for you no problem and they do now can you explain to me I have a loose understanding of it but can you explain what the Bricks is like I know there's NATO then there's the Bricks Alliance right

yeah so Bricks was originally Brazil Russia India China okay B-R-I-C Brazil Russia India, China. Okay. So this was more of a trade organization than anything else saying, you know, we're all big, powerful economies.

We're tired of being sanctioned by the U.S. Let's just do our own thing. And it ended up working for them to the point where the Brazilians have been talking for the last year about creating a new currency that's going to be unique to the BRICS countries. like the euro for example and it's gone so well for them that they just added several countries they added like

South Africa South Korea oh wow all the way up until the fall of the Soviet Union there was an international organization called the NAM the non-aligned movement so it was like this

but it was political in nature this is specifically trade in nature Brazil Russia India China South Africa And then they added a bunch They add In 2023 Briggs countries held annual leadership summit

And Johannesburg summit was from Oh the new countries Iran Saudi Arabia Egypt Argentina The UAE and Ethiopia Oh wow Now what does this mean for the United States Yeah this is bad This is bad because

It's all about trade It's all about money And we're so focused on the European Union And on sanctioning everybody that pisses us off, that we've actually cut trade with a lot of these countries. So we're missing out on a serious financial opportunity here. You know, I remember when I was still on the analytics side in the agency, we announced a new round of sanctions on Iran.

And I remember saying to my boss, how many new sanctions could there possibly be? Right? Not realizing at the time that if I say, hey, you, Danny Jones, you're not allowed to open a, checking account in my country. Well, you didn't have any intention of opening a checking account anyway, but that's a sanction. You've been sanctioned, right? So they don't, they're meaningless. We do it for political reasons. But then, you know, after a while, these countries are like,

you know, I'm tired of this. Fuck you. I'm going to go with the, I'm going to go with the Chinese. I'm going to go with this new bricks thing. Yeah, they're not yelling at me and sanctioning me all the time. And that's what's happening. That reminds me, there was, There's a story you told when we were gearing up for the Iraq war. I think you were sitting there in a televised meeting. You were supposed to take notes. And somebody said something about invading Iran. Yeah.

It was the day before we invaded Iraq. And I was the note taker in a secure video teleconference. It was only George Tenet, who was the CIA director and me. And then on the screens was the vice president and his note taker. Condi Rice was the National Security Advisor and her note taker, Colin Powell, Secretary of State and his note taker. Don Rumsfeld and his note taker. A couple of other people, the head of NSA, the head of Sancom, and their note takers. And so our job is done as far as CIA goes, right?

And starting tomorrow morning, it's his military operations. So George is just sitting there at the table with his hands folded. There's a microphone in front of him. And the vice president being the senior officer in the meeting is chairing the meeting. And he starts by asking the commander of CENTCOM general, I forget his name now, to give us a briefing. So I'm sitting directly behind George. This is like the story of my life. I'm always the note taker.

I'm always the guy sitting behind the important guy, right? So I'm taking notes and I think I mentioned you. I hate military analysis. You got to be a fast writer. A very fast writer. In fact, do you like abbreviate? Yeah.

And one of my trainers actually commented on it one time. He said, you take notes at a wicked pace. I said, oh, thank you. Anyway, I'm taking notes and I hate military analysis. It's so boring and mind-numbing to me. The general's got this big map. And he's like, you know, elements of the first infantry division are moving south to this village. And then elements of the fifth army corps.

And we've got the unit, this battalion. I don't know what the fuck he's talking about. So I'm just writing it all down. And then he says, if all goes as planned, we can be in Tehran by August. And George, again, George is just sitting there like this. And then he very discreetly turns the microphone off. And he turns around and he says, did he say Baghdad or did he say Tehran? And I said, he said Tehran.

And who was it to say that again? The commander of Central Command. Okay. Four-star general who's leading the troops across the border the next day. Got it. And George said, have these people lost their minds? And then he turns the microphone back on and just sits there. So the meeting goes for about an hour.

Everybody's like, good luck tomorrow, everybody. Good luck, good luck. USA, you know, that kind of thing. So I go back to the office. I was working for the deputy director at the time. And he said, who was the deputy director again? Jim Pavett. Jim Pavett.

Yeah, yeah. And he said, how'd the meeting go? And I said, did you know we were going to invade Iran? And he goes, ooh, are they still talking about that? And I said, yeah. I said, Sinkent brought it up. Sinkent,

Commander-in-Chief Sincom Sincent brought it up. And he said, listen, they're not going to invade Iran. These people don't understand anything about the region. They think we could just, you know, walk in and everybody's going to be

milk and honey. Nobody's invading Iran. And of course, you know, it was never mentioned again. Wow. That's so wild. It was nuts. Just to be a fly on the wall for these meetings.

remember one of the other attendees. I don't want to say his name, but he was a senior director at the National Security Council. I didn't like this guy from the get-go because he was so arrogant and he would put people down. He would put our allies down. He was especially harsh with the Kurds. We used to have Kurds come to Washington all the time for high-level meetings. And I was often the note-taker or sometimes I would escort them to the meetings. And this guy always talked to them like they had half a brain and, you know, it was just,

insulting. So anyway, Sink Sense giving the briefing and this guy chimes in and he says, they're going to throw flowers at us as soon as we cross that border. And I said to my boss afterwards, listen, has this guy never been to the Middle East? Has he never read history? Do none of them

understand what we're getting into tomorrow? Throw flowers at us. They would rather live under Saddam Hussein. than to be occupied by the American army. And so when you guys were leading up to the Iraq war, what was the CIA's stance on this? Oh, yeah. So when I was first read into the compartment,

it was about, let me think. It was about eight months before the invasion. They said, look, We're going to invade Iraq. We're going to overthrow Saddam Hussein. We're going to do this and do that. And there were some con man who was involved in giving a teleby. Yes, chelope.

That's what it was. I'm a chelope. Major con man. When I was first read into the compartment, I said, are they nuts? We haven't caught bin Laden yet. Like, this is all we ever talked about. We got to find bin Laden. We got to kill bin Laden.

Now all of a sudden we're going to attack Iran or I mean Iraq? For what reason? Iraq hadn't done anything to us. And this senior officer that read me into the compartment, very senior officer, he said, look, the decision's already been made and the battle lines have been drawn. This isn't, this is an answer to your question. He said, the battle lines have been drawn. He said, the pro-war faction is OVP, the office of the vice president, OSD, the office of the Secretary of Defense, and NSC, the National Security Council. He said the anti-war faction is the State Department, the CIA, and the Joint Chiefs.

And we've lost. Wow. Mm-hmm. Yeah. It was crystal clear. This was all on Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld. All of it. And to a lesser extent, Condi Rice, because she was very easily pushed around.

Yeah. And so can you explain chelaby? Yeah. And how was he instrument? in all of this. He was like, he was like robbing people out of their money. He created like a fake bank at one point. And did Dick, did Cheney know? Oh, of course he did. Okay. Yeah. That makes that makes it an even more interesting story. So Ahmed Chalabi was one of those very rare Shia Kurds. They're like, you know, six of them, right? He was born in Iraqi Kurdistan. But his family, was Shia Muslim. Very, very unusual. He was a bright kid. And so his parents sent him to London to get degrees in finance at the London School of Economics. He ended up moving to Jordan before Saddam became the leader of Iraq. He moved to Jordan and opened a bank there that he called Petra Bank.

and Petro Bank succeeded because Chalabi was able to convince Iraqi refugees to use it as their bank. Right. So if you were Iraqi, Petra Bank was your bank. You didn't bank anywhere else. So that lasted from the 60s through the 70s through the 80s. And then at the end of the 80s, he literally stole all the money. was $30 million in deposits, and his secretary smuggled him into Syria

in the trunk of her car. He had transferred the money to secret accounts in London and Geneva, and then escaped to Syria, and then flew to London. He owned a magnificent townhouse in Knightsbridge, London, right by Herod's. Magnificent that today would be worth

you know, 50, 60 million dollars. He wore suits that I could only fantasize about affording. But there was something very dirty about him. He was just an awful human being. And he would come on to every female officer that we would go out there and meet with him with. He was just disgusting. So in 1990, Iraq invades Kuwait.

and George H.W. Bush says, we got to get rid of this Saddam Hussein, 1990. Well, you can't just overthrow a foreign leader and not have a plan for the next day. And so he said, well, we need to identify somebody that we can install as the new president of Iraq.

Well, everybody liked this guy, Chalibi. Why? Why do you think people would really like Chalabi more than everybody else? he spoke English he spoke English as well as you and I everybody else is like you know if they spoke English

it was heavily accented they had B-O you know they didn't shave all the time but Chalaby wears $2,000 Italian suits he speaks English he smells nice yeah we like him we like chelaby

so the CIA engaged a private contractor by the name of the Rendon group in Washington headed by John Rendon I love John Rendon awesome guy

what kind of contractor he's a propagandist you know he said to me one time I said to him well what does that mean actually that you're propagandist does he's a self-proclaimed propagandist oh nice and he said

you remember the day that we liberated Kuwait and I said I'll never forget it as long as I live I went into Kuwait with Marines on Liberation Day Oh, wow. And he said, everybody in Kuwait was waving a little American flag. I said, yeah, it was like a dream.

He goes, where the heck you think they got all those little American flags? What, they're just laying around? Wow. And I was like, oh, my God, I didn't even think of that. No way. That's wild. This is a CIA contractor. Woo.

So, um, so they pick chelaby. So John Rendon flies to Vienna, Austria, meets up with chelaby. And John says, okay, here's what we're going to do. We're going to create this new group called the Iraqi National Congress. And what it's going to be, it's going to be representatives of all the different Iraqi opposition groups. Right. And you're going to be the chairman of the Iraqi National Congress. So when we finally move into Iraq, you're going to be the president and everybody else will be your cabinet.

Okay, that sounds like a decent enough idea. several problems. I'm a Chalabi hadn't even been to Iraq since 1965. We weren't even sure if he spoke Arabic anymore. Secondly, all the other people hated him. They're like,

I'm at fucking Chalabi, are you kidding me? Do you people not know who you're dealing with? The answer was no. At the time, we did not know who we were dealing with. The third problem is literally not a single one of these people on the Iraqi National Congress

actually lived in Iraq. None of them. If Saddam thought that maybe perhaps someday you might possibly become an oppositionist, you're going to get a bullet in the brain. So there were no oppositionists inside Iraq, except the Kurds.

And the Kurds are like, we're not working with any of these people. We're going to make Kurdistan and we're going to live happily ever after. And that's where the oil is anyway. So, the CIA started funneling money to the Iraqi National Congress, millions and millions of dollars. They need to buy a building. Where are we going to put this thing? We could put it in Vienna. We could put it in London.

We don't want to put it in Washington. It'll be too closely tied to us. So we're trying to come up with different ways to do it. Maybe Vienna is the way to go. Okay. So he spent all the money and he needs more money. Okay. So we gave you $40 million. How much more do you need? Give me another $20 million. Okay. So what have you done with the first $40 million. I spent it. Yes, we know that. We'd just spend it on. All different kinds of stuff. Like what? Where's your building? You must have bought a building with $40 million. I know you bought a new friggin' house in London and a house in Geneva and a Mercedes S-600. So where's the rest of the money? He couldn't account for a single dollar of it. Gone. So the CIA issued something called a burn notice. A burn notice. A burn notice. is when you send a cable to every CIA officer in the world

and say, don't ever have any contact with this person ever again. He's dead to us. Okay. That's what we did with Chalaby. So then for the rest... What year was this again? Pardon me?

What year was this? By then it was like 92. Okay. Got it. So then we pretty much forget about Chalabi. Through the 90s. You know, the Iraqis are sort of pissed us off because they won't let the UN inspectors go. in and then Clinton would bomb them

and then they'd do it again and we'd bomb them again and nothing was happening it was just a stalemate and then George W. Bush gets elected president and 9-11 happens and as soon as 9-11 happens Bush says we got to invade Iraq it's their fault 9-11's their fault

we're like no they had like literally nothing to do with 9-11 well we're going to invade him anyway okay well we think this is a mistake but battle lines drawn as I said earlier. Was there no conversations,

like real conversations with... The only conversations were between Cheney, Connie Rice, and Rumsfeld. But mostly Cheney's deputies, Scooter Libby and Addington and, you know, all those guys. Zal Khil-Zal. No one in the CIA could get in Bush's ear

and be like, look. We were absolutely preoccupied with Al-Qaeda. Got it. Okay. Everybody in the building's working on Al-Qaeda. Okay. And then Bush-C. calls one day and says, oh, by the way, come up with an invasion plan because we're going to invade

Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein. We're like, what? What are you talking about? But that was it. That was the order. So we decide to invade Iraq and the CIA says, let's say we do invade Iraq and we overthrow Saddam Hussein. Then what? And Dick Cheney says, we're going to put this fellow Ahmed Chalabi, he's going to be the president. And we said, whoa, no, we are not. Cheney said that. Yeah, we have a burn notice on Cheney. I mean on Cheney and on everybody associated with Chalibby, we're not working with Chaliby.

And then the CIA reissued the burn notice saying, listen, this is from 10 years ago, but just remember, we don't deal with this guy. So what Cheney did is he ordered. the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence to secretly reopen a channel with Chalaby. And he specifically told him, don't tell the CIA. I remember, you know, part of my job, or 90% of my job at the time, was reading 10,000 cables a day, 20,000 that were coming in to brief the director. I'd boil that 10 or 20,000 cables down to a half a dozen of the most important issues to brief the director in the morning. And then we started getting these cables.

Like the weapons of mass destruction are located at these geocordinates. I'm like, holy shit. Who found this? Super secret, you know, double secret probation kind of special source that nobody can know about. Well, this is a. military cable. What sources does the military have? We're the ones that run the sources. Unless this is actually an intercept that they're disguising, which sometimes an intercept is so sensitive that they'll disguise it as something else. What is an intercept? NSA catches it out of the air. Got it. So I went to my

boss. I said, do you know anything about this? You know who this source might be? And he's like, no, it's pretty explosive information. I said, yeah, it could like, you know, end the war before it begins. if we can send the UN inspectors in there. And then we started getting these like every single day. Amazing. Exactly on point intelligence. So a couple of our guys from the Iraq operations group said, we want to talk to the source.

We don't care where he is in the world. We're going to fly a team out there and we're going to, we want to interview the source. Pentagon said absolutely not. Too sensitive. We said, no, no, no, no. we're the central intelligence agency, right? At the time, the head of the CIA, his title was DCI,

director of central intelligence. He was the DNI. He headed all intelligence agencies, not just the CIA. Now it's just the CIA. Okay. But the Pentagon refused to allow us to have access to the source. And then finally,

after some pushing and prodding, they admitted it's chalibi and we're like literally not a single word is true not a single word we went to war for this but people are dying because of this and not a single word of it is true and so nothing ever came of chelope where's he now he died a couple of years ago two three years ago uh in london yeah yeah did you see on i saw on twitter this morning there was a video of Liz Cheney talking about how Trump is going to lead us into a dictatorship. Oh, please. Her father led us into a dictatorship. I was going to say that's one, it's a one hell of a thing for a Cheney to be given us a lesson on dictatorship.

Seriously, right? None of those people from the Iraqi National Congress ever amounted to anything. In fact, only the Kurds, only the Kurds ended up running government. And Jalal Talibani, the head of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, ended up being the president of Iraq. And I'll tell you something funny. In my office a couple of weeks ago, we were talking about Iraq. And my co-host on my radio show said something about Barham Sala. And I said, oh, what's Barham doing? And she looks at me.

She said, he's the president of Iraq. I said, Barham Sala is the president of Iraq. he was my main partner during the Iraq where he lived in Annandale, Virginia we had dinner at each other's house every couple of weeks

we would go out our kids would play together I said he's president of Iraq it's like wow Barham really made it makes me feel like an underachiever Good Lord Yeah but Barham was a Kurd

He was a Talibani Kurd There were two different There's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan Under Jalal Talibani and the Kurdish Democratic Party under under um the amount of people that you've just rubbed shoulders with that are like powerful such powerful world leaders around the world is so bizarre to think about man masoud barzani was the other Kurd it just came to me yeah it's crazy but you know i'm i'm almost 60 years old now and i don't feel like i'm 60 like in my mind i still feel like i'm 25 how old were you

when you were the note taker for that meeting with President Clinton and in Greece who was the meeting with Oh, in Greece it was with the prime minister

the foreign minister and the defense minister and then on the American side it was the president the secretary of state the national security advisor and the ambassador I was

30 I had just turned 35 35 and that was the first time you ever met Clinton or That was the first time I had met Clinton. Yeah. What was that meeting like?

What was the purpose of that meeting? It was a meet and greet. Okay. He didn't come to go to Greece often, did he? No. In fact, the only other presidents that have been to Greece have been Eisenhower and H.W. Oh, wow. Yeah.

He specifically came to Greece to apologize for overthrowing the Greek government in 1967. Yeah, which was a major, major. deal. I'll tell you a funny story. I used to watch the Greek news every night, right, to practice my spoken Greek. And for two weeks before Clinton came, they derisively coined a name for him, a title for him. It was planetarhis. It means the planet ruler. So they wouldn't say, Oprodros Clinton, President Clinton, they would say, oh, planetarges, Clinton, the planetarges, Clinton, the planet. ruler, Clinton is going to come here and grace us with his presence, you know, that kind of thing. Every single night on every news channel, it's Oplanadarges, and it would piss me off, right? Then Clinton came and he's like, we love you. You love us. This is the birthplace of democracy.

We owe our culture to you. We owe philosophy to you and medicine and mathematics, language. We owe everything to you. And I want to apologize from the bottom of my heart to the people of Greece for the illegal activity of my government in 1967 to install a military dictatorship here that you have never gotten over. You know, people are still traumatized. As soon as he gets on the plane to leave, right? I put the news on. And they're like, wow, we were wrong about him.

What a good man. What a kind man. Oh, my God. He should be the president of Greece. It was like, it was crazy the turnaround. It was crazy. But that meeting, I will never forget that meeting as long as I live. Just because I'm standing there.

Like, I can't, there have been a couple of times over the course of my career where I'm in the room and I'm looking around like, I can't believe I'm in the this room. Like surely they're going to figure out that I'm a fraud, right? Didn't he walk up to you? And he was like talking about the hors d'oeuvres or something like that. Yeah, he offered me. I got there before he did. And when I first got there, the prime minister arrived with his people. And I offered the prime minister a cup of coffee, a cup of tea, whatever he wanted. He said, no, no, no, I'm fine. I said, okay. So I'm standing there because again, I'm the note taker. So my job's not to get comfy on the couch. My job is to stand discreetly with my notebook and take notes.

So Clinton comes in and it's all hugs and kisses on both cheeks and slaps on the back and he asks the Prime Minister, would you like we got sandwiches, we got all, it was a table of food that went like the entire length of the room. It was ridiculous.

A thousand dollars worth of food on this table. He didn't want anything. The foreign minister didn't want anything. The defense minister didn't want anything. And the Greek note taker, of course, wasn't offered anything. So then he turns to me, I think I told you this, and he goes, may I offer you something to eat? And I said, oh, no thank you, Mr. President. I'm fine.

And he goes, oh, are you with me? And I said, yes, sir, I'm with you. He said, I'm sorry, I thought you were Greek. I said, I kind of am, but not really. It's a long story. Yeah. Was Hillary there? Oh, yeah.

What happened was we finished the meeting. The meeting went about 45 minutes. Uh-huh. Not a single substantive word in the whole thing. And Clinton walks out with Berger, who was the National Security Advisor. Albright, who was the Secretary of State, walks out with the ambassador, and then I walk out. So they're standing in the hall. There are two little groups.

And I'm standing against the wall. So I'm about three feet away from Clinton. Maybe I'm four feet away from Clinton. Clinton and then he finishes his conversation with Burger. So Burger walks over to Albright and the ambassador. So Clinton is standing like where you are and I'm standing where I am. And at the end of the hall is the elevator and the elevator opens and Hillary and Chelsea get off the elevator. And she's got this, this mug.

You could just tell like, oh, this is going to be bad. Just a look on her face. Like, oh, she was ready to explode. So she walks right up to us And it's the four of us then And one thing that I learned very quickly about Bill Clinton Is that he absolutely hates silence Something he's so gregarious and so outgoing

Somebody has to fill the void With a joke, a story, something Yes So he says Boy we sure had a good time at the Parthenon this morning Didn't we Hill silence. She just looks at him with this look like she wanted to kill him.

So he repeats himself. And he says, We sure had a good time at the Parthenon this morning. Didn't we Hill? And she says, Jesus Christ, Bill, it rained all day. I'll be in the room. And then she walks between us.

And he looks at me. And I'm thinking of myself, you poor man, you have to sleep next to that every night. So he looks at me, he goes, let's get the fucking. out of here. And he walks to the elevator. I follow him to the elevator. Secret Service runs down there.

We go to the basement. There was this raucous crowd of 500 women in the basement. It was the throwing themselves out of him. He pretty much. It was a Hellenic American women's chamber of commerce. And he gave this rousing, like amazing speech. There's screaming, we love you, Bill, you know, that kind of thing. I don't know how he did it. I don't know how he did it. What do you think fueled that relationship, the resentment she had towards him? Or I don't know if it was resentment. Yeah.

This was only, this was only a year after the Monica Lewinsky thing. Oh, a year after. Yeah, he had humiliated her. Right, right, right. You know, she had eyes on her own political career by then. She was weighing a run for the Senate from New York. She didn't need him anymore. Right.

Yeah. And, you know, I- It's amazing they stayed together all this time. It's amazing. I was friends with him. the with the American ambassador to Luxembourg. He's a Greek American who's now the president of of, oh, some big university. I can't remember now which one. But anyway, he told me the best story. He said that he had been, he had been a businessman and multi-millionaire, self-made millionaire.

And so he was the head of fundraising for the Clinton campaign for the southeastern United States. And his reward was he was named ambassador to Luxembourg. So he said that when the Lewinsky scandal broke, all the fundraisers got together and called each other and said he's got to resign. Right. We have to we have to confront him together and we've got to get him to resign. Gore can become president and then Gore can run for his own term in 2000. So Clinton agreed to. get together, not knowing why they were getting together.

But they said that they all needed to see him together. He said they rented a room, a banquet room at the Willard Hotel across the street from the White House on 15th Street. And he said that they had met the night before and they had rehearsed this. That they are going to, they're going to be strong and they're going to be united and they're going to tell him that he has to resign or that none of them are going to raise money for anybody anymore. This is going to be it. They have to resign and make room for gore. And so he said, Clinton

finally gets to the room. And before anybody can even say anything, he says, I have wronged you, friends, with this like almost, this quivering, almost cry in his voice. And he begs their forgiveness and he pleads for them not to abandon him that what he did was wrong and he's so sorry he can't believe that he did what he did now like every president he's a sociopath this is probably an act it's probably all made up you have to be a sociopath to be president you climb to the

top on the backs of everybody else around you that's just the nature of the system that we have right So the ambassador said to me, nobody ever mentioned resignation. He said, by the end of the meeting, he said, most of us were crying. And then somebody started chanting, Clinton, Clinton, Clinton. And that's how it ended. And that's how he walked out with people chanting Clinton. And I said, I said, he suckered you. He said, of course he suckered us.

He knew exactly what was going on. Yeah. He knew exactly what we were there for. and he suckered every one of us. He said, but that was that Clinton magic that people used to talk about. And I said, I saw it that day in the meeting. I saw it myself.

He had a meeting out of his hands. Yeah. Wow. He was positively inspirational to be around. I've never experienced anything else like it. Reagan, Reagan was like that in a much more understated way. But I only met Reagan once. But Clinton, like, wow.

You really felt like you were in the presence of greatness with Clinton. even if you weren't, you felt like you were. Wow. What do you think of, what is your take on all the different people, like the next presidential election and the people that we have lined up for the next president. I saw something about my friend Julian was explaining to me. He saw a report about Mark Cuban potentially might be doing it.

He apparently like sold his. He sold the Mavericks. He sold the Mavericks to a guy. To Edelson's widow. Like what? But he not only did he sell it, but he remains in control of Bassett. basketball operations. Yeah.

That was the deal. The deal was he sold her 95% of the team. He gets to retain 5% and control of basketball operations. That doesn't happen. Ever. That's not normal. I'm not aware of that ever happening. So he has to be running for president.

Well, you know, every four years, he's like, I might run. I might run. I might run. I'm not going to run. Every four years. Frankly, I think it would be kind of an intriguing candidate. I really do. maybe I'm an idiot. I don't know. It's entirely possible. God knows people have called me an idiot, including two ex-wives. But it would be intriguing to me. But one of the things that I say on my own show a lot is that neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have a deep bench, right? The two weakest possible people that any party could possibly nominate are going to be the nominees. You can't ask for two worse people. Bob Kennedy, I consider to be a friend. I think Bob's,

an awesome human being. I believe him when he says that he's not anti-vax, but people think that he's anti-vax, and that might be enough to just kill his candidacy. But I like the man, I respect him, he's an awesome guy, awesome human being. But, you know, name

another Democrat or another Republican that can be taken seriously. Maybe, possibly Nikki Haley, maybe. Isn't she the lady who said something about the, when the Israel, Palestine, thing kicked off. She's like,

crush them all or something. Yes. Yes. She was known, she took a lot of heat when she was very briefly for a minute, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. Okay. Yes. I say a minute. It was two years. But she took a lot of heat because a news reporter took a picture

of her speaking with the Israeli ambassador. He was sitting. And so she's on her knee talking to the ambassador and people like, uh-huh, on our knees to a are masters, the Israelis. Right?

He should be on his knees in front of her. Right. But, I mean, that's the crazy thing, right? Like, talking about the Israel lobby. Mm-hmm. I was just watching a great podcast with, Um,

uh, Mersheimer. Oh, he's fantastic. John Mersheimer and Lex Friedman. Yeah, yeah. They did a podcast where he was talking about the Israel lobby and how much influence.

Like, it's unprecedented. The amount of influence. It's also exempt from reporting, uh, Laws. Did you know that? It's exempt from what? Reporting laws. You and I were talking about the Farah Law, the foreign agent's registration act, right? With Maria Bhutanah who didn't register.

APEC, the American Israel, it's not political action committee, it's like policy, I forget, they're cute with the title. They don't have to register as representatives of the Israeli government. Wow. They're the only ones that don't. Everybody else does. You'll go to prison if you don't. Right.

They don't have to. Why? Yeah, it was fascinating to hear like the amount of influence that Israel has over policy in the United States is like, is unheard of. And John's argument, even though people like to label him anti-Semitic. But he's not. His argument is that it's to the detriment of Israel. It is.

It is to the detriment of Israel. And there, he said there's also. Also, a lot of Jewish Americans or Israeli Americans that are against the Israeli lobby. Absolutely true. Absolutely true. I'm friends with a bunch of them. I have a good friend, Miko Pellid. His father was a four-star general in the IDF and is one of the country's greatest military heroes in history. And Miko wears a kathia and, you know, shouts free Palestine at every at every, at every, uh, Demonstration. Yeah, he's a major part of the Jewish voices for peace. It's just like when you see the people that have the most chance of becoming president, they all have some sort of tie to Jeffrey Epstein. Like, can we just get a president who has no ties to Jeffrey Epstein? That would be a nice change of pace.

Even, you know, I don't, I'm, I've never met Bob Kennedy, but I know he had a lot of numbers in the Black Book. Yeah. Bob has tried to deal with that head on. Has he? Yeah. So he was on the flight logs, at least one of the flight logs that was released. And he had a legitimate explanation. His wife at the time was friends with Galane Maxwell, who was Jeffrey Epstein's. What do you call her?

Girlfriend, I guess. Procurer, partner in crime. Yeah, partner in crime. And her father was a very well-known Mossade. A very well-known Mossad asset. And Bob's wife mentioned that the family was going to fly to Palm Beach for Easter. And she said, oh, do you need a lift? And so the whole Kennedy family flew down on Jeffrey Epstein's Lodita Express.

Oh, wow. Yeah. It was innocent. The amount of reach that guy had was unbelievable. Oh, my God, it was incredible. But that's what makes for a successful access agent. I feel confident in my analysis on Epstein. I believe he was a Mossad access agent.

I'm very confident about that. You know, I said on your show when we spoke, what, two years ago now, a year and a half ago, that if you're the Mossad and you want to recruit somebody at the absolute highest levels of the U.S. government, you're not going to be able to recruit a president or a vice president or, you know, anybody that's in that direct line. So you recruit an access agent. You recruit somebody who has access to the people that you would like to recruit. And so what better way than to have somebody like Jeffrey Epstein who had virtually unlimited funds. Nobody was really sure how. But unlimited funds, a private island and an illegal kink that might be.

kind of attractive to some of those people, you know, a perversion. I think that's what that was. My good friend, Julian Dory, shout out to Julian Dory, has a great podcast. He took me to Epstein's house. Wow. I went to go visit a couple months ago, his new place in Hoboken, New Jersey. I was like, I'm like, I haven't been to New York in a couple of years. I'm like, let's go walk by the Epstein. It was he did it. We took a photo in front of it. It was like surreal to be standing in front of that place. Is this the wide townhouse? The townhouse, yeah, whatever. It was like a hundred million dollars. It was like one of the three highest valued townhouses in all of New York. The amount of people who were in that place.

Oh, I just got like chills down my spine. Thinking of the people that would visit that place every week. Yeah. He was saying, I think Trump was there like at least once a month or maybe like maybe once a week, a bunch of other really high level people. Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's a incredible story. Oh, yeah. Yeah, the Clintons, yeah.

They were regulars. You've seen the picture of the Trumps, the Clintons, and Epstein and Galane Maxwell, all together, the six of them. Yep. Yep. Yep. Sickening. Mm-hmm. What else are you working on right now?

Oh, a couple of things. I've got a substack. I'd appreciate it if I could plug the substack. Yes. John Kiriaku. My follower. Oh, yeah, I love it. Thank you very much for that.

I read it every day. Thank you. I have fun with it. And it's gone well so far. It's gone well. I've got a radio show every day. which I send around on the substack. I have columns in covert action magazine and in consortium news.

I also write occasionally for the sheer post. And just recently, I started a monthly column of all places in a newspaper in Amsterdam. Oh, wow. They've commissioned me. Yeah. I'm happy about that. Any more movie consulting gigs?

You know, craziest thing. Well, you know, I was consulting on this CBS series, uh, uh, true lies. and unfortunately it was canceled since I last saw you. Oh, no. So, you know, we had fun. It was a good season. It wasn't the greatest show that's ever been on TV, even on broadcast TV.

But it was fun. We had a good time with it. Since then, I had the oddest thing happened the other day. I got a LinkedIn invitation from a guy whose name sounded vaguely familiar to me. And I generally just accept, unless you're obviously a nut. I just accept LinkedIn invitations. And so I accepted it. As soon as I accepted it, he emailed me or DM'd me.

And he said, I don't know if you remember me. But I used to be a vice president at CBS. And you pitched a show to me in 2010, a reality show. And I said, oh, yes, I do remember you. He said, we didn't know what we were doing at CBS in 2000. intent on reality. They had, what's the one,

the famous one, the island. Survivor? Survivor. They had Survivor and they had the greatest race, what's it called? The Great Ray?

I don't know. Whatever that race is. Okay, yeah, I don't remember. So they had those, but he said they, they just sort of stumbled into those. They didn't really know what they were doing. And he said,

I no longer work at CBS. I have my own production company and I want to buy that show. And I said, oh, great. So I flew out to L.A. and I met his whole team and they bought the option and we'll see where it goes. That's incredible.

Yeah. And you got your new book you're working on about the cemeteries? Yeah. So I did one called Remains of the Day, the Ultimate Guide to Washington, D.C.'s historic cemeteries that was supposed to be out yesterday. Oh, really? Yeah, it was supposed to be out yesterday. They've delayed it a little bit because they didn't like the design of the cover the way it came back. Is that what Tony?

No. Okay. This is this one is with rare bird books. Okay. It's an imprint of Simon and Schuster. Oh, nice. And then they liked it so much, they commissioned three more. So I'm halfway done with the mafia graves of New York City.

And I just now started the historic graves of Chicago and the country western graves of Nashville. That's incredible. So I signed the contract. And then the publisher called me back and he says, hey, what about the graves of America's most notorious serial killers? And I said, all right, I said, listen, let me finish these four books first. And then, yeah, I said, the thing about serial killers, most of them, their families were so ashamed of what they had done that they just cremated them. So there are no graves.

And most of the rest of them are just buried there in the prison yard. And those cemeteries are off limits. So I said, we'll figure something out. We can write something. That's incredible, man. And then one more. One more thing I wanted to ask you about we talked about this off camera last time, but can you tell the story of working on the movie Bruno? How did that come about?

This would be a nice wrap up for the podcast. So I have a dear friend who is the head of media and entertainment at a consulting firm in Washington. And he does a lot of logistical work. you know, they want to film in a place that looks like 1950s Moscow, let's say, or they want to film in a place that looks like Havana, and you can't film there, so he'll find them a place. So he calls me one day, and he said, hey, I want to introduce you to a filmmaker. They're going to need your expertise on the Middle East.

I said, okay, great. And I had already consulted on a bunch of movies, the Bourne Ultimatum and the Kite Runner, and there were a bunch. So, so I do a conference call and it's Sasha Baron Cohen. And the company was this, this LLC.

It was like river, something river LLC. So I googled it and there's nothing. There's no, like there's literally nothing. They just made it up for this one film. The production company? Yeah.

Yeah. So they're usually shell companies. It's a shell company. Yeah. So we got on the phone and, and Sasha introduces himself and says, I don't know if you know anything about my characters. I said, oh, I know all of your characters.

I said, listen, Bruno, I almost pissed myself. But I've been watching you since Aliji when it first appeared on HBO. And he says, okay, so you know Bruno. Bruno is a gay Austrian fashion journalist. And I said, yes, very flamboyant. Yes, okay. He said, I want to put Bruno in. in front of bona fide terrorists.

He said, I'm thinking Al-Qaeda, maybe Hezbollah, and I want to show them polaroids of men having hardcore anal sex. And I want to ask them in the Bruno character if this is a form of torture and should these men be sent to Guantanamo? And I said, oh, that's an exceptional. bad idea. He goes, really?

I said, oh, listen, just as a general rule, you shouldn't mess with the religious types. They're nuts. I said, they'll kill you. They'll kill your crew. They'll go out onto the street and kill people who remind them of you. And he said, but I've got to do it

and it's got to be convincing. And I said, well, what we could do is, you know, there are still bona fide terrorists out there who are not religious, they're communists, and they're kind of retired. They all live in Damascus, you know, popular front for the liberation of Palestine,

Abu Nidal organization, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. And he said, yeah, do you know how to get in touch with them? I said, I think I could probably figure it out. And he said, where should we film this thing? And I said, well do you have any locations in mind he said yeah

Jordan and I said yeah Jordan's a good that's a good choice but you got to bring the Jordanians in on it because they have one of the best intelligence services in the Middle East you're not going to be able to get away with anything he said absolutely not nobody can be in on the gag nobody and I said now that's that's not going to work I said well we could do it

I said you know I was talking to the Libyan ambassador the other night at dinner. And, uh, and they're dying to have Hollywood films done in Libya. This is right before Gaddafi was killed a year before. And he said, no, won't do that. He said, as a Jew, I just can't go to Libya. I'd be too afraid. And I said, well, we could do it in Morocco, but Morocco has very unique architecture. And it's not going to, it's not going to look like Palestine. And he said, why, I think we should just do it and enjoy. but not tell the Jordanians. And I said, no, I have an idea.

I said, let's do it. Let's do it in Syria. I said, I know the Syrian ambassador. And I can call a Syrian ambassador and try and get it all, you know, online. And he said, no, no, I'm going to go to Newport Beach tomorrow. And there's a Syrian consulate in Newport Beach. And I said, no, no, this is what you're paying me for. So let me call the Syrian ambassador.

the next day 11 o'clock at night my wife and I are in bed and we're reading and the phone rings and I look at the phone and it says Sasha Baron Cohen and I show my wife look at this it's like 1130 at night

so I said hello Sasha and he goes mate with this he has a very thick British accent he goes mate I think I fucked up mate and I said oh don't tell me you went to that Syrian consulate in Newport Beach

he said he walked into the Syrian consulate the guy saw him came out from behind the bulletproof glass and said stop I know who you are I know what you do and you are not welcome in Syria

and I was like damn it wow and I said okay I got to double down if we're going to do it in Jordan you have to tell the Jordanians that you're doing it and he said absolutely not I said, Sasha, if we have bona fide terrorists flying in from Damascus on the same day to go to your hotel room, they're going to be on you like white on rice. And he said, no, I got to risk it.

I said, okay. So the plan was he was going to fly out to Amman and then I was going to fly out the day later. Okay. So only he and one cameraman flew out. And he told me later when I arrived that when he landed, they got off the plane and they go through customs and immigration. And there's a guy standing there with a sign that says, Sasha Baron Cohen. And he says, I'm Sasha Baron Cohen. And then he tells the cameraman, John got us a limo.

John didn't give them any limo. so they get in the car. And he said they're driving through town. And he says to the guy, where are we going? And the driver says, we're going to the royal palace. His majesty is a huge fan. And he says these enormous iron gates open. And they go onto the palace grounds.

And there's the king. And he's standing next to the director of the Jordanian intelligence service. So they get out of the car and the king says, Sasha Baron Cohen, I am your biggest fan. He said, Bruno, I mean, Borat, I almost wet myself, he says. But I want you to know, we're happy to have you in Jordan. Anything you need. You call my friend here.

He'll take care of you anything you want. And I said the next day when I got there, I said, I told you, you hadn't even arrived in the country yet. and they knew exactly what you were doing and when you were doing it. That's crazy. So we get these guys. And you hadn't told them.

No, I didn't say anything to anybody. I had a non-disclosure agreement. I didn't even tell my wife. Wow. Nothing. So we meet with these two guys, one from the popular front for the liberation of Palestine General Command

and one from the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. So we're at this table. at this table. I'm, you know, standing against the wall with my not pad like I always do. No, I'm not. I'm just standing against the wall. So we get to the point where

he pulls out the Polaroids. And dude, these were hard core gay, anal porn. And he asks them with that very effeminate, flamboyant accent if, is

this torture and should these men be sent to Guantanamo? And the one, like they're adjusting their trifocals. They're old man. They're in their 70s. And he looks at the Polaroid like, what? And he goes, no, no, no, no, this not good. This is not good.

And he puts it down on the table. Sasha had specifically said, I want the guy to leap across the table to try to strangle me. That's how angry I want him to be. And I said, well, I mean, this is pretty offensive for these guys. Yeah. He goes, no, no, this is not good. And he puts it down.

And then the other guy picks it up and he looks at it. And he's like trying to adjust his glasses. Like, what? And he goes, oh, oh, this haram. Not good. And that was it. And we're just like sitting there or they're sitting there. I'm standing.

And they're like looking around like, can I get a cup of coffee or how long is this going to take or whatever? And we're like, okay, cut. Thank you. Thank you, gentlemen. And that was it. They didn't even put it in the movie. Wow.

It was a disaster. It was a disaster. So the other thing was the second part of that Middle East scene, I only consulted on the Middle East part. Oh, I should add, I found these guys in the Damascus telephone book. No way. I figured they're old men. Nobody remembers them. Right.

Nobody remembers them shooting up the Rome airport and killing six people or hijacking a TWA plane to Cairo, right? They're just living in these little apartments of Damascus and their names and numbers are in the phone book. So I just called them. Hey, would you do this? We're going to pay all your expenses. We'll give you $100. You know, be in this documentary about the peace process. So we go on to Israel.

I actually flew home from Jordan. He went to Israel without me. And he went to the Western Wall, right? But he went in leather boots that went up to his mid thigh and pink hot pants. Need a photo, Steve. And a leather vest with no shirt underneath. And he's like covered in hair like a gorilla. Right?

Yeah. And he said, as soon as he got there, he saw this nearby group of yeshiva students with a rabbi. And the rabbi spat on him and called him a dirty. and he said next thing he knew these yeshiva students are just wailing on him and they beat the shit out of him to the point where it was the only time in the filming of the movie that he broke character and he said no no it's a joke it's for a movie i'm sasha baron kohen it's a joke it's a joke they were wailing on him they blackened both of his eyes and he had to stop filming for two weeks to get his uh we'll see if we can find a picture to get his uh you know eyes swelling to go

down oh my god look at him riding the cannon oh my god i got to say it was an absolute pleasure to work with him he's a genius and that's not a word that i throw around lightly the man's a genius sometimes his genius is too cutting edge for people but I found him to be absolutely brilliant yeah and the movie the movie The Dictator Oh my God I just rewatched it a couple of weeks ago Oh my God

Even my son is like how did I never see this movie before It's hilarious He's running in the race and just shooting everyone that's next to him Oh God incredible The guy's brilliant Incredible story John, thanks again. Thank you.

I really enjoyed it as always. We'll have you back again in the future, I hope. Substack. Substack. I put everything I write, everything I record, I've got a TV show once a week. I have a radio show every day. It all goes on substack. Perfect.

I'll link it all below. Thank you. And let's get you on your flight. Goodbye, everybody. Thank you.