Pod Save the World - Venezuela, Libya and the Russian navy's beluga whale

Episode Date: May 1, 2019

First, Tommy and Ben talk about violent clashes in Venezuela, Trump pouring gas on Libya's civil war, designating the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization, the Russian navy's beluga whale, good news out of Spain and GITMO becomes a retirement home. Then the Washington Post's Beirut bureau chief Liz Sly joins to discuss the new video from ISIS chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

Welcome back to Pod Save the World. This is Tommy Vitor. Ben Rhodes. Ben, Rhodes in the studio. In the studio, as always, Ben, holy hell, there's a lot going on. There's a lot going on. So we're going to start with some updates out of Venezuela and Libya. Then we want to talk about an armed and dangerous beluga whale found in the North Sea. Then Trump is reportedly planning to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization. There's some good news out of Spain. There's the ongoing disaster that is Gitmo. And then finally, the Washington Post, Liz. Sly calls in from Beirut to discuss the emergence of a new video from ISIS chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

So buckle up, worldos. We got a lot of show. That's a lot. So let's start with Venezuela because there are some really scary updates happening today. Opposition leaders slash, you know, maybe president, whatever you want to call him, one, Guido, appeared in an event on a military base today with a bunch of soldiers. And he called on citizens to rise up against Maduro. That led to a series of protests and armed clashes and a bunch of places across the country,

including at Maduro's presidential palace. There's some really, you know, scary videos on Twitter where you can see Maduro's goons, like literally driving over protesters. You can see huge crowds running from gunfire. Interestingly, another opposition leader named Leopoldo Lopez, who had been house arrest for a long time up here beside Guido. So anyway, Ben, this is getting pretty dicey. It's scary.

Yeah. And, you know, I think it's another one of these times where we have to step back and consider, really there's kind of two questions, Tommy. There's this question of essentially, you know, who would you like to see emerge and how would you like to see Venezuela governed and get out of this whole? And I think we can all feel like Maduro has failed the Venezuelan people, that Maduro doesn't have the interest of the Venezuelan people at heart, does not have democratic legitimacy, governs in authoritarian ways, clearly is willing to utilize violence as necessary

to hold him the power. And yet, at the same time, the second question is, well, what do you do about that? And I continue to be worried that everything that this administration is doing, from Donald Trump to Mike Pence, to Elliot Abrams and John Bolton, to Colonel Rubio, to Private Rubio, are just, are making the situation worse for the Venezuelan people. And your policy should be about making things better, not worse. And again, they've tried the recognition, the opposition, the opposition. They've tried to do the broad sanctions to tank the economy. They've tried to force in foreign assistance. And now they're clearly trying some play to more overtly appeal to the military

to come to Gua, which hasn't happened yet. And at every one of those turns, things have gotten worse, not better. And the situation's gotten more polarized. And the question is both, can you dislodge Maduro this way or not? And thus far, they have not been able to. And, two and the military stuck by him and he's actually been able to essentially play the card that this is a foreign directed coup against me. And then also like even if you do get him out, like, how do you put this place back together when you've polarized the society so much? And again, both the tactics that they're using and the people who are in charge, I mean, to have L.A. Abrams, the guy who was responsible for these policies that led to the massacre of civilians in Central America

who was responsible for a regime change policy in Iraq to put him in charge of your regime change policy in Venezuela sends a message about how we look at this and who we trust to do this. And I'm just worried that whether you think Maduro should be gone or not, this is not an approach that is helping the Venezuelan people. Yeah, and the personnel thing you mentioned is no small piece of this. It's not.

Dexter Filkin has a great profile out of John Bolton and the New Yorker this week, and he's talking to Bolton about why he suddenly cares about Latin America because it's not really his specialty. And he talks about how there's now Russians in Venezuela, and he's talking about Cuban influence. I mean, the only surprise was he didn't talk about the Soviet Union. It's such a Cold War mentality. And, like, lost in all of this conversation about the political dynamic and the violence

is that the Venezuelan people are suffering. I imagine the situation has gotten exponentially worse over the last several months. I personally haven't seen any significant humanitarian steps taken to help them. Have you? No, and if you go back to kind of pre-recognition on Guido, if you made the whole push of the policy focused on finding ways to improve the life of the Venezuelan people and the address to humanitarian crisis, while finding some way to try to negotiate some transition to a different government, I just think we'd be in a better place now. I can't guarantee that you'd have dislodge Maduro, but this is breaking the country apart. And even if you've got Elliott Abrams flying down on military jets carrying foreign aid and God knows whatever,

else those military jets are carrying. We've seen that people like L.A. Abrams are willing to use covert authorities to try to sponsor coups. And, like, that's, number one, failing thus far. And the Cubans and Maduro and all these, and the Russians are pretty good at playing this game. They're pretty good at the kind of life or death struggle. So they could hold on. And then where are we? At the same time, again, even if you sponsor the coup that L.A. Abrams may be trying to sponsor, if you don't think it's a coup because of the constitutional hook for Guido to be in power, this place is going to be broken into pieces and you're going to have kind of civil violence if not a civil war because Maduro is arming all these people. And I just, I think we really need to be scrutinizing more

whether this constant escalation makes sense. And I honestly believe that the Trump administration has been pushing Guido to do all these steps, you know, that we're the strongest power in the hemisphere and we're pushing them. And we're raising their expectations. I mean, Mike Pence, you know, tweeting today, we are with you, what does that mean? Or does that mean we're going to invade? I mean, you know, so the Venezuelan opposition is getting their expectations raised, you know, and I'll put ourselves on the hook here because it reminds me a bit of Syria where, you know, we call for Assad to go, we recognize the opposition, they get their hopes up.

You know, we're providing them some support. And we didn't remove Assad ourselves. This looks eerily similar to that situation. And I worry that it's just going to get worse for the people in the moment. middle of it. Yeah, I agree. I agree. I mean, look, next topic is another country that was broken apart by the international community that the U.S. is now making worse, which is

Libya. And just one more thing on the, yeah, please. The Russia piece, the Cuba policy they've taken is basically just inviting Russia back into Cuba. Right. I'll give you one example. Like, they need to rebuild the airport in Havana. The Cubans do. And they, I think, we're trending towards

doing that with a European company. But now, like, because of the way our sanctions are making this complicated for Western companies. Like, they'll probably go to a Russian company. You know, the Russians and the Chinese are undeniably going to gain much more influence in Cuba because of what they're doing and removing the U.S. opening. So if Bolton says he's worried about Russian influence in Latin America, he's inviting Putin into Cuba 90 miles from Florida because he's shutting the U.S. out. So their policies are stupid on top of everything else.

They don't even achieve the objectives that they set out for them. No, no. So we talked about Lubeau. Libya like two weeks ago, but I want to dig in for a minute because you literally predicted this, Ben. Actually, yeah. There's a silver. Worldos go back and check the record. I mean, you did. Trump inserted himself into, and the U.S., into the middle of a civil war in Libya.

And so to catch you guys up, there's a Libyan warlord named Khalifa Haftar, who was attacking Libya's capital, Tripoli. Haftar was part of Gaddafi's army in the 60s and 70s and became a senior guy in the 80s until he turned against Gaddafi in an unsuccessful coup attempt. So the CIA basically extracted him from that situation in his guys. And Hofzars lived in northern Virginia, interestingly close to Langley, the CIA headquarters for about 20 years with no discernible source of income or job until returning to Libya sometime in 2015, I believe. Not at our behest, though. Right, exactly. Yeah. So starting with that, I mean, you were in government when Heftar went back and made his return.

And there's a great New Yorker piece. I think by John Lee Anderson from that time. What did you make of Haftar? We were worried about him. the time because, you know, he, he kind of went back to cleanse Benghazi, the eternal, you know, the word that has many different meanings of Islamic militants, but totally kind of extraditiously. It wasn't through any Libyan government governing structure. It was just a guy basically going and try to mobilize essentially his own militia to go in and take out these Islamists.

Now, his principal sponsors in this effort were Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the U.A.E. So the typical cast of characters supporting kind of the authoritarian blend of politics in the Middle East. And we were worried about this. And we were always trying to focus with the UN and the Europeans on building out from Tripoli, the capital of Libya, you know, the authority of the Libyan government, of which, you know, Haftars had this kind of complicated relationship. What I said on the pot a couple of weeks ago is, you know, there was a policy that the United States government had to oppose Haftar taking his militia and essentially trying to conquer Tripoli and, conquer the country because the UN supports the governing authority in Tripoli. Haftar is a divisive figure.

He's seen as potentially another Qaddafi, just, you know, another authoritarian, just like Cece replaced Mubarak. You could have Haftar as a new Gaddafi. And the U.S. government's position was to support the United Nations and to support the, you know, government in Tripoli and to oppose Haftar coming in and essentially escalating a civil war in the country. And what I said on the pot, I think, is I hope Trump doesn't pay attention to this.

Yeah. because if he does, he's going to end up signing with Heftar. And what happened is, by all reports, Cici, the Egyptian strongman, comes to the White House and he says to Trump, hey, you should really be backing Heftar. You know, he's our guy in Libya. And then Moham bin Zayed, the leader of the UAE calls Trump and says, yeah, you should be calling and backing Huftar. Trump calls Hufthar, right?

His own government, his own state department. Calls a warlord. Like, this is crazy. Imagine calling down the sit room and be like, hey, get me that Libyan warlord on the line. This is one of these things that, like, if we weren't living in authoritarian dystopia, which should be a much bigger fucking story. Because you're the president of calling a warlord that his own state department has urged not to do something and pledging his support.

And this is so fucking crazy that the United States was backing a UN Security Council resolution that was in opposition to Haftar and in support of the Libyan government. And now he's telling his own government to do a 180 and veto that resolution. And we are essentially sponsoring a warlord who's trying to, conquer the country because Donald Trump's fucking paymasters in the Gulf and in Egypt, the dictators that he cares more about than the Europeans. You know, think we have these Democratic allies in Europe who put a lot of time and money into Libya. We've got the United Nations all saying this is bad. This could escalate an already difficult situation. This could

precipitate civil war or a full dictatorship. And Donald Trump looks at that and says, okay, I better call the Saudis and then Marathis and figure out which side to be on. And now he's on the side of the And I should say even Lindsey Graham has gone public with his concern about Trump's call to Haftar. In the last three weeks, the situation has descended into chaos. Hundreds have died. Tens of thousands have been forced out of their homes because Hoftar probably told Trump, oh, I'm just going to fight the terrorists. They're all terrorists. They're all terrorists. I mean, Donald Trump is the easiest info op victim in history because the other thing that apparently happened when C.C., the president of Egypt was in D.C. was he asked Trump to designate

the Muslim Brotherhood as a foreign terrorist organization. So that would be a huge deal. It would mean sanctions on companies that do business and one of the biggest Islamist parties in the region. I mean, it wasn't that long ago. In 2012, Mohamed Morsi won Egypt's presidential election as the Muslim Brotherhood candidate. No surprise. The man who led a coup against him, General Sisi, is the one pushing Trump to designate the MB as a terrorist organization. So, I mean, Ben, can you give a quick overview of like, what is the Muslim Brotherhood? And what do you think the ramifications of this decision would be? So, you know, the Muslim Brotherhood is a kind of pan-Islamic group, right?

So they're in many different countries. And in many different countries, they are the largest opposition group to some of the dictatorships we talked about. And look, I do not sign on to, I do not ascribe to the views of the Muslim Brotherhood despite what, you know, many right-un-trolls say. I want to say, yeah. But, you know, because they are, some of their views are, you know, can veer into kind of undemocratic, you know, zero-sum views of politics, not respect for minority religions. But it's a varied picture.

So, like in Tunisia, the Muslim Brotherhood is in the government. Right. The NADA party and has actually acted very responsibly in not seeking to take over power and making agreements to the secular parties and supporting the transition to democracy. In Egypt, obviously, they were removed from power and there was this crackdown. But the point is, is that, number one, they're not a terrorist organization. I mean, they're just, these guys have been trying to make them the same thing as al-Qaeda, and they're not. They're Islamists, yes, but if you can't draw a distinction between al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood, you are painting tens of millions of Muslims as terrorists.

You know, there's broad popular support for the Muslim Brotherhood in a lot of these countries. And if we're saying we treat you the same way we treat al-Qaeda, Right. I mean, Mom and Worcsey won with like 52%. Yeah, we're essentially turning into terrorists a lot of people who are not. And frankly, in a sick way, incentivizing them to say, well, if you're seeing us that way, you know, maybe we'll radicalize. The other thing that we're doing is we are giving carte blanche to the potential violent crackdown on these movements in these different countries. And again, whatever you think of the Muslim Brotherhood, the tactics, you know, whether it's the mass executions and crucifixions that we saw in Saudi Arabia, the killing of hundreds of protesters in Egypt, do we want to essentially be validating an authoritarian worldview that treats people who, you know, are with some of these Islamist parties all as terrorists,

and just giving a blank check for whatever repression they want to engage in, that too is deeply counterproductive. And by the way, aligning the United States with the worst forms of repression in the Middle East, which in the long run is not the way to fight terrorism. Right. I mean, that's the thread that links. Haftar and this MB designation and everything else, right? Is it these strong men tactics and the strong men authoritarian we've supported in the past have led to more terrorism, not less?

And we need to learn that lesson. And if you look at what we are currently associated with, and I'll be the first to acknowledge that the Obama administration wrestled with and got things right and wrong in the context of the Arab Spring. But if you look at what we're currently associated with under Trump, a war in Yemen that has put millions of lives at risk, right? this brutal escalation of potential civil war in Libya, crackdowns against even nonviolent Islamists in whatever Middle Eastern country that has a Muslim Brotherhood presence. You know, this isn't going to have long-term repercussions for our security. It's going to make the potential long-term terrorist threat worse, not better.

And the only reason Trump is doing this is a mix of his domestic politics that's demonized Muslims and his fealty. to these dictators in the Gulf in Egypt. And it's just astonishing. And it's one of these things we have to step back and not normalize Trump that this guy will literally not take the advice of like

an Anglo-American or an Emmanuel Macron or Justin Trudeau on anything. But if it's a dictator who's telling him what to do, he's like, oh, yeah, we're there. We're all in. And that's not a way in which the U.S. president has ever operated in the history of our country. We've had, yeah, we've had bad

tradeoffs at times. But to just uniformly pick the side of autocrats over allies like this and to kind of just toss human rights overboard. It's also ironic we're talking about this right after talking about Venezuela. Because what the fuck does it do to our credibility? We're sitting there in Latin America talking about democracy while we're backing a warlord in Libya and like crackdowns across the Middle East. It seems a little bit cynical. Yeah, I'll take your point there.

Okay. When we come back, we are going to talk about a Russian military equipped beluga whale. Stick around. really are. We're actually going to talk about that. Ben, this is my favorite story of the week. It's so good. I need to look at the whale. I have a picture. I love the whale. It's so cute. Fishermen in Norway spotted a beluga whale, a baby beluga wearing a Russian-made harness that had been mounted, I guess, for a GoPro camera. Marine experts think it was probably trained by the Russian military. They've been known to use beluga whales. I think they put out an ad one time for dolphins for naval missions. I'm not

kidding here. So first, let's wildly speculate on what this beluga whale might be doing. And then I think there is a more serious point and reminder that Norway, Sweden, Finland, they deal with basically a constant Russian military or naval presence and harassment from submarines in your Stockholm or what have you, I guess now Wales. But I mean, so the experts in this piece think that they might, I guess, use them for reconnaissance, surveillance to help divers to find equipment. Like, have you ever heard anything like this before? I mean, in like a Bond movie or like a satire of a bond movie. And look, this is a pretty cute guy. Yeah, he's a happy little whale.

We'll tweet out some photos. I mean, you know, a baby balloon. I know, he just wants that stupid harness off his head. So let's just pause it. The beluga whales are cute. They're so cute. Great ones at the Chicago Aquarium, by the way. But I will say that what we've seen is that, you know,

nothing reveals anything. You know, the Russians are willing to use just about anything. And I actually think that part of this, and like, I don't know, I can't get the head of whatever FSB officers strap the camera fucking GoPro and the Baluga guy. But like some of this is like they want to surveil

all these you know coastlines and where their naval assets of NATO. But some of this is fucking trolling. Yeah, they're probably right. It may just be like yeah we're going to send some belugas out there with some GoPro's just to remind you guys that like we're up in your shit, you know? But like like

where are we in fucking 2019? Like where the fuck are we? We had the Russians interfering in our election and like a Russian asset in the White House and a beluga whale, like coming up to Norway. Like, we got to get our shit together. I will never work in government again. I'll never have access to intelligence again. If someone could just leak to me what the Russians are doing with the beluga's,

I would be super interested. I mean that to the Russians, not the Americans listening, because that would be illegal. He was reportedly affectionate. That's what they said. He just wanted someone to pat his, you know, beluga head. Yeah, feed him a fish. Help him out. Okay, some good news.

We got good news. Yeah, a beluga thing is cuts both ways. Yeah, you know, I do love whales. So the New York Times, they have a headline right now up on their side that says Spain's election gives a lift to the left and a warning to the far right. So they just had a big election. I guess 76% of the country turned out, which is amazing. Literally would solve all our problems here in the U.S. if we could do that. A far right anti-immigrant party called Vox gained some seats in parliament, so that's bad. But their emergence also mobilized the moderate left. So it does seem like big picture. This is a good data point and gives us some hope. that we can stop these far-right populist parties. Yeah. Yeah, we're on a role, man. I mean, the world goes in Spain, like, represented. I mean, I, because I, we talked about this after I was in Spain. People were freaked out about Vox and Steve Bannon was down there. Steve Bannon was helping, like, you know, another big win for Steve Bannon here. He got his ass kicked in Spain because essentially what happened is the

center-right party said that they would not make a coalition with the center-left party, with the socialist. They would with Vox. And so everybody started thinking, think, oh my God, we're going to end up with a coalition that has these kind of Spanish Nazis and power. And, you know, really hardline, anti-immigrant, wanted to take away the autonomy for all Spain's different regions, so kind of nationalist view of politics. And instead of succumbing to that wave, Spanish voters turned out in much higher numbers than usual to reject that and to give a big victory to the leftist center. And I think it does show that people are being mobilized in opposition to these far-right movements

and that center-left politicians can tap into that energy and win elections. And we've now seen this and talked about it on this pod, you know, these glimmers of hope, you know, in Turkey, in the local elections, in Slovakia, where a dynamic woman who rejected populism was elected. Now in Spain, a major European country rejecting the far right, I think we are seeing voters look squarely at the danger of this far-right politics, look squarely into the racist heart of Steve Pennins' worldview and the toxic mix of anti-immigrant, anti-Europe nationalist brand of politics, and reject it. And if we carry this forward through our election and some of the other European elections

coming up, we can beat back this tide. So I think this is really good news out of Spain. A place where, by the way, there are a lot of problems. There's a lot of unemployment. There's this potential, you know, the conflict. over Catalonia and whether they break away or not. And the fact that even with all these problems, like the environment was ripe for a right-wing populist party to exploit it,

when given the choice, Spanish voters rejected it, I think that says that you can beat these people anywhere. That's really good. Okay. So Carol Rosenberg is this fantastic reporter who has been covering Gitmo for, I think, since it was created. She's a big feature in the New York Times this week about how the Pentagon, 17 years after opening Gitmo is now planning for the prisoners there to essentially grow old and die there.

They're planning for like palliative care, end of life care. Yeah. So, I mean, the military commission's process that's allegedly supposed to be happening there is still a disaster. The trials are barely proceeding. It costs hundreds of millions of dollars to keep the facility open. I mean, I know that there are some truly heinous, awful people in Gitmo that deserve to die in a jail. But it is hard to think of a bigger waste. of money than Gitmo. And it's hard to think of a more complete failure to uphold the standards of

justice that we claim to believe in as Americans than the process and what we see happening in this facility. Yeah. I mean, this disappeared, you know, when Obama left. Because, you know, Trump said he was going to keep it open. But the absurd, Gitmo does stand for something. It stands for the complete moral and strategic failure of the United States after 9-11. that we open up this legal black hole where we really brutally tortured people. And then Barack Obama, everybody kind of figures that out, even John McCain's for closing Gitmo in the 2008 campaign. Barack Obama comes in. And because he wants to close it, Congress says, no, we won't allow you to move any of these people to the United States.

I want, there's like 40 guys left in Gitmo. It costs, I think the estimate is $10 million a year to keep each one of them there. That seems like a good use of money. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been requested to upgrade this prison, to literally be building hospice care down there. They've been asked for plans that project out to when Gitmo detainees will be 96 years old down there. I mean, this is insane. Yeah, this is like a window into a country that just got something really wrong. This is like Kafka-esque dystopian hell.

It really is. And there's another article that people want to kind of get more angry. The New Yorker had an article by Ben Taub a couple weeks ago, like a week ago called Guantanamo's Darkest Secret. And it's about this guy that we kept there that we just, and it details the torture. I mean, just the brutal, cruel, physical torture, psychological torture, abuse, sleep deprivation, heavy metal music blasting, constantly, you know, force feeding, trashing the Quran, women undressing, you know, around, you know, to make him feel. bad and it turns out that this guy didn't do anything. Like we had the wrong or we we were wrong about him. He wasn't the terrorist guy. And now he's released and he's living in Mauritius, you know. And so some of these people were the wrong people. Yeah. I mean, you know, everybody says,

you know, the caveat that they're bad guys down there and there's some terrible guys like like Chuck Mohammed who was responsible for 9-11 tax. But we just, this also details the, a lot of people ended up in Gitmo. We went to Afghanistan and we're like, hey, if there's an al-Qaeda guy, you a bunch of money. And so a bunch of people were like, sure, I'll finger, you know, this guy. And so a lot of these people who ended up there were there because somebody in Afghanistan went into a payoff from us when we went in. And, you know, I'll get all the incoming from the right. I don't understand how dangerous people are. The dangerous ones, we can put in a fucking prison in the United States. And by the way, some of these guys are old and sick.

They're not going to bust out. It's not going to be like escape from Alcatraz with a bunch of 80-year-old jihadists, like digging a fucking tunnel. Well, the five Taliban guys, we sent back as part of the Bo Bergdahl deal that was treated like they were going to, Rambo was going to be back on the battlefield, are now negotiating a peace agreement, which is, you know, like to your point, this is complicated. There's some very bad people that. I don't think we ever justify as torture. But, and here's the honest truth.

Like the Bush administration, the Obama administration, and I assume the Trump administration, has released people who are more dangerous than most of the people of guimmo. When we ended the war on Iraq and we closed bogram, people we picked up on the battlefield had had to be released, right? if somebody is a terrorist mastermind, then you should be able to convict that person and put them away for life in a supermax prison in the United States, which, by the way, at this point today is a far worse place to be than Gitmo because we're not, obviously, Obama ended all the tactics I talked about, all the torture. Why on earth, we are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to keep open a symbol for the America's torture of people after 9-11. just because people like fucking Lindsey Graham didn't want Barack Obama to have an achievement, it says something really disgusting about our politics.

It's common sense and decency. It was the most infuriating 180 I've ever seen. And the Democratic Party, let's not excuse a Democratic Party. These fucking people in Congress who just duck and cover, you know, I don't, you know, I'm going to vote to prevent Obama from having the capacity because I can then go tell people I'm tough on terrorism. Like, what's so tough about, like, paying $10 million a year to have some geriatric case down in Cuba instead of in a supermax person?

That's not tough. That's fucking stupid, right? And we're, like, somehow we've talked ourselves into this insanity here. It's also one of the places where I feel like the reporting on it is abandoned all common sense as well. Like, Carol Rosenberg is completely different. She's been on this beat forever. But the Washington conventional wisdom on Gitmo being.

some horrible political decision was just ridiculous. It was a symbol that was helping al-Qaeda recruit. It should have been shut. Yeah. Last thing I want to read for you. So Dexter Filkin's great reporter, The New Yorker, has this long piece on John Bolton that came out this week. That's pretty interesting. I just want to read you a passage from that. The Trump administration has persistently spoken out against Iran, but it has also made scattershot efforts at diplomacy. A senior Iranian official told me that in 2017, Trump sent eight requests to meet with the Iranian president. President Hassan Rouhani. Quote, Trump invited President Rouhani to dinner, the official told me.

Rouhani is one dinner away from getting the North Korea treatment. And yet, this is the animated... I mean, like, what the fuck, man? You, you fucking kidding me? That's in the piece. Eight requests. I haven't read this yet. That's...

Come on. Nope. No. And there's even more details about addition. contacts who a business. So what is it going to get a fucking couples massage as a Supreme Leader while he's at it? Like what, like these guys, this is, here's the thing. Here's what people need to know. Take the dinner. They, these people think you're stupid. Yes. They think you're dumb. Yeah. Like, they think that they can simultaneously just stack up sanctions,

to talk about how much tougher they are than Obama, having no impact on it. But then Trump's ego is stroked when there are a lot of TV cameras when he meets with like, like dictators, like Kim Jong-un, and so he's going to, like, sit there with Rahani and say he's making peace at the same time that they're sanctioning him so that they can tell slices of voters across the United States that they're sanctioning him, they're tougher than Obama, and he can call up his account manager in Saudi Arabia, Mahm bin Salman. Like, none of this is on the level. None of it is on the level. And I'd say, I hope Rouhani takes a dinner. It would be great. I got filleted by the right-wing troll farms for three years for referring to Hassan Rouhani's a moderate.

Right. You know? Imagine if I invite him to fucking dinner eight times, like what they'd be doing. Like, we'd have, you know, a parade of, you know, trolls from Free Beacon and Breitbart coming into the studio right now to, like, point iPhone cameras at me and be like, how come you invited Hassan Rahani to dinner? Muslim Brotherhood! Mark Doolowitz would poison you. Yeah, yeah, you know. And then a bunch of earnest democratic blob types would be like, well, of course we much get must tougher on Hassan Rahani, blah, blah, blah.

blah, blah, blah, but maybe the Iran deal's okay. But then, like, fucking Donald Trump is going to, like, sit there and have, like, take out Chinese with the guy. You know. I'm so glad you hadn't read that. Ben, that's all I got for the show. Play us out. Russians are Russians, man. Like, they, at least the Russians have a sense of humor sometimes.

Yeah, at least they're crafty. I mean. You guys have seen Blugas in, like, the aquariums. They're the coolest. They're smiling all. They look like they're smiling. I'm happy. You guys seen Finding Dory?

I mean, like, was that, was destiny in Dore? like a fucking Russian agent though. Like this is going to change the viewing habits that I have with my daughter who's watched Finding Doey's 77 times. Now we know that actually the way in which Destiny was able to take the truck down in Dory is because she was Russian trained. When we come back, watch the post Bayroot Bureau Chief Liz Slide. On the line is Liz Slide.

She's the Washington Post Bayroot Bureau Chief dialing in at 10 o'clock Lebanon time. Liz, thank you so much for joining the show. Thank you for having me. I'm a long-time reader of basically everything you ever write, so I really appreciate it. So ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi appeared on video this week for the first time in five years. His only other video appearance was at the Great Mosque of Al-Norri in Mosul in 2014 when he declared the caliphate. We know that this video was filmed in April because he mentioned several recent events. What do you think it says about the state of ISIS that Baghdadi is not only still alive but willing to risk coming out of hiding to

to record this? Well, yes, I think this is really a very significant event because, you know, you can kind of dismiss the fact that, okay, he's in hiding now. He was in a mosque and he controlled territory when he spoke the first time five years ago. Now he's, you know, obviously in hiding in the desert somewhere. We don't know where he is. He's lost all his territory. But he's shown that, you know, he did survive.

He looks to be in great shape. He's bulky. He's gained a lot of weight, even fat, yes. somehow all his fighters and children were starving in the Islamic States' last holdout but he seems to have been eating quite well it's a sort of you know

poking the eye to the world you okay you got up you know you took our territory away but we're still here it was a very business-like message in some ways he didn't ramble on too much about sort of history and make big boasts he said this is going to be a long battle and he used most of the time

to kind of show off, if you like, or boast about all the affiliates he's gained, all the people around the world who have pledged allegiance to him over the past couple of years also, you know, in countries like Mali, the Philippines, most recently, East Sri Lanka, of course, Nigeria. He kind of rattled them all off. And the message seemed to be, okay, don't let's mention that caliphate thing too much that, you know, we just lost. But, you know, we are now a global presence. We're a global franchise and lots of people adhere to me. And I, I'm here. I'm still running the show. And yeah, we carry on. You know, the Islamic State continues. Yeah. When you talk to military or intelligence analyst, how much physical risk or operational security risk do they think releasing a video like this creates for Baghdaddy?

I mean, ultimately, couriers led to the demise of Osama bin Laden. But it was never clear to me how much intelligence agencies can learn from these videos themselves or the timing. I don't know how much intelligence can be gleaned from the video itself. People have poured over it. He's speaking against a blank, white wall. People have noticed that the shadow is suggested. It's some kind of fabric. So people said maybe he's in a tent, but then, of course, he could have put the fabric up against the wall to disguise something who knows what, or just to make it look clean and white.

People have speculated about the floral covering of the cushion, and people have said that they have seen that floral covering in markets in Syria. But, you know, we know a lot of Islamic State. People have crisscrossed the border there, and I don't think we can prove that you can't buy that very same cushion in Iraq. So there really isn't very much to be told from the video itself. But obviously it is a risk. I mean, there is a reason why he hasn't made another video,

where he didn't make another video after the appearance in the Norie mosque, obviously it was an operational security because doing a video was a good thing. It says to your followers, I'm still here and I'm still watching you. So I think it was brave or bold of him to make a video at this time. The timing was very good from his point of view. And obviously there is an operational risk. I was going to point out as you just did, that that's exactly how Osama bin Laden was caught by tracking a career.

I don't know enough about whether this would have all been transmitted electronically. Obviously, the internet's got a lot better than it was. when Osama bin Laden was in his hiding place. But again, the electronic signals obviously are also a danger for him. So, yeah, I don't know if we're going to see too many more of them, but I think this isn't the last. Yeah. It did seem like Baghdaddy staged Kalishnikov rifles and did some other things for the setting

to make it look like past Al-Qaeda videos. Do you think that a Baghdadi video provides the same propaganda lift that say an Osama bin Laden video once did? I kind of do actually because, I mean, the Islamic State has had inflicted upon it, you know, a major military humiliation. It is no small feat that has been undertaken by the fighters on the ground in Iraq and Syria to conquer back all of this territory. Of course, they did it mainly because of US air power and it wouldn't have happened without the US air power. But they did nonetheless conquer this vast area of territory. And he is saying he's still there.

They do seem to have a lot of affiliates around the world now. This was something that hadn't really been predicted. It was, you know, I think some of the experts had thought that their loss of territory would take the shine off their brand name, that people would be like, oh, those guys can't fulfill what they're talking about. They made all these boasts. And so, yeah, to see him sitting there so relaxed with this very symbolic gun next to him does create this impression, I think, of a leader who is in control that there is an identity. to the leadership, that it exists, it's there, it's with them. Yeah. Your report in the Washington Post mentioned that the video included a separate audio-only message about the Easter attack in Sri Lanka. Baghdadi claimed the attack was in response to

fighting in Syria and not a response to the New Zealand mosque shooting as the Sri Lankan government is claimed. What did you make of that discrepancy? Well, his comments on Sri Lanka are interesting. First of all, they were added in an audio later. So I think we can pretty much time. that video to between April the 11th, the event he mentioned in the Sudan, the coup in Sudan, and the April 22nd Easter Day attacks in Sri Lanka. The video was taken in that time frame. He had to add on the audio about Sri Lanka after that. Now, what he said about Sri Lanka was interesting on two counts. First of all, yes, he very clearly said that it was retaliation for the loss of the fighters who were killed in Bagu's, which was the last battle that the Islamic State

fought where they finally lost all of their territory. And yeah, I think on the part of the Sri Lankan government, it was pure speculation that it was vengeance for the New Zealand mosque attacks because the Islamic State doesn't really need an excuse like that to do it. It's keeping it in the family. It's saying, you know, we are avenging our own guys, but we're not sort of involved with that other stuff over there. And the other reason it was quite interesting was that he didn't claim that the Islamic State Central or he had had anything to do with the Sri Lankan attacks. He thanked very much the group in Sri Lanka that carried out the attacks for pledging allegiance to him, but made it clear that it had been something they had done. He congratulated

them for choosing the targets for, encouraged them to continue their work. But he seemed to be saying, you know, this was their deal, this was their thing. They did it and we, and we appreciate it very much. But he wasn't claiming an operational role in any way at all. Yeah. When you look out at the globe, but in the many places ISIS is attempting to recruit and launch new attacks. Is there anywhere outside of the Middle East that really worries you and you think that people should be focusing on or, you know, mindful of? Well, in some ways, other parts of the world are more worrying. Now I don't cover other parts of the world as closely as I cover the Middle East. I'm very worried about the prospect of an Islamic State revival in Iraq. It's already coming back in quite a strong

way in certain areas of the country, mostly ones that were actually liberated from ISIS up to five years ago. It's taken them a while to get back there, but they are coming back. In Syria, they've suffered a very recent defeat. It's places like Sri Lanka where a group was apparently able to carry out this spectacular, an incredibly devastating attack without having been noticed or spotted. And places like the Philippines where it seems they control islands, remote islands, they are sort of taking territory in other countries around the world that have a Muslim, non-Muslim divide. And yes, I mean, it's a very important point about them that they're sort of piggybacking onto a lot of local Islamic causes around the world. And that gives them a much

bigger platform than they might otherwise have in the Middle East where they come from and where they have suffered just significant defeat. Yeah, that's true. They're co-executive producing a lot of things that they're actually not doing any work on. Last question for you. The last time I paid really close attention to Lebanon was when Sad Hariri, the prime minister, was, you briefly detained or imprisoned, however we want to call it in Saudi Arabia, forced to film a resignation speech, and then, I guess, just kind of walked it back. Have people just moved on from that episode in Lebanon? They kind of have. it was handled quite well from the Lebanese government's point of view by the politicians here because they stood by Hariri.

It said they didn't believe that he had been, he had actually made this resignation, that he had been forced to do this. And they sort of welcomed him back as a victim of Saudi excesses. And he is now continuing in his job as Prime Minister at the behest of the Hezbollah Alliance here, which has affirmed its role in Lebanon and the dominance of its role in Lebanon, partly as a result of that ham-fisted attempt to roll back Ghisbollah's influence. Yeah. Liz Sly, thank you so much for the reporting you're doing, for joining the show today,

and helping us understand this horrible asshole's new music video. It is unfortunate to see him out there and still alive, but time will tell. It's a pleasure. Thank you. Thank you. Ben, that was a very fun episode for me. I really is. I don't know why this was such a fun episode. We got Balugas.

We got good news in Spain. I feel good. We got some good news. I'm glad I stayed up until 11 to get through the whole Dexter Philkins article because, boy, that was worth it. Talk to guys next week. See you next week.