Aug. 30, 2021 - Bannon's War Room
48:54
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| Okay, welcome. | ||
| You're in the War Room. | ||
| It is Sunday, the 29th of August, the year of our Lord 2021. | ||
| Now with over 80 million downloads on the podcast. | ||
| Of course, we're live everywhere. | ||
| This is a special, The Gathering Storms, Afghanistan and Hurricane Ida. | ||
| I want to thank our partners at Real America's Voice, John Frederick's Radio Network. | ||
| We're doing this in partnership tonight with Weather Nation. | ||
| That's a sister channel of Real America's Voice. | ||
| And we've got a correspondent in the field, Ben McMillan. | ||
| Ben, can you hear me? | ||
| Ben is in Thibodeau, Louisiana, right now near the eye of the storm. | ||
| Ben, by the way, Ben's in Lafourche Parish, about 125 miles southwest of New Orleans. | ||
| Tell us what's going on. | ||
| This storm came ashore at 130. | ||
| It's still there. | ||
| The eye's still there, Ben. | ||
| Tell us what's going on. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes, Steve, it's extremely dangerous out here. | |
| This hurricane made landfall in Louisiana at 11.55 Central Time. | ||
| It is now 6 p.m. | ||
| Central Time. | ||
| That is over six hours of 100-plus mile-an-hour winds battering coastal Louisiana. | ||
| We are here at the Thibodeau Regional Hospital, which provides emergency services to over 300,000 people. | ||
| In the region. | ||
| They have several ambulances staged. | ||
| They have law enforcement staged here. | ||
| But it is so dangerous that no one is out. | ||
| We're, believe it or not, we're behind a concrete building. | ||
| And you can see how strong the winds are here with a windbreak. | ||
| First off, Ben, make sure you take care of yourself. | ||
| Your safety is paramount. | ||
| But I gotta ask you a question. | ||
| This thing has been essentially stationary battering the southern coast of Louisiana for five hours, going on six hours. | ||
| Do you have any initial damage reports of what's actually happened to those parishes down there southwest of New Orleans? | ||
|
unidentified
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We've heard of one other hospital in the area that had a roof Ripped off. | |
| We've heard of a lot of power outages, multiple hundreds of thousands of people without power. | ||
| We've heard of storm surge flooding as high as 10 to 16 feet. | ||
| And if you can imagine that much water coming up into your beachfront property, your beachfront home, it's going to cause damage that may be unrecognizable. | ||
| You may never understand What did that? | ||
| It's just so, so vast and intense. | ||
| Ben, Governor Edwards called for an evacuation of this part of Louisiana a couple of days ago. | ||
| Do you have any guesstimate of how many people actually decided to ride the storm out? | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, let's talk about Grand Isle, very close to where the storm made landfall. | |
| Around 50 people stayed. | ||
| And that area could have been completely washed away. | ||
| That 10 foot plus surge moved up into the beaches and I've seen video from that area of complete water covering any kind of emergency route out of that area. | ||
| In addition to that, There's no rescues going on right now because of the conditions. | ||
| So the Coast Guard Regional Emergency Services will go out when it's safe, but because of how slow this storm is moving, north at only about 10 miles an hour, It's like being stuck in a bad dream, Steve. | ||
| It just keeps on hitting hour after hour after hour. | ||
| And on top of that, this is hitting on the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. | ||
| So it's a bad family reunion that nobody wanted to come to. | ||
| Ben McMillan is with Weather Nation, the sister channel to Real America's Voice. | ||
| He's live in Thibodaux, Louisiana, down in Lafarge Parish, about 125 miles southwest of New Orleans. | ||
| He came ashore close to there at the southern coast of Louisiana at 11.55 Central. | ||
| That's approximately one o'clock East Coast time, Eastern time. | ||
| He's been there. | ||
| He's barely moved off the southern coast. | ||
| He's been battering there for five or six hours. | ||
| Pretty extraordinary. | ||
| Remember when the winds that they came ashore 155 miles just put in perspective you have a 75 mile an hour hurricane and 155 mile an hour the cat 4 that's not twice that's 250 it's logarithmic it's 250 times the strength also it came with I think a 12 to 16 foot surge and they're talking about anywhere from 12 to 18 inches of rain we're gonna try to get back do we have do we have Ben? | ||
| Ben, tell us what assets were put in place. | ||
| Is the National Guard down there? | ||
| State Police? | ||
| First Responders? | ||
| What was actually even in place when Governor Edwards had everybody leave? | ||
| Those people could, I guess, make a decision whether to stay or not. | ||
| Were they pre-positioned a lot of assets? | ||
| National Guards? | ||
| Army Reserve? | ||
| Militias? | ||
| Anything like that? | ||
| What is actually down there to help rescue people? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes, they have pre-positioned assets, but not necessarily where I'm standing. | |
| They've positioned them outside of the eyewall impact zone, which is the most dangerous, as you can see behind me. | ||
| Some of the cities are on standby also. | ||
| So I spoke with the mayor of Morgan City, Louisiana. | ||
| He had a call from the governor offering National Guard, offering generators Offering resources, but the response from the mayor when he talked to me last night was let's just put that on standby But I don't think anybody's on standby anymore This is definitely an incident that people are gonna have to respond to and unfortunately we may have some people hurt or worse Ben, where's the local command center? | ||
| We know they have one up in the state capital. | ||
| There's also one, I think, near New Orleans. | ||
| Is there a regional... You're down in Thibodaux. | ||
| You're actually closer to the eye of the storm than even in New Orleans because you're about 125 miles southwest of New Orleans. | ||
| Is there a local command center where either FEMA or the National Guard or somebody is running all the operations out of? | ||
|
unidentified
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Steve, we haven't seen anyone in our direct travels. | |
| Speaking with the CEO of Thibareau Regional Hospital, he said they only have six ambulances on standby. | ||
| So those types of resources are going to be depleted very quickly. | ||
| And it's going to be difficult for the response to go fast with trees down and other debris blocking major highways into the area. | ||
| We learned a lot of lessons after Katrina with response, if you can remember the response to that. | ||
| But still, it takes time to get help into the area. | ||
| I believe it's been reported, Ben, that maybe not in Thibodaux, but down in south of New Orleans, there's still been an issue with some of these levees. | ||
| Can you give us any update to your knowledge? | ||
| Are there any levee problems so far? | ||
|
unidentified
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Steve, I've been covering the Ize landfall. | |
| So New Orleans is just to the northeast of the STORP Center. | ||
| So New Orleans officials would be the best to check with them. | ||
| I don't know if one of your producers could reach out. | ||
| I know they were facing some stress earlier, the levee system in New Orleans. | ||
| And there was also, there was also a pump that was not operating. | ||
| But according to city officials, I had been told they still believed they would be able to hold the waters back from the city, which is actually below sea level, if you remember correctly. | ||
| Ben, I tell you what, we're going to bring you back here to the studio. | ||
| Really take care of yourself there, man. | ||
| That looks incredibly intense. | ||
| We don't want to lose Ben. | ||
| Ben McMillan, who's one of the great correspondents from Weather Nation. | ||
| He's a field reporter. | ||
| Just a report from Weather Nation, which is a sister broadcasting channel for Real America's Voice, and they do a fantastic job. | ||
| Right now, it came ashore at about 1 o'clock Eastern Time. | ||
| Believe it or not, that storm has not moved very far inland since that time. | ||
| If you look at the maps and you look at the weather maps, we'll put it down in the corner. | ||
| Weather Nation's got a fantastic system. | ||
| If you want to get the app, make sure you download the app. | ||
| Weather Nation's got just tremendous reporting on the weather, very detailed, tremendous meteorologists and a great field staff. | ||
| It came ashore. | ||
| I think the weather winds were 155 miles an hour talking about a 10 to 14 foot surge, 10 to 18 inches of rain, potentially just a massive hurricane. | ||
| But here's the breaking news. | ||
| It has not moved that far inland. | ||
| It is standing, pounding, pounding, pounding these parishes southwest of New Orleans. | ||
| Ben has been in Thibodaux at the Thibodaux Regional Hospital. | ||
| They're obviously taking taking a pounding. | ||
| And we hear trees down, power down. | ||
| There's a discussion about people that didn't evacuate off some of the barrier islands out there. | ||
| I'm sure they're going to get to more of that as the storm passes through. | ||
| But the storm is also scheduled to, look, right now it's kind of stuck right there on the coast of Louisiana. | ||
| But as it progresses through, it's going to go up through Louisiana into the Tennessee Valley. | ||
| It looks like it's going to, like a A dogleg right. | ||
| It's going to start to hook right, given the given the jet stream going to Tennessee, looks like North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, all the way up to Pennsylvania, and then to New York. | ||
| And so this thing's going to drop a lot of rain, a lot of flooding. | ||
| This is going to be very serious. | ||
| Weather Nation's covering it nonstop, and we're going to cover it nonstop, too. | ||
| It's one of the reasons Real America Voice was so good to help us get on air tonight, because we knew this was going to be a big storm. | ||
| But I got to tell you, when I saw that thing hit, At one o'clock, I said, well, the eye of the storm will be passed. | ||
| We'll be talking about the damage reports. | ||
| It is still there. | ||
| This is a historic storm. | ||
| Governor Edwards said the other day he believed it might be one of the strongest storms to hit since records been kept since 1852. | ||
| Okay, but I got to tell you, even Camille and some of these historic storms from the 60s, 70s, 80s, very rare to see a storm hit with the eye and just hang right there on the coast and pound and pound and pound. | ||
| So we're going to go back to Ben McMillan later when he gets to safety because it's pretty dangerous out there right now. | ||
| Okay, two parts of the show today. | ||
| We're obviously going to have a lot of stuff happening in Afghanistan. | ||
| Also, there was a dignified transfer of the remains of the fallen, the 13 honored dead that came to Dover. | ||
| We're going to have a lot of reporting on that, a lot of discussions about what actually happened. | ||
| We're going to have Sam Faddis. | ||
| We've got Michael Yan. | ||
| He's got reports from what's happening in Kabul right now. | ||
| There's been a drone attack that took out a car bomb, supposedly a car bomb that's pretty loaded. | ||
| With some terrorists that were prepared to, they thought, launch on Kabul Airport. | ||
| New reporting just out from CNN. | ||
| It took down a residence right next to the car bomb, it looked like. | ||
| I think a family, I think the reporting is nine dead, including six children. | ||
| As Kabul starts to get, I think, more and more like the Wild West. | ||
| We're in the retrograde period for US troops. | ||
| US troops starting to pull out, starting to withdraw. | ||
| And there's a lot of activity going on in Kabul. | ||
| I want to bring in, we're going to have Maureen Bannon a little bit later. | ||
| As our co-hosts, we've got Michael Yan and Sam Faddis. | ||
| Sam, as you know, worked in-country with the CIA for many, many years. | ||
| Knows the Pashtuns, knows Pakistan, knows all of it. | ||
| Michael Yan, do we have Michael Yan? | ||
| I hear you. | ||
| up Michael Yan for a second. There's Michael right there. | ||
| By the way, I want to thank Weather Nation. We're going to go back. We want to make sure Ben is safe because those winds right now are just, I've never seen something like that for a reporter out there. We're going to make sure we go and we're going to toss it if we have to back to the Weather Nation storm center. Do we have the audio on Michael hooked up yet? Michael, do you hear me? I hear you. I hear you, Steve. So Michael, can you give us an update on exactly, can you give us exactly what's going on? | ||
| Just to put it in the audience perspective, I think that the way the math works is that August 31st at midnight in Kabul is about five o'clock in the evening, four o'clock in the afternoon on Tuesday, correct? | ||
| So Tuesday at four o'clock eastern time, right before we come on for our live broadcast at five o'clock, in fact during the John Frederick's We're in the retrograde phase right now, Michael. | ||
| You might want to explain what that is and give us an update. | ||
| You've been bombarding me all day with activity happening around Kabul Airport. | ||
|
unidentified
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Can you update people on what's going on? | |
| Yeah, as you know, Steve, we'll probably be out certainly within 24 hours unless something happens. | ||
| For instance, an attack or Just normal situational, you know, things do get messed up when you're doing something this big. | ||
| There's a huge airlift. | ||
| I can see four C-17s that have their beacons on right now that are going in. | ||
| And it's just constantly going in and going out. | ||
| And there's sporadic gunfire by the Taliban outside, but it sounds like they're just firing warning shots and that sort of thing. | ||
| They're holding up American citizens. | ||
| Not letting them get through the gates, although some are getting through. | ||
| I've been sending you stuff that obviously we can't put on air, but you can see some of the situation yourself. | ||
| I've talked with Laura Logan a couple of times in the last 18 hours or so, and Laura has said, and I think correctly, that the U.S. | ||
| is funneling American citizens actually through tally band checkpoints at some times. | ||
| I think that the evidence supports what she's saying. | ||
| Right now, the situation is very clear that Americans will be left behind. | ||
| There's no question about it at this point. | ||
| They're not all going to make it. | ||
| I can talk about, for instance, sometimes it's their own fault. | ||
| For instance, there's one family that's trying to get it through with three people, but wants to take a total of 10. | ||
| And the other 10 are not Americans. | ||
| And so, of course, we're not issuing visas for entire tribes. | ||
| And so, you know, people want to take the entire tribe, that sort of thing. | ||
| Some of the problem. | ||
| Other problems are people are all over Afghanistan and you know Afghanistan is 1.7 times larger than Japan and it's a huge country and people are all over the country. | ||
| There's checkpoints everywhere. | ||
| It looks like there's ring security around Kabul at this point and certainly around the Kabul airport as well by Taliban. | ||
| I would still be surprised if there's not an attack on the way out. | ||
| You never know what's going to happen. | ||
| Well, okay. | ||
| Hang on. | ||
| We're going to take a short commercial break. | ||
| We're in turn with Michael Yan. | ||
| We've got Sam Faddis, Captain Bannon. | ||
| Of course, the entire Weather Nation team down in Louisiana will return in a moment. | ||
| Okay, welcome back. | ||
| It's War Room. | ||
| This is a special gathering storms, Afghanistan and of course Hurricane Ida. | ||
| Hurricane Ida, I already think, is becoming quite historic. | ||
| We're going to go back to Ben McMillan as soon as we possibly can, Weather Nation. | ||
| I want to make sure everybody, this is a sister channel of ours of Real America's Voice, everybody download the Weather Nation app right now. | ||
| I want to put that in all the live chats. | ||
| When everybody in the boardroom posse, this is an incredible channel. | ||
| And as you can tell from Ben McMillan, I think it's one of the most intense interviews I've ever done, but particularly dealing with hurricanes. | ||
| Ben McMillan's down there, and he's down in the heart of this. | ||
| People have to remember, this storm came ashore approximately 1 o'clock Eastern Daylight Time. | ||
| It has made very little progress since then, and it came ashore as, I think, as a Category 4. | ||
| Now, the winds have dissipated somewhat, but we don't have reports of the damage right now, but Weather Nation is doing an incredible job. | ||
| If you download the app, if you're doing two screens, obviously you can watch the War Room, but a pillop of the Weather Nation app. | ||
| Here's the reason you have to do it. | ||
| This is a historic storm and I'm telling you it's going to sweep up right through the Tennessee Valley and then to like Tennessee, Western North Carolina, Western Virginia, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland, all of it. | ||
| You see the storm tracker. | ||
| It takes a big hooking Right, like a dog-leg right, and this is going to be a massive storm, and it's going to drop some serious water, some rain. | ||
| It's stunning to me, coming from Virginia, around the coast of Virginia as a kid, in the summers, you're watching hurricanes all the time. | ||
| This is pretty extraordinary to have one come ashore and just stick. | ||
| We don't know how much progress is made, but I've got to tell you, including your prayers tonight, In addition to the brave American soldiers, our heroes in Kabul airport right now doing this extraction in the retrograde process, also keeping your prayers night, the people in the great state of Louisiana, where everywhere this storm is hitting in Mississippi, Alabama, all of that. | ||
| But right now it is a it's a monster storm and it's just pounding. | ||
| The parishes of Louisiana, southwest of New Orleans. | ||
| So, as soon as we get Ben McMillan up, we'll come back to him. | ||
| We've got a lot of live reporting today. | ||
| A lot of activity in Kabul, including an airstrike that took place. | ||
| An airstrike that took place on terrorists that were getting ready to do a massive car bomb at Kabul Airport. | ||
| They've been taken out. | ||
| Also, a building was hit. | ||
| I think a residence was hit. | ||
| CNN's reporting a family of nine, I think, including six children were taken out as the security situation in Kabul continues to deteriorate as U.S. | ||
| troops begin what they call the retrograde process, which is really wrapping up the evacuations of our allies and any other civilians to start to pull the troops out. | ||
| I want to go to Michael Young. | ||
| We've got Sam Faddis, former CIA operative. | ||
| We've got Captain Bannon, who was part of the process in Iraq, what, 10 years ago, when we pulled out of Iraq, when she was there with the 82nd or 101st Airborne. | ||
| I want to go, Michael, what else do we know about this strike today? | ||
| I understand people are coming to the American citizens. | ||
| You've already said, given your contacts, Laura Logan and other people, And you've been very accurate to date that there's no doubt that American citizens, particularly American citizens who want to leave, and we don't have time for cold opens right now, but on the talk shows this morning, Tony Blinken and Jake Sullivan got lit up by the mainstream media, both on Meet the Press, CBS News, and of course ABC, Martha Raddatz, and Well, they're not going to make it out. | ||
| Many of them are simply not going to make it, period. | ||
| There's no chance. | ||
| The military will tell you that. | ||
| They're telling me that. | ||
| They're trying to get everybody out. | ||
| They can't at the last minute. | ||
| an update once again on the American what you know is where do we stand with American citizens to be evacuated? Well they're not going to make it out. Many of them are simply not going to make it period. There's no chance the military will tell you that. They're telling me that. They're trying to get everybody out. | ||
| They can't at the last minute. We have a lot of great people in the military and then we have people like you know White Rage Millie, Miley, whatever you want to call him in Austin. | ||
| I mean, we've got people that clearly shouldn't be there, but we've got a lot of other people that are trying very hard, but they're not going to make it. | ||
| We've cut the deadline too short. | ||
| We've got people now that no, I mean, American veterans who are over there working so hard that no longer trust the U.S. | ||
| government. | ||
| Uh, they don't even want to talk with the US government because they're afraid that the government is selling this, not necessarily selling, but giving this information to the Taliban. | ||
| And of course the Chinese have their IT people over there. | ||
| We can see that they have, they've had their people in, uh, apparently in Pakistan for a while and now in Afghanistan, uh, that are getting ahold of all this computers and whatnot that have been left behind. | ||
| So all this information, Through many sources, whether it's in people's heads. | ||
| There's some things I want to tell you, but we'll have to wait for a while. | ||
| But the bottom line is, there will be a genocide. | ||
| Okay, hang on for one second. | ||
| Just hang on, Michael. | ||
| I want to go to Sam Faddis. | ||
| Can we bring Sam up? | ||
| Sam spent many years in country with the CIA. | ||
| Sam, give us, I know you've got tremendous connections over there. | ||
| Can you give us a sense of the security situation now, particularly as we start this retrograde process, which is really the extraction. | ||
| And remember, our specials over the last couple days, and we'll have it again tomorrow morning, is extraction under fire, which is an incredibly complicated military evolution. | ||
| Can you give us your sense from what you're hearing of what the security situation is now in Kabul and particularly Kabul Airport? | ||
| Well, the security situation in Kabul Airport is terrible. | ||
| As we've said before, the military told the president when this plan was put together that this was a militarily indefensible position. | ||
| And obviously, we're now well into pulling folks out of there. | ||
| I'm not going to give exact numbers, but we're well down the road. | ||
| To get everybody out. | ||
| So every step of the way, as there are fewer and fewer troops on the ground, the more perilous it gets. | ||
| I mean, let's keep in mind, this is an airport basically stuck in the middle of the city with one runway. | ||
| And all along you've had American troops more or less on one side of a wall and the Taliban on the other. | ||
| So it's not, there's no standoff here. | ||
| It's not like there's some normal perimeter where the Taliban would be thousands of meters away. | ||
| They're literally right there. | ||
| And what has happened over the last day or two is actually all of the gates and the entrances to the airport have been turned over to the control of the Taliban. | ||
| So to physically get into that airport, you now have to go through a Taliban checkpoint, as I think Michael noted. | ||
| So you're basically completely on your own in doing that. | ||
| About a day ago, I think, We learned that the Taliban had moved a bunch of heavy machine guns and mortars and other heavier weapons into the immediate vicinity of the airport, more or less overlooking the airport. | ||
| We haven't seen them use those weapons yet, obviously, but as you're talking about trying to get the last few guys off that runway, they are in effect sitting ducks. | ||
| I mean, they're down in the bottom of a bowl. | ||
| Surrounded by the Taliban that is literally eyeball to eyeball with them. | ||
| So, you know, we pray to God that we get out of this without seeing a real disaster. | ||
| Sam, so after the attack the other day that we've got our 13 dead Marines and corpsmen and a soldier, the Biden administration struck back with the Reaper attack, the drone attack that took out a couple of what they call planners. | ||
| Then today you hear this information that there was a major car bomb Getting ready to go to Kabul. | ||
| That was taken out by a strike and obviously collateral damage. | ||
| We're a civilian family, I guess, in the house next door. | ||
| What is it talking? | ||
| I know we can't give any classified information here, but the targeting right now has got to be pretty intense, right? | ||
| I take it the Americans, to protect our troops, have got to be on the trigger. | ||
| If you're talking about car bombs a couple, you know, a mile away from the airport itself, And they can take it out. | ||
| People have really got to be on watch here right now, correct? | ||
| Yeah, which is why I think they took out the car that was in proximity of the perimeter. | ||
| I will say that I personally am not yet in possession of any information that would confirm that what they targeted today was actually a car bomb. | ||
| I can't refute that either, but I have some significant questions about what exactly the intelligence It is that we're using for our targeting right now. | ||
| But in any event, yes, you're absolutely right. | ||
| You know, look, this is a terrible situation, and there is no military justification for where we are, and there's no magic answer. | ||
| As the perimeter gets smaller and smaller, you got fewer and fewer guys, and you got more and more Taliban, closer and closer, with all kinds of weapons. | ||
| If you get off the ground and get out of there and they don't blow you out of the sky at some point, it will be because they made some calculus, in my estimation, that it wasn't worth what the U.S. | ||
| response would be. | ||
| But there's not going to be anything physically that will prevent them from doing that. | ||
| This is an incredibly important point. | ||
| We're going to take a short break. | ||
| We've got a couple of minutes. | ||
| You knew the guys and you were at the agency when they did the Jawbreakers and they went in and the paramilitary group actually with the Northern Alliance took over the Taliban, beat the Taliban and took over Kabul back in 2001. | ||
| In fact, the 20th anniversary of that, I think October 7th kicked it off. | ||
| Is it stunning to you, given your experience as a field operative, that we're actually in a situation that only by the good graces of the Taliban deciding they don't want to shoot us out of the sky, that we can actually pull these troops out? | ||
| Yeah, it's absolutely insane. | ||
| I mean, I think central to the part of the Biden administration's narrative in terms of trying to sell for political reasons Some fantasy that this isn't the debacle that it obviously is. | ||
| They're trying to conjure up this image of some sort of kinder, gentler, evolved Taliban, right? | ||
| That they're not the guys that we fought before. | ||
| It's complete fantasy, a complete and utter lie. | ||
| I personally am unconvinced. | ||
| We were told it was ISIS-K that blew up our folks the other day. | ||
| I am completely unconvinced that the Haqqanis who are running Kabul were not behind that attack. | ||
| They are ruthless. | ||
| They have killed our people in very large numbers before. | ||
| It's insane that we have put ourselves in this position. | ||
| You can't do this and stay alive. | ||
| Okay, Sam, if you could just hold on, I appreciate you. | ||
| Guys had to change their Sunday nights to be with us. | ||
| We have Michael Yan, who's an expert combat correspondent from Afghanistan. | ||
| We have Sam Faddis, who spent many years in-country, knows the territory better than anybody, a CIA operative. | ||
| Captain Bannon, who was part of the Iraq pullout under General Austin. | ||
| What, 10 years ago? | ||
| And we're going to be joined by Colonel Wendy Rogers, who's been in harm's way. | ||
| All of it, we're talking about what's happening in Kabul today. | ||
| We're also going to go back to Weather Nation for live coverage of Hurricane Ida. | ||
| A historic storm is now right on the coast of New Orleans. | ||
| Be back in a moment. | ||
| Okay, we're live in the War Room. | ||
| It is Sunday evening, the 29th of August, the year of our Lord 2021. | ||
| I want to thank everybody. | ||
| Got a huge audience here in all the live chats. | ||
| Really want to thank people for getting the word out for this special. | ||
| I want to thank Real America's Voice, the great team of Rob and Howard, all their producers helping us get stood up. | ||
| Really want to thank, and this is where you got to download it, all the posse to download Weather Nation. | ||
| You don't have, it's not a place for happy talk. | ||
| It's hardcore weather. | ||
| As you can see, Ben McMillan, one of the bravest of these correspondents, a field correspondent, he's down in Thibodaux, Louisiana, Lafourche Parish, about 120-125 miles southwest of New Orleans. | ||
| This historic storm is kind of locked in down there on the coast, pounding it as a Category 4 winds 150 miles an hour. | ||
| As Ben told us, I think 50 people he said did not evacuate off of Grand Isle down there right off the coast right on the coast of Louisiana. | ||
| I just got a report 180 gusts of 185 miles an hour and this storm has hung on the coast moving very very slowly. | ||
| It came ashore, it made land at 1 o'clock, approximately 1 o'clock Eastern Daylight Time. | ||
| It is now almost 7, 730. | ||
| Storm just barely moving inland, so we pray for all the folks down there. | ||
| Now you know where Governor Evans gave an evacuation, Governor Edwards gave an evacuation policy to get everybody out. | ||
| We'll return at 10 minutes to the hour. | ||
| We're going to return to Ben McMillan. | ||
| We're tracking down Colonel Wendy Rogers. | ||
| We're going to try to get her up. | ||
| I want to go back to Sam Faddis, who has tremendous expertise in Pakistan, and that's why you're worried about the Haqqani Network. | ||
| I mean, Sam, we're going to have Posobac on, First Sergeant Bennett, Mo Bannon, a lot of veterans that are going to talk about what happened today in Dover, what happened the other day. | ||
| We're going to play the footage of what happened the other day. | ||
| You know this neighborhood very well. | ||
| It's a bad neighborhood. | ||
| On the 20th anniversary, Sam, of 9-11, have we effectively allowed a terrorist super-state to be created that's got the Taliban, you've got ISIS, you've got Al-Qaeda? | ||
| People we've defeated and spent blood and treasure, nine trillion dollars in these two wars, what, 10,000 dead of uniformed soldiers, many more thousands dead of contractors who are all pipe hitters, and what, 50,000 wounded, 60 veterans a day committing suicide, PTSD everywhere, families ruined, individuals ruined, and not back at the beginning. | ||
| It's worse than the beginning, and you've been there on this a long time. | ||
| Sam, your thoughts about this? | ||
| It hit me on the head when you just said it is much worse than it was, right? | ||
| Because we have gone in, spent 20 years, and there is no question that the way this is going down, the way we're withdrawing, the humiliation, the confusion, The fact that we're having to beg the Haqqanis to let us leave alive. | ||
| This is a humiliating defeat in front of the whole world. | ||
| So just before we get to China and all the other people that are watching this, for the jihadist movement that attacked us 20 years ago, this is ultimate victory. | ||
| They're not done. | ||
| They're not even thinking about being done. | ||
| Osama has won the war. | ||
| He has been proved correct. | ||
| We have been defeated. | ||
| We have not ended any war. | ||
| We've just guaranteed that the war will continue. | ||
| And a lot of it's now going to be fought here and elsewhere on the planet. | ||
| That's all that's happened here. | ||
| And Biden can spin this and lie about it. | ||
| It doesn't matter. | ||
| It doesn't change that. | ||
| It doesn't make it not true. | ||
| They're trying to spin it as like the Berlin Airlift or some air bridge Dunkirk. | ||
| That's not what's happened. | ||
| By the way, The Economist, as you know, besides the Financial Times, my favorite publication, this is the magazine of the party of Davos. | ||
| And look at today's headline, Where Next for Global Jihad? | ||
| Where Next for Global Jihad? | ||
| You know the answer? | ||
| And everybody ought to get this magazine this week and read it. | ||
| It's a 20-page special report. | ||
| Where Next for Global Jihad? | ||
| You know what the answer to The Economist is? | ||
| Everywhere on this planet. | ||
| Okay, everywhere on this planet. | ||
| Everybody's sitting there and Biden comes to the microphone and says, oh, we've ended this war. | ||
| This war has just started. | ||
| You may not have, and look, I'm not a neocon by anything. | ||
| I was the one that said we've got to get out of here, but you have to do it in a way that you can take care of the bad guys and not just go and defeat. | ||
| This was never Donald Trump's plan, and don't let Biden try to spin it. | ||
| Don't let Blinken try to spin it. | ||
| Don't let McMasters, any of these clowns spin it. | ||
| That's just an outright lie. | ||
| You may not have an interest in Jihad, but it's got an interest in you. | ||
| This war is just starting, and now we've heard yesterday, and Sam Faddis knows this better than anybody, with Pakistan, and now the terrorist super-state in Afghanistan. | ||
| With the Chinese Communist Party in partnership with this, our ally India is going to be pressed up against it in Kashmir. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| That's going to be the western flank of this war. | ||
| And the eastern flank of this war is going to be the South China Sea and Taiwan. | ||
| Taiwan would be Silicon Valley West. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| The advanced chip design of the United States economy. | ||
| This is a mess. | ||
| Beyond a mess. | ||
| This is a debacle. | ||
| And we're on the path to a kinetic war. | ||
| As sure as the turning of the earth. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| By a feckless elite Of both parties. | ||
| Of both parties. | ||
| The Wall Street, the corporations, the party of Davos, the city of London, our political uniparty, the Globus elite. | ||
| After 20 years, nine trillion dollars, 10,000 dead, 10,000 war dead, another what, 50,000 casualties, PTSD everywhere, 60 suicides a day. | ||
| That's what we got. | ||
| And trust me, it's worse now. | ||
| How could that possibly be? | ||
| How could you have it that I would say it's orders of magnitude worse. | ||
| And now you're having a humiliating exit, an extraction of not humiliating for the people doing it. | ||
| They're heroes. | ||
| And 13 of them came home today. | ||
| I want to go to Colonel Wendy Rogers, an Air Force colonel and a pilot. | ||
| Colonel Rogers, can you tell us how difficult is it and how much bravery does it take to do this extraction from these pilots that are flying into a place controlled by the Taliban? | ||
| They've got the mortars, they've got the manpads, they've got the howitzers. | ||
| As Sam Faddis tells us and Michael Yan tells us, only by their good graces are they not firing upon us constantly. | ||
| How tough is it for pilots to get in and out of here? | ||
| Well, thanks for having me on, Steve. | ||
| It's a very sad time for our military, for our country. | ||
| I'm talking to you from family home in Atlanta area. | ||
| I flew the C-141, which was the predecessor to the C-17. | ||
| And the C-17 normal crew is simply two pilots and one loadmaster. | ||
| And it's a very dangerous mission that they're on. | ||
| These are unarmed aircraft, sitting ducks as they are. | ||
| And, uh, going in there dauntlessly, gallantly, uh, to extract these, uh, folks out of harm's way. | ||
| And when you texted me earlier today and you said, Colonel, you're going to be on a show honoring the 13 heroes. | ||
| I thought I would dig more deeply and look into one who is from Ohio because that's where I'm going tomorrow to be with Josh Mandel and Jenna Ellis. | ||
| And the Ohioan was none other than the Navy Corpsman. | ||
| Max Soviak. | ||
| We need to remember these men's names. | ||
| Max Soviak. | ||
| Enlisted in 2017. | ||
| He did a two-year course at the end of high school in electronics. | ||
| He's from a little town, a little village called Berlin Heights near Sandusky, which has a big amusement park that as Michiganders we used to go to. | ||
| So I know exactly where that is. | ||
| And this young man has many siblings. | ||
| And they are all mourning for him right now. | ||
| And, uh, this is the kind of fine heartland American who signs up, who was on the football team, who was on the wrestling team. | ||
| And if you look at him, he's just a slight in stature kind of guy. | ||
| And he became a Navy Corpsman to work with the Marines. | ||
| And there's a special name for a Navy Corpsman who works with the Marines, who tends to and cares for Marines in combat. | ||
| He's called Devil Doc. | ||
| Like Devil Dog, a Marine, except he's the Devil Doc. | ||
| And my first and best friend in Flagstaff, Mike Hayes, was a Devil Doc. | ||
| And so for many years now, and Mike Hayes bodyguarded me during my congressional run. | ||
| And we had a lot of long time together, Mike and I, and he told me what a Devil Doc does. | ||
| A Devil Doc is a Marine. | ||
| Mike, for example, is in the Marine Corps, essentially. | ||
| And, uh, these guys are the best of the best. | ||
| They are the toughest. | ||
| And he never winced, uh, never grimaced about going into harm's way, both Mike and Max. | ||
| And I want to read to you what I, uh, just, uh, got here from Max's parents. | ||
| Um, that, that is just epic here. | ||
| The Soviak family said Max, Maxton, was proud of being part of a state champion wrestling team and a Final Four state playoff football team two years in a row. | ||
| Quote, but he was most proud to be a Navy Corpsman and a Devil Doc for the Marines. | ||
| His final words to his mom over FaceTime when he was telling her goodbye was after she told him to be safe were, quote, Don't worry, Mom. | ||
| My guys got me. | ||
| They won't let anything happen to me. | ||
| They won't let anything happen to me, the statement said. | ||
| And today, she realized that they all just went together. | ||
| This is our American military. | ||
| This is why my heart breaks for the tragic and unnecessary loss that occurred in Afghanistan by | ||
| This Commander-in-Chief, and I won't even, I can't even say his name, and for the Office of Naval Intelligence to say that people like me, who are retired, can't disrespect the President, flies in the face of everything we all have fought for, which is the freedom of this country and the freedom of speech. | ||
| I want to go. | ||
| Colonel Rogers, we got a couple of minutes. | ||
| I want to go back to that. | ||
| The bravery and heroism of these young people, by the way, most of whom were in their early 20s, Max being I think Max was 20. | ||
| It goes without question. | ||
| And remember, this is an all-volunteer force. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But what does it say about the chain of command? | ||
| The only person fired in this is Colonel Scheller, the Marine Corps Combat Commander, who said senior officers have to be held accountable. | ||
| He's the only one relieved for cause. | ||
| What do you say about that, Colonel? | ||
| Well, I was with General Flynn yesterday, as you know, Steve, here in Georgia for two days with Vernon Jones and General Flynn. | ||
| And when he was interviewed, Uh, on Real America's Voice. | ||
| I sat in the room when he said, those four-star generals, he said, I've worked with and served with nearly every one of them at the top. | ||
| They are the ones who should have thrown their stars onto the table. | ||
| They are the ones who should have risen up and said, this is a botched operation and unless we fix it and abide by the plans we've had, we're not going to continue to lead. | ||
| That would have been the right thing to do in terms of having a spine and being a leader that the rest of us in the rank and file can look up to. | ||
| That's what a real leader does. | ||
| So it took a lieutenant colonel, the same rank I was when I retired, To rise up and say, enough is enough. | ||
| I know I'm going to lose my pension. | ||
| I know I'm going to lose my career. | ||
| But by golly, this is what I stand for, and I'm going to call it what it is. | ||
| And it's been a botched operation to begin with, without any regard for the safety of the troops or Americans left behind. | ||
| Colonel Rogers, how do people follow you? | ||
| I know you're going around the country and you're lighting people up about the 3 November movement. | ||
| I know you're out with Josh Mandel in Ohio. | ||
| We're going to do a pregame for your event on Tuesday to talk about you being out there with Josh and Jenna Ellis. | ||
| Can you give us your social media so people can follow you? | ||
| Because people are saying, how do I follow Colonel Rogers? | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Please go to my actual website, WendyRogers.org. | ||
| Wendy, W-E-N-D-Y, like the hamburgers. | ||
| Rogers, like Mr. Rogers, R-O-G-E-R-S.org. | ||
| WendyRogers.org. | ||
| And go to the upper right corner of the landing page and sign the petition to decertify This abominable presidential election. | ||
| We want a million signatures. | ||
| This is a national symbolic decertification of the election and we are already well over a quarter of a million signatures toward the million. | ||
| So WendyRogers.org, go there and sign please. | ||
| Thank you, Colonel Rogers. | ||
| Appreciate you taking time to do this. | ||
| We're back with the hurricane. | ||
| Okay, welcome back. | ||
| This is a War Room Special. | ||
| Gathering storms, Afghanistan and Hurricane Ida. | ||
| Our correspondent in the field, Ben McMillan, is, as you saw last time, is really fighting the elements down there. | ||
| Historic Hurricane Ida came ashore at 1 o'clock eastern time. | ||
| It's still down there in southern Louisiana. | ||
| And those parishes southwest, about 100 miles southwest, of New Orleans. | ||
| It's going to, it's epic what's going on. | ||
| Let's toss to, we've got Sam Faddis, we've got Michael Janczek, Pasovo is going to join us. | ||
| I'd like to toss to Weather Nation, which is our sister channel here on Real America's Voice. | ||
| Oh, they're on a break? | ||
| Okay, fine. | ||
| As soon as they get back, let's go to it. | ||
| They've got a tremendous storm center, I want everybody to take a look at. | ||
| Sam, you've got breaking news from Kabul Airport right now, from your relationships out there. | ||
| Which are spectacular. | ||
| You and Jan are dialed in hard. | ||
| What are you hearing from Kabul Airport right now, sir? | ||
| Our situation where the Taliban controls entrance to the airport, and we got American citizens who were actually making it through the showing their blue passports and making it through the Taliban checkpoints onto the airport, but then being told by the Department of State, our Department of State, that they are not on some list. | ||
| I guess they haven't filled out the right form, so therefore they can't get in a plane and they can't be transported out. | ||
| So they have made it through Kabul, escaped from the Haqqanis, passed through the Taliban checkpoint and now our own government is telling them they won't put them on a plane and fly them anywhere. | ||
| Let me ask you, is that, for security reasons, is that a smart thing? | ||
| I take it a lot of the citizens, what I'm hearing is a lot of the American citizens today are people, are Afghani, right? | ||
| Afghani nationals that are now American citizens, and so there's been this whole security Issue about checks and everything like that. | ||
| Is that a logical thing to do when you're in this phase? | ||
| Because right now you're in retrograde. | ||
| The principal focus is no more evacuations. | ||
| The principal focus is retrograde. | ||
| It's actually pulling, what is it, 4,000? | ||
| There's a couple of battalions of 82nd Airborne and obviously Special Operators. | ||
| Would that be a logical checking to do? | ||
| To say, hey, look, we got to double check the list. | ||
| We have to double check this in a security situation like this? | ||
| Well, look, we already put thousands and thousands and thousands of Afghans about whom we knew essentially nothing on planes and flew them out. | ||
| So I think at this point when you're up against the wall and we're all about to leave, I suspect actually we'll all be out within 24 hours. | ||
| You put them on a plane, obviously everybody's going to be searched and we know nobody's carrying something that's going to damage the aircraft. | ||
| And then if you had any questions about the validity of their passport, then you can sort that out when you get them Clear of Kabul, but not throwing them on a plane right now and acting like, you know, we can come back and revisit this two weeks from now. | ||
|
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And it seems to me it's bizarre, right? | |
| I mean, just make sure they're clean. | ||
| They're not carrying any explosives or weapons. | ||
| They got a blue passport. | ||
| Everything looks good. | ||
| Get them on the plane. | ||
| Also, by the way, the Department of State ought to have the capacity to scan the passport and connect to a computer system and tell you right there whether it's valid or not. | ||
| Given your knowledge of the Haqqani Network and these other, you know, Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, the ISIS crowd that's there, and by the way, they make bigger distinctions than you make. | ||
| You say, hey, look, it's all one pot of kind of bad guys. | ||
| What do you anticipate? | ||
| You know, Michael Yan says, hey, this is going to be really brutal after the Americans leave. | ||
| Given your experience in Pakistan and with It's going to be genocide. | ||
| services down there, etc. in the county network. How tough is it going to be for any foreign nationals, any of the NGO people, anybody that worked with the Americans and or worked with NATO or any of the Western companies or allies? How tough is it going to be after four o'clock tomorrow afternoon Eastern when the Americans finally exit? It's going to be genocide. The door is going to slam shut and whenever they want the internet is going to | ||
| come down and all connectivity with the world is going to go down and all foreign journalists are going to be expelled. | ||
| And then they are going to methodically hunt down every opponent of the regime. | ||
| They have apparently computer files from our own Department of State listing everybody we trained that for some reason or another weren't deleted. | ||
| And I know that they've gone into the headquarters of the Afghan intelligence service and they've gotten all that information from there. | ||
| And as Michael alluded to, we know there are already Chinese technical personnel on the ground there helping them with this. | ||
| So they're just going to methodically hunt down and massacre everybody. | ||
| And the distinctions between these groups are, yeah, they're meaningless. | ||
| All this distinction about ISIS-K blowing up a car bomb the other day, but it wasn't the Haqqanis. | ||
| ISIS-K basically is the muscle the Haqqanis use whenever they want to rub somebody out but claim it wasn't them. | ||
| They're the guys that make the hits for the Haqqanis that the Qahinis then want some distance from, which is, in my opinion, exactly what happened at the airport the other day. | ||
| ISIS-K carried out a hit for the Haqqanis and Biden was very happy to go along with the lie because otherwise somebody would say, Well, hey, why don't you retaliate against Khalil Haqqani, who's sitting two miles away in Kabul? | ||
| In the couple minutes we've got left, you know, we have people like, you know, Brian Kennedy, Frank Gaffney, people I really respect, that say this is not incompetence. | ||
| This almost, because you couldn't have this many stupid decisions, bad oversight, lack of execution. | ||
| What are your thoughts on that? | ||
| Is this just, is the, are the institutions below the fighters and the troops and at the, you know, north of the lieutenant colonel level, have Are these institutions just so messed up that this was actually acts of commission? | ||
| Or do you think this just shows gross incompetence and they were just acts of omission? | ||
| I think we are at a point where, at least at the level of Biden and his cabinet, we have to actually start seriously considering the possibility that what we are seeing are deliberate actions on their part to harm the United States of America. | ||
| Now, why all the subordinates then decide to salute and go along and not grow a spine and refuse to execute the orders, that's another matter. | ||
| But I really do think that we're at the point where we've got to actually entertain the possibility that we've got a guy in the White House who is playing for the other side. | ||
| Sam, Anne Magazine, that you're the founder and publisher of, is unbelievable. | ||
| How do people get to you, social media and the magazine? | ||
| And magazine.com and we are on, uh, well, let's see, we're on all social media, you know, get our parlor, everybody other than LinkedIn. | ||
|
unidentified
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They threw me off for some reason that I also the author of a book more relevant than ever. | |
| The decline was the decline and fall of the, of the CIA. | ||
| We'll put that up into the live chat. | ||
| If you want to see why we're in this situation, read Sam fetuses book, Sam, thank you for changing your schedule around to join us. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Okay, we're going to return. | ||
| It's a gathering storm. | ||
| Afghanistan and Hurricane Ida. | ||
| Hurricane Ida, already a historic storm. | ||
| We're going to return after a short commercial break. | ||
| We're going to have the Weather Nation team and a live report from Ben McMillan from Thibodeau, Louisiana, that's being hit right now. | ||
| We've also got Jack Posobiec, First Sergeant John Bennett, Michael Yon, Captain Ben, and everybody in the second hour. |
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