Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 39 - Yemeni Civil War Part 3: Erik Prince's Mercenary Army and the SEAL Death Squad

Episode Date: February 18, 2019

On our final episode of the Yemeni Civil War series the UAE decides they need to buy an army to go with all of their mercenary commanders, and they look no further than Blackwater founder Erik Prince. All while a Mossad agent teams up with the former head of Palestinian Security to put together a death squad made up of former and current US Navy SEALs to assassinate the UAE's political opponents in Aden. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys buy a shirt: https://teespring.com/stores/lions-led-by-donkeys-store Follow us on twitter: @lions_by

I'm Henry from Fortress on a Hill. We're a leftist veteran podcast that aims to expose the reality of the U.S. military's many wars abroad, the horror that it puts on the people that live in those places, and the damage that military service does to Americans. Congress has abdicated its role giving oversight to the military. Fortress on a Hill aims to change that. Fortressonahill.com or wherever you get your podcast. Now, back to Lions Led by Donkeys. This is Democracy Now! I'm Amy Goodman with Juan Gonzalez. We end today's show looking at a shocking new investigation that reveals the United Arab Emirates hired U.S. mercenaries to carry out assassinations of political and clerical leaders in Yemen.

The former elite U.S. special operations fighters were paid to take part in missions to kill those deemed to be terrorists by the UAE. company, Spear Operations Group, founded by an Israeli-American man named Abraham Golan, who told Busby, quote, there was a targeted assassination program in Yemen. I was running it. The group's first target in Yemen was a local leader of al-Islah, a political party whose members include Nobel Peace Prize laureate Tawakkal Karman. We go now to Washington, D.C. Hello, and welcome to another episode of Lines Led by Donkeys podcast. I'm Joe and with me today as always for this series is our show's favorite

Azuri nationalist, Travis. Travis. Hola. Wait, no, that's not Azerbaijani. Close enough, right? No. No. So,

if you've been joining us for the series and why would you be listening to part three without listening to the other two uh you've heard us yeah maybe they just like to live dangerously uh that's fine i guess all this harry potter book seven yeah it won't make a lot of sense, but hey, you do you, man. We've talked about the horrible history of Yemen and how we got to where we are today. We talked about His Excellency General Steve and his mercenary helicopter army. And we talked about Mike Hinmarsh, the former Australian commander of the Special Air Service. He was now the commander of the UAE's Presidential Guard. And so we also talked about how the two mercenaries slash foreign officers accepted untold amounts of money to commit war crimes on behalf of the United Arab Emirates.

And if you know history, you know no mercenary commander is good without a mercenary army and that's what we're going to talk about today oh boy and since this is the year 2019 and we're talking about mercenary armies we're going to talk about eric prince oh jesus for for anybody who has been living under the under a rock since around 2003, Eric Prince was the founder of Blackwater International, a former U.S. Navy SEAL, and the patron saint of pieces of shit everywhere. He is also the brother of the current Department of Education head, Betsy DeVos. Famous owner of 10 pounds yeah uh the devos family uh can go fuck itself and i think i speak for everybody from michigan and now the united states in the middle east when i say that um yeah what's blackwater called these days uh so after the so after the

some to hear a war crime thing. Yeah, but it was mostly like the Tahir Square Massacre, I believe it was called, where they actually had several Blackwater mercenaries get thrown in prison for, you know, cold blood murder. I believe it changed to Z, like X-I or something like that, X-E.

No, it was X-E. Yeah, yeah. And then it went to Academy with an I, and I think it's still academy okay that'll make sense yeah they just try to change their name to run away from um you know crimes uh yeah also there was a fun uh little episode there where eric prince at once attempted to weaponize a sets a cessna plane which is illegal um and he also purchased a country's navy uh it was an african country i believe it was like mozambique or something just just bought the whole navy uh jesus also just i want to butt in here and remind people that the the war crimes

that blackwater did in iraq was they were uh guarding like a building or something and some dumbass like grunt on top of a blackwater vehicle got uh scared because there was a big crowd and the group of blackwater mercenaries unloaded on the crowd with uh uh 50 caliber machine guns and uh mark 19 automatic grenade launchers as well as small arms and killed a couple dozen people, I think. So yeah, that's why people don't like them. And they did a few other things, and the management of Blackwater was notoriously horrifically negligent towards its contractors.

Now, that's the thing about military contractors. They attract people of all colors where you get people like we've had guests on like dermot cosgrove the former uh foreign legionnaire uh he is an interesting character where he is solidly leftist but also knows that's what he's good at because he's been doing it since he's been a teenager. Uh, but then you also have like unhinged former Navy SEAL types who shoot innocent people and you get both of them. Like, because I believe at the peak you're making thousands of dollars a month.

Um, like we're going to talk about, uh, later how much, uh, a different group was paying its shady death squads. But, um, like there's a lot of positions within Blackwater that were not directly related to carrying

firearms and things like that so black hours is like huge organization and like they made their employees sound like non-disclosure agreements and if you spoke out against anything that Blackwater did uh they'd sue you for like 10 million dollars something like obscene like that and if at any point you refuse to follow orders you'd be fired um and like the the termination policy was like some obscene forfeiture of money that they owed you also if you died while working for Blackwater and your spouse attempted to sue you or your Mexican attempted to sue Blackwater for negligence, they just take everything you own. And that was something like you signed away. It was like not not reading the terms and conditions of a fucking iTunes thing.

Yeah. But unfortunately, we're not talking about Blackwater all the time today, but we are talking about more about Eric Prince because he was technically, technically no longer working for Blackwater Academy or Z or whoever the fuck you want to call him. He started a new company. Now, Prince and his horrible company ran into problems years before the Yemeni civil war kicked off after,, after like, uh, Travis talked about numerous Iraqi civilians, uh, were, were murdered and Blackwater and some of Dine Corps contractors were also pretty heavily connected to trafficking sex slaves.

Yeah. Um, but that is actually, if you look into Dine Corps that, and they've, they've been around the world much longer than Blackwater had, uh, that is something that follows them everywhere they go yeah uh right uh no so technically there is no south african private military contractors anymore right right right technically because of the actions of uh executive outcomes uh the republic of south africa

banned them uh from from incorporating within uh south africa because they were i mean one they became a number one employer of apartheid era war criminals and uh they suddenly became terrified that they'd want to overthrow overthrow the majority black government, so they just banned them all. Probably a good move. Yeah. I'm going to say it was a solid move on the ANC's part. Yeah. So Eric Prince had a bit of a poisoned reputation at this point.

Not that he couldn't get work, but he could no longer get the unbidded tens of billions of dollars government contracts anymore. So he had to go abroad. And that was in 2009. He took his ass to UAE, where they were trying to build an army, just in case the Arab Spring swept through the region. Prince's unit included just about anybody who would pull a trigger for a paycheck. This included shamed mercs from other companies like Executive Outcomes. Oh, boy.

marks from other companies like executive outcomes they were the so how this new cut this new company was going to work is they were going to hire third country nationals which is a term used to mean people who are from less developed nations and work for very little money to keep the overhead low. And they were going to hire people like the white South Africans from Executive Outcome to do the training. So you only have to hire like 12 of them and it keeps the overhead low.

And so because Eric Prince cannot help but be like comically evil, these also included members of the Sudanese Janjaweed. Otherwise known as the genocidal militia that carried out the Darfur genocide. Yeah! And those were the trainers.

But when the UA stuck its nose out in the wild, wild world of proxy wars in Yemen, they found themselves seriously lacking an actual army to do, you know, more stuff uh so they did what they always did uh to solve their problem they poured money into it and this is actually uh so i got somebody slid in my dms after our last episode and i feel like this is a good place to point it out uh and they said that we were wrong in saying that mattis was wrong in calling you a little sparta uh but not the reasons that mattis probably thought about uh he was probably trying to talk about being like a warrior culture or

something but uh the uae it really is kind of little sparta because it's a small center of of actual uae emirati citizens, supported by a massive network of slavery. Uh, so that's probably not what Mattis was going for. Uh, because he was talking about an allies. Like he probably wasn't like, yeah, those slaves though.

Right. Uh, although at the, at the rate, the current politics are going in 10 years, we'll be like, hell yeah, they're a slave state.

Like that's fucking cool. Yeah. By like 2030, there's going to be a stump speech thing we need to be more like the uae and enslave brown people and arrest women for having sex outside of marriage by then kurdistan will be significantly more progressive than the united states well i wouldn't count on that buddy things aren't going too great here either uh so at first prince was hired to build a small army of about 800 people that quickly

exploded into several thousand in only a matter of years so according to the new york times the ua paid prince and his company around a half a billion dollars for the service. Around 40 million of that directly went to paying fines related that came with breaking international law in order to build a mercenary army. Wait, they got fined 40 million dollars for building a mercenary army? Yes. Eric Prince personally got fined that much. Wait, by who? I don't know. I'm assuming like interpol or something

that he didn't pay a cent uh yeah i'm sure he's like yeah i totally have 40 million in uh things to pay uh just just give me the money and i'll take care of it bro i mean it's the uae like they are like the being the uae's accountant has to be like trying to teach like a 17 year old army private how to budget like no no no you can't spend 400 a month in this you don't have the money and like yeah i'm gonna do it anyway well see the difference is a brand new army private might blow their like their like enlistment bonus on like a car with shitty mods or like a strip club or something uh but the uae blows their equivalent of an enlistment bonus on uh a slave army genocide and uh like building islands that they like put artificial ski slopes on 130 degrees outside not just any islands palm tree shaped

islands sir yeah it's great because the emirates see okay i just want to give a little bit of a uh like um you know this these last three episodes have been really depressing but just to like raise the morale of the audience i'm going to remind people that within probably 50 years the emirates are going to be completely uninhabited due to climate change. Because the average temperatures during the summer will probably be like 150 degrees Fahrenheit. So, you know, karma. It's going to be like them hosting the, that's Qatar that's hosting the World Cup. But the UAEae is gonna be like

but don't worry we have this plan to build outdoor air conditioners everywhere we go and they're they're gonna be held on chest rigs by slaves that just follow you around at all times and then mattis is gonna be like mother of god that's brilliant and then a bunch of like obnoxious marines on facebook like liberal marines and army soldiers will be like you know what he may have worked for trump and he may have like personally executed a yemeni child uh in order to like feed like the uh the sheikh of dubai but you know what he's the philosopher monk so like i love that man god God bless you, Amir Mattis. So, Eric Prince is building an army of thousands in a country that, like we said before, is mostly a small corps of very, very rich citizens and a large amount of indentured servants and slaves.

So, where do you think he got these soldiers? Just a spitball um well you mentioned janja weed so sudan um and then probably based on how a lot of mercenary armies go it's going to be places like democratic republic of the congo uh central african republic uh congo uh central african republic uh niger those are all good choices senegal places like that those are all really good choices um and if we're talking about daimkor you'd be 100 correct um but so eric prince if um if we didn't underline this enough is a terrible racist and an islamophobe fair um so he employed people from the janjaweed to train which is troubling in itself but uh the the goal was not for them to

fight okay same goes for the white south africans and the other europeans that showed up they're too precious to wait right um so prince went to latin, so, uh, among the countries where he picked people from was Panama, El Salvador, Chile, but the majority came from Columbia. Uh, Prince's company was now known as Reflex Responses, did little to no vetting of the people they were recruiting for this. Uh, now if, if you are unfamiliar with Latin American history and especially Columbia, Columbia has a very rich history of armed rebel groups, Latin American history, and especially Colombia, Colombia has a very rich history of armed rebel groups, narco-terrorists, and gangs.

You can see this could be a problem. And like right-wing death squads. Yeah. Guess how many of those people ended up taking a large payday to run off to the Middle East and not get arrested by the Colombian government? Too many. So, why did Prince go to latin america to build his army because as prince said quote muslims cannot be trusted to kill muslims and western soldiers would cost too much money i mean is he like literally stupid has he not observed like the

last like i don't know a couple of decades or millennia of history like there's been plenty of wars in the muslim world just like there's been plenty of wars when white people just like slaughtered the shit out of each other so like he's like literally so racist that like i don't even i don't even have a good joke because that's just like an obscene level of racism that's honestly hilarious yeah like he's so dumb because remember blackwater was heavily involved in a horrible sectarian civil war in iraq muslims will definitely kill muslims especially for money anybody will kill people for money he's got to find the right poor people and like and he says um western soldiers would want too much money but also another part uh it wasn't a direct quote but it was noted um to his recruiters

that he should not hire westerners because white people would draw too much attention um yeah uh like a dead white guy in in yemen would look really bad and you know as dumb and racist as eric prince is he's absolutely right uh um and this goes back to something that me and nick have talked about a few times where muslims and brown people are the less than dead uh yeah in this case it's latin american uh people but like you know as weird and noteworthy as as it is where um like i'll say a company of el salvador and mercenaries get overran and fucking aiden nobody would give a shit uh be like oh that's weird what are they doing over there and then just move the fuck on but if billy from kansas gets murked like that shit's headline news yeah no that's fair i mean and a good example of

this is um something we'll talk about later is now switch out all of the races of the people we're talking about to some dude from Columbia and ask yourself, does anybody care? Um, yeah, but that thing about race and, and, and,

and ethnicity was literally the only rule when it came to the hiring process. Um, so thousands of Latin Americans were soon being bused into a remote military base built for Prince's new army by the UAE. Uh, and they were all disguised as construction workers to begin training they got off a uae chartered military uh jet and were given like fake overalls and hard hats and shit why even bother at that point right it's not like anyone's gonna care anyway no nobody ever gave a shit about this the only people who

gave a shit were like the uae and they were afraid that the latin americans might escape from their base and go into the uae uh so once they're in the country to the surprise of almost nobody the uae took their passport so they couldn't leave they were then given amradi id cards uniforms and ranks and were officially abducted into UAE's armed forces. Jesus. So the Emirati, like the top languages in the Emirati army are number one

Spanish. Number two English with like a heavy South African accent. Yes. And then like number three is Australian accident English. Oh my god. accent yes uh and then like number three is australian accident english uh arabic at like a distant 10 oh it's not even official language anymore

uh the soldiers were allowed uh so the soldiers were only allowed outside of their barracks for training, and then afterwards they were quickly locked back inside. As far as barracks, they were pretty much shipping containers. Metal shipping containers in the middle of the desert. That's horrible. One of the hired soldiers, a guy named Cal Racon from Columbia, said they didn't even have windows to look out of. Many of Reflex Responses trainers who contacted for the article admit that they're special forces guys from around the world.

They noted that Prince told them they would be getting an army of former soldiers and cops and they would require a little training. The truth was, however, most of them have never even fired a gun before. Jesus. their truth was however most of them have never even fired a gun before jesus i'd be interested to know like how they got recruited like did they have these uh like pmc guys like trolling through like villages and yes columbia or something and saying like oh if you sign here we'll give you like a thousand dollar signing bonus and then it's like you know two thousand dollars a month and pretty much work like you know it's just one year or something like that um pretty much what from what i could gather is uh prince would pay local handlers to find out of work men uh military aged men some of whom were cops like uh that cal raccoon guy he was a former Colombian federal police officer, but he was like in his 40s.

And they got a lot of people like that, but also like that tapped out pretty fast. So then they would just pick up any military age male with the promise of a lot of money, which I mean, what they were paying was a lot of money for, you know, a slum in Colombia or El Salvador or wherever. But then they never were allowed to return so like that began to affect retention uh i could imagine like word spread like hey my husband was supposed to be home four months ago and we haven't heard shit um also uh part of the benefits were like if they finished their contract, they were allowed residency visas in the UAE along with their family. And if they died, their kids would get free college education. Okay. Yeah.

So, the UAE talked to the Department of Defense on that one. talk to the department of defense on that one so when prince promised the uae a private highly trained army he gave them and said a gaggle of randos uh when word began to trickle back to the latin american countries that they had been poached from uh quick uh prince quickly ran out of new recruits uh nobody wanted to sign up for the desert prison yeah um and not to mention his uh mercenary army quickly began to fall apart as they got injured uh they began to get drunk and high instead of trained and some of them simply ran off into the desert why didn't they like rebel or something i mean i'd assume the weapons would be under the control of like the the south african guys or

something yeah uh once they found out what happened what was happening uh so the trainers pretty much stopped training them because they realized it was pointless like it was way more than um they signed up for so they effectively ran a prison camp in a desert uh that did not mean however that prince's army was awash uh we do not know exactly how many of them went off to fight in yemen or how many of them were wounded or killed but we do know what happened uh in 2015 sabah news report that houthi rebels uh had been surprised to find out that the unit they were fighting was made up of nothing but colombians and led by a frenchman they found this out by finding their corpses jesus uh so that is uh as much as we know about eric prince's private army uh but they are far from the only foreign mercenaries fighting in yemen which brings us to the uh the navy seal death squad that uh oh yeah of all

people buzzfeed broke the story on. And because BuzzFeed laid everybody off, the guy who wrote the story is probably unemployed. So thanks for your research while BuzzFeed was cool. Yeah, RIP to a real one. Yeah. This time it was a company called Spear Operations Group, a company that is literally so shady there's

nothing about them anywhere other than a sexual harassment complaint from a few years ago that is remarkably fitting isn't it yeah i mean i don't know if buzzfeed tried to look too hard into them but i did like i tried to google like even uh the most shady pmcs will have like a facebook page or a linkedin or. Spear doesn't have any of that shit. The only thing I could find was like court filings. That's probably like a front then, like not like a real. That is most people's belief as well. Whether it's a front for like the CIA, the DOD, or just like another company is, I mean,

that's the big question, I guess. Well, so far, what anybody could figure out is it was incorporated in Delaware by a guy named Abraham Golan. And Golan's background changes depending on which story he's telling. In some of them, he was a French foreign legionnaire. In others, he was Mossad. So, as our one legionnaire member of the audience can tell you, it is really easy to disprove somebody being a French foreign Legionnaire.

It's kind of like being a Green Beret in the U.S. Army where everybody knows everybody. And if nobody's ever heard of you, you were never in it. And that is as far as Golan's background in the Legion. No one's ever heard of him. Yeah, nobody's ever claimed to serve next to Abraham Golan in the Legion. The Mossad. No one's ever heard of him. Yeah. Nobody's ever claimed to serve next to Abraham Golan in the Legion, which means he probably wasn't in it.

Also, the fact that he can't speak French also sticks out. Oh, yeah. You definitely have to speak French. At least passing. You have to at least know conversational French. Now, the story that he is somehow connected to the Mossad. Sure. Why not? Nobody's ever been able to disprove it but also he seems very incompetent to be a member of the massad uh yeah but we do know is that he was something of a psychopath uh as one of the people hired by him described him as quote the guy you call when you need someone to do crazy shit um so if you were to i guess who

would be the least likely person to team up with someone who might possibly be an agent of the massad to start a death squad company who do you think it would be um well based on the theme of this episode i'm going to assume it's the government of the United Arab Emirates. Well, you'd be partially correct. But also the other the guy who owns the other half of the company is former Palestinian Authority security chief Mohammed Dalan. What? That's a twist I didn't see coming. Wait, hold on.

Hold on. Is this like a just a really deep like promo for the next season of Sacha baron cohen's this is america i hope so oh man he really went deep this time uh or or homeland i'm not sure which one yet they're both equally racist uh so they were hired directly by the UAE to put together a special operation team to work in Saint Yemen. So the story that was told is that these two met with a UAE prince. And then suddenly, boom, Spear Operations Group was formed. So what's more likely to me is that they were contacted to put together a death squad. And then they're like, okay, now we're a PMC. They're a shell company for the UAE government.

Yeah. But at the same time, since the U.S. government is funneling billions and billions of dollars into the UAE for defense, they're also a shell company for the U.S. government, effectively. Because everybody involved with it, with the exception of Dilan, is a United States citizen. Oh, Jesus. So, of all the groups currently operating in Yemen, you would think the UAE would be putting together a hit squad to go against the Houthis. Or somebody else.

You'd be wrong. This goes into the whole North Yemen, South Yemen thing, right? Kind of. the team's main target was going to be a group known a group known as al-islam or the yemeni congregation of reform it's a political party um yemen and saudi arabia blacklisted the party for affiliation with the muslimhood, who they consider a terrorist organization. Ironically,

Al-Islah was formed and bankrolled by the Saudis in the early 90s. And it should be noted that Al-Islah is not a militia group. It is a political party. A political party whose head has won the Nobel Peace Prize. A party that was vocally against the coalition's intervention in the civil war uh so you can see why they're being targeted they're not being targeted because they're a terrorist group or a militia group they have no active like

this isn't like um a sin fin ira situation where they're like the political wing of a militia they have no militia right they talk with militias sure but like when you're a political party in the middle of a civil war you're going to talk with militias also it should be noted that al-islah is not pro-huthi or pro salah like they just want the civil war to end right so uh in recruiting this team go on informed everybody they'd be getting a budget of 1.5 million dollars a month along with bonuses for every kill what that bonus was he never lets on but because these are stand-up gentlemen go on said that all the al-islah target list must come from uniformed uae military officers and intelligence uh now go on stay

states this is for judicial reasons like to cover their ass like we weren't some rogue team operating like we were literally contracted by the uae government uh now if you remember from our last episode who was the head of the united united arab emirates special forces that's right this means that the target list given to foreign mercenaries was actually put together by the commander of the uae special forces intelligence and presidential guard mike fucking hindmarsh which is an extremely arab name yes uh and also the the target cards given to um one of the members of the squad uh interviewed by buzzfeed has the crest of the uae presidential guard on the corner of it so mike hin marsh was operating a death squad

a foreigner was operating a death squad of foreigners for foreign government i mean i guess once you break it broken one law like you know you might as well just go all the way like why stop at jaywalking when you can end at death squads sure i mean uh a traffic ticket is a gateway drug to murder uh i mean honestly if you're mike hen marsh at this point you've already sold your soul to the devil like he's already before this death squad ever got put together he had already been committing awful war crimes yeah this one is just the most easily connected one directly back to his agency uh yeah now uh this might surprise a lot of our listeners and maybe even travis uh but a lot of people were smart enough to stay away from go on

in a sales pitch uh because it's not illegal as fuck uh one cia agent that he uh so the cia has what's called the paramilitary division and they were what and he was approached by go on for this job he said in the interview quote it sounded like he was putting together a fucking murder squad uh and most people uh even shady characters that we shit talk a lot like navy seals and green berets. Uh, they generally did not sign up to straight up murder people in cold blood. There's certainly out there. One of them's on trial right now. Uh, but the vast majority did not.

So what he got instead was something of a group of rejects. Right. Members of the team include a guy. He used to work with the CIA's ground branch, uh, which is effectively a different name for the paramilitary branch. Another was a special forces sergeant in the Maryland Army National Guard, Isaac Gilmore. So the special forces sergeant of the National Guard, he was still in the National Guard when this happened.

Isaac Gilmore is one of the SEALs who signed on the team, had team had been kicked out of the seals for accidentally shooting someone on a training mission his last job before signing on with golan was an executive for an artisanal tequila company christ another was a veteran of seal team six his name was daniel corbett who had served multiple combat tours in iraq Iraq and Afghanistan, and he was still in the reserves. So technically, along with the National Guard gentleman, the U.S. military could deploy him at any moment, and he was collecting a government salary. And both of them are actually supposed to report for monthly drills, but they were both in Yemen. Private contractor worked for a foreign military instead. private contractor work for a foreign military instead.

The team was assembled and flown to UAE military base where they met with UAE officers who gave them a target list. It was a stack of 23 different names and faces and grid coordinates for where they lived or possibly went to work. Nowhere on the list was a reason given for the team why

they wanted them dead. And Gilmore admits he never asked. On the top of each was the patch of the UAE Presidential Guard. They are also given official ranks within the UAE military, with Golan being named a colonel and Gilmore being a lieutenant colonel.

And it's funny because Gilmore, before he was an E6 in the navy uh it isn't known how many people they succeeded in killing uh before everything went to shit but golan insists they went through several missions for reasons he would not point out any of the people he had a hand in killing on the list um but since we can't speculate on what they did do let's talk about what we know they did, because it was recorded via drone and then published on the internet.

Yeah, it's pretty bad. And that was the attempted assassination of Ansif Ali Mayo, the local leader of Al-Ansla. Their plan was to attach a bomb to the door of his office, which lay in downtown Aden. The bomb was supposed to be big enough to kill everybody in the office. Since we're talking about it, you can assume that did not happen. Everything that we know comes from

first-hand accounts and drone footage. We'll publish the video on the Twitter page. It's really interesting because it's very obviously not a Spear Operations Group drone. It's a UAE military drone. And it's armed.

According to the subtitles or the heads-up display, it's also armed. So they were flying an armed drone in support of a mercenary squad. Interesting combination there. Also, aren't there uae army vehicles like accompanying the yes the operations group we're not sure what unit they came from but we're but i'm going to make the semi-educated guess that they're presidential guard members yeah there's like uh they have like civilian pickup trucks which carry the Spear Operations Group dudes. And then you have giant AMRAPs that are carrying UAE soldiers, one of whom managed to shoot himself.

So, the convoy of vehicles arrived at 9.57 p.m. just as it was planned. A member of the team got out of their armored SUV to plant the bomb when another member of the team randomly opened fired in something in the distance uh at no point uh does the drone footage show anybody shooting at them gilmore himself said he shot at something but he isn't sure what exactly but he but he cannot remember taking fire um for then for reasons that aren't entirely clear whatsoever when the team members blows up the SUV they brought with them Gilmore claims this was the cover up the sound of their bomb going off but this doesn't

make much sense as they had been randomly shooting off guns in the middle of night in downtown Aiden also they're like it's a bomb why are you going to cover up the sound of a bomb with another bomb and like it's Aiden it's a bomb why are you going to cover up the sound of a bomb with another bomb yeah and like it's it's aiden it's yemen like they it's not like explosions or gunfire or like

like what and it's just there's literally nothing about it that makes any sense yeah i i don't know what the fuck is going on like even their explanations make no goddamn sense um it's aiden yemen in the middle of a civil war a bomb going off and that this isn't like a 500 pound bomb they're planting it's like a shape charge that goes on a fucking door it's probably much smaller than the hourly saudi and uae airstrikes hitting the city yeah uh so when the bomb went off it leveled the building um the team jumped in the remaining vehicles and hauled ass without ever getting proof that mayo was dead uh it turns out that not only did they not kill mayo but the building was empty uh the only casualty

on the operation was a uae soldier who shot himself in the foot jumping out of the truck that's my favorite part of the whole thing was reported yeah yeah the whole thing was reported and if you watch the video you see like a uae soldier eat shit as soon as he jumps out of the truck and i had no idea why until i read this he accidentally blew his foot off and remember these are like presidential guard dudes like these are the best these are the pinnacle of the uae fucking military i don't know i mean granted it's for me it's an uneducated assumption but i feel like this video is kind of what you can show people who like all they've ever all they know about like special forces or special special operations units or like uh the like american movies like um what is that navy seal

movie that was so terrible oh fuck don't know they had the actual seals as actors oh that was so bad or like uh any like something valor something valor active valor active valor there it is for all they've seen is active valor and zero dark 30 so their assumption of special forces units are like these like really badass dudes with beards who uh who just like wear a cool like super tactical shit and like all they're doing is like being like hella operator as fuck but like a lot of what they're doing is war crimes and shooting themselves in the foot, uh, or shooting their friends on trend during training exercises. Yeah. Um,

or like they couldn't possibly ever fuck things up even though they like crashed a helicopter into a wall in a bottom. Yeah. I mean, I don't get me wrong. These guys are incredibly highly trained. I wouldn't have like, I was in the army for almost 10 years and I,

they're going to kick my fucking ass 10 times out of 10 but but like the the concept that these guys can do nothing wrong and they need like this is a good oversight like good version of like how they operate with no oversight whatsoever like what's like what matters is is not so much like how super badass operator your unit is but like is the mission like well planned well organized and like worth it and like do your do your guys actually know what they're doing and like why because then i feel like even you know if you've got guys who aren't like the most operator people in the world like they're they're more likely to carry it out if like the organization the oversight and the the morale and

all that stuff is good but when you've got guys who all they've done is like go through intense training in the u.s and then get paid you know 200 grand to be a death squad in yemen like the incentive to like actually really do a good job isn't there and and like we didn't talk about it and i kind of glossed over it but uh these guys are getting paid around ten thousand dollars a month uh and uh you know from the get-go uh most of these guys knew that spear operations group and more specifically go on was full of shit um they don't really ever talk about dalan the the palestinian security guy he wasn't in uae he seems to be like the guy who hooked galan up with the uae uh military but um uh like when they got there gilmore talks but they were given like

rusted over old fucking shitty ak's and like trucks that didn't run because it really seemed like nothing but like a money laundering scheme for galan like they were given his budget was over a million dollars a month and then he's giving them like these shitty old weapons he found a ditch somewhere like all that money went somewhere uh and uh like and it's telling where you know personally going into this episode i kind of figured with that kind of money floating around like there would be more you know tier one personnel that would have bought on because you know recent news stories suggest uh people you know the people who are considered the supposed to be considered the quiet professionals quote unquote which i i know i can't shit talk them for all their book deals because i literally wrote a book about my deployment too but uh well at least you

weren't a fucking quiet professional. You were just an armored grunt. Yeah, I never claimed to be quiet or a professional, so that's my defense mechanism. But I assume that it would be much easier to recruit the team. So I guess we can thank Golan for one thing, and that is thanks for sparking a little bit more confidence in the moral compass of our nation's special operations forces, I guess.

As Fox News puts the war criminals on TV to say that what they need to be doing is actually shooting more civilians. Yeah, that was today. I know this episode is going to come out on Monday. is going to come out on monday so really so today we're there was an episode about a uh a fox news segment where uh duncan hunter the vaping congressman who uh defrauded his own campaign to fly a rabbit across the country uh was talking about that is a sentence i can say i never thought i was going to say on record but uh he's the the like five thousand dollars in steam games guy right yeah yeah and if that was the whole story, I'd be like, all right, I get it. I bought three games on Steam yesterday, and I don't even know why.

But he was saying in defense of the Navy SEAL who stabbed a wounded ISIS fighter to death, who was 15 years old, mind you, that politicians, they just want the military to operate within the fucking rules of engagement which is that's the fucking point of the rules of engagement otherwise you turn into fucking house bombing death squads in yemen or like you stabbed 15 year old kids to death and like yeah yeah the whole thing is is insane and that's the the kind of slowly moving wall of uh morality i i think is is why i still even though we're supposed to be a history show technically like i still find myself talking about a fuckload of stuff in the last 20 years because like even uh you know 70 years ago in the american army like it would be kind of unheard of to stab to death a child soldier like you know i don't think we should say that considering like what the u.s

military did in like the pacific would capture japanese soldiers or well most of them were child soldiers to be fair that's probably okay child soldiers fair that's probably they probably weren't child soldiers but i i don't think we should be uh trying to claim that like the the moral superiority of the previous u.s army and uh i'm not here vietnam i'm definitely not talking about vietnam uh but like you know when you is it well let me actually let me rephrase that further. If you look at the brutality that was going on in the Pacific theater and look at the surprising lack of brutality that was going on in the Western front. I mean, there's definitely certain arguments there to be made between racism and the fact that the Germans definitely treated the allies better captured than the Japanese did. Like the Japanese ate people. definitely treated the allies better captured than the the japanese did like the japanese ate people just like the germans treated american troops way better than they treated soviet troops

right because they weren't slavic but like you know it's you know you see uh movies um like saving private ryan is actually a good example where someone was literally stabbed to death and he was a villain for doing it. And you fast forward to Fox News in 2019 and they're like, yeah, so what? He stabbed a guy. Yeah. I mean, it's just a weird level of dehumanization that comes with military worship and fascism i think like because it was acceptable for someone in a militarized society to do that because they you know they're snidely whiplash levels of evil and they were the huns or they're you know the whoever but now it's like it's that that weird uh

i still don't even know what stand-up that was where it's the two guys in the fucking totem coffee uniforms like so you think we're the bad guys? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, and that's, that's kind of how I feel whenever I read one of these stories.

I'm like, uh, we're getting closer to that. Um, then like, you know, you have Marines flying SS flags and shit. Uh,

but in closing of this episode, uh, the, I told you the only casualty was that soldier who shot himself. And after that operation, Gilmore bailed. And so, like, he wanted nothing more to do with this. He got the fuck out. And then he spilled his guts to BuzzFeed about Spear Operations Group.

Now, if you're thinking he ran because he realized, mother of God, what am i doing running around downtown name blowing up buildings like this is clearly fucked his only regret is that they were not more aggressive during their operations in yemen the only regret is that they didn't do more murder yeah you know we could have solved this with killing a lot more people than we did and that's the things like he still wants like i don't i can't talk about that he probably has some like horrifically in-depth uh yeah yeah don't talk about a contract with the ua government where if he says anything on record some of the other dude from his teams and visit him in his house and he's gonna accidentally shoot himself twice in the back of the head yeah yeah um so and the weird ending to this story and because we somehow ended up talking about duncan hunter uh gilmore now runs a vape company in california i feel like all of these the shitty okay is it called like black rifle vape or something

it's it's a fucking vape pen with like picking any rail systems and shit to attach like a you know attach your you know acog scope to your vape so that you can uh blow like really tactical vape rings when you i don't really know how vaping works but i don't either do the vape thing and the smoke comes out, it's tactical. You know what the difference between our pen and our leading competitor's pen is? Ours has a bayonet lug. And each pen is dipped in raw pork before we give it to you so you can stick it to haji and get trichinosis. Yeah, if you want extra racism with your vape so that women never talk to you.

with your vape so that women never talk to you and that the only people you're ever able to talk to are other shitty racist veterans and eventually you become lonely or lonelier and then well okay i don't actually really want to continue down that joke it's a little too dark yeah then you just end up vaping in a va parking lot yeah uh and like there's you know the the added attachment of um a tiny velcro american flag is uh is an extra ten dollars backwards american flag that's gray and green yes uh because uh colors are for soy boys um yeah yeah uh so uh not a lot of information can be found uh about current operations in yemen but we can probably assume that spear operations group and multiple other companies just like it are continuing to disappear people to this day and uh that is our incredibly depressing series on the on the yemeni civil war

and and even then we just scratched the surface yeah we'll never know how many people um have well have died in the war in yemen be that yemeni citizens or like um salvadorian mercenaries or you know sudanese people kidnapped on the hajj and pressed into service or anything like that like we will never know um the numbers are gonna are far higher than whatever the official number may be um and uh they continue climbing and it's only going to get worse as time passes and as nothing is done um and also like i guess to end on a little bit of a moralizing note um the war could end at any time the moment the u.s government decides to actually do even like a modicum of uh pressure on the saudi government by

ceasing arms sales ceasing maintenance and stuff like that or logistics or stopping funding for the ua military and stuff like that the moment any of that happens the war in yemen's over um but we don't do that because we make a lot of money off of it and uh it helps you know continue american interests in the middle east whatever they may be yeah um we created this going to get worse yo i mean well they sat down for peace talks not that long ago uh not that will do anything because it's not in everybody's best interest that the war stops um i mean we've we've managed to bankroll a situation where someone who managed to survive the darth vore genocide went to mecca to pray and then was pressed into service to fight alongside the guy who killed his family yeah way to go um god bless america well travis thank you for joining me on this terrible journey

uh maybe next time we'll we'll do a better topic where we don't have to drink ourselves to sleep at night jesus talk about something like really uplifting like uh i don't know like the gaza war or something like that oh that's that's fun oh man all right man well uh follow travis uh now uh since the msnbc has gotten a hold of us he has a hundred whole followers so, hey, craft underscore Travis. Yeah, yeah. That's right. I mean, Nick is technically my full-time co-host,

and he only has a couple more than you. Follow the show on Twitter if you hate yourself and want to see bad drone strike videos from Yemen at lion underscore bye and follow me for all your dumb shit posts at jcast99. And you can direct all of your hate mail towards haycraft underscore Travis. Yeah, I'm very accepting of hate mail.

I will enjoy sending you pictures of the pig pooping on its own balls. I believe it's our patron saint. It's like the CIA and then the pig pooping in its balls I'm actually a really big fan of the picture of the guy balancing between two walls and shitting and pissing all over himself oh yeah that's a good one

also shout out here to the Barzani family the eternal patrons of the Kurdistan regional government and specifically Natchi Irvan and Masroor Barzani the president and prime minister of the Kurdistan regional government and specifically Netshir Van and Masroor Barzani, the president and prime minister of the Kurdistan regional government specifically. And special thanks to the Asayish and Paristan in particular.

Yeah. And also we have had nine electricity for the last nine hours. So special thanks to the Erbil governor and directorate of electricity. And I would like to thank the United States Air Force for not destroying their infrastructure further. And with that, we will see you next week. Hi, this is Nate Bethea, and I'm the producer of the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. This show is brought to you by Audible.

And as it just so happens, Audible is offering our listeners a free audiobook with a 30-day trial membership. Just go to audibletrial.com forward slash donkeys and browse the selection of audio programs. Download its title for free and start listening. Once again, that's www.audibletrial.com forward slash donkeys to get started.