DeProgram with John Kiriakou and Ted Rall - Behind the Minab Massacre (interview with Murtaza Hussein) | DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas

Episode Date: October 3, 2026

Conflict reporter/writer/cartoonist Ted Rall and political analyst Jamarl Thomas deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM ET. Today we discuss:• Murtaza Hussain, senior national security and foreign affairs journalist at Drop Site News, joins “Deprogram” to discuss the latest reporting on the US massacre of schoolchildren and educators at Minab during the opening days of the Israeli/US war against Iran.• Tennessee’s prison chief, Frank Strada, presided over the fifth “botched” execution under his leadership across two states since 2022. Krista Pike, 50, was heard choking and struggling an hour after receiving the first injection of pentobarbital, a sedative, and after a second dose failed to kill her, she was hospitalized in critical condition.• Riot police clashed with high school students across France on Friday and unions called for teachers to strike as President Emmanuel Macron's government battled to contain increasingly violent protests over classroom conditions and education funding. Tear gas choked the streets in the eastern city of Strasbourg, ​fireworks were aimed at ‌police lines in Marseille in the south and rubbish bins set ablaze in Rennes in the west. Rights groups have accused the police of using heavy-handed tactics against minors, including the use of batons, tear gas and non-lethal flash-ball guns. MERCHANDISE: DeProgram.MySpreadShop.comLIVE ON YOUTUBE: https://www.youtube.com/@DeProgramShowLIVE ON RUMBLE: https://rumble.com/c/DeProgramShowhttps://x.com/tedrallhttps://x.com/JamarlThomas#tedrall #jamarlthomas #news #politics

Good morning. I guess I cut off the intro a little early there. This is Deep Program with Ted Raul and Jamaral Thomas. And if you're wondering why we're here, even though it's a Saturday morning and we don't normally do this on weekends, it's because we have a very special interview coming up with Murtaza Hussein of DropSight News. That's coming up in about 29 minutes. So stay tuned for that. He has co-authored for DropSight News a comprehensive account. of the Minab massacre that happened in the very early stages of the U.S. and Israeli war against Iran. That killed over 150 students and teachers and other people in Iran, and we will get into exactly sort of what we know so far and what we still don't know. There's no one better to talk to about this than Murtaza, I think, and I'm looking forward to touching base with him about that.

If you're just tuning in, thank you very much for watching, sharing, liking, and following the show. Your support means a lot to us, and it's what makes all this possible. So if you have the ability to subscribe to the show or make a Rumble rant or a super chat, we especially appreciate you, but seriously, the best thing you can really do also is to share the show in your social media platform and everywhere else. Just get the word out so people know we're here. generally people people tend to like it when they know it's here but that's true about a lot of stuff good morning tomorrow how are you doing i'm doing okay i'm doing okay i can't complain early early it is early yeah yeah it's a it's a quiet time it's night i mean oh my god today

it's the most beautiful day uh it's just like stunning it's like going to be 70 degrees and just like partly sunny partly cloudy just beautiful always wonder how do they determine the difference between partly cloudy and partly sunny. Aren't they kind of the same thing? I assume they just mean a sunny day with not many clouds in the sky. But who knows? I mean, as long as the day is gorgeous, that's what matters. Yeah, that's all good.

And then, you know, going in the winter or going in the fall. Fall is going to be gorgeous here in the States. And I'd imagine upstate New York is also gorgeous. Oh, it's great. Really great, really great. Okay, so what we've got for you this morning, guys, is basically we're following a couple of continuing stories that we've been covering over the last part of the work week. The scandal over the botched execution of Krista Pike continues to grow. And I think so far I'm feeling confident about my feeling that this is really truly the beginning of the end for the death penalty in the United States. This is, Krista Pike is currently in critical condition at the hospital as doctors are, she's on a ventilator. Probably her doctors are desperately trying to save her life after the prison system was desperately trying to take her life.

And we now know more details about how she was choking and struggling for over an hour after receiving her first injection. Then they tried pentobarbital again a second time, but wait, there's more. So the prison chief of the state of Tennessee is a guy named Frank Strata. Well, apparently he has a habit of presiding over botched executions. By the count of the guardian, this Krista Pike thing is the number five screwed up execution that he's presided over. Yeah. Yeah. So we will get into that.

Number five. Number five. Yeah, he brought, you know, Arizona's loss was Tennessee's game. and the riots in over the high school students and the riot police in France continue to spread. The teachers are about to walk off the job. They probably are not going to show up on Monday. The French school system has adjusted. They've gone back to the COVID days.

It's going to be just online instruction only. I would say online instruction. It's just an oxymoron. But the, so they're going to, basically, they're rioting over lack of education funding, poor classroom conditions, overcrowding, and so, and lack of equity between the various schools throughout the country. It's a national school system. In Strasbourg, which is on the German border, beautiful city, tear gas and riot police are running rampant. In Marseille, the cops were shot at and fireworks were aimed in their direction. The rubbish bin,

were set up in, were set ablaze in wrens. Meanwhile, even though the, the protesters are minors, right? These are children. The riot cops are going in with batons, tear gas, and non-lethal flashball guns, although the thing is, that's an oxymoron because they have killed people in the past. At least one young girl who was 15 or 16 years old, lost her eye to one of these things yesterday. So, you know, if the France is in full sense, spice mode as we go into day four of this. And of course, at the bottom of the hour, we'll have

Murta Hussein, senior national security and foreign affairs journalist at DropSight News. I would urge you to read, not now, because you have to listen to D-Program, but after the show, you should go and check out this story that he co-authored with Jeremy Cahill and someone else to discuss the latest reporting on the U.S. massacre of school children and educators at Monab during the very early days of the Israeli-U.S. war against Iran. Okay, so that's what we've got. Where shall we start with the 23 minutes that we've got before Murtaza comes on? I don't think this is going to be the end of the death penalty in the United States. I don't. I just, I think you're looking at it as a lefty and think to yourself, this is so disastrous that they have to do something about this, that they can't keep this up.

They can't keep doing this. But as you pointed out, this is this guy's fifth time doing this. He's presided over five other of these type botched executions that they are now trying to save the woman's life so they can kill her again. Like, think of how dumbness is. Okay, well, we don't want her to die a horrific death. We want her to die to death that we want her to die. So let's save her to do this again. I mean, it's so dumb.

I agree with you that I can't, the idea that they would do this to this woman again is outrageous. It's like, well, they're not going to execute her. They won't execute her now. I mean, they just won't. I mean, her, first of all, you know, my friend Ron Kuby, the great civil rights attorney who was a, sort of the, he was the protege of the great William Consular,

the Chicago 7 attorney. And Ron Kubi, he said on Facebook, we're Facebook friends as well as real friends, he said that probably she suffered brain cancer and under the federal, I mean, brain damage, and under federal law, the U.S. Code, if that happens as a result of something that they did, basically they can't execute her. Her brain is mush that basically they screwed up and now they have to commute her sentence to life in prison. and just sort of as a matter of law. So pretty much, I mean, whatever life she has has now been spared, effectively, the state of Tennessee, which had a previous botched execution earlier this year, has suspended, once again, it's the second time this governor has suspended the executions. I mean, at a certain point, I mean, look, Florida and Texas will be the last to go, right? But, I mean, at a certain point, you know, we have to admit that we just don't, as a country, we don't know how to execute people properly, right?

Do you want to hear about these other cases, by the way? This same guy, right? He came from Arizona, where he had a similar job. He was the head of the Executions Department of the Corrections Department. Listen to that a little bit like the execution department and the corrections department. I mean, you've got to love that. Anyway, he created the teams that carried out the procedures. He monitored the practices and he obtained the lethal drugs, right?

So in May 2022, there's a guy named Clarence Dixon. The execution team couldn't find where to put the IVs. Ultimately, they kept poking him and they finally made an incision to his growth. in order to insert the IV. That took about 40 minutes. In June 2022, Frank Atwood, another death row inmate, had to help the executioners find his vein, because after the officials just couldn't find his vein. He was 66 years old. The guy had a degenerative spinal condition, so he had blood flow issues. And then in November of the same year, the Arizona idiots, couldn't find a vein in Murray Hooper, forcing them to insert a catheter into his groin.

So even though this happened back in 2022, three times they sent him to Tennessee in 2023. The governor appointed him, so that's totally on him. And basically, once he brought all of the wisdom that he had from Tennessee over to, I mean, that he had from Arizona over to Tennessee. So this is just, I mean, you know, it's outlandish. It's a freak show. And like, I mean, I would just think that from an embarrassment point of view, this would just come to an end.

If you're going to kill people, kill people. Sure. Just don't be fancy. Which is what they're trying to do. It's like if somebody, like, have you ever seen a football player catch the ball and the guy showboating? on his way to the thing, and they stripped the ball from him. And it's like, okay, well, you could have just ran the ball into this.

Just run fast. Just run fast, right? You don't have to showboat. You don't have to do this other stuff. But the problem is running fast is a guillotine. Running fast is a firing squad. Right. And we don't want people, we don't want people to see people get shot.

That's impolite. We don't like that. And it's like, but you're doing the killing anyway. I feel like, honestly, this feels like the trans thing. It's like, yes, this is really a man, but we don't want to say that's a man because that's impolite. And so we as a society will put ourselves into pretsles of what bad firm is used, should they be able to play sports in this way, et cetera, et cetera. Meaning it goes beyond just, okay, people want to be, they want to live their lives as women or want to live their lives as men. And we can accept them doing that into, but now we have to pretend that they're actually women.

Where even on the left, they would be like, well, there's no difference. And it's like, are you serious? Like, I mean, you've gone from this idea of placation into completely pretending like Little Tommy is an astronaut. And I feel like it's that same energy. It's like, well, we don't want to really kill people. But we want to kill people. right we want to kill people we want to kill people but we don't want it to look bad you don't want to look bad it's impolite well we don't we don't even really hardly want anyone to

see it um just a few people you know just just the media a few reporters and the victims family and uh i guess presumably also the also the um the murderer's family too right um i just don't see what good it does anyone right i mean you know one aspect to this that you know, we don't think about very often, but it's worth, it would be worth looking into, maybe there's someone who can talk to us about this, is the effect that it has on the executioners. I mean, a lot of times, these, the guards get to know these inmates over the course of decades, and they befriends them, and they start to like them. And I've read accounts where the guards, like, really were, you know, grief-stricken

when the execution, when capital punishment is carried out, in some case they have to help participate in killing their friend or this person that they've gotten to know. I mean, and, you know, obviously they don't have a personal beef with this person. They, you know, they didn't take away their loved one. So, I mean, it's, this is like, you know, getting back to what we were talking about yesterday, at least with a system like Sharia law or vigilanteism,

The person who's, you know, angry and has a reason to be angry carries it out. This is outsourced to like a low-paid state civil, you know, a civil servant assassin to do basically like, hey, honey, I'm going to be a little late. I'll pick up a chicken on the way home. I've got to kill this guy first and then I'll see you later. I mean, that can't be good for them. Yeah, but it can't be good for the family either. No. I mean, and to be honest, they're paid.

I mean, it's not like they're being forced to do the job. They're paid to do a job. They decide. They choose. They decide, I want to work for the prison system. You have an execution who says, hey, I like killing people. That's what I want to do for a living. And so much so moves from one state to another in order to continue to do it.

I mean, it's like the Saudi Arabia, right? where they have like ads in the paper head chopper required for right you know good vacations by the way those guys know what they're doing yeah i mean but the heads usually come off right i mean that big that big sword comes down that princess is like not going home with her head and by the way that goes back to the guillotine like it may be um you know medieval you know they may come across prehistoric but it works Yeah, F you said has a comment. I gotta be honest with you.

I don't want vigilante as well. I don't have an issue with the state doing the job. They just need to be good, effective at the job. Under normal circumstances, we have no issue killing people abroad. So why is it so dice here? Get an ice agent. They do it all the time. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's like, well, I mean, it's strange because our history books teach us that like when people gathered, I'm not even talking about lynchings,

but when people will gather to watch legal hangings carried out by, you know, in a legal way. If they, you know, we see those photos and we're like, oh, that's savage. People brought their kids to watch and all that. I don't know. It seems less savage than what we're doing now. I don't think so. I mean, do it in public. If you're going to do it.

Do it. I mean, but it's sanitized murder. It's because. All I'm saying is it should be. It should also be carried out in public. I mean, I think, you know, all government functions that can be should be carried out not in private, right? Like, I think every meeting between a lobbyist and a congressman should be recorded and livecast, live streamed on the, on the congressman's website. I think every meeting of the cabinet or the National Security Council should be live streamed. And the only things that

should be removed are things that directly involve national security. But, you know, every government document that doesn't involve national security should be up on a website where reporters and citizens can look at them i mean we pay for all this it's it's our taxpayer dollars i mean why are we being kept from seeing what we pay for well i thought that was the case though that it's not oh 99.999% of government documents will never be available to the public oh yeah yeah i agree with you on that part public executions. I get your point. Your thing is, it's kind of like

like cows. Like there are some states where it's illegal to publicize what they do in the farms. Right. And it's kind of like executions. It's all secret. Well, because I mean, the thing is, it's kind of like killing kings and queens.

The moment that you kill a king and queen, you legitimize the fact that you can kill a king and queen. It's not appointed by God. it was appointed by God how these people being killed. And if you say, well, murder is bad. We don't like people being killed. Okay, well, the state is just committing an open murder. And the state doesn't want you to know that it's committing an open murder.

So the state tries to find ways to avoid doing that. Hence, we're going to put it behind the wall. We're just going to give people a heads up that, hey, by the way, we killed this guy. But the issue is they're not doing it cleanly. And I know that sounds horrible, but it's true. It is true. Again, the issue for me is not necessarily the fact that they're killing somebody who's a monster. It's that we don't know if as a flat fact that the person is a monster.

Well, that's true. I mean, we know that roughly one out of eight is innocent. But also, I mean, as for the other seven, and this is a big, this is the real question for me, honestly. It's not the question. My real question is what you said. I don't think the state can be trusted to do this. And I think the state shouldn't be in the business of killing anyone. I mean, just as a matter of philosophy.

But I also kind of don't really see that we should be judged by the one worst thing we've ever done. And that's the only thing that should define us. Like, you know, if you kill, like this woman, Krista Pike, she horribly murdered an innocent girl when she was 18 years old. And the question is now at the age of 48-ish, should that thing that she did on her worst moment, in her worst day, should that be the only thing we think about when we think about Christa Pike? I don't think that's fair. And the death penalty implies that it is the only thing we should think about.

Well, I mean, I guess the question is, is there a redemption? And what does that look like? Right. I'm pro-redemption. I think most people who kill, first of all, murder has the lowest recidivism rate of any major crime. I mean, this isn't like, you know, pedophiles. I mean, pedophiles, you know, they can't help, they usually can't help themselves. They usually come back for more. most, the vast majority of people who kill once never kill again, never would kill again. So it's not really about protecting society, but if you're talking about redemption, I mean, this is someone, I mean, you know, it's horrible, obviously, but it's, you're not, I mean, obviously redemption is possible if by definition you catch a person who kills one person, and then they're not likely to ever do anything like that again, by definition, redemption is possible.

Wait a minute. It's the recidivism rate low because they've been in prison for God knows how long. Like if you kill somebody, you go to prison for 20 years. You can kill people in prison. You can kill people in prison, right? I mean, people do. Yeah, ish. I mean, that's different.

I mean, if you're around other monsters, it might be harder to kill other monsters. But from the standpoint of a civilian population that is not interested in killing or not interesting in violence, you are a predator to those groups of people. The recidivism rate? Most murderers are predators. Very few murderers are, very few murderers are predators. Right? I mean, predators are very specific. Yeah, are predators.

Most people who are murderers are, it's a crime of passion or it's committed in the, in the conduct of some other crime. I went to rob the liquor store, the guy pulled a gun, I killed him. Right, but you were robbing a liquor store and he kills somebody in a lot. I shouldn't have a rubber and a liquor store. Sure, but that's not the kind of thing that you're going to, it's not a predator. He's not like, he's not like, he's not. didn't go out to kill someone, right? So he went out to rob a liquor store.

Right. You don't think that's predation? Who do you think was going to be in the store? Okay, that's fair. Do you think they were going to use a gun when they were going into the store to rob? But they're not a predator in that they're looking forward to, you know, shooting, they're not looking to shoot a man in Reno to watch him die, right? I mean, it's not just for fun.

Is that the only measure? They needed money, maybe. He robbed a liquor store and killed somebody. I'm saying that's predation. Like, it's not like, you know, just because that's true, I'm not saying he's a psychopath where he just shoots a guy and just watches him and enjoys it. And that's the only thing that's the only thing that's what I was thinking of. Yeah. Yeah, but that's, I mean, come on. That's a cartoonish view of predator. I'm saying somebody who would take advantage of somebody else. And if you're robbing a liquor store, even if you needed the money, fair enough.

Like silence of the lambs is I was thinking of that, you know. Yeah, see, I wasn't thinking of that. I was thinking of somebody who just praise on somebody else. and robbing a liquor store. It's conceivable he would rob another store if he wasn't a lot. Utterly conceivable. Yeah. So. And I guess the point is that like that person is still, even if they never kill anyone and they just rob liquor stores, it's still, it's still, it's still predatory behavior.

I'm saying the fact that they rob, it kills somebody in the first liquor store. It's very conceivable that they can kill somebody in another robbery, even if they're not intending to. I'm saying that statistics show that that's unusual. That's all I'm saying. unusual because they are in a cage for 20 years when they get out there in a 40s and a lot of people have a lot of people are i mean roughly 50 percent of murders go unsolved so it's like yes so it seems like a lot of those people are still out and about i mean there's a lot of people i remember doing this like you know mental brain experiment on the subway at one time during rush hour and thinking

okay so based on all the number of the average lifespan and all that like in the number of unsolved murders and the murders that are committed ever i was like there's probably someone in this train who killed someone and got away with it right and i mean that's kind of like amazing um and they they walk among us we know them right i mean right and they make you work with them but they don't commit another murder maybe it's like someone who you know i don't know i mean there's a million circumstances there's a lot of people who kill each other because of jealousy romantic stuff. I mean, that happens a lot, right? Right. And they should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law for doing. So they're

eliminated. Well, I'm saying they shouldn't be executed because like, you know, it's like, it's something that you did when you were 20 and stupid and inexperienced. And now you're in prison for 30 years. And would you, if you were freed, ever do anything like that again? And the answer is no. But it's not about whether you do it again. It's about what you did. I don't think it's fair to say that that's the only thing that matters about you as a human being. This one, should we all be judged by the shittiest thing we've ever done in our lives? And that's how we should be assessed. Well, I understand.

You don't think that. But the fact of the matter is as a family that has just lost somebody, there's a parent that might have just lost somebody or a brother or, etc. That loss matters. And yeah, there should be a course. Of course it does. for that loss. And the question of what that cost is will vary. There's some people who make of a deal, you can make it up later. No, that's the question. What is that what is that cost?

I think nobody thinks there should be no cost. The question is what should that cost be? Unfortunately, we're going to have my talk, I mean, unfortunately, I'm looking forward to it. You have Murtaza on in a few minutes, but we have also want to talk about France. So the, you know, Obviously, these student protests don't seem like they're going away anytime soon. They seem like they're expanding. This seems like a bigger than average crisis. And I'm like, I love the French kids. You know, vizis, les enfons.

Yeah, I was watching school burn. And I was like, holy hell. Holy hell. They are getting vigorous. Yeah, they're getting very vigorous. Yeah, God bless him. God bless him. I mean, this also represents a,

this represents a major, um, political crisis for the government of Emmanuel, and Macron. Um, the, the presidential election is next year. It's, it's, you know, this year is over in two months. I mean, it's coming right up. Um,

I mean, three months. It's like, it's, I mean, it's, it's really just, um, I mean, obviously Macron is of lame duck. He's not running again, can't run again, wouldn't run again even if he could. He's got an approval rating that, you know, I mean, he's jealous of Donald Trump's approval ratings, right? I mean, he's like 12%, 14%. It's catastrophic. Trump is blacking him. Trump is what, 31%.

He's beating him by like three. I'm hesitant to say what I'm about to say, because this is the kind of thing where you can definitely, you know, walk. You can get away over your skis or too far out on a limb. easily but it's conceivable I don't want to say it will but it's conceivable this is one of those May 1968 moments in France where it can bring down a government like not just this president but like the gut like the type of government I mean in May 1968 France almost became a communist country you know it came like this close there was an incident where President de Gaulle was on the

roof of a French government building in Paris, and he had a chopper ready to spirit him off to exile in West Germany. He was ready to flee with his wife, and they were looking off the roof, and they saw a riot, a mob of people coming down one of those little narrow Parisian streets, and they were waiting to see which way they would turn, and if they came toward them, they were going to fly off, and if they kept going straight, they didn't. And they just, they had the mob, was they kept going straight and the french government and de gaul managed to ultimately send in the troops and massacre as a bunch of them and and crushed the rebellion right but it was that close and um i mean this could get to that i mean you know this is like the the yellow vests were a prequel to

this um and you know by the way if the yellow vest movement or its air it were to join up with this you would have a national uprising that was bigger than may 68 may 68 was an urban phenomenon from the left and from the trade unions and from the students here you would have a rural slash you know not urban phenomenon there's never been anything like that i mean that just doesn't happen in revolutionary moments where you get populist left meets populist right uh that could happen yeah have they said anything about the yellow vests or have the yellow vests, I mean, for one, is the entity even, does it still exist? It seems like right now they're sort of in wait and sea mode.

The French government negotiated with the yellow vest people and gave them a lot of concessions and promised to poor and started to pour some resources. That's part of what's going on is that concessions to the yellow vest movement ended up taking money out of other parts of the budget, including education. So, um, interesting. So it's kind of like, I mean, although I would, the first place I would go if, uh, if I were French and I mean, I am French, but too, if I were living in France, is I'd be blaming the government for pouring money into stupid military spending and, you know, blowing money on NATO

and sending money to Ukraine and all this nonsense. I mean, yeah, it's a lot. It can do both. One of the most bloated countries in the European Union. if I remember correctly. In fact, if I remember correctly, during the Yellow Vest movement, Germany or the European Union had to give them a kind of a dispensation to run a higher budget deficit

in order to give money to the yellow vests in order to bring down the level of protests. Because if I remember correctly, there were protests going on in like Iran or something that the U.S. government was fully behind, but wasn't behind the French one. In fact, they were trying to pretend like the French one wasn't existing.

It was very strange. Like they were trying to act as if pay no attention to the fact that the Yellow Vest movement is paralyzing France for like a year. But hey, let's pay attention to Iran and hope that they can take down the Iranian government. Now, I remember that. The European Union ended up giving or allowing France to spend more money as a budget deficit over the course of that year that the yellow vest was taking place to try to bring down the protests in France. Yeah. Yeah. And by the way, it's impossible to overstate.

the hostility between protesters and the Surite and the other French national security forces. The United States doesn't have, at least up until now, doesn't have a national police. You know, the closest, I mean, ICE might morph into that, but we're not, well, the FBI is a, it's a, yeah, but it's not a police force, right? They're not like, they don't have batons and, you know, tear gas. So, yeah, so, but these guys are, they're hated. And I think the antipathy is partly born from the fact that, you know, they're not from the community, right? So they come in, these guys come in from somewhere else.

So if there's an uprising in Marseille, you know, these guys might come in from Brittany and do this. They don't have any connection whatsoever to the community. To them, these are just brats who are causing trouble and need to be put down. And they're recruited to be goons. I mean, you know, it's like ice. They're the worst of the worst, except, you know, they're kind of, it's scarier because they're smarter and better educated than ice. But, you know, because they're French.

They're better what they do. All right. Well, I think with that, I see Mertaza waiting in the background. Mertaza, thanks for joining us. If you could turn on your camera and your mic, there you are. Okay. I'm going to go ahead and bring him in. Good morning, Murtaza.

How are you? Morning, guys. Good, good to see you. Good to see you. Good to see you, too. So, Murta is the senior national security and foreign affairs journalist at DropSite News. And we're very excited to have you this morning. And thanks for coming back.

Just to talk about this big blockbuster report that you, that DropSight put out that you co-authored about the Minab Massacre in the very early days of the war. Basically, this was kind of like the first major strike, right? The United States, it now turns out, we do know, although they denied it, launched a missile attack that blew up this school, killed about 158, correct me if I'm wrong. students, teachers, maybe some parents, other staff at the school, they blow up a school. And so you basically now have

sort of a comprehensive report about how it went down, how it happened, and what the effects were. And I was wondering if you could just sort of tell us the highlights of what you learned. Sure, yeah. Well, first of all, thanks for having me, and good morning to you guys and everyone watching and listening. Yeah, so we did this report, which was published on Wednesday, about the Minab Massacre,

and then subsequently a video, which is based on some of the interviews we did with the parents of children who were killed in the massacre or first responders and so forth. And, you know, I think there's been quite a bit of reporting about the actual event itself, but our story was a bit unique in the sense that it really dug down, with the community that was affected and the families and the staff and the first responders and other people in the Minab community who were affected by this to give their assessment of what they actually saw that day and reconstruct the events from their perspective. And then also the impacts had on the community.

It's really, as you can imagine, it's had a devastating impact on the community, psychological impact, emotional impact, especially on the children who survived as well too. And just the description of the actual event from the people who were there is very harrowing. So I do think that a lot of, not all the coverage, but a lot of it has been kind of antiseptic, I would say, maybe. It's a lot of focus on the technical errors that led to the attack or what the administration is saying or not saying. And they did lie about it numerous times initially. They haven't come clean in general. Yeah.

But this story is very different. It's a very, I'd say, kind of emotional story because it's very hard to be unaffected when you read the people's descriptions of their kids or what they saw when they arrived at school. So that's our contribution to it. And yeah, also it, you know, it also leads to questions about intentionality or lack thereof in the attack. Because, you know, one thing that became clear from reconstructing it is that this wasn't like one missile that hit the school. It was just like nine missiles hit the school in total over the course of three hours or this school or the vicinity of the school. So, you know, whatever there were striking there, they knew they were striking something at those coordinates. And the experience of people who were there was not that, you know, it was just a stray missile.

It was that this school area was being pounded by Tomahawk missiles in and around the area for hours, including after first responders arrived and so forth. So, you know, it raises very serious questions. And, you know, one thing I'll tell people is that it's not necessarily intentionality would be that somebody specifically ordered a school and signed off a school being hit during school hours. But if you look at the chronology of events before the war, Pete Hex said the department's head of the Department of Defense or Department of War, he eliminated the already quite meager civilian protection agencies inside the Pentagon to prevent things from this like this happening.

And all throughout the chain of command and his administrative decisions, we're all kind of pushing towards emphasizing lethality, as he puts it, and reducing civilian protections. So then things like this would inevitably happen more in that sense. I always analogize it to saying if I cut someone's brakes in their car and then they drove to work that day, maybe they drove to work a couple days and they were okay. But then maybe in the third day they hit a tree, maybe I didn't make them hit the tree, but I created a situation where it would be very foreseeable that that would happen.

I think that's exactly what happened in the case of this meeting out of school. You're speaking my language. That was exact same thought. My thought was either it's intentional or they set up conditions to make this particular situation happen. Mike, it was infinitely foreseeable, right? And as you point out, he's screaming about lethality, even to the point of trying to give people testosterone injections because he wants to be that much more lethal warfighters. Okay, now you've murdered a bunch of children.

And the response from the state for the longest point, as you point out, was kind of like, well, we don't know if we did that. We were going to do investigations. We're going to do blah, blah, blah. And then they came out and blamed AI for that error, which is someone. And old maps, right? Yeah, right. And Google Maps. I mean, they hit this, correct me if we're wrong, with nine missiles.

Yeah. Not all nine directly hit the school, but there's like a little community around the school with like Car Wash. and clinic and things like this. And they're all sort of surrounding this little area. So that area in total was hit nine times. And the school was also hit multiple times, including after the first responders arrived. So, yeah, it was like a triple tap strike,

at least on the school itself. And yeah, that's exactly what they did. And we said in the story, it's probably the worst single incident of mass killing of civilians, specifically children that we can. remember in any conflict. Even going back to Vietnam, it's hard to remember one particular incident where this many children specifically were killed. And you know, maybe Milai, right?

Yeah, maybe the Milai massacre, exactly. It's the only thing it may come to mind. And then even that, I'm not sure how many children per se were killed, but, you know, even if it's not children, it's still a huge number of civilians. So yeah, that's, you know, it's an unbelievable, just absolutely shocking event. And You know, there hasn't really, one interesting came across in our story. We interviewed a lot of former U.S. military officials. They told us that, you know, if they hit this coordinates, the CENTCOM would be able to tell you literally an hour later after there.

There was no ambiguity about whether they did it. But first, they lied about it. They said maybe it was an Iranian missile. Then the footage came out. We just saw the TAMOF missiles, which Iran doesn't have, hitting the school repeatedly. And then they've just been saying, Kassan Lee, since then that they're investigating it. A Sankom Chief Brad Cooper, you told a reporter that was an active IRGC naval missile base that they were firing at. That's not true.

There's no missile base at that base at that school compound. But, you know, the thing is, in going back to the point of how this happened, you know, we talked to the Iranian government. There was at one point a IRC naval office located in this compound. And they had showed us the title deeds of the buildings in the area. there was one there at some point, but they moved it because they didn't want it to become a target in the case of a war, such as they would hit the school. And the school's location had been known for at least a decade, and it was there. So it seems that what happened, most likely, in this case as well, too, is that at the start of the war, they wanted to do a big shock-in-all campaign and generate lots of targets to hit immediately. So Heg Seth and whoever else, Cooper, they demanded that their analysts provide them.

thousands of targets that they can hit in the first couple hours so they can really, you know, shock the Iranian system immediately. And we don't know how much time frame they had to revet these targets, but it seems like probably not that much. So normally what you do before you get these targets, you go through them, you look at, make sure they're still valid because, you know, buildings can change, locations can change, things like that. It seems like they probably didn't vet these targets.

They probably didn't vet the school again because it's very obvious. school. You can actually find the school on Google Maps, too. It was not even a, you know, very deep cover thing or anything. You could look on Google Maps in Iran. It would show up on those coordinates. So, you know, I guess they didn't vet that again because they didn't have time and they didn't prioritize it. And as I said, they also eliminated some of the civilian protection agencies in the Pentagon that may have done something like that. So, yeah, so then they just hit all the targets that they had. And then guess what? One of them was in elementary school. Mattaza, I mean, one thing that, I mean, I have a lot of questions about this,

but the big one to me is that we have all these drones, the U.S. military does. And normally, my understanding is that before a target like this is struck, the drones spent days, maybe even weeks, before a launch of a strike like this. And then, you know, they're feeding constant 24-7 high-quality, you know, camera footage back to you know, a trailer in Nevada or whatever. So, you know, they're observing what it is. And it's hard for me to believe that, you know, anybody observing this,

even if they're not really particularly well trained, wouldn't be able to identify things like teachers arriving early in the morning to school, you know, parents dropping their kids off to school, kids walking in and out of school at certain hours, leaving for lunch. I mean, I mean, okay, so the math. are old. I get that. It's inexcusable, but I get it. I don't get, didn't they observe the target beforehand? That's two-part question. And the other thing is Iran has a major problem with Mossad and

Israeli agents, right? They constantly are fighting this issue. They could have had, why didn't they have one of their Israeli, you know, traitors, basically, go and case the joint before they found it. Well, you know, the Iranian interpretation is that it was done intentionally for all the reasons that you mentioned, that if they have such a good intelligence, they could locate specific individuals inside the country and kill them, how could you possibly hit a school full of kids and teachers and so forth in the middle of a school day? So, you know, that's the way many of them feel about it. You know, the way these targeting practices were. is my understanding is that there are some targets that are heavily surveilled and tracked in these ways,

or they use signals intelligence and so forth to identify certain individuals or certain targets. But it's not necessarily they always do it. A lot of it is done by satellite imagery. So the satellite imagery probably generates the bulk of the targets that are hit in a country. And these are big stationary targets that they think they're hitting, at least on paper, like naval bases and military bases. So you don't necessarily need to be over them all the time. to see what's going on, you do probably need to update your imagery and so forth periodically

because, as I said, the use of the at the building changes over time. Like most buildings, they may turn over their purpose or the ownership and so forth. So it seems like in this case it was likely, people we spoke to indicated that it was likely that satellite imagery was used. But even like there's no other reconstruction of the attack, I think, but UK Channel 4 as well too, there was imagery of this site that actually showed for many, many years. It was a school, including shadows of the children standing in the courtyard of the school, very clear, granular information like that.

Also, if you were to Google again, the school had a pretty big online presence. So you could see the kids at that location, you know, doing activities, doing sports, painting, drawing, normal things kids would do. Playground. There must have been a playground. there was a playground, which is very visible, including on the satellite imagery. So, you know, I would say that it's very hard to imagine how it happened other than either people didn't care or some people think they did it intentionally or something like that. And I think that the major issue also is that if you look at the command climate, which is being created by the leaders of the Pentagon and so forth, as you mentioned, they are talking about lethality all the time. I mean, they're saying that they abolish a civilian protection agencies.

It said indicating the laws of war are irrelevant and woke or something. That's the message clearly being given by the leadership. And even if not everyone in the military agrees with that, you know, it inevitably influences people and their behavior and conduct further down the chain because that's your leadership. And you take your cue from your leadership. And even if you don't want to kill civilians or children in the school, it's been clearly indicated that you won't be punished for that at minimum if it happens.

It's not like they're not looking for people to punish for things like that. So you would take less care to avoid it in any case inevitably or some people would do that. So I think that these old things are all contributing to creating circumstances where this would happen. And even still, like we're all upset about people who write these stories. We've got tremendous response. We're having this interview. Pentagon doesn't care. The military doesn't care.

The U.S. government doesn't care. So for what they view it and their perception of it is, it's just a embarrassing incident that they're going to deal with by not acknowledging it. Maybe at some point they'll issue some perfumatory turf statements saying X, Y, and Z happened, or there's some glitch. Blaming AI, blaming some extraneous factor. I really think blaming AI is completely ridiculous in this case. AI is a tool you used to gather information. He's still human beings signing off on all these strikes. So, yeah, I think that that's the case.

And so, you know, I don't think people should have any other expectation about it. And I do hope to people around the world, though, people in Iran, too, who maybe had a different perception of what the intentions of the U.S. government were in the war may look at this as kind of a wake-up call that actually there's not really this high degree of standard of care for civilians or in this case, Iranian civilians. Yeah, whatever liberals that are there and the government or that are there in general that still have this idea that America. is coming to save us. The yanks are coming to save us. Nonsense. Nonsense. I think they did it on purpose. And I think the people who are in Iran who looks at it as if they did it on purpose should accept it as that. You murdered a bunch of kids, for God's it. What is the government going to do in regards to dealing with the deaths of all of these people? Or does the government get involved in situations like this, meaning dealing with the outcome, the repercussions of the

the deaths of all of these kids and the damage done to all the parents? Or is that just something that the parents has to accept? Well, you know, does the government get involved in helping after? While they're fighting a war, right? Yeah, well, you know, we spoke to some local authorities there and like they're doing the things that you might expect that after a school shooting in America. They're giving psychologists and so forth to the kids and to the parents. But I mean, like after something like this happens, like what can you, what psychologists, and my opinion, like, what can they even say at this point? But, you know, they're trying to have a rally around it as a cultural issue and, you know, giving this type of support. We just speak to some of the psychologists and the things

they told us were really harrowing because, you know, a lot of the kids, like, first of all, a lot of the parents, they never got the full bodies of the kids back because they were basically ripped apart by the bombs. So all they got was like a foot with a sock on it that had the SpongeBob sock and they knew they put the sponge bob sock in their kid that day. Or, you know, there's got a backpack and the backpack had a sandwich in it that was uneaten. And the mom knew that she made that sandwich for that backpack that day. And that's kind of all they have. So, you know, that's, and there's even one or two kids, nothing has been found yet.

So they're still looking and try to give the parents something pulled on to. A lot of kid parents have been talking to the inanimate objects of the kid, you know, and just talking to them as though the kid was there, like that type of thing. And a lot of the kids who survived, they feel like survivors guilt. These are like seven-year-old kids. Some of them have been like burning themselves lighter so they can feel the burning that their friends felt before they died. Some of them, you know, are still afraid that the American government is going to come back and kill them again. And some of them, I should tell the psychologist that they believe that not only was the attack intentional,

but the goal of the war was to kill all the kids in that school. And the war will not end until the U.S. military comes and kills every kid who was at Shedger, that day, and then that's the purpose of the conflict. That's the way the kids are interpreting it because it's an unbelievably traumatic incident. And also, so some of the parents whose kids were killed, you know, they are telling the teachers, like, how, why didn't you save my kid? Like, what, I thought you said that my kid was just like your kid, and then why is my kid dead? And obviously, the teacher, what can you even say to that?

They didn't know what to do or that. I'm not going to hit to school that day. So all those type of psychological impacts have been very, very pronounced. all the first responders too because we interviewed a lot of them where they told us was very harrowing. They arrived at that right after the bombs hit. They just said they came to the school which they were very familiar with and then just the yard was full of the body parts of the kids who they knew and then their hands they were digging through them and their nails were filled with the brains of the kids and they wouldn't come out with the showering and things like that.

So, you know, it's just a psychological impact in the town, just a pretty small town to be It has been devastating. The government is trying to pursue legal action, like international courts, international law. I think they're realistic, though, in the sense that it's not really much that these institutions can really do to the U.S. government. And the U.S. has been dismantling the ICC right now because of the, they tried to prosecute Netanyahu.

It seems to be the motivation. So, you know, even whatever meager protections did exist, they're trying to undermine them. So I think there's more that, you know, they're just going to have to accept that this happened and there's not much accountability that's likely to be forthcoming. And I do think at some point, maybe

years on the land or whatever, the U.S. will issue some statement about it, but it's just going to be perfunctory and it's just going to be another unhappy understanding its episode in the relationship between Iran and the U.S. that maybe they'll try to take revenge for one day. Maybe that

will be the military operations have been waged in the name of the kids at the school and things like that. Maybe that'll be the way they frame it. But You know, when you're a weaker country, you guess a more powerful country, you know, your avenues for redress have always been limited throughout history, unfortunately. Is it fair to assume that the U.S. government knew within, let's just say, hours, exactly what happened and how it went down and that there was no mystery here whatsoever, and that there is not really a real investigation and that everything, this right now, they're just dragging their feet. and installing for time and hoping that everybody forgets about this.

You know, I always have to say absolutely because, look, the first thing they did when the report to the school came out being hit was lie about it. They said that the Iranians hit it. It wasn't another government which revealed that wasn't the case. It was just ordinary reporters

and open source researchers who viewed the video footage that was recovering from the town that identified the munitions as being American munitions. So the Tom Hawk missile is a very exquisite system. You could describe it, expensive and unique. The Iranians don't operate it. Only the U.S. and U.S. allies operated.

So that was the first response, which is completely wrong. Secondly, as we mentioned, we spoke to some former people in the DoD, told us that, look, they could tell you immediately if they hit those coordinates. So that's not a mystery. they, like, as soon as it happens, they can tell you if someone punched in those coordinates if they were struck, and they never really fall up about that. Like, they could do it within an hour. It's been eight months.

They haven't done that. So that's another data point. And then they've continued lying about it since then after they revealed that they said, well, that that's not what it was there or we're looking into it. Or, you know, Trump, the commander chief has said repeatedly he doesn't care. There's nothing. He said that why you still asking about this? you know, he's indicated it's not a priority.

It's not something that is in there, something that they give any consideration to. So that's another aspect of it. So these things all kind of accumulate a little bit. So, you know, I will say also that everyone who's found out about what happened there has been reporters. And, you know, the New York Times, maybe has some resources.

Dropside, I tell you, has way less budget than the Department of Defense. I think they're asking for a $1.5 trillion dollar budget. Our budget is supposed to say infinitely less than that. We were able to reconstruct all this. So, you know, it shows that they're obviously not devoting their tremendous resources to doing it because it's not something which they care about. It's embarrassment.

It's embarrassment to their narrative of the situation. And they're dealing with embarrassment by trying to be silent and hoping it goes away, trying to think of some sort of mitigating PR narrative, maybe blaming AI and so forth, diffusing the conversation entirely to that subject. That's how they're going to deal with it. But, you know, I always say this is a stain, which will say on Sancom indefinitely.

It's just like a Milai massacre we still talk about. Yeah, the Minab massacre is up that scale undoubtedly. And, you know, that's exactly what's going to happen. And, you know, there are also other massacres that place on the same day in southern Iran. We might do some stories about that, too. There was a girls' volleyball practice not far from there in the town called Le Merritt, which was hit by another Tomahawk. No, one thing by Tomahawk is hit by a PRSN missile,

which is a experimental missile, which explodes above the target and then dislodges tens of thousands of people of tungsten or shrapnel. And they totally ripped apart the girls at this volleyball practice. And some of the survivors, I think about 18 people were killed, but some of the survivors were blinded or their inners were ripped out by the missile. So that also happened on the same day. And they lied about that, too. They said it was an Iranian missile again, even though we have the footage and the aftermath of that bombing as well. So there's lying in the sense that anyone you would expect any, you know, quote-unquote authoritarian government to lie.

Yeah, that's what they're doing about all this. And we're piecing together with minimal resources what happened as journalists and other outlets there are as well. But, you know, they have all the data because they know what they did and they're not coming it out. So that kind of speaks, kind of tells you what it is in and of itself. They clearly knew that it was that they did it. I mean, come on. Like, this wasn't even, the U.S. was attacking Iran. A bunch of people died in a school.

Why would Iran hit its own school, right? Iran is going to be firing missiles at bases that are in other countries, not at its own location. Like, it made no sense from the very beginning. It's like Russia blew up its own pipeline. It was always nonsense. You think they're embarrassed. I don't think they're embarrassed. I don't think they carry one way together.

Yeah, well, you know, it. I don't think they care a person, and that's the inference I get from their actions and words. But also, like, you know, there's a desire to put forward a pristine narrative of their motivations and their actions in these conflicts. To the public, the global public, also to the people inside the institution. Nobody likes to be, you know, like Brad Cooper at one of these testimonies, a reporter for Channel 4 who was reporting on Amina Massacre as she was young. yelling at him and calling out to him and just darted off. I think they prefer to be just lauded as heroes and have a pristine record of what they did in the conflict. This war is very unpopular among Americans.

It's probably the most unpopular war that's been recorded in the last century. The Vietnam War took years to lose this level of unpopularity that the Iran War hit almost immediately. And, you know, I don't think most Americans really want their tax dollars to be used to kill children and their girls elementary school around the world in a conflict that has nothing to do with them and that's been harming their interests on that anyways. So, you know, I think these things all add up.

And I do think it's upon the American public to a degree also, like we're giving the information about what's going on here. And then they can do something with that when they protest or vote or so forth. But, you know, it should be entered in the historical record and people can do what they want with it. And the historical

record of this war, I think it will be unfavorable. It will show it was an unpopular war of aggression that was fought, didn't achieve his goals, killed huge number of civilians, and committed, as I said, the single worst single individual incident of U.S. war crime in many many decades. So I'm glad you brought it up, and I feel like that is a good place to sort of end it. But, you know, as a last question, Rattaza, I mean, I was five years old when the Milai Massacre happened.

And nevertheless, I remember its aftermath. because it was in the newspaper and on national television for years. It was, there were congressional hearings. The media, which was, of course, a lot more robust at the time. You know, after this story, there were dissidents within the army who, you know, who kept stepping forward. I mean, it was a slow, constant burn. And until Lieutenant Callie was held responsible and, you know, we can, it's a different story as to whether that was enough or not, but anyway, until he, until his trial, basically, the story just didn't go away.

I wonder, I mean, how many Americans even know that the Minab Massacre even happened? And if you walked into a mall in Paramus, New Jersey, and asked a thousand people, you know, what was the Minab Massacre? How many would be able to answer that question? Yeah, you know, Ted, this is something, it's kind of a disturbing sort of development. because, you know, I remember the Iraq War in 2003, and I was probably a teenager at that time, but, you know, there was a tremendous public debate prior to the launching of the Iraq War. And obviously, it's remembered rightly as a complete, you know, there was lying and it was a softest tree, and there was just fabrications.

And it was seen as a very, you know, shameful episode, the fact that the war started on false pretenses. But there was at least a discussion about it. And there was huge protests about it. People were talking about it pro and against. The government felt it had to make a case about the war one way or another, even if it was a false case. In this case, the war was just started without any discussion, without any public debate, without much public response for the most part. There wasn't really huge anti-war protests. There wasn't pro-war protests.

It just was an elite-driven exercise entirely. And it's continued as an elite-driven exercise entirely. If it wasn't for inflation and gas prices, I don't think it wouldn't notice the war is going on at all for the most part. I think that speaks to a shift in the American public, which has somehow been sterilized or something in the course of the past few decades. There's not the raucous public response to, maybe there's this exhaustion or maybe people after the Gaza protests were kind of suppressed. There were the people who would protests and been kind of chasing now, maybe. And the discussion of the course of the war or how it came about or the justifications for it or what's happened during it, incidents like Minab. Yeah, as you said, there's not been a public sphere that is seemingly very activated to talk about these things.

I think it may, you know, it could be broader than the conversation of this show, but maybe this changes in the technological environment, atomization, the fragmentation of attention and so forth had all corresponded to sort of dissolve the shared public sphere. fear that maybe we had inhabited to a greater degree before, such that some people's society are very aware of the Minab's incident or among other incidents. And some people could not even tell you in a million years, even that the war is going on for the most part. That's very possible, I think. So, you know, I don't know. I thought about the same thing. There's a lot of reasons that it could be. I think that if most people knew about it, I think their natural human inclination would be to recoil from it and demand accountability. But like you said, I think most people don't know about it and had the establishment media so to speak you know i can't say that

they haven't covered it at all they have covered it a little bit they probably they haven't given it the level of coverage that the mili massacre had which was covered every single day and uh you know i don't know they had they had reporters in vietnam by the hundreds of dead reporters right right yeah and nothing happened like these uh publications which you know for the most part demanding a decreasing share of public attentions this fragmentation's happening a lot but But the foreign bureaus don't really exist anymore for the most part. They've been dissolved or scaled down tremendously. So that's another aspect of it.

So yeah, it's unfortunate and I think it speaks to foreign policy in general, just become a function of the executive branch and the public is decreasingly involved in it, absent a draft or something like that, which doesn't seem likely in the near future. Yeah. Rattaza, thanks you so much for joining us. Marta Hussein is the senior national security and foreign affairs journalist at DropSight News. He's a co-author of a major reporting piece called Behind the Minab Massacre. So go to DropSight News, check that out.

It's a long, painful read, but I think we all have a responsibility to know what happened. And thank you very much and look forward to speaking to you again soon. Thank you, yes. Thanks, man. So we should, let's see, go through and see if we have any comments to talk about here. Thanks very much to Ray for the $5. O'Brien 37 to beam up. We need to get off this rock.

Have a good day, everyone. Thank you very much for that. And there was a previous comment that was a little more lighthearted than we just spent the last half hour talking about. But if you so, it's irrelevant question. I have a leaky toilet. Does anyone know of a good plumber? Huge bonus if he could fly a commercial plane, too. I don't know if you saw the latest Iranian Lego video lampooning the narrative about the Fly Dubai incident.

Fly Dubai, by the way, it's being reported that it wasn't a knife. It was apparently an axe that the co-pilot brought on board. Because who doesn't bring their axe on board? Like Jack Nichols, I mean, the shining. And my first question was like, well, how did they get a knife on board? Well, a knife is hard, but an axe. Everybody brings their axe. Right.

That seems even weird. But I think they took the axe from the plane. I don't think they bought it on board. I think they're saying, well, how did he get a knife on board? And it was like, well, wait, it wasn't a knife. There was an axe. There was an axe on the plane. So, like, it's used in case of emergencies or whatever.

Yeah. That's the American's there. And they took the axe and used the axe. Which is even weirder. It's like, how is he swinging an axe in a cockpit? Yeah, there's not a lot of room in there, if you've ever been in there. Or you can just look, you can look inside until there's not a lot of room to swing around. I mean, of course, yeah, the idea that, by the way, did you hear this, the hero Israeli plumber who supposedly leveled the plane out?

So he claimed that he You're laughing already Because you know what I'm going to say He claimed he was watching some TV He was a fan of some TV show about air disasters And that from watching this TV show He knew what to do That basically after the plane plunged from 34 to

From 34 to 17,000 feet In 29 seconds And like by the way There was an expert on CNN who said that if that were true, that the plane had dropped that quickly, it would have disintegrated. And also that the... There's just so many things here that are just don't make a lot of sense. Also, the rudders were shorn off. So how were they able to stabilize the plane in order to bring it in for a landing?

But anyway, the point is somebody really got burst. So the one thing that's being doubted, I kind of don't doubt. which is the Iranian guy, the Indian pilot after the attack was able to open the door. I believe that. I'm like, sure. I mean, people have, they're not just dead instantaneously. They have energy. And probably he was highly motivated to open that door.

Okay, I get that. So then the Israeli dude, the plumber comes in and like pulls the thing up. Now, apparently it takes tremendous steady pressure to do that in a situation like that. to level the plane out. And then I guess then we have the Kumbaya, Russia, Ukrainian co-pilots who come in and finish the job and bring the plane in for a landing. It's, I don't know, I don't believe,

I don't know if I believe the plumber who watched it all on a, on a YouTube, how-to video. Like, you know, how to land a commercial plane. Every Israeli can land a plane. Of course. It can land a plane, right? He's the every man. that can just go in and just pull.

I knew a guy. I knew a guy who was an air traffic controller in Ohio, civil aviation, right? And he told me this terrible story about this guy who was, he got a, they got a call. And he's like, I'm on a, I'm in a Cessna. And the pilot, he just had a heart attack. And he's out. He's gone. And I don't know how to fly the plane.

And, you know, he's not the co-pilot. He's a passenger, right? He's just sitting next to the pilot. the guy. And, you know, so the, he tried to, he said, he tried to keep the guy calm and say, I'm going to teach you how to land the plane. He couldn't land the plane. The dude crashed. And that's a really simple plane, right? I mean, if you've ever, I mean, I have flown one of those planes a little bit. And it's like, it's simple. There's not a lot to it, really. This is far more complex. I mean, you know, you have, and there was no word that, like, an air traffic

controller was saying look for the orange dial look for you know that's your altimeter or you know what i mean like there's he did it all on his own i'm like just from having watched the tv show i mean bummer ted of course you could land it's right and and by the way israeli bummer in charge of the national debt would be okay and keep in mind the fighting apparently second places are falling like so they're fighting a zero g yeah so apparently it was a full at least one one full G, right? And that, oh, so that's the thing too, right? So while they're supposedly moving toward the cockpit, by all accounts, you would be

effectively zero-gy. Your feet are off the ground. You're literally- You're fighting his ergy. I was in an incident when I was 16 years old. I was flying to Reckivik, Iceland, with my mom. And the plane lost about 7,000 feet of altitude all of a sudden. And let me just say it was a fucking hot mess.

Everybody who wasn't buckled in went straight to the ceiling. People were covered with blood. People lost teeth. They broke their noses. People had their glasses break out into their eyes. They lost their sight. I'd say probably a third to a quarter of the passengers had significant injuries that required them being hospitalized.

and then, you know, and the rest of us were all bruised and beaten up, right? You know, we all thought we were going to die. If you saw the plane afterwards, right, there's shit all over the, I mean, literally, there's shit and piss all over the place from people losing, you know, evacuating their bowels. There's blood smears all over the place. The oxygen masks have been all been deployed. All the luggage fell out from the overheads on top of people.

everything's been the drink card's been banging around you know on the ceiling i mean it's basically like you like god took the plane and went like right well that's that's what happened in this fly dubai incident was a lot worse a lot and by the way and they were fighting as this was supposedly taking place yeah it's like a it's like it's like an action movie like air force one where harrison four is hanging off the back of the plane like Come on. Yeah. It just sounds a bit much.

It just sounds a bit much. And then you get the Kumbaya scene at the end with the Ukraine and then Russian join hands and land the plan. It's like, okay. Okay. We're all, all of us Jews have to stick together. Yeah. And then BB's like, come here, big guy. Like, oh.

It's crazy. I mean, yeah, I don't know what really happened, but I know that it's not exactly the tale we've been told. No. Okay. I'm in wait in C mode. Anyway, thanks, Jamal, for doing this this morning. Thank you to Murtaza Hussein for joining us from Dropsite News. Thank you all for your support. Please have a great weekend. We'll be back Monday for the regular two-hour show on Monday, 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. Eastern time.

Thank you to producer Robbie West. We'll see you then. Thank you to Trent for arranging this interview. And anyway, enjoy a beautiful fall day wherever you are, or if you're in the southern hemisphere, I guess it's a spring day. All right, by all. Have a good one, gosh. Ciao.