The Tucker Carlson Show - Seth Harp Exposes the Murder & Drug Trafficking Taking Place Inside America’s Largest Military Base

Episode Date: August 15, 2025

Fort Bragg is America’s largest military base. According to reporter Seth Harp, it’s also a hotbed of murder and drug trafficking. (00:00) The Mysterious Deaths at Fort Bragg (07:14) Who Was Billy Lavigne and Mark Leshikar? (12:34) The Government’s Secret Assassination Programs (38:47) The Drug Trafficking Ring Within Government Special Forces (40:33) Who Carried Out These Murders? Seth Harp is a veteran investigative reporter and author of the critically acclaimed new book The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/730414/the-fort-bragg-cartel-by-seth-harp/). Before becoming a journalist he practiced law for five years and was an assistant attorney general for the state of Texas. During college and law school he served in the United States Army Reserve and did one tour of duty in Iraq. Paid partnerships with: Dutch: Get $50 a year for vet care with Tucker50 at https://dutch.com/tucker Pique: Go to https://piquelife.com/tucker to get up to 20% off for life when you start your first month  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

So you got out of the military in 2011. This is how I understand the genesis of the book that comes out today, the Fort Bragg Cartel. You get out in 2011, you're a reporter. At some point, you start to understand that there are a lot of deaths at Fort Bragg, which is America's biggest Army base, some of the Special Forces. And you start to investigate those deaths. That's right. I first read about a double homicide on Fort Bragg that took place at the tail end of 2020.

Just an ordinary article in the New York Times that said that these two veteran special operation soldiers, Billy Levine and Timothy Dumas, have been found murdered on a remote training range of Fort Bragg. They had both been shot to death and their bodies have been dumped in the woods. I also read that Billy Levine was a Delta force operator. And in all my time reporting on the military, working as a war reporter, and then before that, serving in the army myself, I had never heard of a Delta Force. operator being in the news for any reason because it's the most secretive and elite unit in the entire military. And the police were saying that this was believed to be a double homicide from a drug deal gone wrong. And so I knew that there had to be more to the story because you can

imagine if like, let's say a CIA agent was found shot to death and dumped in a park in Maryland or something like that. And the police were saying it was a drug deal. I mean, that's the level of secrecy and that's how elite Delta Force is as a military. What is Delta Force? Delta Force is what's called a special mission unit. It is an army unit. It's part of what's called the Joint Special Operations Command. It was created in the late 1970s to be an elite counterterrorism force for things like hostage rescue. For many years they were obsessed with the problem or the danger of loose nuclear weapons and drilled constantly for scenarios in which they would be called upon to secure a loose nuclear weapon. This is all pre-9-11. After 2001, after the war started in Iraq

in Afghanistan, Delta Force grew quite a bit and came to have a much more prominent role in U.S. military operations. And what they primarily specialize in are clandestine operations, covert operations, what we might call black operations. That's Delta force and it's headquartered at Fort Bragg. They get no publicity. None. I actually looked into this when I was writing the book to see if they had ever been talked about in the 20 years that the U.S. had been at war since 2001. And I found that in fact, they were talked about in the context of the 2004 Abu Ghraib scandal

and had been implicated in the abuse of prisoners in Iraq. Other than that, for 20 years, they kept their name completely out of the news. So there are other units famously that have worked with Hollywood filmmakers, a lot whose members retire and go on talk shows, including this one. And you know, you sort of know quite a bit about the SEALs, for example, the various SEAL teams and their training, etc. But has there ever been a Delta operator in public talking about the training or the missions or anything like that? there are former delta force officers who i've seen occasionally talk on tv um but as far as the regular enlisted guys go their culture really is um you know the saying that they have that i've heard repeated is that um you know seals write books at delta guys write history something to that effect

it's very much part of their culture not to to come on tv shows and not to talk and not to write books. Interesting. Thereby increasing the mystique. And I think the assumption that we all have is that they're, because they're the most secretive, they are the most impressive. They're very impressive in certain ways.

You know, the level of physical fitness that you have to be selected, to be an operator, is very impressive. Marksmanship, you know, other skills that they have, very tough, tough people for the most part. But as I talk about extensively in the book, the unit has, I think, declined in recent years in terms of its culture. So let's begin with the story of the Delta operator, Billy Levine, and the man with whom he was found dead. Who killed them and why?

That's the question that animates this book from the beginning to the end. I mean, although I talk a lot about military history, I talk a lot about foreign policy. But really, it's a murder mystery. This book is at its heart. And the question is who killed those two guys? And the fact is that there are many, many possible suspects. And that kind of is what made it such a rich topic for exploration. It turns out that Billy Levine, 18 months before he himself was found murdered,

had killed a guy at his house in Fayetteville. In fact, he had shot and killed his best friend and fellow Green Beret, a guy named Mark Leshiker, right in front of his Mark Leshiker's daughter, who was about six years old at the time. And the police, the local police, the sheriff's department, the district attorney of Cumberland County, North Carolina, and the U.S. Army Criminal Investigations Division completely covered up that murder. And I used that word covered up advisedly. I'm actually an attorney myself, so I don't use it lightly, but I devote the first two chapters of the book to showing what the evidence was against Levine and how that case was adjudicated and how he was not even placed

under arrest. He was just lightly questioned and let go that same night on the grounds that had been supposedly a justifiable homicide when in fact that theory, that defense was definitively contradicted by the physical evidence. So Levine having previously killed a guy then goes on to commit three, or excuse me, I think four or five felony offenses in Fayetteville over the next 18 months, including aggravated assault with a deadly weapon for shooting at a guy in the streets of Fayetteville, manufacturing controlled substance for cooking crack in his house, lots of weapons charges. He'd even been arrested for harboring an escapee, which is a new one to me. And in every case, the DA had dropped the charges against him. Who was Billy Levine? He was a Delta Force soldier

he had done about, he had done more than 12 deployments, more than a dozen deployments in his career. He wasn't a high-level officer in the Delta Force, but he was a veteran operator who had deep experience in America's classified assassination programs in Iraq and Syria and in Afghanistan. So that was the reason why I think he was not, he was dealt with with such leniency by the authorities. Why did he shoot his best friend to death? It's very mysterious why he did that. Both of them had severe drug problems.

You know, this is one thing. Levine was not a, he was not a one-dimensional character by any means. He's someone whose military career and whose downward trajectory are reconstructing the book because I think it's so illustrative of what's happened to our military over the past 20 years. he was such a great example of what has happened. He developed very severe PTSD moral injury. He came to believe that the wars in which he was participating were morally wrong.

He had severe substance abuse issues, very severe. He was smoking crack every day and doing a lot of other drugs as well. Wait, while he was a Delta operator or smoking crack every day? Yes. And I learned that that's not that unusual to my surprise. But my understanding was in your description suggests that these guys are like basically Olympic athletes whose physical condition is going to be monitored, I assume by the unit doctor or somebody. Well, you know, operators have a particular type of physical fitness that you really only find in the Army, which is the kind of guy who can, you know, run a two-mile run in 12 minutes, but also smoke a pack a day, you know, and get drunk five times a week. Yeah.

I mean, they're very, very. just savages. This is just savages, yeah. That's impressive. So, but this guy was maintaining his, you know, his training schedule while smoking crack every day. Yes. And I was shocked to the degree to which, because not only, you know, I served in the conventional part of the military, not in the special forces. And I had also been out for more than 10 years. So I was very, very surprised when I started investigating Fort Bragg and learning the extent to which cocaine use is normalized. And the Green Beret, it's not just in Delta Force,

but in all of the Army Special Forces, which is a much larger organization. Then Delta Force is pretty small. But the Green Berets is thousands of troops and people just, you know, people that live in this community, live in Fayetteville, or live in Moore County,

you know, to them that's just understood that this is just part of the lifestyle. Hey, to brag, but we're pretty confident this show is the most vehemently pro-dog podcast you're ever going to see. We can take or leave some people, but dogs are non-negotiable. They are the best. They really are our best friends.

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So he was a Green Beret. He was still serving in the National Guard. I don't believe he was on active duty the day he died. I'm not sure if it makes much of a difference, but to be precise. Was Levine ever punished for killing him? No, he wasn't. In any way. Not in any way. He remained an active duty operator on Delta Force after killing a guy in his house when they were both completely out of their minds on drugs.

And Levine was not even given a toxicology test after he shot somebody. That's completely crazy. The reason for that is because once you have done 10 deployments in service of covert operations, assassination operations, it is an unacceptable national security outcome from the perspective of authorities for you to go to prison, for you to be in a courtroom for any reason. Those guys, they are not supposed to exist, and they just can't process them through the criminal justice system in ordinary ways. And to me, that's what made his death so intriguing because so many people alleged the sources that I quote, I want to be responsible about this, and not say that it's what I believe, but the sort of conventional wisdom that when I first got into the case, people were saying that the military itself had killed Billy Levine because he had turned into such a problem and was messing up so badly.

I don't want to derail your story, but you've referred twice to assassination programs. I wasn't aware that the United States admits it assassinations people. When did that start? that when did that become a feature of modern war or statecraft or whatever it is? What is that? What are you talking about? In 2001, President George W. Bush signed secret orders that essentially, and they're secret, so I haven't read them, but based on the best reporting that I've seen, he signed secret orders that essentially reversed the assassination ban that had been put in place decades earlier.

actually the groundwork for that legal move had been laid under president reagan there were memos in place or certain authorities executive orders in place that did allow for assassination in the case when the target was deemed to be a terrorist that those authorities actually weren't used to my understanding for decades but when after the september 11th attacks you know the bush reversed that that and you know you're saying that you haven't heard too much about it, but that's because we often hear about it by a certain euphemism, which is night raids. So you may have heard, I'm sure you have heard, that under President Obama, the war making, all of the war effort in Afghanistan became about drone strikes and night raids. Well, night raids is just a euphemism for assassinations. Yes, if somebody comes out waving a white flag, well, probably get shot anyway. But under certain circumstances, they will take people prisoner. But for the most part, you know, when they hit a target, every, every military age man, as they say, on that target, it dies.

Whether or not he's guilty of a crime or even suspected of a crime. Well, guilty of a crime, I mean, there's no accountability over this because it all depends upon the determinations of intelligence analysts in the Joint Special Operations Command and in the CIA and what have you. The people that generate targets, you know, Delta Force just hits the time. targets. They may not necessarily generate them, although they do have substantial intelligence assets that develop targets. But there's no way to check their work and say who these people really were. But, you know, as I talk about extensively in the book and trying to get some clarity around this, you know, the error rate is believed to be very high, you know, at least 50%. Is this a longstanding feature of American military policy? Have we been assessing people for

centuries. Is this an American thing to do? Absolutely not. And in fact, before the modern era, before the 21st century, assassination was not considered to be a valid or a credit-worthy tool of warmaking. It was considered to be something dirty down low. I mean, and there also wasn't perceived to be a tactical advantage necessarily in assassinating enemy commanders in in the enemy chain of command. There was more of a sense in fighting things out honestly on the battlefield. And that has completely changed. And, you know, I think one big influence on American policy.

Wait, so up until 9-11, you're saying. So when you say modern area, you don't mean like the advent of electricity. You mean like 25 years ago. So I'm not a military historian by any means. But my understanding is that there was. extensive assassination operations also in Vietnam. And we call that the, that's known as the Phoenix program where the CIA was using assassination to dismantle what was perceived as enemy command and control networks. Was it pretty effective? We won that war? You know, actually I think that a lot of

people in the sort of national security set did, although it elicited a great deal of repugnance in the public, I think that my sense is that it was perceived as an effective way of waging war. Well, then why didn't we win? Well, we haven't won any wars since 1945, unless you count the Gulf War. Right. So, you know, I don't think if we're doing anything right, basically, including assassinations. Yeah, I mean, that is a stat that kind of hard to argue with that you almost never hear in and around Washington.

Like, when was the last time you won a war? You spend a trillion dollars a year and you can't win a freaking war, you can't beat the Houthis? Like, maybe it's time for some reform or to rethink what we're doing. It's not working. Even by their own measurements, right? I completely agree. And I think a lot of people, including people who are anti-war and who would prefer to see a more isolationist foreign policy, complacently assumed that because we spend ungodly amounts of money on our military, a trillion.

this year on the national defense budget, that whatever else you think of our foreign policy, at least we have the world's most powerful military. That assumption goes largely unexamined, and the reality is we don't. I was just at Trump's military parade in Washington, D.C. A magazine sent me to cover that. And a lot of those troops were from Fort Bragg,

and you may have seen on TV what a joke the parade turned out to be, how disorganized how unimpressive it was and the technology that was on display you know people expected to be this fascistic spectacle this authoritarian spectacle like you might see in north korea or whatever but i was looking at the troops going by not even marching in step you know the the bradley fighting vehicles which are 40 years old and and performed very poorly haven't been replaced with anything newer same goes for the abrams tank it's been in service for more than 40 years, the Black Hawk helicopter, just before the parade, a Black Hawk helicopter had crashed into a passenger plane over the Botanic River, lest we forget, killed 68 people,

worst aviation disaster since 2001. I'm looking at all this and I'm thinking, man, our army is in sorry, sorry shape. And that was the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army because the Army actually predates the constitution and predates the creation of our nation. And to me, it is very worrisome to see the state of decline and disrepair in which it's currently languishing. And I think the stuff that's going on to Fort Bragg is highly symptomatic of just that. Certainly is.

So back to assassinations. So assassinations are, it sounds by your description, like a big part of our foreign policy or our war-making efforts. A central part of it, sure. And Delta is basically conducting a lot of these, some of these? Absolutely. Delta Force and then SEAL Team 6, which is Delta's naval counterpart, also part of the Joint Special Operations Command. And you hear a lot more about them.

Can I ask a dumb question? Why? So if you're fighting a war or you're in some protracted struggle with violence, I don't know if it's a war, but you're like fighting. Why wouldn't, if you could, why wouldn't you capture key players from the other side in order to extract intelligence from the usable intelligence from them? I thought that's what we used to. We used to to do. I don't want to paint them in a cartoonish light. By them, I mean, Delta and the J-Soc. Well, they're not making these decisions. I mean, these are made, as you said, by the command structure. Often it's direct orders in the White House. Right. And also with input from certain congressional leaders are involved in these targeting decisions to a degree that I was not aware.

Congressional leaders? Apparently, I've heard anecdotes about about operators sitting on target and waiting for the go-ahead from Congress. I'm not sure what to make of that because all this is so classified. But that's what I've heard. In any event, there's no doubt. Why would it be classified? I'm sorry? Why would it be classified? Well, that's another big component of the evolution of the American way of making war, waging war for the past 20 years, is the increasing secrecy around all of this, which I think also has had an extremely deleterious effect. You're not able to complete a sentence without me interrupting you. I'm so sorry. No, it's great. No, you're just saying so many things that are evocative and interesting. I'm trying to track them all down. Okay, I will

stop interrupting you. So you said, I don't want to paint a clownish picture of the Delta operators, but... They do capture people. They will abduct people. They will take them to like a ship that's in international waters and do God knows what to them to get information. But in most cases, they're just killing the person that they're targeting. Boy, there's a lot of lying. And some of the worst deception surrounds your health. How come Washington never talks about the poison in your food supply. What about what's in your drugs? You have a right to know what goes into your mouth. And the more you know, the more distressing it is. That's why it's critical to seek out alternatives you can trust. Now, it's an alternative to the garbage that you can pick up at any store. We strongly

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slash Tucker, you will feel at the very first morning. It is great. What kind of people are these? Like villagers in faraway Middle Eastern countries or others? It all depends on the theater. It depends upon the time. I can tell you what they're doing right now because Trump made an interesting comment

in one of his speeches earlier this year where he talked about, he said something to the effect of since my inauguration, it had been a few months since he was inaugurated. He said, since my inauguration, we have eliminated 68 terrorists in Iraq, Syria, and Somalia. This is all going to come home. We're going to have this kind of violence here.

You can't commit violence without facing the effects of violence. It's a principle of the universe. Live by the sword, die by the sword. That never changes. And if we're running around assassinating people, we will have Americans assassinated. Fact. Well, some of that blowback, I fully agree. Some of that blowback can be seen in cases.

like Billy Levine, where he's someone who has, since he was a very young man, has been raised in this system of violence who comes back and is unable to control it. And, you know, when he perceives small threats, like with his buddy, Mark Leshker at his house, barging in his front door because they're both out of their head on drugs, you know, he just, as a reflexive mechanism, pulls out his gun and shoots the other guy. So I think one of the first signs of is, and I'm tracking about 24 murders involving Fort Bragg soldiers in the book since 2020, yeah, in which it was either a Fort Bragg soldier who was murdered, accused of murder, or convicted of murder. 24.

24. That's my best count. It might be off by one or two on the Martians. Well, that's wild. The military base? Yes. I would imagine the murder rate at a military base would be zero. I think it should be.

If you're an employee of the government, if you're an employee of the government, if you're active duty soldier you're supposed to be the most disciplined people in the world right supposed to be i don't know if you can see that anymore so billy levin um was by the way is he from a service family how did he wind up on all this no he wasn't he was a he was a he was a middle class guy from working class guy from the upper peninsula of michigan who joined the army when he was 17 years old before 9-11 happened and um 9-11 took place while he was still in and in training training. And he soon got taken up the pipeline of the first special forces group. And then from there, by 2009, he was a relatively young man, 26, I think, at the time that he was selected for

Delta Force. So he was an extraordinary person in that he was clearly suited to the job. Well, very physically fit, very outdoorsy, very tough, you know, a guy who had the self-confidence that is necessary for these this type of work uh you know an adrenaline junkie for sure a lot of these guys are big time adrenaline junkies jumping out of planes you know parachuting is a big part of what they do so he was um he was like those guys in all these respects but at at its core billy levin was somebody who um also had a sense of ethics and and right and wrong that his time in the service really degraded to a tragic tragic effect so he murders his best friend in front of the daughter, gets away with it, no penalty whatsoever.

That is absolutely wild. And then some months later, he himself is found dead with another man on a remote training range of Bragg. Right, about 18 months later. 18 months later. What were they shot to death? Yes. And it appears that double murder appears to have been the work of people who knew what they were doing. there were no uh well you've got about 50 000 potential suspects on the scene because it's a

military base right and the other guy either was uh his name was timothy dumas um not to reduce them to their their respective races but to keep it clear out one was a white guy one was a black guy Levine's a white guy dumas is a black guy he also was not someone who would have been easy to kill he wasn't an operator he was a um supply officer who was attached to j sot He served in the 95th Civil Affairs Brigade and had done many deployments to Afghanistan in service of the J-Soc-led task force in Afghanistan. So he's a guy who gets the operators all the stuff that they need in the field, including cash, weapons, ammunition, food, all the basics, gas. And he was deeply, and he's a whole separate story that we could go into. but to come back to what we were saying about the murder itself you know both of them were very very tough guys who never went anywhere unarmed who kept their heads on a swivel and who had been to war repeatedly so the fact that both of them were cleanly taken out and then dumped in this remote area and that the scene was free of any kind of um you know i interviewed uh several um army cid agents who worked the scene of the of the murder and by all accounts

They found no drugs, no guns, no money, and maybe a couple of shell casings. But, you know, there weren't even like footprints on the ground. Were they shot with a rifle? No. I was never able to obtain ballistic evidence. I believe that Dumas, the black guy, was shot in the head with a small caliber pistol. And I don't know what a type of weapon caused Levine's injuries, but he was shot multiple times in the torso and in the leg, maybe five times. I'm not quite sure. Any idea where they were killed?

Dumas was killed on site, it seems. He was killed execution style on site. Levine's body had been wrapped up in a sort of tarp or blanket and placed in the back of his own truck. And then someone had driven out there and abandoned the truck in the woods with his body in the back. And so the armies, there's lots of theories of this murder, but the CID theory was that

somebody, the third man, because there had to have been a third person there, these guys couldn't have shot each other because there were no guns. So someone left with the guns at a minimum. And so Army CID presumes that Dumas, who was a really bad guy, to be honest, he was a drug trafficker and by some accounts a hitman. Like hitman? Yeah. You said he was an army officer. He was a warrant officer. Warrant officer, okay. Yeah.

But, yeah, I talked to a woman, a police officer, in fact, who Dumas had offered to kill her husband for money. And so CID presumed... He was active duty? He was not active duty at the time of his death. He had just been expelled from the military for his criminal behavior. And that is actually a key fact that we can get into because the fact that he had been kicked out when he was a few months. shy of his 19th year in service. So, or a few months shy of his 20th, 20th year, in which case he would have been eligible

for a lifetime pension. You know, if you serve 20 years and then you get a pension. So the fact that he had been kicked out and deprived of his pension really is an operative fact in all of this because the story, it goes on from here. But what was I saying about the murder itself? So he was killed, Dumas was killed on site. Right. So I was trying to recapitulate CID's theory of the case very briefly, which is that they think that Dumas was hired to kill Levine and did kill Levine with the cooperation of another person or persons. They then put Levine's body in the back of the truck, drive him out in the woods with the intention of throwing his body in a lake that's near there.

But the truck got stuck in the woods, got stuck in the mud because it wasn't on a road. it was on a firebreak trail. And at that point, according to CID's theory of the case, the other guy decided to just abandon the situation and decided to kill Dumas in order to get rid of any witnesses. We thought this through when we started this podcast a year ago and we decided we're never advertising anything that we or people on our staff don't use. Period. We're only partnering with companies that we agree with and endorse actually in our personal lives. so we want to announce a new partnership with a survival company we trust most last country supply is the name of our collaboration last country supply i have a big surplus of survival food from that great company if you get a bucket of food with a 25 year shelf life 2,000 calories a day potatoes rice bread drinks you feel a lot better let's say there's an eMP attack or civil disturbance and you don't know what could happen in the future you are prepared and you are protecting your family with Last Country Supply products.

So head to Last Country Supply.com to shop for our new collection, bulk up now. There is no scenario where you will regret being prepared. What's the theory as to why DeMoss would have been hired to kill Levine? Why he would have been hired? Yes. So there's a lot of competing possibilities. And as I said, I think that's what makes this murder mystery, for me at least as a writer, it was a productive narrative vehicle because there's lots of things to explore.

One is that Mark Leshiker, the Green Beret, who he killed, his teammates, by some accounts, wanted revenge. The fact that that murder went completely unpunished, as you might imagine, leads to resentment in the community, leads to a lot of whispers. And, you know, you can't just kill somebody, maybe get off legally, but there's going to be repercussions. Yeah, a lot of dangerous people around. Sure, yeah. So that's one. Okay, so that's a more human, I'm not saying justifiable. I'm not as bothered by Leshger's buddies getting together and killing the guy who killed him.

That seems understandable. I will say I found no evidence for that. I also learned that Dumas and Levine were trafficking cocaine together at a high level. And that... They were trafficking cocaine? Not dealing cocaine, you know, in the little baggies to their friends. I'm talking about trafficking kilos of cocaine from Mexico up into the United States and distributing it in a large multi-state area.

And Levine is a just once again an active duty member of Delta Force. That's correct, yes. So they had enemies in the drug world, dangerous enemies, people that will kill you if you don't pay for your product. And finally, Levine, as I said before, was known to be. be going around telling people that he didn't believe in the mission anymore, that what the United States was doing was wrong, and was in the process of writing a book. And we touched on this in the beginning of our conversation about how much the unit frowns on people writing books. But, you know, Lee... Possibly really frowns on it.

Levine's ex-wife told me that he was writing a book. She showed me the text messages where he texted her and said, I'm writing a book. And he also said that someone already wanted to be to turn into a movie. Now, Dumas said that, so put a pen in that, Dumas, because he had been kicked out of the army, just shy of his pension eligibility date, he also was writing something, variously described me as a book or a letter, in which it wasn't a memoir. He was actually deliberately intended as a blackmail document. He told people that he knew about a drug trafficking ring and the special forces involving special forces soldiers who had gone over to the dark side in Afghanistan, where there was a great deal of drug trafficking going on, by the way.

By active duty, U.S. military? By the Afghan client state that the U.S. supported for 20 years. Yeah. So all these guys, having served many times in Afghanistan, would have been very close and in close proximity to working with warlords, police chiefs, militia commanders, and so on Afghans, who were some of the biggest drug traffickers in the world, period. So that context, I think, is important. But in any event, Dumas had written this letter purporting to name all these individual members of this drug trafficking ring and the special forces

and was going around telling people that because of this leverage that he had over the Special Forces Command, he was going to get them to reinstate his pension. So the fact that both of these guys are writing tell-all documents, and then both turn up murdered on Fort Bragg is yet another potential theory for explaining their deaths. You must have spoken to people they knew, their friends.

What is the prevailing theory among people who are there? I can't say that anybody purports to know for sure, but I would say the most common reflexive answer that you get from folks is that they think that they were murdered by elements of Delta Force,

either rogue elements of the unit or the command itself. Now, I want to be very careful. Come on. I want to be very careful and say that I don't have any evidence of that, and I don't pretend to. Is that the opinion of any Delta operators, do you know? Funnily enough, yeah. One of the guys I talked to a former Delta operator

seemed to find that, excuse me, a former Delta officer, seemed to find that perfectly plausible, which was disturbing to me. But it's bonkers. Again, it's not, if folks who read the book, they will see the direction in which I lean ultimately. And I don't want to spoil, you know, the ending. Bottom line, no rest have been made.

That's not true. And so a further complication comes in with regard to just that. so in recently i don't want to spoil the last chapter of the book but um recently the department of justice accused someone of committing these murders and let me just say that it is not at all who you would think and um virtually all or i can just say all of the sources that i talk to about this um either dismiss it out of hand and say there's no way or they just have a really hard time believing it. And the person that they've accused has pleaded not guilty. And he is scheduled to go on trial in January 2026. Have we spoken to him? I have not spoken to his father, but not him.

He's a adult operator? He's not. Yeah. He's someone who people struggle to understand how he could have, how anyone could imagine that this person would travel from where he lived, which was not in the area, go on to Fort Bragg and murder these two guys who are, you know, one of them is like a real-life Jason Bourne and the other one, you know, also a very dangerous man. How he could have done that and gotten away with it. And also the indictment is very strange that, you know, the victims are identified only by their initials. A lot of the cases under seal, the whole thing is very suspicious. I don't want to dance around it. A lot of people that I've talked to say the government is framing this kid. Maybe because he was 20 years old at the time, 20. And Levine's 37, Dumas is 44.

You know, these are mature men who, the idea that a 20-year-old stick-up kid could have killed them defies credulity in a lot of people's opinion. Now, personally, I have to think that the Department of Justice doesn't indict people for murder lightly. I hope not. I just, I have trouble getting that far mentally. So it seems like he must have had some involvement. I want to credit my government for being at least that minimum level of responsibility that they're not simply framing this kid.

But they haven't made any of their evidence public. And as I said, he's pleaded not guilty. so we'll just have to see how that trial goes. Have they, but they made the indictment public, but none of the evidence. The indictment is public, but, you know, like I said, it identified, I only knew about it because I think someone sent it to me. It only identifies the victims by their initials, WL and TD. I've never seen that before.

A murder indictment where the victims are identified by their initials, I don't even... Especially since their murder was public. I mean, it was reported on at the time, right? It is a very, very strange case. here's what we know we know that Levine murdered a guy got away with it

obviously his superior officers knew that command knew that was it widely known that he was a drug trafficker it was widely known that he was a drug user and yes

it was known that he was the guy that dealt drugs to his fellow operators I mean I talked to Mark Leshiker's family so Mark and Billy they were best friends And so Mark's wife and his mom even, they all knew Billy Levine.

They had all spent time at his house. And they and many other witnesses, you know, I interviewed lots of family members and friends in both of these men. And they said that, you know, you would go into Billy's house and there was just cocaine everywhere. And all his fellow operators from Dullda Force were at his house too. There's a bunch of coke on the table. They're doing MDMA.

They're even smoking heroin, you know. And it's considered to be. totally normal in this community. That's what to me was the most shocking to hear again and again, like, not only to be told that all these people, these guys are using drugs, but that people just seem to think that that's kind of what they

do, which I didn't know that. There's so many threats. I mean, the most obvious is the human effect of 12 combat deployments. So that's too much, obviously, and that will destroy you. It sounds like it destroyed Billy Levine. The second

is, like, where's the Pentagon in this? This is the premier unit in the United States military. And people are openly using cocaine, smoking crack, and shooting their friends and no one's doing anything about it. Like, what is that? It's baffling to me. I would have never imagined. I mean, I remember when I was in the Army, one guy, a sergeant in my company tested positive for cocaine in a piss test. And he was just gone after that.

I mean, he was just removed from the unit. Well, that's a question that I should have asked you a half an hour ago. What about drug testing? So all members of the military are subject to random drug testing, but apparently they considered a joke. I mean, there's a lot of reporting on this around the Navy SEALs. A lot of Navy SEALs have gone on the record to say that they were using constantly during their time and service and that the drug testing regimen was a complete joke because there's ways to defeat it. In particular, you can get a tip off because it's supposed to be random.

It's not something they do regularly. And maybe that's what they need to be doing. but as the randomized testing you know you can be told by someone in time hey your name is on the list and that gives you time to like suck down a bunch of water and stop doing drugs and and pass the test or by urine by clean urine but you would imagine maybe that's something that's going on as well hadn't heard that in particular but i know that people can do that um they certainly can you got to remember these guys are intelligent highly trained um they're spies just as much as they are assassins. Many of them are. There's various levels within Delta Force. There's

compartmental elements. There's the line squadrons, et cetera. So it depends on the person. But, you know, these are people who are, their job is to do covert action. So they're very good at getting away with things. When your job is to penetrate a foreign country that's guarded by paranoid counterintelligence officials to go into that country and, I don't know, bug an embassy or kidnap a guy off the street. A drug test isn't going to be something that you're too worried about, I think. And you alluded to this earlier, there comes a point where, you know, the government is afraid of you because you know too much, you've done too much.

You're also performing what they think is a valuable service. No one else can provide that service. Like, you're too valuable to expel over a failed piss test. That's a great point. That's absolutely part of it. Which is that, yeah, after they've spent millions of dollars training you, they don't really care. I think they would put it as like if they were to come out and say it. It's like big boy rules, I think is how they look at it.

If you're going to do drugs, then do it. Just don't get caught. Right. Just don't get caught is the rule. Well, it sounds like their work life has the same rule. Absolutely, yeah. So you said Billy Levine had decided that the missions he'd been sent on 12. times were not morally justifiable. The whole war on terror was a bad idea. Is that a common

view, do you think? You know, it is the fact that combat veterans are one of the most reliable anti-war demographics in that country. I've noticed. They don't know that in cable news. They're always like, oh, combat veterans support whatever mission this is. That's the opposite of what I've noticed. The opposite is true. There's data on this. There's polling. Super majorities of combat veterans say that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were not worth fighting. And I'm one of them. And so to me to learn that Billy Levine, you know, held those views is not surprising at all. When did that come to you, by the way? What's your, can tell us, take five minutes and tell us your story if that's all right?

Sure. You know, I'm not, my story is really not part of the book. But the relevant background would be that I actually deployed to Iraq at the same time as Levine's first. tour in Iraq. And, you know, I, before that deployment was over, I had come to the firm point of view that the war was not just a mistake, but a crime to carry out this invasion on the grounds that there were supposedly weapons and mass destruction in Iraq when there weren't. And what was your role? You were in the Army.

Yeah, you know, I was in college. I was a college student who joined the Army Resort. serves. I was a student at the University of Texas in order to pay for college. Oh, wow. I fell for the recruiter's pitch, which is, you know, one week and a month, two weeks a year. I was 19 years old. And that was in 2004, 2003, excuse me. That used to be real. Well, that was the year we invaded Iraq. Yeah. That used to be real. I mean, the reserves served, you know, one weekend a month, two weeks a year, for a long, long time. And then the war on terror commenced and those guys were dragged into real war. But I don't think that had happened before, had it? Well, you would know. You did it.

No, it hadn't happened before. And in fact, you know, I sometimes in retrospect struggle to explain to folks how it could have been that I opposed the Iraq War and had no interest in fighting in the Iraq War and yet still joined the Army Reserve at a time when it was clear that the Iraq War was going to happen. Well, because the reserves were not used in that way. There's that. And also, even people who opposed the war had no idea that it was going to last for years. We forget about this completely. But even people who opposed the war assumed that it would be over pretty quickly. And I can remember even asking my recruiter naively, you sure, I'm not going to get sent to this war in Iraq that everyone's talking about. Don't worry about that. But yeah, of course, my deployment orders were cut. Even before I left basic training, they were sent to me while I was standing in formation and basic training. It's had to deploy to Iraq for 528 days. Oh, come on. And you're a UT student?

Yeah. Sorry to laugh. It's okay. It's hilarious. It was two years before I went back to college after the day I signed that contract. What did your girlfriend or parents or buddies say? I'm sorry to laugh. Do you see the humor kind of?

I do, of course. Yeah. My parents were pretty resigned to it. Bless their hearts. They had to put up with a little. lot. But, you know, before I even deployed back to the United States, I was writing editorials for the Daily Texts, I wrote for my student newspaper, you know, talking about the Iraq war and using my perspective as a veteran to try to convince people that this was a mistake and that

this whole post-9-11 permanent war paradigm she re-examined. So that's kind of like my sort of origin story and how I came to... Wait, so how long did you spend in Iraq? 528 days. Oh, you actually did. Oh, yeah, yeah. every single one of those days. What was that like? You know, I think a lot of people had certainly had rougher deployments than I did. I've read books about some of the units that had the toughest, that had the most casualties. I don't want to, you know, exaggerate what my experience was like, but at the same time, it was, it was pretty rough.

It was pretty rough. I mean, there were guys in my unit who were killed. We were attacked on a fairly regular basis. Nothing crazy, but, you know, getting shot at and getting mortared was a continuous thing. We were often outside the wire because we were, although we were non-combat troops, we built bridges and roads. It was our job. We did a lot of construction work and dirt work in war zones or in, you know, areas where they've been fighting, especially to repair roads that have been damaged by AEDs. several of our convoys were ambushed a lot of i think maybe five or six guys were shot and survived uh and then also there were other bad things that went on um you know i uh in one circumstance there was a soldier who um shot up a car in front of me and another group of soldiers and killed the occupants of that car who were just a woman and her kid oh and you know he said that he thought that you know they were approaching too fast i won't want to get in all the details of it but the ugliness of it and the savagery and how unnecessary it all was made a deep deep impression on me at that age um and i have dedicated all my work as a journalist and reporter ever since then to

opposing you know the continuation of these wars well bless you for that what was it like coming back after 528 days did you rejoin your fraternity or what I mean it must have been bewilder it was great coming back it was good you know I didn't have like

the sort of stereotypical hurt locker type of experience where you know I wasn't like what's that movie apocalypse now

where I'm laying under the ceiling fans skinning rats it wasn't like that I mean I do remember I remember having, it's been a long time now, but I do remember having nightmares for years. Not necessarily of violence, but I would have this dream where I had lost my weapon and was unarmed. I was in Iraq on the street or whatever and didn't have a weapon. So, yeah, there was some lingering effects, but, you know, I don't complain about my personal experience in this.

The U.S. killed a million people in Iraq, maybe. maybe the estimates vary but hundreds of thousands possibly a million people they're the ones who are the victims of this not u.s soldiers like me who have hurt feelings when we come back uh you know i want to be clear about that but it sounds like your experience there affected your view of the broader mission for sure yes profoundly i would say what about the guys you served with um my reaction was typical like I was saying before most there was a divide in the unit

I can remember debating the 2004 election with the guys who were for Kerry and the guys who were for Bush you know the military is very reflective of our society maybe not the special forces but the regular army is

and so the same divisions we see in society at large are reflected in the ranks so it was no different what do you think the prevailing view let me ask you again among the special operators is

of the mission itself? Why are we doing this? Is that a question they discuss? I don't hear them talk about that sort of thing very much. They just say bad guys. We kill bad guys. We kill terrorists. I have to assume

that in units like Delta Force, the majority of the guys are able to compartmentalize the ethics of it and say, or the wisdom of it, and say that that's simply not their job to think about and that they just follow orders.

Yeah. But as you can see in the case of a guy like Bill Levine, that only lasts for so long. Eventually, it starts to dawn on you that this is not okay. And if you listen to operator-type podcasts, you'll hear a lot of that. I mean, yeah, it's,

they're not the most jingoistic and pro-war people, like you said before, her cable news, cable news anchors not, you know, soldiers. The soldiers, I think, have a more nuanced perspective, almost as a rule. Did you ever run in to any cable news anchors when you were over there?

No. No. So Mark Levin was not in your unit. I didn't see him, no. I did see Joe Millionaire once. Joe Millionaire. Whatever happened to him? I don't know.

I saw him in Iraq. I also saw a 50 Cent gave a concert in Iraq. How was it? It was cool. Yeah. It was a high point of the deployment. So this is the coolest Christmas present. I'll get this year. This is a leather alp pouch. The logo right there gets on your belt made in the United States out of actual leather. If you carry, you can put the firearm on one side and a loaded tin of Alp on the other. It will never be far from you. And it is legit cool. I'm going to be wearing it.

Recommend you do the same. Alpouch.com is where you can find this. The leather alpulch. I want to go back to the connection between Levine and his friends, his colleagues, the Delta operators, but also the other special forces, community members at Fort Bragg, and drug use and drug trafficking. That's shocking, but it doesn't seem to have shocked to their superiors. to what extent is drug trafficking tolerated in the military? I can believe I've been asking this question but it sounds like it is.

It's hard to imagine that you would have to ask that question and yet from what I was able to learn it's not an isolated case. Levina Dumas. In fact, it seems that after 2020 these like the drug trafficking rings that permeate Fork Bragg only increased and you even had

public statements from Fort Bragg officials acknowledging, you know, for example, that they had a hundred percent increase in drug crime on base from 2020 to 2021. How could you have drug crime on a military base? It was very surprising to me as well, but you even have cases of military police officers dealing drugs out of their police cars on Fort Bragg. Folks, going to look that up, look up the case of Jacob Dickerson, who was the MP on Fort Bragg, who was busted for drug trafficking. And in fact, I obtained the investigative files in that case and learned that there was actually four or five of these MPs on base that were trafficking drugs.

And they dropped charges against all but one of the guys because he had exacerbated the trouble he was in by getting into a drunk driving accident. And even he was just given a slap on the wrist. I think he got, you know, a month or two in the stockade and a dishonorable discharge. But there is a, I would say, pervasive practice of, or there's drug availability on Fort Bragg that's comparable to any, you know, dense urban city in the United States. The military is an authoritarian structure. I don't need to tell you that since you served in it. So it seems like you could prevent that if you really wanted to. You could fix that problem.

You would think so. You would think so. And I'm at a loss to explain why so little has been done. I've talked to people who, you know, CID sources who told me, CID is what? The Army's Criminal Investigations Division. Yes. It's a quasi-military, quasi-civillian police agency that has jurisdiction to investigate crimes involving American soldiers. so you have MPs who are the uniformed officers and then above them you have CID so they're the ones who investigate major crimes on basis and they told me about closed-door meetings in which the Fort Bragg brass

mostly seemed concerned with you know massaging the statistics that they kept just to make it seem like drug crime was under control when in fact it's not who runs Fort Bragg well Fort Bragg is under the largest umbrella formation there would be the 18th Airborne Corps. So the commander of the 18th Airborne Corps is going to be the highest ranking Army officer in Fort Bragg.

But you also have the Joint Special Operations Command there, which is a very elite formation in the military, the most elite. And so the commander of J-Sach is also a very important and powerful person, who's a three-star general, if I'm not a Stakin, who's on the base as well. So you have a collection of, you know, what people call the brass. And then, of course, they're subservient to the Pentagon and the Secretary of the Army and the Secretary of Defense. One connection that I've almost never heard anybody make, but I've thought about. So the war in Vietnam really starts in 1964 with the Gulf of Tonkin incident and extends all the way really to the final end in April of, of 1975, that coincided almost exactly with the rise of a real drug epidemic in the United

States. Vietnam is in a drug, is a poppy growing region, the Golden Triangle. And for a bunch of different reasons, that war seemed to have had a material effect on drug use in the United States, like, and a lot of people died from drugs during the period of the Vietnam War. And I think there must be a connection. You see the exact same phenomenon. around the war in Afghanistan, starts in 2001, ends three years ago, and it coincides precisely with this explosion in opioid drug use and the inevitable death toll from that. Is there a direct connection between those two things? Yes, there is.

And the U.S. media's failure to connect those things is probably the biggest dereliction of duty on part of the press corps that I've seen in my life. Those are big things. Big things, yeah. The death toll from drugs during the Vietnam period, and particularly during the Afghanistan period, dwarfs the death toll in the war itself. Yeah. The number one cause of death for Americans, age 18 to 45, is fentanyl overdose. And where does that?

That comes directly out of the heroin crisis that afflicted this country from, let's say, the mid-2000s, up until 2015, 16, 17, 18. And so it's very important to ask what were the causes of this? the heroin crisis. I don't think I've ever heard anyone ask that question. Well, the conventional explanation, which is not wrong, is that the roots of it lie in the overprescription of opioid painkillers in the 1990s. Yes. That's very true.

That happened. The Sackler family in Purdue. Yeah. That created widespread dependence on opiates among a large number of people. You also saw at the same time to feed this demand increased heroin production in Mexico. However, more than 90% of all the world's heroin was produced in Afghanistan between 2001 and 2021. More than 9%? In fact, Afghanistan under U.S. occupation produced more heroin than the whole world could absorb.

So supply their outstripped global demand. And so for that reason, there are now believed to be large stockpiles of Afghan heroin in places like Pakistan and Tajikistan. How could, wait, do you think heroin production went up under U.S. occupation? I mean, it went up exponentially. So, and as a direct result of the U.S. invasion. And we should talk about the Taliban in this context because I'll try to keep it to brief to the essentials because it actually goes back to the 1980s. So in the 1980s, the CIA armed and funded Afghan resistance fighters known as Mujahideen

to fight the Russians who had invaded Afghanistan and were obviously. occupying Afghanistan to prop up a communist government there. So, and they won that war. That's what we call Charlie Wilson's war, the movie, of course. But after the CIA withdrew, those warlords that they had previously set up, took over Afghanistan and ruled it in the 1990s. And they were all major drug traffickers. They're the ones who were responsible for turning Afghanistan into the narco state that it became.

You know, Gulbadine Hekmatjar, if I'm pronouncing that correctly, was the main recipient. of CIA cash, and he turned into the big, by far the biggest drug lord in Afghanistan. There's also the clan of Nassim Akunzada in the Helmand province, who was another major recipient of CIA aid, and who turned the Helmand into the world's most prolific opium, poppy, heroin-morphine-producing area in the world. The Taliban, we hear so much about the Taliban's oppression of women and making music illegal, and they do those things. the Taliban is an arch-conservative movement whose ethics and morality I absolutely do not share.

I never understood why I was supposed to give a shit about that. I mean, I want everyone to be free just doesn't matter of principle, but that didn't, but moving, you know, metric tons of heroin into my country, that seems like a real story. Whether people can, you know, girls can get PhDs and feminist studies or whatever is of less concern to me, right? Right. Well, the Afghan people didn't like it either, all the drug trafficking that was going on in their country. And what made the Taliban popular originally was their suppression of the drug industry in Afghanistan.

They took over and eliminated all of the drug production that was taking place there. Because you can see how it's ideologically consistent with their Sharia law. You know, they don't tolerate drugs. They don't tolerate alcohol either. So they get rid of all of it. But Sharia law is bad, Seth. I don't know if you've heard that. It's bad.

It's worse than what's happening in New York and Detroit. It's just bad. I don't know why. It's just like, years of brainwashing. I'm just like, I'm not Muslim. I'm not for Sharia law. On the other hand, compared to what? Compared to Baltimore?

You know, shut up. Sharia law. Well, in... Sorry, Sharia law. In Afghanistan, the effect of implementing Sharia law was the total suppression of the heroin industry in the decimation of the world's supply of heroin. And a massive reduction in the rape of boys.

They didn't like that. That's another subject that's absolutely part of this. And I almost hesitate to go there because it's, it is a peril. Everything I'm saying about drugs could also be talked about, I can't believe I'm even saying this, but child sex trafficking was something that took place. It was something that the US-back client state was deeply implicated in child sex trafficking.

Another thing that's falsely laid at the feet of the Taliban and said, this is just part of Afghan culture when that is not true. But to return to the heroin thing, it was actually in the summer of 2001. Do you feel like your mind explodes when you start to understand what the truth is? Just that the layers of propaganda that attach like barnacles to your brain when they come off, you're like, I don't even recognize this world. Do you feel that ever? In this case, yes, because although I had served in the military and worked as a war reporter, I'd actually never been to Afghanistan. So I had to educate myself on the Afghan war, starting from scratch.

And what I learned was that the Taliban eliminated the drug industry just months before the U.S. invaded. The DEA and the UN certified the eradication campaign that the Taliban had carried out. And when the U.S. invaded in 2001, they teamed up with the exact same narco warlords that had previously ruled Afghanistan, what we call the Northern Alliance. and those people took over and Hamid Karzai was installed as CIA puppet president of Afghanistan and immediately legalized poppy production in Afghanistan and within the span of let's say two years, maybe three years

heroin production increased something like seven or eight thousand percent in Afghanistan and of course a lot of it winds up in Europe in the United States, correct? Yes, you know, you have like I said, more heroin than the world can even absorb. Why would the U.S. authorities, why would the CIA, why would the White House allow that? My view, there's a paranoid point of view, conspiratorial point of view, among people who believe that this is some kind of, this is some kind of societal program, some nefarious program that the U.S. government wants the whole world.

to be inundated with heroin. I personally am more inclined to the view that they just don't care and that these type of mercenary drug traffickers make natural allies to a foreign power that's invading your country. Is there a difference between negligence and malice? If I leave my toddler in the car with the windows closed on a hot day to go gamble at casino and he suffocates, does it matter if I wanted to kill him

or if I just didn't care enough. No, I don't think it matters. It doesn't matter. And I'm not making an excuse me like that. No, no, I know you're not. I'm just like the bottom line is that U.S. authorities, the Bush administration, and then the Obama administration, and then, you know, up until the end, up until the Biden administration, allowed the United States and its citizens to die of drug

ODs because the country that they were running, Afghanistan, was producing all the heroin. Right? I mean, yes. The, I mean, the amount of heroin that was being produced was very potent, high quality, and large amounts of it. So that obviously supply and demand depressed prices. And you have ample reporting. It's not just Europe and Australia and Asia that's being flooded by heroin. Also, the United States in this time saw a massive increase in supply. Now, here's where the cover-up comes in. Because all of this was well reported up until the late 2000s, let's say 2000s. 2007 or so, that's when the DEA started putting out statements to the effect that although there was rise in heroin supplies in the United States, they claimed that none of it was coming from Afghanistan, less than 1% as the official figure. And so in the process of writing this book, I spent a lot of time in the weeds trying to figure out how exactly the DEA made this determination because it's kind of like saying no oil from Saudi Arabia ever gets burned in the United States. You ask, how is that possible that the world's largest consumer of drugs

is not importing any drugs from the world's largest producer of drugs? Which, by the way, it controls. Which it controls, yeah. That seems to defy reason. Yes, it does. That's why you're a good reporter, Seth. If you read the book, you will see that I get deep in the nitty-gritty of it, down to the actual mathematics of it.

But suffice it to say, I find that that statistic was totally both. and invented as a way to cover up the fact this incredibly damaging effect of the war in Afghanistan had on, on U.S. society. So I guess another way to say that would be, in fact, a lot of heroin from our client state Afghanistan was winding up in American cities. Absolutely. Especially the China, what's called China white heroin. It's called China because of its color or not because it actually comes from China. Now, the picture is slightly confounded because there was also a lot of Mexican heroin coming to the United States during

the same time. But Mexican heroin is black in color and low in quality. It's called black tar heroin. Yeah. It's usually smoked. Right. But it was the China white that really flooded the U.S. during this time period and caused the most damage, especially in the northeast and in Appalachia and in the Midwest, because that's where flights from Afghanistan come. It's all traffic through airports on the eastern seaboard, whereas Mexico kind of supplies the west of the United States and the south. Right. That's why Jerry Garcia was a black tar addict in Marin County, California, and all the junkies in Philadelphia are using China White. Right, right. And the China White, because it's so much more potent, is what leads to all of the huge overdose crisis that we suffered during these years. It's hard to OD from smoking heroin, possible, but hard.

That's my understanding, yeah. Yeah. So who profited from that? That's a very good question. Not the people of Afghanistan. The numbers that I've seen suggest that maybe a billion dollars a year was the profits that went to Afghans of one type or another. The majority of it went to drug supply chains outside of Afghanistan. And that's the most opaque aspect of all of this. And that's where I have the most unanswered questions. Who exactly was making all of this money? So the occupation of Afghanistan was a military occupation, diplomatic as well, intel components. But basically, we had our troops in Afghanistan, therefore we controlled Afghanistan. So if there's an exponential rise by thousands of percent rise in opium production, heroin manufacturing, and export of heroin,

It's kind of hard to believe the U.S. military didn't know that. Oh, they certainly knew about it. And there's an agency called the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction. That had, although it's a U.S. government agency, has done the most important retrospective work on this, including lots of interviews with key people who, and all of them acknowledged that they knew that it was going on. And Saigar is an agency. its acronym, discuss how the U.S. military didn't want anything to do with drug eradication because they saw it as detrimental to their mission because the people they were working with were drug traffickers. And the same story goes for the CIA, except Saigar explicitly says

in its 2018 report on counter-narcotics that the CIA, rather than cooperating with anti-drug eradication measures, prioritized its relationship with significant drug traffickers. That's the language of the U.S. government report. And it even named some of major drug traffickers who worked with the CIA, who were on the CIA's payroll. And let's not forget that the president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, and his brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, were on the payroll of the CIA and when led this drug trafficking organization, which, you know, recently our government accused Nicholas Maduro of Venezuela of being the head of a drug cartel on some very, very flimsy evidence. and they make these organization charts where they purport to show Maduro at the top and these other guys.

If you had taken that same lens and trained it on Afghanistan, you could have very easily created an organization structure showing the world's biggest drug cartel with Hamid Karzai at the very top. And he's someone who is sitting down to dine with President Obama

and all these other top U.S. officials. But if I'm a special operator in Afghanistan and I'm working with the local leaders who are also drug traffickers. I mean, it's not a huge step and I'm buying heroin for, you know, $1,000 a pound when I can resell it for many, many times that can be kind of tempting to bring some home, right? Timothy Dumas, who was found dead next to Billy Levine on Fort Bragg in 2020, had evidently written a letter in which he outlined exactly what you're talking

about a drug trafficking organization involving special forces soldiers who were trafficking heroin from Afghanistan to the United States on military planes. And he was killed before that letter was ever made public. Who did you write it to? He wrote it. It was addressed to a top-ranking. I never read the letter, but I interviewed someone who did read the letter. I interviewed three people who knew about the letter, including Dumas's son, and also his partner in crime, a very corrupt former North Carolina State trooper named Freddie Wayne Huff, who was entrusted with a copy of the letter and read it. And he said that it was addressed to a high-ranking general. As I said before, Dumas intended to use this blackmail letter to exert pressure on the special forces in order

to get his pension reinstated. But it doesn't seem to have been a very wise maneuver on his part. No, no. You can push too hard. Then you wind up executed. I'm coming around to your theory, by the way. that this may have been retaliatory. That's not my theory, although I get what you're saying, but just to be super clear about it, because these are not light allegations. So I just want to be as responsible as possible as reporter and say that this is what people have alleged,

this is what the evidence is, but we don't know for sure. And the reason we don't know is because our ignorance has been procured by the authorities who have the responsibility to investigate this stuff and are not doing it. Do you think, nicely put, and thank you for saying that, do you think the U.S., people in the U.S. military

in the Special Forces Committee did participate in drug trafficking? I find it hard to imagine that they weren't. I will say that there's other ways of making money, other types of crime that I discussed in the book. The book's not entirely about drug trafficking. There's also a lot of weapons trafficking, and a lot of weapons theft from the military. Fort Bragg, it would blow your mind if they ever disclosed

how many weapons and how much in explosives that they lose annually. It's really crazy. What kind of weapons? What kind of explosives? Military weapons and plastic explosives. They lose an incredible amount of weapons every year. And Timothy Dumas was a guy who was trafficking weapons, besides trafficking drugs. He was a quartermaster.

He was a quartermaster, and so he was deeply involved in all of this. Yeah. I mean, I read his separation packet. It's 128 pages, and it makes crystal clear that his entire career was characterized by stuff going missing, documents going missing. He was the, when he was in Afghanistan attached to J-Soc, all of the records for two years, 2012 and 2013, if I'm not mistaken, went missing in their entirety. All the paperwork on all of the J-Soc supply chain for that battalion was just gone. on. But so what do you do with military grade weapons, even small arms, fully automatic rifles? Like, what do you do with something? You can't sell it in the United States.

No, you sell it to Mexican cartels. And then that's how they end up better armed than the Mexican government in states like Tamolipas and Nuevo Leone and Coahuila. Yeah. Los Zetas. The Ukrainian military has been selling NATO weapons, American supplied weapons to the Mexican drug cartels. Fact. They hate it when you say that, but it's true. Well, I haven't seen that. reporting, but I will tell you this about Ukraine. That agency I mentioned earlier, Saigar, there are provisions in the laws providing aid to a Ukraine that ensure that that type of accountability never takes place again. Because Saigar turned into a real embarrassment for the war in Afghanistan because apparently they took their job seriously and did it correctly.

So the aid to Ukraine can never be audited that's written in the law. What? Yeah. Oh, this can't continue for too long. It's too. out of control um you know the roman empire declined for hundreds of years before it finally disintegrated so well then it just moved east um and it lasted another thousand years but um amazingly so you of course you're right you're absolutely right but it is bewildering that this was even just 20 years ago if you had done a poll of people i knew anyway i lived in dc i was around the government every day country corrupt? I would say, not really. I mean, that was my view. I think most people felt

that way. When you joined the army, did you think the people who ran the army were corrupt? No. The simple answer is no. But, you know, corruption takes many forms. In the United States, if you get pulled over by a cop, you can't just bribe that cop to let you go. That's not going to happen. But the higher you go up in the power structures in this country, the more you find legal corruption. I mean, is it corruption for a corporation to give unlimited amounts of money to a politician to get elected? Because our Supreme Court says that's totally legal under Citizens United. But in another context, in another country, in another time, that would just be considered the rankest sort of bribery. So it depends upon how you define corruption.

Of course, it is bribery. I agree, yeah. Well, obviously. It's a complex question because, like, do you have a right to tell people to what extent they can support a politician? I don't know. I mean, I think it is complicated. But the effect, as it stands right now, is politicians are bribed by donors. Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, that's how we got Ted Cruz, totally corrupt human being. Yeah, he's, unfortunately, he's my senator. I hope that he has a primary challenger soon. yeah well i think he just won so uh probably not for a while but um anyway sorry not to get off on a ted cruz tantra but i just want to say again ted cruz is corrupt his wife uh works for goldman in texas and when she pitches clients i happen to know for a dead certain fact uh he goes to dinner with him so that's that's corruption he's well i'm sure he's looking forward to coming back on your show again after the last time anyway sorry no i'm being mean but it's true and there's a lot

of it. But when it happens in the Senate, you're like, okay, of course, take Cruz's corrupt. Look at him. But when it happens among people, most civilians revere, like, you know, the most elite units in the U.S. military, that's dispiriting among other things, right? I think it is. And I think my inclination is to think that it is a result of waging wars that nobody really believes in for years and years because think about what that does to your psychology. When you're engaged in a righteous cause that has widespread societal buy-in, you're going to be constrained by your own sense of yourself as a virtuous actor. And you're going to know that when you're tempted to do things for money or for other motives, that that's not consistent with your self-image. And so you don't

do it. But when you're fighting for years in wars like Afghanistan that the public just doesn't doesn't even pay attention to, and you know all your allies are drug traffickers and they're raping little boys and that they're trafficking sex slaves, but you're just doing it because you like your work and you like being an elite soldier, then it's easier to take a mercenary attitude towards this and just think, it's not going to matter if I skim, you know, $100,000 off the top of the op fund that we have out here in the field, all this cash that we're given. Or it's no big deal for me to grab a couple of bricks of this heroin and put it in my foot locker and then sell it for 50 grand when I go when I get back to Fayetteville I hope what you just said is

clipped because that's a perfect summation of what my instincts are that the more morally corrupt the enterprise is the more morally corrupt the people participating in the in the enterprise become and that's why I spend so much time in the book talking about the wars in which all this the context in which this takes place because it does doesn't take place in a vacuum. And, you know, the decisions of our leaders in this country trickle down to the lowest levels and have an influence on how people live their lives. That's right. Has anyone ever been held accountable? I mean, I think you've confirmed my instinct, which is that

there was a connection between the war in this drug-producing country and our occupation of this drug-producing country and the drug epidemic in the United States. I mean, there's clearly I mean, you have to be an idiot not to see the connection. But has anyone ever been indicted, arrested, convicted for participating in that? No, no, nobody. Nobody. Nobody, no. For the drug trafficking, it took place in Afghanistan?

Yeah. No. That's never happened. And there's been, there was total impunity around the entire enterprise. Man. I think the United States government, I don't think. I think I know is doing things right now whose consequences cannot be foreseen but they'll be profound. I agree. And I think the more rotten your behavior, you know, the bigger the consequences

and you don't get away with it. No one gets away with it. I agree. And, you know, you wonder what's going on now because Afghanistan is fading rapidly into the past. You know, the war ended in 2021. And, you know, is there massive drug trafficking taking place under the auspices of U.S. military control right now? Not that I know of, but there's other things. You know, Ukraine was the most corrupt country in Europe before the war there, before Russia invaded. And we've dumped so much money and so much equipment into that country with no oversight at all. And transferred it to a political class. that we know is corrupt to the bone.

So that would be the place to look now, in my opinion, for contemporary examples of corruption. You'd get assassinated if you tried to do that. You'd be assassinated by the Ukrainians, perhaps, you know, with the help of U.S. intel agencies, period. I feel like it would be very unsafe to look into that subject. It would be very unsafe. I can tell you, first hand, it would be very unsafe to do that.

In fact, you couldn't do it. Which is pretty crazy if you think about it. It is crazy. There's a lot of things that are crazy these days. I think that what made it possible to write what I wrote about Afghanistan was something that happened while I was writing the book, not too long ago, in fact, which was that, you know, the Taliban took over after the U.S. withdrew in 21 and then proceeded to do exactly what they had done in the year 2000 and 2001, which was to completely Iraq. eradicate all drugs from the country. And up until then, we had been told, to the extent that drug production in Afghanistan came up, we were always told that it was the Taliban and that the insurgency and the drug production were just two sides of the same coin.

Liars, yes. But the best lies are the ones that are 180 degree opposite of the truth. Exactly, exactly. And what made it, what gave me the, I guess, what gave me the confidence to really to hit as hard as I could in this narrative was, the Taliban in 23, they completed another eradication campaign where they once again totally eliminated heroin production

and drug production from Afghanistan. So at that point, I had doubts as a reporter because I'm not omniscient and there's always conflicting information. So I kind of doubt my own conclusions. I'm thinking, well, they must have been involved to some degree. We hear that said

so often from the most prestigious institutions of media and government. There must be some truth to it. But seeing the Taliban totally eliminate drugs from their country, again, made me realize, okay, this was always a one-sided thing. It wasn't that both sides were involved in it. And like I said, that didn't happen until 2023. And so, and that's what I think makes it possible to tell the true story of Afghanistan for the first time. You want to get really red-pilled. You want to make it almost hard to live here. Look up Taliban drug treatment. You know, you're in your early 40s, I think.

So you've lived in this country a long time, and you must know people who've been ensnared in drugs or died from drugs. And you must. You live here. So you know people who become addicted to drugs and can't get off. Of course. A lot of them, most are dead. Ask yourself, super simple question. Is the Taliban drug treatment program, you can look this up there, videos of it online.

Yeah, yeah, I've seen it. Does it have, does it produce a higher or lower relapse rate than the American version in, say, Delry Beach, Florida? Are the Taliban better at getting people off opioids than we are? And the answer is not just yes, but hell yes, way better. Because they don't wean them off with methadone. This whole thing is a freaking lie. By the way, a lot of people get rich off that. You know who you are if you're listening.

Some of them are big political donors who get rich on drug treatment programs, disgusting. And it doesn't work. It works for some small percentage, but it doesn't work for most. That's for sure. And a lot of them die. they never lead productive, joyful lives. And the Taliban have a faith-based, I know I'm going to probably get pulled off YouTube for saying this,

but it's true. I'm saying this as a Christian, not a Muslim. They have a faith-based, no-nonsense, zero-intoxicant policy in their rehab, and it works, and ours doesn't. Well, it's a really good point because Afghanistan... Do you think drugs are a serious problem, and I do because I've lived it and seen it?

Yeah, it's a serious point. It's a serious point that we should think about. What is that? Well, Afghanistan came to have the highest rates of drug use in the world. The highest addiction rate in the world, which is a tragedy. And it's something that was foisted on them. And it's a source of profound misery and blight. And the Taliban's way of dealing with it once the U.S. left was to simply round up addicts.

If they found them on the street, they would just put them onto buses. And it was involuntary, take them to these detox wards where they're not given any kind of methadone. kind of medication. They're just given, you know, food, water, and a place to stay. And then they just wait it out. You know, they're basically locked in there, and they suffer through withdrawals. And then once they're sober, you know, they're allowed to leave at that point. And it was amazing to me to see the hostility in the Western reaction to the Taliban's drug detox program.

I mean, you can read all these think tank pieces and all these. NGOs, where they're talking about how inhumane this is and so on. I've been through withdrawal from alcohol and it was so unpleasant and I did it alone. I'm not, you know, I have not done anything extraordinary, but the one extraordinary thing I did go through that, man, I never drank it. You go through that? I mean, I know people relapse after going through withdrawals for sure, but I can just speak for myself and other people I know have done it. That's a pretty powerful incentive not to do it again. It is.

And I do think there's a cost to sort of easing people. out of somebody. I mean, some withdrawal is life-threatening. Of course, you don't want to kill people. But opioid withdrawal is not life-threatening. It's just you just shit yourself a lot and feel terrible. I don't know. There is, I can speak from experience. There's value in that. You'll never have another glass of vodka if you've gone through something like that. That was my feeling. So let me ask you, would you like to see, you know, police officers? Tomorrow. Tomorrow. Tomorrow. If you're standing leaning against a trash can, in the fentanyl haze.

If you're tweaking your brains out and picking open wounds on your face from meth, that is it you're in hell, you're dying. You're a fellow American. I have an obligation to help you. You're beyond helping yourself in the way that a child, a toddler is beyond helping himself,

in the way that a schizophrenic is beyond helping himself. You don't have reason. You don't have free will. And it's incumbent on me to love you through action. And we can argue about the details of treatment. I personally think that when possible and not physically dangerous, total withdrawal is the best way, you know, having done it. But I also think, bigger than that is you can't allow this and call yourself a decent society.

You cannot allow this. This is hell. And anyone who doesn't think it's hell doesn't know anything about it. What if that was your daughter? Getting pimped out. You know what I mean? Like, it's that ugly and you're from a city where it's just totally destroyed your downtown. But most American cities can say that. And no one does anything. So yeah, tomorrow, tomorrow.

This is a country where we force people to take the COVID-vax. So don't lecture me about civil liberties, asshole. Sorry, yeah, I do feel that way strongly. And how many addicts do I know personally who got sober in jail? Yeah, yeah. And they're grateful for that. And so when Nancy Pelosi starts talking about compassion, the partial birth abortion lady is talking to me about compassion. Fuck you, actually. Compassion, look at your city. There's no compassion there. That's hate. Hate for your fellow. citizens allowing this stuff. Sorry. Drugs are destroying America.

And I say that as a former user of drugs and was very liberal on drugs, but I was wrong. You know, I should say I'm not a drug warrior. I don't believe in the war on drugs. I don't think drugs should be illegal. I think that they should be regulated rather than controlled as rather than being a controlled substance that's totally illegal. but I'm inclined to your point of view about the rehabilitation of large numbers of drug people of drug users

I think that drugs are one of the most salient features of American society or the worse and that we have a just as a country we have a big big drug problem and you see that affecting the military more than ever and yeah I guess I shouldn't be you're of course you're absolutely right

it's like the thing about getting older is it's like it's so hard to readjust your previous perceptions of things. But you're right. Of course, you shouldn't be, I should not be shocked that there's a drug problem in the military. There's a drug problem everywhere else. There's a drug problem in suburbia. There's a drug problem in the inner city. There's a drug problem in rural America. We just have drug problems in America, bottom line. Let me say this in response to what you're saying about rounding people up and putting them into detox wards. I think that's better than arresting them and putting them in prison for using drugs. Well, of course. And probably cheaper, too.

it's not even like compared to what how much aid have we sent to Israel to kill people in Gaza yeah I don't know money's not an issue well I mean on some level it is an issue but it's also it's an expression of your priorities what I spend money on my family is an expression of what I care about well what I mean you should care about your own people and the kids you were literally standing there like this like how can you allow that or people lying in their own feces on the sidewalk like that's so shameful. It's a mark of shame against all of us. Those are Americans. And I don't think we should put them in jail. I completely agree with you. That's not a crime as much as it's a tragedy. It's a crime against them. They're committing a crime against themselves. Don't allow that. Would you allow your child? If you had a child who was addicted to fentanyl like standing like this, you'd be like, I'm going to chain you to the freaking radiator until you get better. I love you that much. Wouldn't you? Yes. Yes. We should. We should. should love our fellow citizens that much, but we hate them. And we call it compassion. That's hate. It's not compassion. Sorry. Oh, nothing bothers me more than that. It is upsetting to see the

degree of degradation. Yes, that's the word. As a result of, you know, the drug industry. They're human beings. Yeah. And they've been reduced to something less than human beings. Yes. And there's a lot of factors that go into that. There's a lot of causes. And one of them is something we're really not here to talk about today, but it's the downward mobility that we see in our society, the lack of economic prospects that people have. I strongly agree. Especially if they don't have an elite education,

the cost of housing. There's a lot of reasons why people end up like zombies. But you could also, I mean, yes, I say that often. I mean it sincerely. And we're a tiny number of the worst people are taking all the money. I totally agree with that. Oh, you're a socialist. No, I'm not.

I'm an American who remembers a middle class country, and I would like to have that again. That's it. Even though I'm not middle class, but anyway, whatever. Leaving that aside, you can say there are a lot of reasons your house is on fire, but the first response is to put it out. You know, we probably should upgrade the electrical after this or put a lightning rod on the roof or whatever. We can take steps to prevent it happening again.

But right now, you need hoses and water. And if you see Americans dying of drugs on the street, you have to stop that immediately. Those are human beings with souls. They're your countrymen. And I think that, you know, the government now, under Trump, what they're trying to do is declare war on Mexican drug cartels or on the Venezuelan government.

And this, I think, is totally misguided and will be ineffectual if they actually go through with it. Well, certainly the Venezuela thing is, a product of yeah the thing is we're talking about the complicity

of the U.S. government and the international drug trade and you think that's real I definitely think that's real and it's again it's not what I was saying before it's not

you know a top down conspiracy where it's actually the purpose it's a side effect of our imperialism and the permanent war paradigm and in Mexico I've spent a lot of time

in Mexico before I was working on this book as a reporter reporting on the drug war is there, the cartel war is there. And it's one thing, you know, Trump can tell people, he can tell his voters, we're going to declare war on Mexican drug cartels, and people will buy into that because they see them,

you know, they, as vicious criminals and murderers who are pumping drugs into this country, so it's easy to see why they would be for that. Well, I feel that way. I see them that way. Well, the reality is that Mexican drug cartels don't really exist. in the same way that we've been taught to believe in them by netflix and hollywood um in fact there's a recent book it's an academic book it's not the easiest to read but i think it has an important thesis it's by a mexican academic name as waldo zivala and it's called drug cartels do not

exist what he means by that provocative thesis is that there are not the type of organizations that we see represented in shows like narcos take el chapo guzman for example this famous drug lord who was captured i guess 2015 16 um the u.s government to date has seized no assets belonging to him none why is that i thought he was one of the world's richest men he's on forbes list was one of the world's richest men no assets not in zero um reserve that only for russian oligarchs well i don't think they can find any they can't find any because the drug industry in Mexico is incredibly complex. The first thing to understand is that it's not a collection of organizations, it's a market. And the demand component of that market is in the United States.

So people in this country wanting drugs is the battery that's running this whole thing. Because once there's that demand, suppliers inevitably arise to feed it. And in Mexico, those suppliers, yes, there are low-level traffickers. There are the people, the disposable people who are bringing the drugs across the border, the disposable hitmen who are 14 years old and carrying out hits. But the real power behind the drug industry in Mexico is the military and the police, politicians, lawyers, deep-pocketed investors. They're the ones that are going in on drug trafficking ventures, essentially as joint ventures, as investments. It's much more organic and spontaneous than were led to believe. The organization to the extent that it exists can be found in high-level

army generals or high-level police officers who are taking a cut from all the little fish who are swimming through certain drug trafficking routes. So the sort of idea that we have of a cartel where it's just bad guys hiding out in their layer having meetings with the bosses, that just simply doesn't exist in Mexico. So El Chapo, just to get back to the original example, um was described as a billionaire we got a pretty what seemed like a pretty detailed accounting of the revenue no we didn't i mean you're talking about the dea and the and the doj i mean these they are capable of manufacturing narratives they're lawyers they um prosecutors you know they can put this stuff together and and make this case look i'm not saying that el chapo wasn't a drug trafficker

he was to he was um but he consistently acclaimed that he was a small fry. And he had like four guys with him at the time that he was arrested. I thought he had like a private zoo with white lions and... Where is that? I haven't seen that. I've seen his pictures of his mom's house and seen Aloha. But there was that time that Sean Penn went to go visit him. Did that look like the lair of a drug traffic? He looked like an ignorant compasino up there. He had like chickens and cages and stuff. And he was clearly a very naive person when Sean Penn interviewed him. He was entrapped into this by a desire to give flowers to Kate Del Castillo, the Mexican actress who was with Sean Penn.

I digress to some degree. The point is, I just want you to say to again, the U.S. government, nor the Mexican government, never confiscated any of this wealth that we were told he had. That's right. Because the real power behind the drug industry in Mexico is the political class that's like this with the United States security state. that it gets all of their you know the Mexican army things have changed in Mexico by the way this is a moving target to discuss

because Mexico starting in 2018 has gone through profound political changes for sure that would be the beginning of AMLO sure of the AMLO period yeah AMLO and then his successor Claudia Scheinbaum

but at the bottom especially in the northern states of Mexico along the Texas border I don't think so much has changed there and if you just take a state like Tamolipas which is just south of Texas which has probably the highest intensity of drug trafficking anywhere in the world, bringing it to the United States.

Who are the real powers there? I mean, you could say it's the Gulf Cartel, or you could say it's Los Zetas. These are the organizations that we've been trained by the media to believe are the sort of puppet masters that are making all this happen. By the way, I bought that storyline totally. Okay. I mean, I have no other information.

I don't speak Spanish. I don't know. But, I mean, I just sort of assume that was true. The real drug traffickers there, the real power. The idea that we often also hear that the Mexican state is outgunned by drug traffickers. Yes, I bought that too. I made a comment about that early about the high power weapons that they have. There's some element of truth to that, but the reality is that the cartels are not a threat to the Mexican state. In fact, they're an appendage of the Mexican state in a certain way. And the elite class in Mexico, the kind of a shadow paramilitary structure of, let's say, a state government, like the same, state government of Tamalipas and the police forces there and the military divisions that are

stationed there. And we're not going to go to war with those people because there are allies. I mean, people may not realize this, but there's close security cooperation between the U.S. and Mexico. Yes. I mean, the Mexican army, we arm them. We give them their Black Hawk helicopters and their armored vehicles and also the state police forces in the north of Mexico. We arm all of them and they get training from the State Department and from American police officers and so on. And there, the real cartel, to the extent a cartel exists. And you can see that in other places in the world, notably in Colombia, where, you know, again, it's changing there because they also have a new president.

Latin America is changing rapidly in recent years. But in the past, for many years in Colombia, the Colombian federal government and the Colombian military have been the biggest drug, most responsible for moving the most weight in drugs, I would say. And once again, they're closely backed by the U.S. government. So to bring it home and wrap up this point, you can say we're going to target drug cartels in Mexico. But the fact is, one, they have no idea who these people are, the people that they're setting up as drug traffickers. They may have developed some targets. To fight a war, you need not only political will, you need targets. That was a problem incidentally, parenthetically, in Afghanistan. It was hard for them

to develop targets there because it's such a big remote country. Anyway, in Mexico, they're not going to be able to find those targets. And to the extent that they are, they're going to be people that are protected by the State Department and the CIA. And so it's just not going to happen. This is this war, this war on Mexican drug cartels, I don't see it happening. And if it does, it'll be in the nature of very isolated strikes. So what is the answer? You have to address the demand. The demand is what's causing all this.

Why can't anyone just, why? Here's what I don't understand. Sobriety is good. Okay. Sobriety is the key to joy and productivity and like having a useful life, making it worth being here. I agree. In a short period that we are.

I believe that through much experience. I've never heard any leader in our country say that. But what I'm saying about Mexico? No, about sobriety. About sobriety. But the goal ought to be clear thinking, you know, whatever, within the bounds of human nature, but like virtuous life. I don't know. Try to be clear-eyed, hardworking, decent, and sober.

Like, I don't, I don't, no one, like, there's no kind of goal set by our leaders. Like, maybe you shouldn't be wasted all the time. Maybe we should have your freaking SSRIs, which make you impotent, by the way. You know, or your benzodiazepines or your beer or your weed. Like, no one even says that. I mean, I think they're all on drugs. Everyone's on drugs. I think the whole U.S. government's on drugs.

I totally agree. I mean, look at the people at the highest level. I mean, don't want to cast just reckless aspersions. But here's something that's concrete. Rolling Stone, a magazine I've written for for many years, reported on drug use in Trump's first White House. And, in fact, Trump's personal doctor, Ronnie the Candyman Jackson, they called him. he was an admiral, if I'm not mistaken, in the Navy, a physician, who was demoted by the Navy for running an unlicensed pharmacy in the White House

because he was giving Trump's people prescription drugs without a prescription and for free. And even if you're the president's personal physician, that's illegal. So there's evidence that all of those people were, and you see it in their behavior as well. And I'm not just picking on the Republicans here because look at, look at Kamala Harris, for example. I don't know her personally, and I can't say for sure. But did she seem like someone who was, you know, taking a lot of prescription pills? Well, I worked for someone like that in television. It was the head of a network who, I mean, we used to joke, this person's on Benzos.

Like, just dead-eyed. I mean, you see that so much. Talking nonsensically, like, weird, you know, laughing. Weird reactions. People who just are not quite there in a certain way and it seemed kind of zonked out in a certain way. Yes, that's the whole country. That seems like a lot of our top leaders. So my question is, why does no one ever mention that?

And just say, like, here's what the goal, you know, we all fall short of the goal. It's not even judging. I'm not judging anybody. I'm not qualified to judge anybody. But, like, I do think it's important to articulate the goal. And why shouldn't someone say the goal is sobriety? You know, again, I'm not here to be a drug warrior. or paternalistic or to lecture people who struggle with substance abuse,

but I certainly agree with you that we should, that that should be a value of our society. But you should know, Seth, that the real danger is Sharia law. Sharia law. And you can tell when you go to a place like Abu Dhabi or Riyadh, like, oh, man, I hope we don't ever wind up with a society like this with a rape rate of zero where you leave your keys in your Lamborghini and don't ever worry about it being stolen. and, you know, if people want to get wasted, they do it at home.

You know what I mean? Yeah. Oh, boy, I hope we don't wind up with that. Yeah, I think, I mean, Sharia law is obviously just a punchline. I don't know that too many people actually believe in the reality of that. And, I mean, like I said, you know, I'm a lawyer. I actually studied legal philosophy. Sharia is not that different from other legal codes.

a lot of our own legal code, the Anglo-Saxon common law, Angle-American common law, derives ultimately from religious authorities. There's a lot of universal, there's a lot of universal values in the regions of the world. Homorabi's code is recognized. I wouldn't want to live under it.

It's kind of punitive, but it's not like from another planet. The oldest legal code that we have, Hamarabi's code, it's like, it's not. Like, you sort of know what he's talking about, right? Look, they, I agree, yeah. And look, they put up ten commandments in front of the, I live in Austin, Texas, and they put up the Ten Commandments in front of the state capital. And that's controversial among, you know, religious libertarians. But I'm of the view that they, I'm happy to see them put the Ten Commandments up there if they would just follow them, you know? I agree. Starting with Thou shalt not kill. I couldn't agree more. So let me just put a bow on this really super interesting conversation. Thank you.

with the question like how were your interactions during the two and a half years you were writing this or more with like DOD for example with the Pentagon like you must have called over there to the PIOs and said I have the list of following questions how did they respond to you in general they just didn't respond and I was in touch with them just yesterday because Politico was publishing an excerpt of the book and so we had to go back to them again end for comment. And the fact that it involves Delta Force, the fact that it involves a special mission unit, you know, they said that explicitly in the response that I got from Usa Sock yesterday. They said, because your question implicates a special mission unit, you know, our policy is to not

comment. So for the most part, they didn't give me anything. I was on my own. But... So here you have a documented case of one of their guys murdering someone in his house. Obviously, there was drug trafficking, there was indisputably drug use, narcotic use by federal employees, and they don't have to answer any of your questions because the missions are shrouded in secrecy. Yes, that's right. In general, that's right. I will say, you know, I try not to be, I try to be fair when possible or to give credit where credit is due. there was a case where the Senate Armed Services Committee questioned the commander of Socom, which is an umbrella formation above J-Soc and above all these units, questioned him in a committee, a Senate committee about my reporting for Rolling Stone and asked him to address the cases of drug trafficking and unsolved murders.

And General Brian Fenton, who at the time was the commander of Socom, said that he was concerned about it and said that it was unacceptable, said that they were laser focused on eradicating it. But whether those sentiments that they expressed to members of Congress was actually backed up with real action, I don't know. I don't know. Do you see the possibility of reform? You know, I don't think that I'm very critical in this book of every single presidential administration since 2001. Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden. None of the them, I give a past any of them. But I do see Trump's influence here to be uniquely negative because of the way that he surrounds himself with some of the craziest people in the special operations

community, elevates these people who among their own colleagues are considered loose cannons, not credible. You know, there's the case of Eddie Gallagher, where Trump made it such a big part of his brand to defend this disgrace to the Navy SEALs who was turned in by his own team. mates for killing a bunch of people for no reason. I mean, you're talking about guys who are not bleeding heart liberals by any stretch of the imagination. They're there with Chief Gallagher next to him, seeing what he's doing, and they're not okay with it. They turn him in. The command wants nothing to do with Gallagher. They also think that he's an embarrassment and a disgrace and a murderer. But Trump intervenes to prevent him from losing his trident. And Trump touts him and he becomes this big

influencer and so forth. So that type of incredible irresponsibility and malignancy on Trump's part, his uniquely malignant influences commander-in-chief, I think augurs very poorly for the possibility of reform, at least in the next three years. Well, you want honest, competent, decent military because, you know, it's the purest expression of power that a government has, It's the power to kill people. And you have to think that they're operating on a different and elevated moral plane. They can't just be like an outlaw state. You know what I mean?

Yes, that's what I was saying before about the founding of the U.S. Army 250 years ago. It is a core institution for our country, for our nation. So to see the degree of decline, it's everywhere possible to observe. it's very concerning and I really don't think people are aware of the degree to which the military is incapable of fulfilling its functions I don't know that you can say

that the U.S. has the most powerful military in the world anymore I think that a strong case could be made that China has a more competent military even though they have never been in combat they have totally untested so there's a big caveat there but just looking at on the surface

Like, I don't think Chinese soldiers are trafficking drugs and killing each other. I don't think Chinese soldiers are dropping dead from fentanyl overdoses right and left. And also, China has a much bigger army than us, while our army is shrinking to a degree that's really shocking. I mean, they're really running out of people. This year recruiting was a little bit better. But you're still talking about, you know, a long, long deficit in recruiting. The army's never been smaller than it is right now. They can't get qualified helicopter pilots, let's say.

say, as we saw so, you know, tragically demonstrated over the Potomac River in January. So I think that, you know, beyond just the drugs, there's a lot of reasons to be concerned, you know, about the health and viability of the U.S. military in general. Boy, that's a sad story. Seth Hart, thank you very much for that. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. We want to thank you for watching us on Spotify, a company that we use,

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