Part Of The Problem - John Kiriakou

Episode Date: December 4, 2025

Dave Smith brings you the latest in politics! On this episode of Part Of The Problem, Dave is joined by whistleblower and former intelligence officer John Kiriakou to discuss what he learned while working for the CIA, the portrayal of the conflict with Israel and Palestine, lessons from before 9/11 and more.Order Lauren Smith’s book here: https://a.co/d/67djjBpSupport Our Sponsors:Brunt Workwear - http://bruntworkwear.com/ Use code PROBLEMHexclad - Find your forever cookware @hexclad and get10% off at https://hexclad.com/PROBLEM! #hexcladpartnerKalshi - https://kalshi.com/daveMoink - https://www.moinkbox.com/potpPart Of The Problem is available for early pre-release at https://partoftheproblem.com as well as an exclusive episode on Thursday!PORCH TOUR DATES HERE:https://www.eventbrite.com/cc/porch-tour-2025-4222673Find Run Your Mouth here:YouTube - http://youtube.com/@RunYourMouthiTunes - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/run-your-mouth-podcast/id1211469807Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/4ka50RAKTxFTxbtyPP8AHmFollow the show on social media:X:http://x.com/ComicDaveSmithhttp://x.com/RobbieTheFireInstagram:http://instagram.com/theproblemdavesmithhttp://instagram.com/robbiethefire#libertarianSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

what's up everybody welcome to a brand new episode of part of the problem i've been really looking forward to this one so i'm glad you guys are tuning in it's going to be a good one you know i had this experience uh recently uh i was at an event a libertarian event and someone said to me i remember they just said the the comment offhand and they they were right in spirit but they were wrong technically so this is good trivia to have they said You know, the craziest thing is that we, every American knows that we erected a torture program and no one ever went to jail for it. And I said, that's not true.

That is not true. Someone did go to jail for the torture program that the Bush administration erected. And of course, that is our guest. The person who went to jail for it, of course, is the person who exposed it to the American people. And I think this is true for you. This is true for Bradley Manning. or I guess later known as Chelsea Manning. It's true for Julian Assange.

I think one of the things that really has characterized where America is at is that for all of the crimes that have been committed, just from the government in the 21st century alone, the people who end up getting punished are the ones who expose the crimes rather than the people who committed them. Of course, my guest for today's show is John Curiakou, who is, in my opinion, an American hero, the CIA whistleblower. who exposed the torture program during the Bush administration. So, welcome, sir.

I'm sorry you have to hold the distinct title of being the only person to go to jail for the torture program that was erected in this country. But you've been, well, you've been a really valuable, a really valuable contributor to this conversation and waking people up to the nature of how government really works. And so I'm grateful for the work that you do. And I'm grateful that you took some time to join us today. Pleasures all mine. Thanks for the invitation.

Absolutely. You know, I was thinking, I was mentioning this to you just before we got started, but there was, I knew we had booked this interview a few days ago, and it was, I think, the day before the UN Commission on torture just came out with this report that there was widespread torture going on over the, I mean, for many years, but they say over the last two years, widespread torture of Palestinians, many tortured to death. Of course, that did remind me of the torture programs that the United States of America was involved in in the immediate wake of 9-11 and the war on terrorism. And then there was this whole conversation that I was just interviewed on Pierce Morgan about where Netanyahu is claiming that, you know, he's requesting

a pardon for his corruption charges, and he's claiming that this is the path toward national unity for Israel, right? Like, it's such a divisive issue that, half the country wants me in jail and wouldn't it unify everybody if we were to just give me a pardon? And it just, like, the parallels were so striking to me between Barack Obama's position on not prosecuting Bush error criminals, which then, of course, he ended up becoming one of us. Yes, indeed. But anyway, so just curious, your take on all of this, the parallels between the American dynamic and the Israeli dynamic, or what do you think in this week when you read about this stuff? Oh, my God. Where do you even begin with something like that? You know, just

I'll begin with a little knit that has bothered me for a long time. It's when we talk about Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners. Why do we use different words to describe people who have been snatched off the street and not charged with a crime? Why did the Israelis get to be hostages and the Palestinians are prisoners? They haven't been convicted of anything. I was talking to a doctor recently, an Israeli doctor, who's a human rights activist, and he told me that in prison now, Palestinians are not allowed to speak, number one, and they're not allowed to walk. They have to go from place to place, like to the food hall or whatever, on all fours.

And it's just to cow them. So, you know, that's, like I say, where do you even begin? You know, there are so many different things we can talk about relative to torture and things that we know are wrong because we're signatories to these international conventions that ban, you know, degrading and inhumane treatment. And then we just pretend it doesn't happen when we know it happens. So I don't get the double standard. I've never understood the double standard. And this is not a partisan issue because the Democrats and the Republicans are equally guilty of doing exactly this. You know, I was given an interview earlier today, and I said that we're either going to be a country that that is a shining beacon for human rights and civil rights and civil liberties, or we're not.

But we can't pretend to be this great beacon of hope and yell at other countries and tell them how to conduct their business if we're just going to be hypocrites about it. give you an example. When I was on assignment to the State Department, I was on rotation to the State Department from 1994 to 1996, I served in the American Embassy in Bahrain as the economic officer, but I was also the human rights officer. And so every year, every American embassy in every country with which we have diplomatic relations has to do a human rights report and send it back to Congress. And so that was part of it. of my job. I go out and interview attorneys and detainees and government officials and everybody who has anything to do with human

rights. So when I go to see the Minister of Interior, and I say, Your Highness, you cannot pick up a 15-year-old boy off the street and beat him to death because he marched in a peaceful pro-democracy demonstration and then call his parents that night and tell him to come and pick up the body. You can't do that. I have to report that to Congress, and they may cut off your arms sales. But then, an hour later, some CIA guy comes in and says, don't pay any attention to the human rights guy.

If we give you $10 million, we want you to open up a secret torture chamber, and we're going to bring people here. We'll disappear them, and you torture them, and then you give us a transcript. of what they say. What are they going to do? They're going to listen to John the human rights guy? Right, right. Or are they going to listen to the CIA guy with the suitcase full of $10 million in cash?

So that's what we're up against. Yeah, and it seems like there's an interesting dynamic there where like you also just in terms of public opinion or something like that, like you just lose the moral leg to stand on. You know, you see, you know, there's, I found this to be an interesting. I've mentioned this before on the show. And I'm really not even trying to be. up on Joel Barry from the um he's he works over at a um what's it called the not the onion but

the other one uh the Babylon Bee yeah the Babylon Bee yeah yeah so he so he said and like look I completely disagree with them on the Israel stuff but like I agreed with them I think on COVID and wokeism and you know they nothing against those guys exactly but he said this to me at one point there's your first point here just reminded me of this that I said when the ceasefire at first broke at the latest ceasefire that is hanging on by a thread over in is it's hanging on yeah if you could call that a ceasefire you know like of course like you know if if um israel's killed i think like maybe uh a hundred or 200 civilians since the ceasefire has you know like if the Palestinians had killed 200 Israeli civilians since then we wouldn't be considering this a ceasefire but i said something at

the very beginning of the ceasefire i had a very generic tweet i thought that was just like hey hope this works. I'm not optimistic, but let's hope something better comes. And I said at least, I said at the very least, at least there's prisoner swaps, or I said there's hostage swaps going on, and there's more aid getting in right now than there was a few weeks ago. So that's better. And then Joel Berry got very offended. He goes, how dare you call them hostage swaps? One side is all innocent Israelis, and the other side is all a bunch of terrorists. And I just thought this was such an amazing moment because, first of all, look, dude, it's just the way people conceive of these things. And then it's circular. Yeah, if your starting point is that all the Israelis are angels

and all the Palestinians are terrorists, well, then sure. But there were IDF soldiers who were amongst the hostages, and there were 1,700 people who had never been charged with anything who Israel was holding. So literally, one is a, look, again, all these things are complicated. I don't ever want to see prisoners of war or hostages, even when they're soldiers. But like, it's a different thing for an IDF soldier to be being held in occupied territory than it is for just some Palestinian boy who is never charged with anything to get tortured. I gave an interview. I'm going to say four or five weeks ago, and I said, and slap me if this is too controversial, but I said, I believed that both sides should respect the basic tenets of human rights. Next thing I know, I have a Google alert on myself,

just to see what people are saying if I need to defend myself or whatever. There's an article in some obscure Middle Eastern Journal, and it's written by the political director in the Israeli Foreign Minister's Office. And he says, John Kyriaku, a noted anti-Semite, said, blah, blah, blah, that we should respect human rights. I'm like, what? I said, listen, people have called me a lot of things over the years. A noted anti-Semite.

is not one of them because I said that both sides should respect human rights. Incredible. And I'll tell you the truth. I have a lot of friends who are either Israeli or Israeli-American. There's one friend I'm particularly close to who's served several years in the IDF. And I said, dude, I said, check me if I become, you know, if I say things that are a little too far over in the way of human rights. And he's like, I'd be the first to check you. And no, you haven't said anything.

Well, it's, you know, they got this Zohran Mamdani, who's the mayor elect of New York City here now. First of all, is, I mean, he was like a woke, democratic socialist. He's got, like, in my opinion, some of the, like, cringiest and most ridiculous opinions ever. But the thing they tried, the thing they tried to get him on, John, was that he said he had this Hilarian statement where he said that I think Israel should be a state with equal rights for everybody. Imagine. And this is, imagine, imagine trying to turn that statement into some type of, like, hateful.

And they actually used it. Like, they played the clip of it and went, listen to them when they say, does Israel have a right to exist? And he goes, yeah. And he goes, does Israel have a right to exist as a state? And he goes, they have a right to exist as a state with equal rights for everyone. And they're like, the horror. Yeah.

exactly talking about exactly and then when they deny when they deny that there are similarities between israel today and south africa in the 1980s and then they confuse which one you're talking about yeah i mean come on man it's an indictment but there are a lot of it let me add one other one other this is something that's really been bothered me a lot lately is here in the united States. Listen, I have friends completely across the ideological spectrum. I genuinely don't care if people are Democrats or Republicans or conservatives. It makes no difference to me. I think we can find common ground on everything. But I can't tell you how many friends that I have from both the left and the right who have said, after I say something like, you know, there should be an

investigation on human rights abuses and they'll say i didn't know you were pro hamas it's like the fuck are you talking about pro hamas are you kidding me i was on pierce morgan one time and um and i like going i actually was on pierce morgan let me look 15 minutes ago but i was on several months ago and funny thing to me is he he had me as one of the right wing guys uh which it only occurred to me 20 minutes into the show. But he said to me, do you believe that Hamas is a terrorist organization? I said, of course. And he said, was October 7th a terrorist attack? And I said, of course it was. And he said, so what is the point that you're holding to here? And I said, the point I'm holding to is that Israel has to respect human rights. It really is as simple as that. And he says,

anybody disagree and everybody on the panel agreed and then pierce says i think this is the first time we've ever talked about israel on this show and all four panelists agreed but i mean what's so hard about that all right guys let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show which is cal she we've been telling you about them for a while and they've been popping up all over the place as i'm sure you guys know by now cal she is the first ever fully regulated c ftc approved available in all state's prediction market. So basically, you can bet on anything that's got a clear outcome. You can bet on whether inflation will go up or down next year. You can bet on who's going to win the midterm elections, who's going to be the next president. But you can also view it as a prediction

market and see where people are putting their money. So it's very interesting. It kind of keeps your finger on the pulse of American culture. And also, you can throw some money down and win. Calshy.com slash Dave. Go check out Calci today. Check out the markets. Get in on the betting. Have some fun. Let's get back into the show. Yeah, well, you know, I, again, like you said before, when you're, you know, when there are these terms that are used like, like hostage versus prisoner. But really, there is no definitional difference between the two things.

I mean, especially when you're talking about the, the only difference really is whether it's state or non-state actors, like whether it's a non-state actor taking somebody or it's a state actor taking someone. But if you never gave him a trial. or anything even resembling a military tribunal, then you're the same. You're a guy with a gun who snatched somebody and is keeping them in captivity.

But then here's the same thing is that that also applies to this term terrorism. And I know that, you know, you are somebody who has a career in counterterrorism. And I, but like you said before, I'm not a lefty at all. I'm a hardcore libertarian. Right.

But Noam Chomsky, man, he really did nail it when he said, he goes, fundamentally, what is the difference between terrorism and counterterrorism? It's terrorism when they do it, and it's counterterrorism when we do it. And that's really the only difference. And so, I mean, I told a spokesman for the IDF on Pierce Morgan the other day. He said something that he didn't respect my line of inquiry. And I said, sir, you're the spokesman for a terrorist organization.

And I think I tried to make it a funny line. I said, you're a spokesman for the biggest terrorist organization in a region known for terrorist organizations and but it's really that is it and I think that this is just it's it's gotten to a point where I think that what's kind of interesting is it seems to me like you were a guy who kind of woke up to the reality of this on the inside and then in the in the following two decades it seems like the people have woken up to this reality from the outside oh I'll give you I'll give you an example I'm sorry to interrupt you oh no no go ahead the night that we captured Abu Zubeda and dozens and dozens and dozens

of other al-Qaeda fighters. We caught so many people that night that we had to bring them into our safe house for interrogation in shifts. We had to bring them in ten at a time in a paddy wagon. So the first group comes in and there was this idiot working for me.

He had flown out to Pakistan just for the operation, but he was a total moron and thought he was in charge. And I had to slap him down a couple of times. So he brings these prisoners in and they all have bags on their heads.

And I said, why do they have hoods on? And he said, we don't want them to see our faces. And I said, are you seriously telling me that you have never read the Geneva Convention? It is a war crime to put hoods on them. I said, take the hoods off. And he goes, wait. And he says, don't take the hoods off. And he says to me, I'm going to report you to headquarters. And I said, oh, I'm already reporting you to headquarters for committing a war crime. Take the hoods off. And they took the hoods off. We reported each other to headquarters. I got reprimanded. Yeah. Well, it really does show you that, which is kind of a, you know, libertarian view of

mind that the thing about the law is that there's really no such thing. And it's a nice idea, but they are, after all, words written down on a piece of paper. And, you know, like you see this all the time, like there'll be like videos, like police arrest videos. and there's always, you find that one, you know, the sovereign citizen or whoever, who's like, I know my rights. And, you know, then you watch the cops like, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, get out of the car. And they're like, I have the right not to get out of the car. Then the cop breaks the window, drags them out of the car.

I watch those every single night. Well, what's so, I think what's so fascinating about them, John, is that you actually, when you watch it, what you're actually watching is this, this confrontation between abstract conceptions and brutal reality and in a sense like you got a man with a gun who's got a walkie-talkie to a bunch of other men with guns you are outgunned and outmanned by the most powerful gang in the land which is the local police in any jurisdiction in the United States of America but then in your mind you're like yes but something was written down on a scroll in the late 1700s and I believe that hocus pocus this

It is almost a belief in magic. Oh, yeah. What you realize is that the law is at the end of the day, whatever is enforced. If you're in a 60 mile per hour speed limit, but they don't pull you over unless you go 75, then the speed limit is 75 miles per hour in reality. And I think what you're describing there is that in reality, war crimes aren't illegal, but reporting on the mess. That is the sad, sorry state that we find ourselves in.

You're absolutely right. Yeah. So as you, now you're, so you were at the CIA before 9-11. Oh, yeah. I was at the CIA, what, 11 years before 9-11. Okay. So you came in, I'm sorry, 90, so 1990 to around 2006. 2005, yeah. 2005, sorry. Yeah. So now I know you've talked about this before, but you, that's, that to me is a very interesting dynamic because not only obviously the, you know, the nature of the CIA, has been something different than what the American people have understood of it for a long time.

But obviously, things really changed after 9-11 in the war on terror's launch. I also feel like there's, I mean, like I remember, you know, like my parents were interested in politics that crossfire was on. Oh, sure. My living room in the 90s or something like that. And I think if you had asked them, they would have said that, you know, yeah, there's a CIA. and they do secret spy stuff. And sure, they probably even knew they were toppling some communist governments

or something like that around the world. But I don't think when they looked at politics, they ever thought this is a show orchestrated by the deep state that is irrelevant to the real mechanisms of government, that the deep state is actually running this thing, whereas now I think that's like common knowledge amongst the American people. So you, I want like from your perspective, you're in the CIA, you go in there believing in the,

cause, believing you're serving your country. What was like, what, what were the steps of where you started going like, oh, man, this might be something really unsafery that I'm a part of? You know, the first, the first time I ever considered the notion of a deep state, I still remember it. It was in, it was one specific meeting. There is, uh, there's a group at, that's housed at the CIA called the National Intelligence Council.

So they're supposed to be the top most. analysts from all around the intelligence community. These are the best and the brightest, right? They're all in the Senior Intelligence Service. Almost all of them have PhDs. Sometimes they go back and forth between the CIA and Harvard and Stanford and places like that. And there was one guy who was the NIO, the National Intelligence Officer for warning. So he's supposed to be the guy that's looking five, 10, 20 years down the line saying,

you know, I think that Bolivia is going to be a problem for us 20 years from now. Well, I remember going into this meeting with him, and I was a young kid. I was in my 20s. He was an old man, but everybody, you know, 50 and older in my mind was an old man at the time. I'm 61 now, and I realize how foolish that was. But anyway, people were congratulating him. And I asked somebody, I said, why is everybody congratulating him? oh he got an age waiver from the director and i said what's that mean oh he's allowed to work

until he's 70 i was like 70 how old is he now he's 65 he's been in this job for 42 years and he's going to stay for another five years and i was like why would anybody want to want to be in a job for for 47 years the same job well because that's the power that you've built. That's the authority that you've built. Presidents come and go. How many presidents are going to come and go over the course of this guy's 47-year CIA career? So he knows that if the president calls and says, listen, I want you to take a really hard look at, you know, Brazil. He can tell the president go screw himself. Not in so many words. But he can just so slow role this response that by the time he feels like getting around to it, the president's long

gone. And I realized for the very first time, there actually is a deep state. We can call it the state. We can call it the federal bureaucracy. But by God, it's there. It exists. You know, so it reminds me, as you say this, so there's this really great book written by Hans Herman Hoppa. It's called Democracy, the God that failed. And it's essentially a right-wing libertarian critique of democracy. But whether you come away, like, completely agreeing with his thesis or not, it's just it's a worthwhile way. It's a very fascinating, like, right-wing libertarian critique on democracy.

And essentially, if I could boil it down, like, his argument is basically that, like, having democracy essentially makes the government, like, publicly owned. And the way, if we think about the way any piece of property is owned, we all, on some level we all know that like owners take better care of a house than renters you know like it's just if you if it's your problem that you're going to have to do i know this just from like i own a house now and i used to rent a house now when i own the house i'm thinking about like oh well what's best for in 20 years what's when you're renting you're just not you're like what's gonna am i going to get my security deposit back is essentially your concern and so basically his point was that he was going like

well look hey people who believe in free markets people who believe in capitalism we all recognize that everything is better owned privately. And the logical conclusion of that is kind of like, if you're going to have a government, you're better off having just a decision maker at the top rather than this thing where essentially you're in for four years. Your only incentives are to loot as much out of it as you can before you get out. But then I think another aspect that is what you're talking about.

In a sense, I'm not just sticking up for the deep state, but in a sense there, you're going, well, hey, what are they going to do? They are the permanent part of the government after all. you know like after all the CIA is going to be making decisions the CIA has been making important decisions since it was created we've had dozens of presidents since then but we have not had or i guess do the math whatever since the end of world war two but the point is there's been a whole lot of them coming in and going and so almost just by the nature of the system it's almost designed that of course the intelligence agencies would have to think like that to think like yeah whatever Trump's going

to come in and have his whole executive order tariffs, okay, then the next guy gets in there and he can undo all of them. So who cares? Right. Yeah, that's what it comes down to. Yeah. Sorry, go ahead. I was going to say, and for a minute, we thought that oversight committees might fix that. And I chuckle about it now. At the time, 1975, 1976, this seemed like a good idea that the deep state has become too big, too powerful, too widespread. It kills anybody that gets in their way. They experiment on Americans, you know, dosing people with LSD, forcing people to jump out of windows. We got to put a hold on this. And that lasted for what, six years until we decided, ah, no, you know what? We're going to sell weapons to the Iranians, which is illegal.

and then we're going to have a Saudi middleman do it and he'll launder the money for us. Then we'll use the money to buy new weapons that we're going to use this guy in Cyprus to send to the rebels in Nicaragua, which is also illegal, and just hope that nobody notices. Yeah, and also, like, just to add into that, that it was already known that the position of the administration was supporting Saddam Hussein in that war. So the administration is supporting the other side of the war. Like, I mean, it's just, it's, I always find that to be, I just love that, that example in American history, the Iraq Iran War of 1980 to 1986, just because like, it's so indefensible to fund both sides of a war. Like, it's almost like, it's almost even more indefensible than just launching a war of aggression.

Because at least launching a war of aggression, you know, you can claim some preemptive, like, well, we felt that we would, we had to do. do this or something else would happen. But when you're funding both sides of a war, you go, oh, you're just a monster. Oh, my God. And it was even worse than that. As soon as one would get a leg up on the other, we would increase the level of intelligence cooperation. So if the Iranians move into Iraqi territory, then we start giving the Iraqis top secret overhead imagery. And then if the Iraqis push into Iranian territory, then we start. giving the Iranians overhead imagery. So it was hideous.

That I didn't know. That's really interesting. So when you say the period where like there were six years, you're saying like after the church hearings, but before like the not, I don't know what you would call it, but before the Carter Doctrine and then the Reagan doctrine in the Middle East.

So like we had a little period there where the CIA wasn't certain people. Yeah, this little period. Exactly. Yeah. And then, you know, there was kind of a golden age very briefly under Bill Clinton, where Clinton came down with his edict that he did not want the CIA to do anything with anybody that had what he called a human rights problem. So if you were a recruited asset of the CIA

and, oh, by the way, you happened to run this Honduran death squad, you're fired. We use the word terminated at the CIA, but people would take that wrong. So you're fired. You're fired. There's no more paycheck. There's no more cooperation. And I remember people laughing when that first came down. And then as it was implemented, people were like, oh, oh, he's serious. This is actually working out. Okay.

Well, good for us. And then 9-11 happened. And I said earlier in an interview, the pendulum tends to swing both ways. Well, it went so far after 9-11 that it's not yet swung back. All right, guys. Let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for for today's show, which is Brunt Workwear. These are the most comfortable pair of work boots I have ever put on my delicate feet.

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That's bruntworkware.com. promo code problem for $10 off the most comfortable, durable pair of work boots you will ever own. All right. Let's get back into the show. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. So what? Yeah, well, Bill Clinton had some good ideas and then all of a sudden he's been a blue dress on Jeffrey Epstein's living room wall or something. So was, was your, because I want to ask a bunch about this, because this is like a topic that I've been very fascinated with and read a lot about. But you were there. So the neoconservatives who of course were like whatever, there was like the origins in Team B in their intellectuals. They had positions in the Reagan administration and in the George

H.W. Bush administration. But during those Clinton years that you're talking about, they're essentially out of power. They were out. And a lot of them were Democrats, believe it or not. Like Richard Pearl never changed his voter registration from Democrat to Republican. And a lot of them, as yeah a lot of them as very young men worked for scoop jackson who was a democratic senator from washington state no that i did know i mean they were trotskyites into democrats then into that's why they were the neo conservatives right exactly right so this now these guys while they're out obviously they have made cozy relationships with the military industrial complex at this point like in the 90s all those bill crystal think tanks are funded by weapons companies and that's right they're advocating

both to Benjamin Netanyahu and then later to Bill Clinton that we go overthrow Saddam Hussein that we attack Iran attacks Syria before 9-11. So there's 10 months before 9-11 where like George W. Bush is in and he's staffed his administration with all these neocons. What was the feeling that? Like because weren't they, from my understanding is they were kind of viewed as the crazies in the basement. There's this group of Warhawks that always wants to blow everything up.

But like whatever, they don't really have it. any power. There was even in the George H.W. Bush, there were Brent Scowcrofts and there were people who could like veto them who are like, they're not going to get all their craziest views through. But like I'm saying, before 9-11 in the Bush administration, you guys must have noticed like, oh man, Dick Cheney just staffed the entire government with these guys at the most powerful positions.

And as their deputies and deputies, deputies, deputies, I'll tell you a funny story. When I was in Bahrain from 94 to 96, I had an intern working for me. And he was a student at Yale. He was a sophomore at Yale. Really, really smart guy. And we kind of sort of stayed in touch in the years after he stayed at Yale and got a master's. Then he got a PhD.

And then he sent me a note saying, hey, I just got a job at the Pentagon working in this new undersecretariat for intelligence. And I said, oh, cool. I said, why don't you come over to the agency? I'm working for the deputy director and you can brief him on, you know, what the Pentagon's thoughts are on Iraq. He comes over, gives this briefing. And I remember being like appalled. And my boss kept looking at me like, what are you doing, bringing this guy here? So I walked him out to his car and I said, Michael, I have to ask you. When did you become a fascist? And he turned to me and he says, we're in charge now.

We're in charge and Saddam Hussein's going to die. And I was like, oh my God. Well, he's working for, he's working for, well, I don't want to name names, but he's working for all those guys at the Pentagon who later became famous and appeared in Vanity Fair in these exposés about, you know, how we ended up at war in Iraq. it turns out that they just bided their time knowing that they had a champion in Dick Cheney, that Dick Cheney was the one running the show.

You know, it's funny because right before 9-11 at the CIA, it was China, China, China, China. And I was working on the counterterrorism center at the time, and I was like, ah, you know, they really should kind of divert some of their attention away from China and start looking at this terrorism situation in the Middle East. But it was all about China. And then once we got hit, I mean, listen, there's this famous story that Richard Pearl was at the White House on September 12th, 2001, and said, you know we have to attack Iraq, right?

And then it was just history from there. So now, now I know I've made a lot out of this over years. And I think you've given me, you know, from other interviews of years that I've watched, like you've given me some of the. information about this. Now, I've had people who have tried to like debunk this, but I just find the case to be pretty overwhelming. But if you look at, say, just to pick some like public writings, okay, Benjamin Netanyahu writes a book in 95 or 96 called Fighting Terrorism, that kind of lays a lot of this stuff out. In 1996 is also when Richard Pearl and David Wormsor and Douglas write the clean break memo to Benjamin Netanyahu. The same year, 1996, David Wormser writes

a companion piece called Coping with Crumbling States. Now, anybody can go read this stuff. It's all out there. I mean, you might have to buy Benjamin Netanyahu's book, but the rest of them are all up in PDFs for free on the Internet. And they're very clear that their plan is to explicitly, to get away from the peace process and the promise of Oslo, which is to give the Palestinians their own states.

And instead, what the Israelis need to do is reverse the Yitzhak Rabin doctrine, which was we have to make peace with the Palestinians in order to make peace. with the broader Arab world, and they go, no, no, no, no, we're going to do the opposite. We're going to overthrow all the problematic regimes in the broader Arab world or broader Muslim world. And that way, we never have to make peace with the Palestinian. We never have to do a land for peace deal.

Now, this, this, in, in the, uh, the, uh, the, uh, the, uh, the, the, uh, the, clean break memo, they specifically call for overthrowing Saddam Hussein, uh, strikes on around, strikes on Syria. Then we have, um, the, um, obviously the letters to Bill Clinton. urging him to overthrow Saddam Hussein 98, I believe. Then you have General Wesley Clark's now famous comments about how the plan was to overthrow seven countries in the next five years. By the way, of those seven countries, six of them for sure have been attacked by either

Israel, the United States, or both since. The seventh one, Sudan, the king died, there was a civil war. It was broken up. I believe there's still a horrible conflict going on over there to this day. A genuine civil war taking place right now. Yes, it's really awful. And so now, and I don't know the exact details, but I know there's all types of George Soros articles about how Sudan needs to be separated and needed to be, you know, Southern

Sudan needed to be removed. So I don't know exactly the details of the intervention there. But there's, now when people try to argue with this, a lot of times they'll say, okay, but the clean break memo didn't happen exactly, like it didn't happen exactly the way it's written because they said they wanted a Hashemite King to come in. Okay, the Hashimite King died. Chalaby was the one who sold them on the whole Hashmite King thing anyway. They basically went with the same version of that of Chalabee's group supposedly taking over. Now, again, I guess the point that I've always been making with all this stuff when you put

it together is that clearly, like for the same reason that people read foreign affairs because they want to get the thinking in Washington. So clearly the thinking in Washington here is that we are going to fight multiple regime change wars of choice and like that this this had been a plan it really got animated after 9-11 now you had some interesting information on this too where you had you had explicitly heard tell me remind me of this who did you hear from that we would be in tehran by next year and this was in 2001 i think you had heard this uh it was in two it was in february of 2003 oh okay my mistake so this is this is the night before we attend Iraq. I was the note taker in a meeting that is called a principles committee meeting. So it's

normally chaired by the president. In this case, for whatever reason, it was chaired by Vice President Cheney. But I'm sitting in the CIA director's conference room with George Tenet. He's the only person sitting at the table. I'm sitting directly behind him to take notes. And the Cheney is on one screen, chairing the meeting. Condi Rice is next to him on the next screen. And Colin Powell's on the screen and, um, and secretary, um, Rumsfeld is on a screen and, and there are a couple of NSC senior directors and then the head of, um, Centcom, Sync, Commander and Chief of Central Command, General, uh, who is that, Tommy Franks. And so I've always hated the order of battle briefings. I've always hated them because I don't understand them and I just don't give

a shit where we have, you know. So anyway, Cheney starts by saying, General Franks, why don't you start off with the order of battle briefing? And I was like, so I'm ready to write down. He's like, you know, elements of the First Army Division are at this location and the fifth the cavalry brigade is here and the moving north at 20 kilometers. I don't care where these guys are. So he finishes the briefing and he says, if all goes as planned, we can be in. in Tehran by August. And George very discreetly reaches in front of him and turns off the microphone.

And then he turns to me and he says, did he say Tehran or did he say Baghdad? And I said, he said Tehran. And George says, have they lost their minds? And then he discreetly turns the microphone back on and just kind of sits there for the rest of the briefing. I go down to, back to my office afterwards, I should say at the very end of the briefing, this idiot who was a senior director at the NSC says excitedly, as everybody's, you know,

getting up and they're logging off, he says, when we cross that border tomorrow morning, they're going to throw flowers at us. And I remember thinking, do they know nothing about history? Like they must know nothing about the history of the Middle East. I'll go back to the office. My boss says, how was the briefing? And I said, did you know we were going to attack Iran? And he goes, are they still talking about that?

We're not going to attack Iran. And I said, these guys know nothing about history. He said, of course, they don't know anything about history. That's why they think we're going to go to Iran. We're not going to go to Iran. And then, you know, we attacked Iraq the next day and everything turned to shit after that. Right, right. And of course, you could see where at least it seems to me.

that amongst that neoconservative group, and of course you never know what's in everybody's hearts and minds and stuff, but it does seem like they believed it, like that they really did believe that... I mean, listen, I saw an interview with David Wormser from a few weeks ago, a few weeks ago, and the clean break memo gets brought up,

and he starts defending it. How, yes, if you had put the Hashemite King in Iraq, that the Shiites would have had to listen to the Hashimite, And therefore, they would have told the Lebanese to knock it off and be friendly with Israel. Like, it does seem like they, and it's hard, I think, for younger people to understand, I guess, because I was alive in the 80s and 90s. I kind of, like, I think there was a feeling, particularly after the first Persian Gulf War, where it was like in the unipolar moment, like, this is America.

If we want to topple Saddam's regime, we'll topple them immediately. We'll move on to Tehran next year. And then like, whoopsie, nobody's. saw like a civil war where a million people get killed breaking out and the whole thing being a catastrophe but it at least seems to me that like those people were actually that stupid yes they were actually that ignorant of history and thought we were going to be greeted as liberators willful blindness really is is what it was like how could you not think that two million people are going to end up dead by the time you decide to finally leave like how could you conclude anything other than this is

going to be a disaster and millions of people are going to die. And on top of it all, Saddam Hussein, like him or hate him, like his politics or hate his politics, was literally the only Sunni bulwark against Iran. And if you're, you know, the king of Bahrain or the emir of Kuwait or the king of Saudi Arabia and your population is small and you're petrified of Iranian expansionism, the only thing that's going to protect you is a Sunni leader in Iraq. When I first started as an analyst, I was an analyst on Iraq for the whole first seven or eight years of my career. And our analytic line was that, yeah, Iraqis would probably be very happy to see Saddam go, but they would also be very happy to see him replaced by a Sunni.

military junta, right, where there's no clear person in charge, but it's a bunch of Sunni generals who are going to keep the Iranians off everybody's back, but are going to allow some degree of freedom and respect for human rights among the populace. And that never happened. Right. All right, guys, let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show, which is hex clad. The holiday season is here, and let's be real. The kitchen is where it all goes down.

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also get 10% off if you go to hexclad.com slash problem. That's H-E-X-C-L-A-D dot com slash problem for 10% off your order. Seriously, this is a great Christmas gift, either to yourself or to someone you love, hexclad.com slash problem. Let's get back into the show. Right. So do you, now, what was your take like in those days about the relationship that Israel had with all of this? Because obviously, you know, I think sometimes almost like this debate, it like gets into

semantics, you know, where people will be like, you know, was it Israel's war? Was it our war? obviously it's much more complicated than that. And I think that essentially the Israeli government and the U.S. government have so merged, especially on like the deep state level, that it's almost like hard to tell where one stops and the other one begins. But there's kind of no question here that like, okay, the neoconservatives, obviously, like I just said, they're writing these letters to Benjamin Netanyahu. They're clearly married at the hip with the Lekud Party.

Obviously, the Israel lobby was very instrumental. the neo-conservatives themselves are a part of the Israel lobby. Like, obviously, this was all very instrumental. And the feeling, I guess, was right, like that this will make the region safer for Israel or something like that. Like, what was your perspective on the inside of how much of a role that or how much of an influence that was playing? Well, the first Gulf War was crystal clear. Iraq invaded Kuwait. Saddam miscalculated thought that certainly the United States wouldn't go to Kuwait's aid.

We didn't have very good relations with Kuwait at the time. They were members of the non-aligned movement, and we, you know, we had an embassy there, but we weren't terribly close friends. He was wrong. The Iraq War was an entirely different animal. The Israelis begged us to let them join in the attack on Iraq. And everybody they approached, whether it was the Pentagon or the White House or the CIA said, absolutely not. Now, they tried to get a couple of shots in. I won't say more than that,

but they tried to get a couple of shots in on the day that we crossed the border. But they were so excited to the point of giddiness that they wanted to be involved in this war and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. You make an important point here that I want to amplify. It's not that our relations coincided. It's that the Israelis, along with the neocons, had been working on the government so consistently since the middle of the Clinton administration, since the beginning of the Clinton administration, that there was just almost no way out of it. Like, in retrospect, of course we attacked Iraq. I mean, even if we hadn't made up the whole notion of weapons of mass destruction, we would have made up something else to justify. an attack on Iraq. I mean, look at Dick Cheney's efforts to connect Saddam Hussein with Al-Qaeda.

For those of us inside the CIA who knew a little bit about Iraq and about al-Qaeda and about Islam, I mean, everybody to a man would have said, there's literally nothing Muslim about Saddam Hussein. He famously made the Umbra, the minor pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia. And it was either 1987 or 1988. He went with the vice president of Iraq. Is that Ibrahim, is that Ibrahim was a pious Sufi Muslim. Saddam didn't even know the prayers. And so when they went to the Kabat to pray, Zedahed al-Saddam knelt just behind Saddam

to whisper the prayers to him so that he could say them out loud and make it look like he knew what the hell he was doing. So there was no connection between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. Osama bin Laden hated Saddam Hussein at least as much as he hated the United States. There was no connection there. But Dick Cheney counted correctly, as it turned out,

on the American people being so stupid and so gullible that they would just go along with it. Yeah, well, I guess, and I don't have the expertise you have, but I do know enough to know when you see a French beret on someone that's not a sign of an Islamist. That's usually not the first side. You don't have to know that much to know that that's probably not what you're dealing with. That's right. No, I mean, it's unbelievable.

Throughout the whole thing, I remember just, I remember watching like Carl Rove on Bill O'Reilly, you know, during those years come in. And he would, look, they would do this because they were good at this, because he never explicitly, you know, like lied. But he would so play on the ignorance of the Fox News audience that he would say things, you know, in the context of this is 2005 or something like that. And he would say Iran is the biggest thunder of terrorism. And like in an immediate post-9-11 world,

you know that every Fox News viewer when they hear that is hearing, oh, you mean the guys who took down these towers. I know the Jerka-Durka Muslim terrorists. Those are the guys who took our towers down. Now, he just omits that like, oh, actually there are these shirts and skins over there and they're different sides. And like they're on the other side. They're actually at war with the terrorists.

who we have a problem with. And so there was this constant attempt to like play on the ignorance of the American population and then mislead them toward thinking that they're, you know, like, now again, like, they maybe never technically said, you know, Iran was involved in 9-11 and they really hinted at Saddam Hussein being involved, but they totally just gave that impression to the American people, that that's what's going on here. 100% right. That's exactly what they did.

They tricked the American people into buying into this nonsense. You know, there's something happening right now, too. And I've noticed this on, I've noticed this on Fox News and elsewhere in the right-wing print media. It's about the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. And in fact, I think, I'm not positive. I think the State Department has just declared the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization or elements of it, a terrorist organization. The Muslim Brotherhood has never, ever carried out an anti-American terrorist operation.

And in fact, I mean, it's a, it's a hundred and five years old and has never, ever been called a terrorist organization by any American administration. It's fundamentalist. It doesn't like us. But that doesn't mean it's a terrorist organization. Right. So what do we do? Now it's going to be a terrorist organization. Does that mean we attack it?

Like what's the reason for making this declaration? I don't understand. Well, it's another thing that seems to be going on with this new term that I, it's amazing how these new terms come out and then all of a sudden every like pro-war right winger is repeating them, but narco-terrorist is the new term now in Venezuela where like what exactly the hell does narco-terrorist even mean? Like, you get the terrorist label like, okay, so they've killed civilians in an attempt to shift politics?

No, that's not what we're claiming at all. all where there were drugs on a boat, maybe. Like, we haven't actually demonstrated that or proved it. But it is amazing how essentially terrorist became this label to, like, shut off your brain and shut off your conception of rights or laws of war or due process or anything like that. And then I literally heard just the other day where someone was saying, I don't, wait, this double tap strike on this vote?

It's like, why'd you have to come back and kill the wounded people who were taken out of action already and then the next response is oh what are you defending narco terrorists exactly turn your brain off and just don't even think about this yeah just just stunning you know it's it's so easy to forget that there are laws of war right there are things that we're all signatories to that you can and can't do uh this this boat situation is one if you've launched a strike and there are who are not able to participate in the fight. You cannot kill them. Okay, if you don't like the law, change the law.

Don't just pretend that you're the good guy, so everything's okay. We're supposed to be an a nation of laws. I say this all the time. I want to get back to something you said a second ago, too, these terms. These terms are meant to propagandize us. I remember in 2005, 2004, 2005, this term, was just suddenly introduced in the media, the term was Islamofascism. Do you remember this? And then it turned out that it was created by a PR firm for the Republican National Committee,

and they tried hard to push this term into regular daily usage, Islamo-fascism, and it just didn't catch. And then they just stopped using it. But it's all domestic propaganda, all of it. No, you could tell it. Narco terrorism. Yeah, it's it reads something out of a, um, uh, you know, like it's like you, like you, like you were just at a mall and some, some mom was like, ooh, like Islamofascism. That sounds scary. I don't want to be around though. I don't, you know, like just, I don't know, like just who were the monsters of the 20th century? Let's just, let's just call them Stalinist Hitler terrorists and that'll that'll get everyone to shut up and get on board. Oh, my God, yes. Oh, yeah. That's it. All right, guys, let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for

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But this is something that I think the American people really had no idea about and maybe a little bit over the last two years because Israel's been in the news so much. some people are starting to learn about this but the degree the hostility between like Israeli intelligence and US intelligence and the level of like spying that Israel does on the United States of America you know there's just it's an interesting dynamic to me because there's just like been like one story after another um that over like recently um things what I'm thinking about is like the the Jonathan Pollard story where Huckabee is meeting him at the the embassy and like it's just yeah i mean like it's just you just can't get into how indefensible and outrageous this stuff is and then i the other example that comes to mind is like the um the uh when

when they the kinesit had that largely symbolic vote but still they had this vote to annex the west bank which was donald trump's only demand of them while jd vance is in israel they and you just had this dynamic where there's a country who we support who's essentially our welfare country who we prop up yet turns around and disrespects the United States of America in this like egregious manner and it's just too much to bear but tell people a little bit about this like what were the relationships with masad in those days and israeli spying in general yeah i'll give you my own little thing on masad first then go to spying in general um the CIA has always had just a terrible relationship with Mossad. And it's because Mossad actively spies on the United States. The United States

does not spy on Israel. That's written in stone. People poo-poo this every time I say it. I'm telling them it's written in stone. The United States does not spy on Israel. But Israel actively, consistently has spied on the United States. And it's not just Jonathan Pollard. There are lots of Jonathan Pollard's out there. In addition to that, and this is just a little story that I've told before, I'll repeat to you. Dear friends of mine from the agency, whom I worked with very closely, sat next to the husband, husband and wife team. When I get transferred, well, no, they get transferred to Jerusalem, okay, and they're

declared to the Mossad, meaning the station chief said, these are my officers, you know that they belong to CIA, they're here to one, one is going to work for the state department and the embassy, just doing normal political work, and the other's going to go take Arabic lessons at the university. Okay, so no problem. They go to a dinner party at the ambassador's residence one night, and they come home, and all their living room furniture has been rearranged. Just like, ha, ha, what are you going to do about it? Nothing. There's nothing. you can do about it. Well, a year later, they go to the ambassador's Christmas party. This is when the embassy was in Tel Aviv. They were assigned in Jerusalem. They go to the Christmas party. They make

the 45-minute drive back to Jerusalem. And people had taken shits in all of their toilets and left them unflushed. Just to show them, we can come into your home anytime we want, and there's nothing you can do about it. Their tour is up. They're getting ready to leave. The ambassador has a going away party for them, which is completely normal. And they go back home. The dog is under the dining room table whimpering.

Somebody had cut its tail off and wrapped the stump with gauze and medical tape. Like, why? Why fuck with us like that? When we're your only lifeline, right? We're your only friend at the United Nations. We're giving you billions of dollars at the Americans' taxpayers' money so you can have your own welfare state that we don't have here. And then you're going to do that to our officers who are there to help you, who are friendlies,

and they're there to help you. Now, Pollard. Pollard is indicative of the broader problem. On my very first day at the CIA, as a new hire, I was sitting in the auditorium with 300 other people, and we got a briefing from the CIA's Director of Security. And he told us that at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, there are two declared intelligence officers, one from Mossad and one from Shinbet. But the FBI had identified 187 undeclared Israeli intelligence officers spread all across

the United States, mostly trying to infiltrate American defense contractors. Why don't we arrest those 187 Israeli spies? Because we have such a close political relationship with Israel, and Congress wouldn't stand for it. But then look at Pollard. Pollard was a Navy intelligence officer who stole thousands and thousands of pages of top secret, not secret, top secret documents that he sold to Israel for money, not for ideology or because he was Jewish or loved Israel. he did it for money, and then the Israelis traded those top secret documents to the Soviet Union in exchange for the release of Soviet Jews to Israel. Not only that, Pollard got 30 years.

He did the whole 30. Benjamin Netanyahu on literally every visit to the Oval Office would say, no matter who president was, release Pollard, release Pollard, release Pollard, and every president said no. Bill Clinton almost said yes. And George Tenet said, if you release Pollard, I will resign. And the head of every intelligence agency in the American government will resign. And so he didn't do it. So Pollard did all 30 of the 30 years, went to Israel on a private jet owned by Sheldon Aedelson.

He was met at the airport by Benjamin Netanyahu. He got off the plane, kissed the ground. Netanyahu bestowed upon him Israeli citizenship, and then he gives an interview to the Israeli media, urging that Israel use nuclear weapons on the United States, if the United States doesn't fall into place for what Israel wants, and urging all American Jews with security clearances to spy for Israel. And so our ambassador meets with him in the American embassy. I'm befuddled by the whole situation. It's already, it's so outrageous just on the face of it.

And then there's the other, I went on a whole rant about this last week when the story came out. But it's like, if you understand that like the giving secrets to the Soviets at the height of the Cold War, which is the entire justification for the war in Korea, the war in Vietnam, what you were just talking about, the weapons to Iran, the funding of the conquistas in Nicaragua, like the whole national emergency, the whole, as Will Buckley said, creating a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores justified only by the Soviet menace, the fact that spying for working with them, giving them our top secret information, wouldn't have gotten Israel.

Maybe the debate should be between banished forever and we go to war with them. But like, I mean, the fact that we would still continue supporting them after that, it is just, it is too, it's too crazy to possibly stand. And I think that, you know, when you lay it out like that, you know, people talk about this rise of anti-Semitism, um, online and there is certainly some of that, but it's like, I think the broader picture is what's happening here is that that, that type of relationship, especially like, it'd be one thing, John, it'd be one thing if we were the past. Palestinians and they were the Israelis. Like if they had just conquered us and it's like, well, this is what we live. We live under Israeli control now. But the thing is, we're the superpower. We're the big giant country with the biggest military and the biggest economy.

They're this tiny little country. And it does seem when you even ask the question, which I think you ask kind of as a rhetorical question, but I got to say more and more, I'm looking for the real answer here. We go, why were they doing this to our officers over there? Why are they having this vote to do the one thing Donald Trump asked him not to do, the most pro-Israel president of all time, the one thing he said is you can't annex the West Bank. So they vote to annex the West Bank while his vice president's there. And it does, I don't want to be too conspiratorial here. But like the only answer that I can think of is because like, yeah, that's the point to let you know, to let you know that you are owned.

We don't actually care if public opinions turned against us. or if you know this. We want you, CIA officer, to know that you don't actually work for the bosses. We are the bosses and you work for us and you will take it because you have nothing else to do. Seems to me to be the only explanation. Yeah. And, you know, I remember asking at the time, so what do we do in a case like that? And one of the senior officers said, well, we go and we say, hey, cut it out. Come on. Why are you harassing our people? And they say, oh, okay, sorry, okay, and then we're good again for another year or two, and then they do it again. It just makes no sense, though, man.

I mean, do you have, like, do you think, I mean, your best guess, I know I've heard you talk about Epstein and stuff like this before, is it, like, obviously with Pollard, I totally take that explanation. Yeah, people do things for money, especially huge sums of money, so sure. Yeah, but like, so is that, is it just a mix of people being, some of them are blackmailed, Some of them are broad. Some of them just face the political pressure of the lobby and stuff like that. Some of them have their religious convictions.

Is that just what your assessment of it is? No, counterintelligence officials will tell you that for 85% it's the money. This is just a cash deal. It's all about the money. A handful are going to do it for ideological reasons. A handful are going to do it for revenge. Maybe they've been passed over for promotion. They hate their boss.

They're angry at the government, whatever. but for the most part it's it this is a cash transaction yeah well i think it doesn't that kind of describe all of it too though in a way like there are ideologues all around but what's really going on is it's business it's all like all the wars it's big business it is you know because like even and i and i think sometimes maybe i get too caught up in kind of like the ideological worldview of say the neoconservatives where it's like look it is true that they had this ideological worldview but why were all those weapons companies pouring money into their think tanks? Not because they agreed with them.

No, not at all. I say all the time. It's not an accident that before 9-11, the highest concentration of millionaires in America per capita was in Silicon Valley. And after 9-11, it's in Washington, D.C. It's not an accident. Yeah, where they produce nothing except weapons of war. Nothing is actually built except that.

Well, sir, I knew I would. really enjoy talking with you, and I really did. I would love to do this again sometime soon. Please let everybody know where they can find your stuff, where they can learn more about the stuff I'm talking about. Thank you. Thank you. I'm like all over YouTube now.

I actually have two podcasts on YouTube. One is called Deep Program. I do it every morning from 9 to 10 with Ted Raw. There's a more intellectual one that I do once a week called Deep Focus, also on YouTube. And then I've got a kind of a fun podcast on Apple Podcasts called Dead Drop, What Makes a Spy Tick? And we talk about all these kinds of issues. That's right now, it's only on Apple podcasts.

And I'm on X and Insta and Facebook and all the usual places. Awesome. Well, yes, you are all over Twitter these days. I see what my algorithm. I can't go five seconds without seeing another one of your videos. But they're always great. So I'm great. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate that. The algorithms working on our side. John Curiaku,

thank you so much for taking the time. Thank you so much for listening. We'll catch next time. Bye.