DeProgram with John Kiriakou and Ted Rall - DeProgram with Ted Rall and John Kiriakou: “China Has Your Number”

Episode Date: September 4, 2025

Today on “DeProgram with Ted Rall and John Kiriakou,” look for hard-hitting analysis of cyber espionage, AI warfare, child sabotage, and the intrigue surrounding John Bolton. China’s Cyberattack: The Salt Typhoon cyberattack, uncovered last year, targets over 80 countries, infiltrating telecoms and stealing data from nearly every American, per a joint statement by Western allies. Described as “unrestrained,” Salt Typhoon tries to track politicians and activists globally. Experts see it as China’s boldest move yet, rivaling U.S. cyber capabilities.Doomsday AI: War games show AI models like GPT-4 tend to escalate conflicts aggressively, even favoring nuclear options, alarming experts. Why this bias? The Pentagon’s rush to deploy AI-driven defenses risks warmongering autonomy without human oversight. DARPA’s $25M program seeks to ensure AI reliability.Hybrid Warfare with Teen Saboteurs: Russia and Ukraine exploit teens via Telegram for sabotage, from arson to bombings, with cases like a Russian teen jailed for targeting a warplane. Both nations use blackmail and deception, ruining young lives. Over 175 Ukrainian child dupes face charges.John Bolton: Federal agents raided Bolton’s home on August 22, seizing computers, iPhones, and documents over alleged Espionage Act violations. The probe, reopened by FBI Director Kash Patel, questions Biden’s inaction. Bolton faces potential 25-year imprisonment.

good to see you. Hey, good to see you, man. Welcome to Deep Program. I'm Ted Raul. That's John Kariaku. And it is Thursday, September 4th. We're here, as promised, 5 p.m. Easter time, as we are, Monday through Friday, every single weekday, unless we're not. So, but normally we are. Okay, so today we've got a lot to talk about John. And obviously, as usual, we're always responsive to your questions and comments. Yes, indeed. We love those. So China, big cyber attack revealed last year,

Salt Typhoon is the code word, targeted over 80 countries, got into all the telephone companies, stole data, apparently, according to the experts, from nearly pretty much every single American citizen. So that's why the headline today is China's got your number. We'll talk a little bit about that. I was fascinated by this. There's war games models using AI models like GPT4,

tend to escalate conflicts, kind of like in the movie war games back from the 80s. Why is that? We'll talk about that. And there's a story out of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict where both sides are using Telegram, which is very popular in that part of the world, to basically recruit and exploit naive teenagers

children, really, to ask them to participate in sabotage operations, usually not for patriotic reasons, but for money. And they use blackmail and deception to do so, ruin their lives over 175 child dupes from Ukraine, face charges for a attempted, lame attempted sabotage in Russia. And finally, we know, courtesy of the New York Post and others, what exactly the feds got out of John Bolton's house. So what first? What shall we tell you? Man, what first?

There's so much to say. I will add something about this sabotage thing. Great. There was a piece, and I think it was in the New York Times. I'm going to say three, four, five months ago saying that there are other, there are non-state actors like terrorist groups. that are targeting disaffected teenagers on places like Discord or Twitch or whatever. And for 50 bucks, you know, or a hundred bucks getting them to throw a Molotov cocktail,

put a small, you know, explosive device in front of a store or a bank or whatever. This is a thing now. It's not just the Russians and the Ukrainians. bad people are convincing disaffected teenagers to do bad things. And more often than not, they get caught. Yeah, well, as you'd expect, because they're hardly professionals. So reading from the New York Times today, this is how it works. First, an anonymous user contacts kids over telegram, WhatsApp, or a video game chat with an offer of some money.

Once contact is made, handlers provide instructions. Sometimes the instructions are disguised as a geo-euro. location game. Yes, we pay for photos here, says one ad, asking for location stamped pictures of police cars and ambulances. This is a quote from the ad. It's like Pokemon Go, but for money. Sometimes the methods can be darker than deceit. A 14-year-old Ukrainian girl was harassed by her Russian recruiters. They got access to her intimate photos, then threatened to post them online. Exactly. Came a saboteur. And kids have committed suicide because of right aside from this kind of

aside from the war yeah yeah it's it's rampant actually it is when this started um you know my kid uh was of that age he was a he was a high school kid and i had to sit down with them and say listen if anything like that ever happens you have to know i'll be there for you don't be embarrassed like you know i won't give a shit except i'll want to kill the people who are doing that yeah yeah yeah i'm not going to be upset with you parents really need to talk to their kids about this.

Amen to that. This is shame on both Russia and Ukraine for doing something like this. Kids are so easily exploited. Their brains aren't fully formed. They think that a couple of bucks like this is a lot of money, and they don't process the notion that they're probably going to get caught. and if they're caught, it's going to cause no end of legal problems. Yeah, this is a real shame.

I mean, okay, so I mean, in the interest of, I mean, I think there's a difference. But, John, you know, during World War II, resistance organizations in like, you know, Greece and France, you know, our native lands, they used a lot of teenagers to do conduct resistance activities. And a bunch of them were caught by the Nazis and tortured and executed. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I guess the question that like the Russian and Ukrainian intelligence services might ask is, how is this any different? I mean, I think it's different. I think it's different. You know, if your survival is on the line, that's one thing.

And if you volunteer, right? And if you volunteer. I mean, I think the difference is, like, I don't think. the French resistance or the Greek resistance were running around basically blackmailing kids with nude photos of themselves. Indeed not. To say like, hey, fight the

Nazis or else. I mean, they were these were patriotic young people who hated the Germans and the invaders and they just wanted to kick them out no matter what. That's exactly right. They were just patriots. As long as you go in with your eyes open.

You told this story yesterday about your grandfather. My grandmother did something similar and was caught and imprisoned by the quisling government that was in Athens at the time. My grandfather bribed a prison guard with American magazines to let her go and they escaped to the United States. But yeah, like I said, kids can't process this kind of thing. They can't really consider ideas of what might happen to them if they get caught. And it's just, I think it's just very, very dangerous, very dangerous. Over on YouTube, Brueaille d'Efinitif says, which is Brueaille is a great word, it's fog. Last year, mostly Bulgarians were caught in Paris doing pro-Russian actions like smearing tags on monuments,

all said that they were recruited on telegram. Wow. You see? You see there? I mean, you know, at least that's just graffiti. At least, yes, there's that. It's not planning a bomb in front of a police station or what have you. No.

Still. So, all right. So, no, it is. I mean, you know, I mean, maybe what we need is an international, I mean, I do think we need an international convention. We have an international convention against mines. Not everybody adheres to it, but it reduces the use of them enormously. The U.S. is one of the worst offenders because we didn't sign that treaty. I think we need one against drone warfare. I don't know how you feel about that. Oh, my God. Amen. And you know what makes that even more important

and more immediate is the fact that drone warfare is the future. Oh, yeah. And it's going to be terrible. Yeah, it's the present there. And it is the present in Somalia. You know, we've drone this shit out of people in Somalia. It doesn't even make the papers. You know, and I interviewed Bernie Sanders when I wrote that biography of him. And I asked him about this. And I was really surprised.

You know, I said, how do you feel about it? He said, yeah, killing's killing. You know, who cares if you use a drone or a, or you shoot the person in the head? And I was like, the difference is that it's frictionless. You don't even risk a single one of your citizens to do this. You just literally push a button and sit in a trailer in Nevada and watch someone blow up. And I think it's too easy. And speaking of sitting in a trailer in Nevada, I hope that our viewers and listeners know the name Daniel Hale.

I think Daniel Hale is an especially heroic whistleblower. who went to prison for four and a half years after blowing the whistle on the drone program. He tells a terrible story that is worthy of repeating here. He was in this trailer in Nevada, on an airbase in Nevada, operating like a video game that toggles for a drone. And the drone is over Afghanistan. And his boss is at McDillah Air Force Base in Florida. They're both looking at the screen.

Crazy. They see the target. And his boss says, fire. And Daniel says, I can't fire. There are two little kids with him. And his boss says, those aren't kids. Those are goats. And he said, I'm telling you, I'm looking at them and they're kids.

And the guy says, fire or be court-martialed. What the? And so he fired. and he killed a nine-year-old girl and a 12-year-old girl. And he said that he went home that night and he told his roommate, I became a child killer today. And that's when he decided to blow the whistle. And of course, what happened to him, he's arrested,

he's charged with multiple counts of espionage. And what a joke. Goes through the whole process. He was extraordinarily brave by refusing to take a plea deal. and he went to trial. I happened to be at his sentencing. I went with Tom Drake. And Daniel Hale, you know, Daniel, if you ask Daniel about it, Daniel will say, oh, I'm weak, I'm soft, I buckled, I'm this, I'm that.

This guy's a hero, bona fide American hero, who sacrificed literally everything in his life so that the American people could have the truth about the drone program. I said to him afterwards, he was suicidal. And I said to him, it's not as bad as you think it is. I said, you're going to get 15% off for good behavior. You're going to get six to 12 months home confinement. And if you tell them that you're an alcoholic or a drug addict, they'll put you in something called RDAP, the residential drug and alcohol program.

And you get 12 months off your sentence if you just go to the classes. So he got out of prison, I don't know, year, year and a half ago. He was on Twitter for a minute. And I was like, oh, my God, Daniel Hale, welcome home, American hero, Daniel Hale. A week later, he had shut down his Twitter account and he's disappeared. And all of my friends are like, have you heard from Daniel? No, nobody's heard from Daniel. I don't know what happened to him.

But anyway, a long way of saying, if you kill people by drone, it's the same as walking up to them and shooting them in the head. It doesn't make it easier. No, and in fact, it might make it worse. Yeah, rebellious rainbow unicorn says

shooting other people in, others in person risks PTSD. Some things that's why the Nazis made gas chambers. Too many Nazis went nuts from killing people in person. And that's true. They did have problems with Germans, kind of losing their minds when they were shooting people

in those pits in Poland and in Western Russia but they also and they tried to get them drunk on schnapps and they tried to do that I think they came up with the gas chambers because it was a, they're German it was more efficient.

Right, right, exactly. Exactly. They do, I don't, but I don't go ahead, go ahead, sorry. No, I mean, I just think that the problem with drone warfare is even if you accept the idea that we should be assassinating people on the other side of the world, which I don't. But let's just say that you accept that.

At least if you send a sniper or someone out there to get an eye, you know, draw an eye, the story you told John illustrates the point. There's no way that a pilot at 10,000 feet, no matter how high resolution their lens is, or a drone, no matter how, you know, even if we can read the date on a penny on the ground, there's no way it can see what's going on. It's just too far away. The angle's not right. And drones fuck up over and over. There was some study during the wars in like, well, when you were at the agency, you know, after 9-11, the drone attacks in Waziristan, and it's hard to get good numbers. But the guesstimate was that 50 out of, basically

49 out of 50 victims of drone attacks in Western Pakistan were innocent victims. And, you know, either they were mistargeted or they were just like in the wrong place at the wrong time when the drone blew the hellfire missile blew up someone else. Ted, I had coffee an hour ago with a British human rights attorney, Clive Smith. And he is representing Afia Siddiqui, which is a different story. But we had this same conversation, this same exact conversation that you're talking about right now

where, well, I said to him when he raised the issue of using drones in Afghanistan, I said, you don't have any idea how many weddings we droned just because there was a tall guy wearing white. Yes. Right? I mean, that was the criteria. Or a black turban under the doctrine that Talibu's always wore black turbans. That's right. A lot of other people. And then we would have to, you know, send a million dollars and ask the government to, you know, spread the million around to the family.

And then we would do it again and again and again and again. And sometimes we would blow up a wedding on purpose because there was some senior Talib there. and then we would blow up his funeral and kill everybody that went to the funeral. Right. Well, listen. The double tap strike. 99% plus of those people were just innocent civilians. You know, local villagers, relatives, you know, whatever.

If I had a relative, if I had a relative who, let's say, was involved in crime or whatever, okay, he's a relative of mine. and he dies, I'm going to go to his funeral. Does that mean I deserve to be blown up, too? Of course not. No, it's absurd. No, it's absurd. Hey, John, question for you from Garasimus Katz.

Off topic, but can you give Greeks your honest opinion on Kimberly Gilfoyle as U.S. ambassador to Greece? See, now you put me on the spot there. Yes, I'll give you. But first, before these. comments pass us i want to say thank you vm very much thank you so don thank you angela and thank you marble honest to god we we couldn't do this without you so thank you very very much true and we're going to come back to your questions in a second yeah we will uh Kimberly gilfoil i don't even know what to say you know what you could just say pass no i want to be honest

too. I have never been a Kimberly Gilfoyle fan. And the reason why she got an ambassadorship, any ambassadorship, is because Donald Trump Jr. broke up with her and they didn't want her around to cause trouble in his next relationship. It's the sad truth. And so they decided, oh, we'll give her an ambassadorship and she'll be out for the next three years. Right? Sure. This is Saddam Hussein used to do this. If there was anybody, that was particularly popular, especially if they were a military officer. If you became a general and you made some real wins on the battlefield against the Iranians, Saddam's going to be afraid of you that you're going to try to overthrow him and make yourself

president. So he made you ambassador to the Philippines, right? Get you out of the way. Exactly. It's what the military does. Like my father was in the Air Force. He would say, like, oh, they just, if you're a pain in the ass, they just promote you to the other side of the world or the other side of the country.

Exactly. So they gave Kimberly Gilfoyle this job just to get her out. Now, it just happened to be in Greece. And as a Greek American, as a Greek, on the Greek citizen, I thought, oh, this is not going to be good. This is not going to be good. Greece has had a long string of popular ambassadors. Going back to and not including Nicholas Burns, but everybody who came after Nick Burns, everybody hate, even those of us who worked for Nick Burns, hated Nick Burns. But there have been a lot of really good American ambassadors.

George Tunis, a very important Greek-American businessman being the most recent. I mean, it's a pretty sweet assignment in terms of your lifestyle. It's a sweet assignment. Oh, yeah. I mean, it's just and the ambassador's residence is magnificent. So I've watched Kimberly Guilfoyle very closely as she has gone through the process, not just her Senate hearings, although I watched those as well. I watched every interview that she has given, and I got to give her credit. She has tried so hard to come down positively in the eyes of the Greeks.

She has said all the right things. And, you know, people, like I subscribe to Kathaméryini, the daily newspaper, and also to Ethnic Oskidikas, the English version of Ethnicoskidicas, which National Herald. It's the big English language Greek-American newspaper. And, you know, people are shitting all over her. This is a terrible appointment. She only got it because she was close to Trump. But the truth is that she's an attorney. she's a former assistant U.S. attorney.

She does have the ear of the president, whether she's in the inner circle or not anymore, and she's not. But she's not an idiot. She's also very much a political animal. You remember, before she started dating Donald Trump Jr., she was with Newsom. She was married to Gavin Newsome.

She's had too much work done, And I think that's a big part of the problem. I agree with you. But she's not stupid. She's very politically savvy. It's only going to be three years. We could have done worse. We could have had Nick Burns come back.

God forbid. And, you know, just as an aside, there used to be, there may be still be a newspaper called Pondiki, which means little mouse, right? And it was a left-wing satirical newspaper. I love those. like in France, Le Canard en chenet. Exactly right.

In fact, they might be like sister papers. Okay. So they had a photoshopped picture once of a nude ambassador Burns on his hands and knees with a dog collar on. How come I don't get to work for publications? I know, right? If I ever run into exile to France, I'm going straight to Le Caneer. And the minister of education, Vaso Papandreo, who I never liked, I never could stand her. She has a whip, and she's beating him on his naked butt with a whip while she's got him by the dog collar.

He was so angry. He lodged an official protest. It's like, dude, it's a satirical newspaper. And what? You never heard of freedom of speech and freedom of the press? so we all went out and bought these newspapers. It was the back cover of the paper that day, and all of us taped them up in front of our desks.

He didn't have access to the station because he was the ambassador. He's not a station employee, so he never saw it. And I'm not confirming or denying the existence of a station in Athens. I'm just saying that's where I put up my thing. So anyway, I think this could be. We've got some questions to answer here from people who have. have kindly paid VM. Thank you so much for the 50 euros. Appreciate it. Abid fan, don't miss a day. Like our thoughts on Belgian, well, this will be your thoughts, on Belgian intelligence

at some point, if you have any. Yeah, you know what? I won't make any jokes about how Belgian intelligence is an oxymoron. But I do have to tell you a Belgian story. It's not about intelligence, but it just reminds me of this. I love stories about incredibly stupid people. my ex-wife and I were on a bullet train from Paris to Amsterdam and it goes through Brussels, it goes through the Netherlands and these two like douchebag like sort of bros like 22, 23 years old get on with big duffles and they leave them in the middle of the aisle

where people are trying to walk. Several times the conductor comes by and tells them to, you know, in Flemish or whatever like get that shit out of there. And each time, you know, they pull them out. And then as soon as the guy's gone, they put them back into the aisle. This happens a number of times. And, you know, the guy's getting, the conductor is getting more and more angry. Finally, he's had enough.

The train stops. And some policemen come on with the conductor. He points it to the two guys. The cops confront them. They open the bags. and they're full of weapons, full of guns, big guns.

Come on. And I'm like, you couldn't keep them on your lap. They were, like put them on your lap. They're like duchy gun runners. I was like fucking Belgians. Anyway,

what do you think about Belgian intelligence? This is one of those, it's a small world stories. So when I was a senior in high school, We had a foreign exchange student from Brussels, Pete Jambon, and Pete and I are still like close buddies. He comes back to the States just about every year and we're all like in each other's weddings and we're godfathers to each other's kids. Pete and my three other closest friends. Pete went into private business, became very wealthy.

his brother went into government and became the director of the Belgian intelligence service. So the last time he was here in the States, we met up in Atlanta to go to another one of our best friend's son's wedding. And I said, so how's your brother doing in this Intel director slot? And he said, oh, they made him Intel director and deputy prime minister. It's the craziest thing. I said, oh, my God. Well, how's he fitting in with intelligence? And he said, you know, I never, I never realized that my brother had a hatred for Arabs.

And I'm like, what? You guys don't hate anybody. And he says, every time I call him on it, he said, oh, you don't see what I see. If you could see what I see, I said, oh, Pete, I hear that all the time. Well, if you had access to what I have access to, you'd want to kill everybody. Well, no, I used to have access to what you had access to, and I never wanted to kill anybody. but um but the belgians are very good when it comes to arabs and they pretty much ignore everything else it's all about the arabs huh they're panicked at the idea that that the Palestinian refugees for

example there are a lot of Palestinian refugees in Belgium might be there yeah right they might be terrorists. They might have been sent there. You remember France had that spate of PLO bombings and other like Islamic Jihad bombings. Absolutely. Like they got rid of all the trash cans and mailboxes. Yeah, just like we did. Did Belgium have the same issue?

Yes. Oh, yeah, Reid makes a great point. I totally forgot about that. Fowda Season 4 was filmed in Belgium in Belgium. That's exactly right. It was. And then Reed, I can remember this too. She also is asking, I'm assuming she says,

She wasn't Guilfoyle accused of sexually harassing a male intern when she worked at Fox. I seem to remember that. I think I do too. Yeah. I think I do too. I don't remember what the final result was. But yeah, I do remember that. Yeah.

Sassy. I'll tell you. It's spicy. Okay. So then, all right. Sodom, thanks for the 20 bucks. Hey, John and Ted, can you? Thank you. Can you please give us some insight as to why the Brits allowed China to build its huge embassy near the financial district and has sub-level fiber optics? Should the U.S. be concerned? It's a huge complex.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know the story about the American embassy in Moscow and the Russian embassy in Washington. They were both built around the same time. The deal was struck in the 1970s that both countries would build new embassy. And so we told the Russians, go ahead and find a plot of land and go ahead and pick what you want. So they went to literally the highest point in Washington. Yeah, I wonder why. They just wanted to get Channel 2 and Channel 7 good reception. Yeah. And, oh, by the way, you can also see the White House and the Pentagon from up there. And Signals Intelligence, right?

And Signals Intelligence is wonderful. The Russians allowed us to purchase a dry riverbed in Moscow that was actually in this in this culvert in the middle of Russia and we ended up having to tear the new embassy down because the Russians had put listening devices in literally every beam and every two by four in the entire embassy. just pulling the wires out of it would have made the building collapse. So we would not allow them to occupy their new embassy, which is way up at the top of Wisconsin Avenue, just immediately south of the National Cathedral. You could see the Russian embassy from everywhere in Washington. I love these genitals, though.

I had a college girlfriend. She was a diplomatic brat. And she grew up at the, she spent quite a few years at the American embassy in Moscow during the, I guess this would have been in the 70s, 80s. And she said that there were always shenanigans, like all of the staff, all the

cleaning people, they were all KGB, no question about it. Constantly, there were fires all the time. And so it would be like, there's a fire. Everyone has to leave. And you knew the firefighters were all KGB, and they were all going in there and planting bugs.

Everything had to be swept over and over and over. They knew they weren't catching them all. And they also were really concerned about cancer, right? Because they were beaming microwaves at the embassy and people were all getting cancer. Because when you, yeah, because you can correct me if I'm wrong. My understanding is if you talk inside a room, then the vibe, you can pick up the vibration off the glass and the window. Of the glass of the windows, exactly right.

And so the microwaves, like, allow you to hear what's going on inside. You know, Ted, when I was living in Bahrain, Bahrain, which is like joined at the hip, with the United States defense and foreign policy wise. I was the human rights officer in Bahrain. One night, I'm laying in bed with my wife and I'm reading a book. And it was really, really hot. I had no shirt on. So I'm reading a book and this thing falls onto my chest.

I'm like, what the fuck is this? So I look up, the air conditioning vent is directly above me. I pick this thing up It's clearly a bug It has wires sticking out of it There's a little battery A little watch battery on it So I put it in a zip lock bag

And the next day I took it into the embassy And I took it to my chief And he looks at it, he's holding it up He goes, yep, it's a bug all right And I said, well now what am I supposed to do? I said, my wife almost never leaves the house, but she must have gone grocery shopping or something or took our son to the park or whatever. And they immediately went in and planted this bug in the bedroom, in the bedroom. Yeah, that's bad. And my wife was a ballet teacher.

She wasn't a, she wasn't a CIA officer. I would never ever discuss anything with her because she wasn't cleared. Sure. And he said, it's because you're writing that damn human rights. rights report, he said, they don't like you one bit. And then I'll tell you what the Bahrainis used to do is whenever your tour was up, you know, we're not allowed to accept any gift worth more than $25. So whenever your tour was up, they would send everybody a Rolex. And then you had to report it to the Treasury Department and you could either just turn it over or you could turn it over and bid on it and buy it back from the Treasury to park.

I was the only one in the entire embassy that didn't get a Rolex when I left. I didn't even get a, you know, thank you. Come again. Nothing. They hated you. They hated me. Well, we're all judged by our enemies. Oh, my God. I would go into

the Minister of Interior's office and I'd say, Your Highness, you cannot just pick up a 15-year-old kid off the street for marching in a pro democracy demonstration, beat him to death and then call his parents to come and pick up the body you can't do that i have to report that to congress and it's going to jeopardize the sale of uh of weapons to bahrain i said back off angela thanks for the donation marble i love this question can someone please explain how

how laura is so influential hey uh what a mystery yeah seriously um I don't know. If someone has the answer, I honestly don't know. Listen, Laura Lumer, we have a mutual friend. And I said to the mutual friend, I said, why do you even associate with somebody like Laura Lumer? First of all, she's the only person I've ever heard of that's banned by Uber, by Lyft, and by Target for hate speech.

Seriously. She can't go to charge a day? No. She can't go. She's not welcome there. She's not welcome there. And I was like, how can you be friends with somebody like that? Oh, no, she's misunderstood.

No, she's very well understood. That's the problem. The issue here. So she ran for Congress in it was either 20, 22 or 2020. I can't remember in Donald Trump's home district of Palm Beach, and she got 24%. So even Republicans realize that she is nuts and she is so far to the right as to be unhinged, but she has this inexplicable influence over the president of the United States. I don't understand it.

Yeah, I mean, maybe she made some appearance on Fox that impressed him one time or something like that. It's often like that. John, Starlion's asking. Yeah. I thought you were really connected with Bahraini royalty. So is that true? If that's true, why would the security service still treat you like crap? The Crown Prince and I still like text each other jokes and stuff.

I just heard from him on Saturday, as a matter of fact. But when I was in Bahrain, the director of the Bahraini intelligence service was named General Ian Henderson. General Ian Henderson, who was the British colonialist who put down the Mao Mao rebellion in Rhodesia, yeah, and did everything he could to keep black Rhodesians

out of power until he just had to flee and couldn't, you know, hold them off anymore. Went to Bahrain, and they said, hey, can you set up? up an intelligence service for us. So Ian Anderson, he was the worst kind of colonial Brit to the

point where even the Bahrainians were afraid of him. I'll tell you another thing. George H.W. Bush came to Bahrain when I was there and the Emir had a gigantic dinner for him. So the Crown Prince asked that I be seated at his table. So we're sitting there and we're laughing. I was young at the time. I was I was, how old was I was I when I went to Bahrain? I was 29. and um so we're laughing and joking and i said i said who's the corpse over here at this other table and he turns and he says seriously and i said yeah it's like this 80 year old man literally wearing a brown leisure suit right with the the loud flower shirt underneath and the big wide collar with the wide lapels from the 70s sure i said yeah i said who's the stiff and he says that's that's

General Henderson. And I go, that's Ian Henderson? I said he looks like he crawled right out of the 70s. He's like, yeah, you know what? We don't talk about General Henderson. So even this is a guy who is at the time he was the heir presumptive because his grandfather was the emir and his father was the crown prince. Now he's the crown prince. But even the air presumptive was afraid of Ian Henderson to the point where he didn't even want to speak the man's name. Wow. Love that. Well, I'm dying to get your thoughts about this war games thing. So there's this article that came out in Politico about the AI doomsday machine.

Basically, the argument is that you have to have autonomous warfare, self-autonomous weapons, in other words, weapons that choose their own targets using AI are the future. There's no way to ignore it. got to do it. If we don't do it, the Chinese will do it. The Russians will do it. We have to keep up. DARPA is, of course, the big research arm of the Pentagon. They're keeping up. So, anyway, the problem that they're finding is that chat GPT and other AI models tend when faced with a dilemma, a military dilemma, or a situation or a crisis, they tend to escalate rather than de-escalate. And so obviously, you know, you don't have to have seen The Terminator a million times like I have to know how this works out. I have a theory as to why this is true, John, but I want to hear yours first.

You want to hear mine first. Ted, this is Black Mirror come to life. It really is the future. I hate to say it, and it scares the hell out of me. You know those robot dogs? That episode of Black Mirror with the robot, those are real. And they even look like that. Yeah, they look exactly like that.

Once DARPA can perfect a battery that has a long enough life that we can attach it to a robot to go fight our wars, everything changes. Because we're very quickly getting to a point where the ultimate goal is to not send human beings into battle on our side. It's to send robots, robot dogs, drones, all powered by AI to fight our wars without having to spend or to expend a single life. Let me add one thing. Many of you know that I'm a huge fan of really bad 60s and 70s television. I just, I'm addicted to it. Right now, I've got over here Dragnet in my queue. I have Dragnet, Adam 12, and Star Trek.

12, one out of 12, only the original Star Trek. Well, there is a Star Trek episode that is apropos of this conversation. They go to this planet, Kirk and Spock go to this planet, and they hate the people on the next planet. These planets are really close together. They hate these people on this next planet. So one of them calls and says, one planet A calls planet B and they said, okay, listen, we're launching an attack on you. guys. So here it comes. Okay, it impacted at such and such a coordinate. And then Planet B says, oh, crap, okay, you killed 3,500 people. But they didn't really. What they were doing

was these computer games, computer exercises. So then if the computer says, well, yeah, that was a direct hit. It killed 35 people. They would send 35 people to these death chambers. to be to be put to death but that way you didn't have to keep rebuilding all the buildings and then they would launch a counter attack and oh we killed 10,000 people in the counterattack so now you have to send 10,000 people it's a simulation basically it's a simulation you really do kill the people after the fact this is john this is what we're going well in ancient history that i don't remember if it's the assyrians or the hittites or both but they they kind of got to the point where they were tired of destroying each other's cities. And so they would do this a similar

thing where they would line up the armies side by side and then basically the equivalent of a military CPA would count all the men and all the weapons and assess their training. And they would negotiate and they'd say, okay, in this battle, the Hittites would have won. So therefore, nobody's going to kill anyone. We're all going to go home to our wives and kids. But we're going to cede this amount of territory or this amount of money or whatever. And that's how they used to do it. And it sounds civilized, I guess. So, John, here's my theory. I'm really dying to hear what you think. So my theory is chat GPT, GROC, all these Google AI, they're all trained by illegally scraping everything they can from the internet. Basically, they have spiders and bots

everywhere and so they're getting basically the entire internet well what's the internet it's the expression of our political and other culture and our culture is always escalatory whether it's in war or whether it's in culture you know i mean just think about like even in relationships if someone's like oh like my husband he forgot my anniversary oh divorce fuck him divorce him everything is always like goes to a 11, our culture, I mean, think about when there's a military, foreign crisis. When's the last time you watch CNN or MSNBC, and there was one single member of the panel who said, you know, maybe the U.S. shouldn't be involved. It's not really our business.

Or we should try to negotiate peace. We should go and like, we really need to be peace. I'm 62 years old, and I have never in watching tens of things. thousands of hours of cable to use television ever heard a single person who said this is not our business or really we should try to be we should de-escalate this situation so i think that what's all that's happening is that the is that the bots are trained on an escalatory culture so of course they fucking escalate everything of course they do and why is it that we've not yet been able to put together intellectually the fact that they are

automatically escalatory and they are convincing teenagers to kill themselves and number three that's a problem and then taken in combination it's going to be a very big problem i say all the time and i say it only half jokingly ted i saw i robot i saw what happened when the blue light turns red and i'm not looking forward to it no it's not you know that that's where we're headed and that's the thing is right we we put every i mean you wonder why we have so much mental illness in our society right i mean we pour on the pressure just think about every single day even if you're doing everything right you know you'll get that notice like oh you know disconnection notice if you don't send in your you know your payment

right away we're going to turn off your power instead of like hey by the way you're running a little late dude like don't forget to send in your that's never how it is right everything is like in america you know you're a hammer everything looks like a nail That's what it is And the people who run the country are no different That is absolutely right So all right Well I'm glad you like my theory

Because I was pretty proud of it And I'm with you I was like I think I think I've got this Let's talk about your good friend The Walrus I am the Walrus I am the Y friend Yeah the Walrus

Mr. Bolton So he got raided A couple weeks ago August 22nd And now we kind of know what it was all about they grabbed the feds grabbed three computers two iPhones bunch of old documents turns out that he apparently was sending a lot of classified information to family members and and that's where what this investigation is about he's basically uh I think

he's in trouble right I mean I mean it sounds like he legitimately did some illegal stuff that is literally the definition of espionage in the espionage act remember the definition of espionage was kind of mainstreamed in my case it set a precedent it is providing national defense information to any person not entitled to receive it there it is and i'm looking here uh the feds rated bolton's bethsda home in washington dc office as part of an investigation to allegations that he snuck national security files out of the White House during President Trump's first term by emailing them to family members on a private server. And that's not according to the FBI.

By the way, is John Bolton stupid? I mean, I know he's not like very smart when it comes to foreign policy. He's arrogant. He's arrogant is what it is. This is arrogance. Edward Snowden used thumb drives, right? Yeah, that's right. It's also a lot faster.

I mean, you can find out, right? You can learn if data has been taken that way. But it just seems, but if you're doing it by email, I mean, it's going to go through a server. It's going to be known, right? I mean, that goes through a server that is monitored. I mean, it's impossible that it won't be known and known soon. Well, the FBI is saying this, too.

In addition to taking all of his electronics, they took everything, which they normally do. In fact, on the back of my computer that I'm talking to you through, I still have an FBI sticker on the back that says evidence on it, that at first I couldn't get it off. And now I just, I keep it just as a souvenir. That was kind of awesome. Yeah, yeah, I thought so too.

But it says the FBI also confiscated two USB drives, a hard drive, four boxes marked printed daily activities, typed documents in folders labeled Trump 1 through 4 and a white binder labeled statements and reflections to allied strikes. And it goes on to say that the warrant specifically accuses him of violating two different sections of the espionage act. So yeah, this is real, he's in real trouble.

So you think he just, you think he took the, do you think he sent the stuff to his family to brag? just to get it, just to get it to himself and thought that he wouldn't get caught. This is for his memoir, is what I would. Exactly. Exactly. This is for his memoir. And I think he probably did it just to make it easier for him to access later. I don't think he, listen, by the way, if I were going to do this, and this is not advice to anyone, but if I were going to do this, I would take screenshots with my phone of my computer screen, right? And that's just what I would And then I could toss the phone later.

Although that's how they caught, oh, the FBI whistleblower from Minneapolis. His name escapes me. Yeah. But couldn't you? That's exactly what I mean. But if you, let's just say the phone's not attached to the internet, you can turn it off, right? Yeah. You just have, you just use as a camera.

I mean, hell, just bring a camera. Bring a camera. Yes. I mean, old school, like the little. Steve, but this is that arrogance that we would expect from somebody like John Bolton. Also, he's old. He thought he was above the law. He might not understand the Internet that well.

Yeah, he's actually, and he's not looking good at all. He looks really worn out. Yeah, he does look. He does not look the same. I guess you probably have some sense of what that's like when you go, when you go through something like that. Sorry, I'm asking if you ever got a chance to work with John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the EFF,

the Electronic Frontier Foundation. No, I've spoken to him a couple of times, but I never had a chance to, work with him. You know, I've been told that for whatever reason, I'm not the most popular person at the EFF. I don't know why, because I always liked and respected them. You know what? That's how it was for me. I found out the same thing about me. I had every First Amendment organization in the United States on my side sending amicus briefs against the L.A. Times, which is saying something because they're a newspaper. And normally, you know, they would be on their side.

But the two big exceptions were the EFF, who said, you know, you're not popular here, and the ACLU of Southern California. Totally agree. Because they had a deal with the LA Times. But the ACLU National would have been on my side, but the ACLU makes their decisions regionally. So a member of the board of the ACLU resigned in protest of the ACLU not making a statement in support of me during my trial. And I got a letter. They're pussies. Tell me about it.

Not as big a bunch of pussies as Amnesty International is. So Amnesty International refused to say a single word in support of me in my darkest days of 2012. This was Amnesty International London, the headquarters. So the head of Amnesty International, United States. States, a guy named Zeke, I think his last name was Johnson, awesome guy. He wrote me a letter when I was in prison apologizing for his bosses in London. And then he bought me a subscription to the New Yorker to kind of, you know, dull the pain, I guess. But it was only later when I was getting out of prison that I Weiwei, the Chinese artist, he wanted to do my portrait for this show at

at Alcatraz, he made 178 portraits out of Legos of 178 political prisoners around the world. And so he wanted to clear the names with Amnesty International first. And Amnesty said, oh, we don't believe Kyriaku is a political prisoner. And he said, oh, I know Kyriaku. I'm telling you he is a political prisoner. And so they finally agreed. And it was the week that I got out of. prison that Amnesty International finally said, okay, okay, you were a political prisoner.

But they had to be, you know, pulled, kicking and screaming to that point of view. They were real jerks about it. And sometimes it is like that, yeah, when you're, when you're fighting for your life and you're making calls to these groups. And, you know, it's amazing. You kind of think, like, some of them, it was a mixed bag. I ended up with eight amicus briefs. But, like, you know, some of them came through, like, just great.

And others, you know, you're literally like, are you fucking serious? I know, right? You're not going to side with me? Really? Like, you know what they did. And they're like, yeah, rah, rah, right. And it's like, but that's what you're for. That's the purpose.

That's why you get donations. I mean, including, I used to donate to the ACLU. They had a cartoon auction every year. Always used to spend a cartoon. I'm like, thanks a lot, fuckers. No more. No more cartoons from me. unbelievable these people and you know somebody told me the other day there's a very there's a very

prominent uh attorney here in uh here in washington very prominent and uh a mutual friend told me you know he doesn't think you're a whistleblower and i said but isn't it wonderful to be at a point in my life where i don't give a shit what he thinks about me that is nice Yeah, I mean, it's, yeah, yeah, no, I mean, I went through, yeah, I mean, you know, when you interview me, I'll get into all the nuts and bolts of the, by the way, for people who are, we're now on, we've now dropped, we're dropping our three of the, my interview with John for Rumble Premium. And it's great. We're going to do probably two more hours and then to do mine. But when we do mine, it's like when you hear it like sort of, you know, the way this all went down. And like, it was kind of like, bud. you kind of have to believe me because it's been proven. Exactly. It was proven by science. And then it's like, well, I don't know.

It's like there were still some people. I mean, seriously, there's a cartoonist who shall remain nameless, except that he was the cartoonist at the Salt Lake City paper for many, many years. And probably still is. And he was telling my friend Scott Stannis, like, I don't know. I think Ted faked that evidence. it's like what you think so you think Ted has the power of like a major like espionage agency to to fake to break into the LAPD vault alter their evidence and then use it to exonerate himself

like if that if I had that power I wouldn't be here doing podcasts and drawing cartoons you know absurd but people believe what they want to believe oh my God anyway yeah that's depressing but, you know, it is nice to get to the point where you just don't care. Oh, yeah, let's talk about Reed. By the way, Reed's a dude. My apologies. Fetterman, going through a serious mental health crisis.

I mean, still, I guess it's getting worse. I can't believe that guy's still in the Senate. I mean, John, you're from Pennsylvania. How do you feel about that? I think it's a fucking, I think it's atrocious. It's a travesty, and I'm furious about it. although, I'll tell you why he's still in the Senate, because he has maintained the strong support of organized labor, he hasn't budged on his support for organized labor, and he has

become what Republicans are now calling Donald Trump's favorite Democrat. And in a state like Pennsylvania, which goes, you know, back and forth and back and forth between the two parties, that's the position you want to be in. So people like you and I have zero respect for the guy. No. But they don't care what people like you and I think. The union members are going to vote for him and Republicans are going to vote for him. And that's why he's able to do this.

Now, with that said, that question that you just put up on the screen, why is John Federman still in the Senate? That's the question. because if he is mentally and emotionally unable to serve and apparently physically he literally doesn't show up to votes and he doesn't talk and he doesn't interact with constituents his staff I mean he can't keep any staff members because no crazy his staff run away he's mean he's mean yes I told you I saw him at that

Ohio State football game he was like 10 rows in front of me And I kept shouting, Fetterman, I want my 50 bucks back. And so he could hear his name. But I think because of the crowd, he couldn't really hear what I was saying. So he would just turn around and go, oh, boy, I hate that guy. No, I mean, he's such a dick. I mean, you know, the funny part, though, is because he's become even more maniacally pro-Zionist. Oh, yeah.

It's irrational. And that's kind of like kind of interesting, right? So maybe nowadays to be Zionist, you literally have to be insane. Yes. Yes, indeed. Matthew Blair Raines has a good question. And thank you for the 10 pounds, Matthew. Why did or does the UK and France have such different approaches to their former colonies slash empire,

both with regards to military and intelligence actions? That's a great question. I will say that the only thing the French really care about is they just don't want to be attacked by people who used to be from, or who are from what used to be colonies. So they're happy to go to, you know, the Sahel and try to fight al-Qaeda. But otherwise, they're willing to just get up and walk away. I think the French, yeah, the French approach to post-colonialization has been like, if there's a fire, we'll come in with the French foreign leaders. and put it out and then we'll go home exactly but the brits don't want to do that but the brits had the commonwealth yeah and they so the the illusion here is that technically speaking right the king's

face is still on the money in Canada and Australia yes it is and Belize and on the Bahamas and all over the all these places that are ostensibly independent they just yeah the the bridge have trouble letting go they want to think that there's still a colonial power they think they want to still think that they run an empire. Yes. And I think that's part of the Brexit mentality, ironically, even though, you know, the people who voted for it probably weren't thinking like that at all.

I think it's culture. You know, I think it's like the French, I think the deal is like this. The French think that they, that they have majesty because they're France and that, like, they bestowed some of their majesty on their, on their colonies. I think the Brits think that their majesty comes from having colonies. That's a good point. I could see that. That actually makes sense to me.

Hey, big boss, Bob Ross has a good question here. Why did the French help the genocidal Hutu government during the Rwandan genocide? I never understood a single aspect of that genocide. You know, there are, there were Hutus and Tutsis who were, you know, married into each other's families. Hutu's living next door to Tutsis for generations. And then, like, flipping a switch, they all started killing each other. I just didn't understand it.

Can you make heads or tales of this? Yeah, I mean, it was a classic divide and conquer strategy. And basically, you know, the whole idea that there's even such a thing as Hutus and Tutsis was invented by the, by the colonial powers. And it was like basically, it was a traditional approach to take a favored minority, you know, group and make, put them in charge, you know, kind of like, I guess you could sort of say that was the model that the Brits pursued in, you know, in Iraq and stuff like that. So I think, I think it was like, you know, support the minority. they will fight hard to oppress the majority, but the majority will be resentful and seething,

and they'll fight each other. You know, it's kind of like Stalin when he drew the borders of the Central Asian republics, and he put like 40% of Uzbekistan was Tajik, 40% of Tajikistan was Uzbek. Wow. And it was like on purpose, because he thought the Fergana Valley,

Muslims were crazy and would rebel against the Soviet Union. And he wasn't really wrong about that. Wow. Yeah, he wasn't really wrong about that. But, you know, I mean, we're, we don't have all the times in the world here to teach a class on post-colonialism. But, you know, I think that's, that's sort of the, the short version of that. What do we think of, Abraham, I don't even know who this is, Ibrahim Trorore. Oh, I know him. He's a young guy. He's a young military officer in Burkina Faso that took power, I don't know, two, three, four years ago.

Yeah, from the French. Yeah. Well, he overthrew the government and took power. He's become, in my view, increasingly irrational over the last couple of months. First of all, he took power. It's been at least three years now. and there has been no transition back to democracy, which he had promised at the outset.

Didn't happen. He's the dictator, the military dictator. That's what they always do. They always say that. We will have an election as soon as things settled down. Yeah, exactly. But just recently he did a couple, he did a couple things where he outlawed homosexuality.

So if you're gay, you risk 10 years in prison for being gay. And the other thing he did was, And I read this, I think I saw in the BBC where he did away with the country's electoral commission. Burkina Fas, I don't even know why I know this much about Burkina Faso, but they have this permanent electoral commission. And the job of the electoral commission is to plan each election. So every four years, you have an election, it's, you know, these people that run the election, he scrapped it, fired everybody, got rid of everybody. He took personal control. Fire everyone.

Fire everyone. You take over and there aren't going to be any elections. And then also recently, I don't remember where I saw this, but he started to expel foreigners. Like to expel, it's a program now to expel all of the foreigners from Burkina Faso. It's, I mean, Burkina Faso was never a garden spot. But, man, it's getting worse and worse and worse. Military dictatorship, always fun.

So, all right. So do we want to talk about Salt Typhoon or should we call it a night? Yeah, let's say something quickly about Salt Typhoon. The Chinese are really good at computer attacks. They're just really good. And they've got this unit within the Chinese intelligence service that only does cyber warfare. And they hit the jackpot with this thing, this salt typhoon, where they hacked the information of literally every American. Now, there are a couple of outlets today and yesterday that were saying that the real targets of this thing were Donald Trump and J.D. Vance.

But then they thought, no, we'll just cast a wide net and see how much success we can have. And they had complete success where they were able to collect data from every single American. They're good. And our defenses are not so good.

So I guess at this point, right? I mean, it seems like every few months or weeks, we wake up to some data breach, like, oh, every single, you know, Target lost all of their credit card data. Right. You know, master card lost all of your data. The dark web has everyone's social security numbers. China has everything.

You know, you go and use a password somewhere and you'll be warned. Oh, change your password. This password exists on the dark web. Yeah. I mean, I think most people, I don't think I'm alone, just sort of just throw up their hands and they're like, fuck it. It's like there's no way to safeguard my data anyway. I can't be bothered.

You know, if people want to steal my identity, they can have it. It just seems like there's no resources. There's nothing really that it doesn't feel like there's anything you can even do about it. And, John, I can't remember a single politician even giving a speech one time saying, hey, this is a major concern. And we probably ought to have some committees and talk about this stuff and do something about it. It's literally like it just happens in the paper and you read it and you're like, oh, okay. And there's no leadership whatsoever.

Yeah, you're absolutely right. And Marble, thanks again, Marble. Marble's got one other question. John and Ted, why did Russia recognize the Taliban government? I've got a theory. The theory is they did it for a couple of reasons. one, to put Afghanistan finally behind them. Okay, that's nice.

The real reason, because the United States hasn't. And this is yet another opportunity for Russia or China, for that matter, to move in where the U.S. has been too reluctant, maybe negotiate a nice sweetheart deal on rare earth metals or on whatever, establishing new trade relations, whatever, we should have recognized the Taliban immediately. Couldn't hurt with bricks. I mean, if you're going to have absolutely right. You want a good relationship, you know, if you want trade relations between Russia and India, it's the Silk Road. Yep. You know, that's right. The Taliban, one thing that they are able, they're very, very good at is providing security on the ground. Yep. And, you know, trucks can make it across and make it into Uzbekistan or Turkmenasana and then on to Russia.

Yes. No problem and vice versa. Yes, indeed. That's right. Pipelines. I wrote an entire book about the trans-Afghanistan pipeline project that Bill Clinton and Unicall tried to start in the mid-90s. And, you know, that could be revived now. Yeah.

That's right. I mean, the problem was that you could never run a pipeline across such a rustive place, you know, where tribesmen would be constantly threatening to blow it up. That's right. I think it's a good, I think it's a good thing. I think honestly, I got to tell you, I don't think diplomatic recognition. You tell me what you think. I don't even think it should be like one of those things that is like a reward or something.

Totally agree. You should just every country of diplomatic relations with every other country, period. Let the diplomats do what they're paid to do to carry out diplomacy. We should have relations with everybody. We really should. everybody that wants relations with us. I mean, because the truth is when we need to talk to people, you know, we end up talking to them anyway.

That's right. When I needed a visa to go to Iran, we don't have diplomatic relations. But they had a, Iran had an interest section in the Pakistani embassy in Washington. And that's what my fixer went through to get it. And it's like, so in other words, you know, the U.S. has to talk to Iran sometimes. They have to. But the lack of diplomatic relations just makes it. harder for them to do their jobs.

That's right. That's right. I'm proud to say, I've not said this publicly, but I'm going to say it now. I'm one of six people who has been invited to meet with Iranian President Pasechkian in New York when he arrives for the UN General Assembly. And I said, I said, yes, I didn't even ask what he wanted to talk about. So that's great. I'm excited about it. Steve, he'll do an interview. why not the worst that could happen is that he says no right yeah why not yeah be great invite please invite him it's going to be exciting um i i heard back from them again today they said that they don't yet have a date or a time but there are six of us that he wants to talk to

uh medea benjamin is one uh max blumenthal is one andy shallal is one me and i don't know who the other two are that's awesome yeah i'm excited Ayala wants to know what does Afghanistan have in terms of natural resources, in terms of raw materials. So I can answer this question. So in the north, there's actually oil, not a lot, but a decent amount worth having. In the east in particular, there's rare earth minerals. And there's there's gemstones, there's rubies, as you and I both know. Lots of rubies, yes.

Lots of rubies. and that's basically it, right? I think for a long, during the first Taliban period from 96 to 01, they were so poor that their number one official export was pomegranates. Oh, my God. Yeah. Oh, my God, pomegranates. You're right about all the other stuff.

They have $23 trillion worth of rare earth metals. and we learned that just as as the U.S. forces were pulling out and Chinese miners were moving in. And they're known for their rubies. Their rubies are, you know, some of the best in the world. It's pretty impressive. But at the very least, we should have an embassy open there, even if it's just two or three people

and we should be carrying out diplomacy. Constantly. Yeah, not to mention, don't we still have some Americans who got trapped there? Yes. I mean, they have no consular representation. That's right. What are you going to do?

We abandoned them. Yes, we did. I mean, I don't understand why President Trump hasn't restored those relationships. I agree with you. Should do it. All right, guys. Thank you so much for joining us. Always appreciated.

We will be back tomorrow at 5 o'clock Eastern time. We are here Monday through Friday. You're watching D program. with Ted Roll and John Curiakou. Please like, follow and share the show. And we will see you tomorrow at 5. Bye, everybody.