Nov. 11, 2025 - Bannon's War Room
48:53
Participants
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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I mean, is this what your takeaway is? | |
| Well, not exactly, but I don't know. | ||
| I guess I'll be the contrary on this. | ||
| I think that the Democratic senators handled this basically pretty well. | ||
| You're playing chicken with the other, the other, it's like you're playing chicken and the other party wants to crash. | ||
| Like, you're never going to win a game of chicken against Donald Trump. | ||
| So why did he get into this? | ||
| Hold on. | ||
| They spent 40 days doing this. | ||
| And I was talking to Senator Kaine a moment ago, and he basically laid out everything that they could have gotten if they never went into a shutdown. | ||
| He was worried about snap benefits running out. | ||
| Well, if they never went into a shutdown, snap benefits would not have run out. | ||
| He was worried about federal workers getting laid off. | ||
| Well, if they didn't go into a shutdown, they weren't going to get laid off. | ||
| And so they spent 40 days saying this is all about health care, all about the ACA and these subsidies. | ||
| This is the only point we're going to have any leverage on this. | ||
| And then now they're like, well, we're going to have a separate vote and the American public will get to see where Republicans stand. | ||
| And by the way, it sounds like the House isn't even going to take it up. | ||
| I hear all that, Katie, but that was the best case scenario from the start. | ||
| I mean, they had no choice but to do nothing. | ||
| And here's the reality. | ||
| If they wanted to get the health care subsidy extended, they needed to win the election last November. | ||
| The Republicans control all of Washington. | ||
| Like this expectation that the Republicans are going to wake up one morning and say, you know what? | ||
| We're going to do the emergency Obamacare extension. | ||
| You know, we're going to make sure that the subsidies for people that are early retirees are going to continue. | ||
| It's crazy to think that the Republicans were never going to do that. | ||
| And the purpose of the shutdown, to my mind, was to demonstrate to the voters as Democrats what their side was on this issue and what the Republican side was. | ||
| There was not going to be a tangible policy. | ||
| The Republicans never even came to the table. | ||
| The House hasn't been in session for a month. | ||
| Donald Trump never tried to negotiate. | ||
| So I hear you. | ||
| I hear everybody when they're saying that they wanted more. | ||
| They wanted to hold out longer, but this is the longest shutdown in history. | ||
| I remember back when I was a Republican, the Democrats and people like me and the establishment of the Republican Party said the Tea Party's crazy. | ||
| These guys at the Tea Party are extremists with the way that they are pushing these shutdowns. | ||
| This Democratic Senate just held a longer shutdown than the Tea Party ever did. | ||
| So I mean, I just think that's like, that is about as much as could have been expected, given the real harm that was happening to people with the loss of benefits, loss of jobs, loss of salaries. | ||
| Did it take, as I guess, Tim, you're suggesting, that much time for the American public to see where the Democrats stood and how they felt about health care and to look at it closely and see that ultimately it was the Republicans that were stonewalling this issue? | ||
| I would have been fine with 30 days. | ||
| That's not a very popular opinion out there. | ||
| But yeah, that would have been fine with me. | ||
|
unidentified
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30 days. | |
| I think that the point was made. | ||
| Adam, jump in. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, look, I think the strategy always had an endgame problem. | ||
| And sort of what Tim is getting at here, the Republicans were never likely to give Dems their big demands. | ||
| I think if Democrats were going to cut this kind of a deal, it probably would have been a better idea to have done it a week ago before the elections gave everybody a renewed sense of momentum before Trump started lobbying Republicans to get rid of the filibuster and people like me were like, hmm, this is interesting. | ||
| Let's see where this goes. | ||
| But, you know, I do think that there is an argument for claiming a win here. | ||
| Democrats were able to drive a conversation about health care and make that a central focus, which is something they've been struggling to do for a long time. | ||
| And look, if you want to be really cynical about this from a political perspective, by not extending the ACA subsidies, Republicans have set themselves up for a year next year that is going to be entirely focused on health care. | ||
| And people's premiums are going to go up. | ||
| Republicans are highly unlikely to extend these subsidies, which is part of why Democrats were demanding that they do it. | ||
| But that's going to be all on Republicans. | ||
| It's going to be similar to 2017 when they made it all about repealing the ACA. | ||
| Republicans have put themselves in a position where all of next year, going into the midterms, is going to be focused on people's premiums going up at the hands of Republicans in control of Congress. | ||
| This is the primal scream of a dying regime. | ||
| Pray for our enemies because we're going medieval on these people. | ||
| You're going to not get a free shot on all these networks lying about the people. | ||
| The people have had a belly full of it. | ||
| I know you don't like hearing that. | ||
| I know you try to do everything in the world to stop that, but you're not going to stop it. | ||
| It's going to happen. | ||
| And where do people like that go to share the big lie? | ||
| MAGA Media. | ||
| I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people had a conscience. | ||
| Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose? | ||
| If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved. | ||
|
unidentified
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Waru, here's your host, Stephen K. Bass. | |
| Monday, 10 November, Year of our Lord, 2025 is the 250th. | ||
| Think about it for a second. | ||
| How many institutions in the world are 250 years old? | ||
| That are not a country. | ||
| 250th anniversary of the beginning of birthday of the United States Marine Corps in Tun Tavern in Philadelphia today. | ||
| My co-host for the next two hours is the great Michael Pack. | ||
| We're going to talk about a whole lot. | ||
| I've got to get, I got the great Julie Kelly is on first. | ||
| Julie, okay, let me lay this out before you get into it. | ||
| When I've got stalwarts of the MAGA movement, and I'm talking first-team players, I've got Darren Beattie, Jack Pisovic, Julie Kelly, Glenn Beck, Stephen Baker. | ||
| When people like that are telling me over and over again, this pipe bomber thing is not simply big, but it's the key that picks the lock on many different things related to J6, the Fed surrection, and the deep state. | ||
| And that I think even Glenn said the other day could be as big as potentially as Watergate. | ||
| I take that seriously since there's such a depth of premium folks and folks that do this for a living are telling me that. | ||
| And as you know, over the weekend, I was in a location. | ||
| I didn't have great Wi-Fi or phone, but my phone literally blew up when I got back into the area on Sunday afternoon about the situation on the pipe bomb and maybe some new revelation on the pipe bomber. | ||
| Can you get us up to speed on everything that's happening, ma'am? | ||
| Yes, so this is a report on Blaze Media, and this was authored by Steve Baker and Joe Hanneman, two reporters who have covered January 6th. | ||
| And this was teased last week, to your point, by Glenn Beck and Steve Baker, that this was going to be the greatest political scandal of all time, that this would implicate high-level Trump administration officials, | ||
| including perhaps CIA Director John Radcliffe, DNI, Director Tulsi Gabbard, and others, related to who these reporters believe they have identified as the individual seen on that very grainy, | ||
| low-quality surveillance video of a hoodie suspect walking around Capitol Hill on January 5th that evening, which is the time frame that the FBI and law enforcement believe those two dummy explosive pipe bombs were planted outside the headquarters of the RNC and the DNC, | ||
| only to be conveniently and coincidentally discovered 17 hours later to coincide with the start of the joint session of Congress. | ||
| So, this article took over social media and the internet all weekend. | ||
| And it was supposed to not just identify this pipe bomber, but also expose this big scandal. | ||
| Well, the article, in my opinion, fell far short of providing enough solid evidence to almost definitively, they said 98% based on this gate analysis, which we can kind of talk about, meaning the walking mannerisms and style of a Capitol Police officer. | ||
| You mean gate? | ||
| You mean gait like a horse would have a gate or like a human would have a gate, the way the way you would walk, correct? | ||
| The way you would propel yourself forward. | ||
| Okay, keep going. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| So, G-A-I-T, not G-A-T-E, gate. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, apparently, what happened is Steve Baker was looking at video from January 6th, Capitol Police officers who were using what they call non-lethal munitions on the crowd. | ||
| You and I have talked about that. | ||
| And he apparently saw a Capitol Police officer who he thought had the same gait pattern as this individual on January 5th, who still has not been identified. | ||
| January 5th, 2021. | ||
| So, apparently, they needed. | ||
| Is there something unique enough about the suspect? | ||
| Because this is like the Magruder film, kind of. | ||
| You and Beatty and Pasobic and Glenn Beck's team and many others for hours and hours and hours have gone over all this grainy footage. | ||
| I mean, Beatty was on the show one time. | ||
| You talk about Glenn and his team. | ||
| I mean, Beatty was on the show one time for an hour. | ||
| And I think we went over this thing, and he had like every movement of this. | ||
| And I didn't have a suspect at the time, but why this was so important, why the official narrative was a lie, and how this was going to be something that would explode the whole Fed surrection, ma'am. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| Well, as Darren Beatty has said, and I think Darren Beatty and I have uncovered the most information, evidence, shady circumstances related to the pipe bombers, both at the DNC and RNC. | ||
| But what Darren always said is if you expose the truth about the pipe bombs, the entire January 6th narrative unravels because that was the incident that those two incidents really initiated the panic that day. | ||
| And I think that's what Glenn's talking about. | ||
| If you solve the identity of this pipe bomber, or you can get the idea that the feds knew a lot more about this pipe bomber, even maybe being part of them or knowing about it, this gets to be watergate level because then the entire official narrative collapses, correct? | ||
| Correct. | ||
| And this is something we've talked about for years. | ||
| And Darren Beatty and I have suspected for years, and you and I have talked about this as well, that this was an inside job, that law enforcement in some capacity was tied to the planting of one or both of these devices. | ||
| I just had a report out last month that you and I talked about more suspicious surroundings related to the woman who discovered the RNC pipe bomb. | ||
| She worked for FirstNet, which of course is a law enforcement agency, and then the DNC. | ||
| So it's not exactly news that this is an inside job, that law enforcement was somehow involved in one capacity or the other. | ||
| I think this might be new to Glenn because of how he's talked about it, but it certainly is not to us. | ||
| So if this individual, and we won't name her name because you could see people are already backing off this report as they identified this woman who now is under police protection, by the way, based on, I think, really dubious. | ||
| Because naturally, the MA people would seek immediate vengeance, correct? | ||
| Revenge. | ||
| Well, look, it's really irresponsible to float someone's name without enough substantive evidence that confirms that this is the absolute identity of this suspect. | ||
| I mean, this is a very controversial issue. | ||
| It's one of great public interest and one of great consequence to both the individual and anyone else who would have been involved. | ||
| So is the evidence that they put forward? | ||
| The evidence they put forward was they actually put pictures over up there and they compared the grainy footage of the suspect or the unidentified person walking its gate versus her gate, so you could actually compare and contrast. | ||
| We don't know because the article did not embed any video clips that had been used as samples for this gate analysis. | ||
| So we don't know what video this one analyst or the software that was used, but we certainly don't have the video clips. | ||
| What I think it is also a little bit questionable here is that in the article they say they did not use the FBI grainy footage that we've all seen for years, that they used different footage that was clearer and had a more accurate timing to it. | ||
| Now, as you know, Darren Beatty years ago broke down how a lot of that video, especially the video captured by the DNC security footage, how it was purposefully slow, that it had such a slow frame rate as to suggest that it's somehow been manipulated. | ||
| So what footage did they use? | ||
| We don't know. | ||
| They didn't put the video clips in the piece, which I feel like from a journalistic standpoint. | ||
| If you're gonna call someone's name out, you better provide the public with the evidence that you're using as a basis of that conclusion. | ||
| Hang on, we're gonna take a break, if you can. | ||
| I know you're under tight schedule. | ||
| Our next guest is also under a tight schedule. | ||
| It's the 250th anniversary of the birth of the Marine Corps at Ton Tavern in Philadelphia. | ||
| As Continental Marines, I think they started recruiting. | ||
| Naturally, if you're going to recruit marines, what better place to recruit them than a tavern right? | ||
| Hard-fighting devil dogs? | ||
| Um, we're gonna get to all of this for the next two hours. | ||
| Julie Kelly Julie, can you just stick around for a minute or two? | ||
| On the other side? | ||
| I know you get a bounce. | ||
| Birch Gold. | ||
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| Get the ultimate guide for investing in gold and precious metals in the age of Trump. | ||
| Find out about your Iras, your 401ks, tax deferment, all those complexity. | ||
| Talk to Philip Patrick, the team today. | ||
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unidentified
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Kill America's Voice family. | |
| Are you on? | ||
| Get her yet. | ||
| No, what are you waiting for? | ||
|
unidentified
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It's free, it's uncensored and it's where all the biggest voices in conservative media are speaking out. | |
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unidentified
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| Download the Getter app now, sign up for free and be part of the new band. | ||
| Okay, welcome back. | ||
| Julie Kelly, this is also important as the engine room, the war room engine room informs me that Kamala Harris might have also been jeopardized because now we know, I guess, I don't know if it's fake news or not. | ||
| I don't know what to believe. | ||
| Kamala Harris might have been in jeopardy. | ||
| Or heck, maybe she was the pipe bomb woman. | ||
| But you broke something the other day. | ||
| I just want people to get up to speed and remember this on the RNC side. | ||
| What was it? | ||
| Yeah, so first of all, with Kamala Harris, she was at the DNC inexplicably. | ||
| Why, we don't know. | ||
| She mentioned it one time in her book. | ||
| She said she went there to call contributors and donors, which still doesn't make any sense. | ||
| And Barry Laudermilk's committee, New J6 committee today is asking for testimony from her Secret Service agents who missed this device, by the way, that was planted right outside of the entrance to the DNC. | ||
| At any rate, I've also been covering for since late 2021 the circumstances of this discovery of the RNC device, which was found by a woman named Carlin Younger. | ||
| She was working from home that day. | ||
| She worked for FirstNet, which is a private public partnership that oversees broadband for first responders during disasters, emergencies, et cetera. | ||
| She just so happened to go do her laundry in the middle of the day. | ||
| And it's this sort of outdoor. | ||
| You have to access it from outside. | ||
| She lived right next to the Capitol Hill Club, a popular hangout for Republicans, as you know, in the headquarters of the RNC. | ||
| As she's going to do her laundry, her second trip there, she looks down and notices a device by a recycling bin and goes to alert security first at the Capitol Hill Club, then RNC. | ||
| So this was around 1240, Steve, on January 6th, 20 minutes before the joint session convened. | ||
| RNC and DNC headquarters, as you know, just a few blocks away from the U.S. Capitol. | ||
| So the discovery of that device, now both devices were not going to be active. | ||
| They weren't active. | ||
| They were dummy devices. | ||
| They were never going to explode. | ||
| So I have two pieces up declassified with Julie Kelly that talk about more suspicious surroundings as to her discovery, which I think has more evidence of, hmm, maybe we need to question this person than certainly the evidence that was provided in the Blaze article over the weekend. | ||
| But to Glenn Beck's and Scott Baker and you, they're coming at it with getting information and try, because they understand. | ||
| This is the key that could pick the lock, right? | ||
| There's something been weird about this from the beginning. | ||
| This is why Darren Beattie was obsessed by this. | ||
| You've been going at this, right, in a different direction, but have very compelling, at least circumstantial evidence right now. | ||
| Is the Justice Department, the FBI, the Secret Service, anything that we consider an actual government apparatus that should have access to absolutely everything? | ||
| Are they working with the Glenn Beck team? | ||
| Are they working with you? | ||
| Can we just get the, why do we have to have two of our smartest investigative units spending an incredible amount of time burning a lot of daylight doing this when isn't a lot of this information there that could be shared by the FBI, the Secret Service, the D.C. Metro Police, the Capitol Hill Police, or anything, ma'am? | ||
| Well, I mean, I don't know if the Blaze and Steve Baker have shared their gate analysis or their video samples with the FBI. | ||
| If, I mean, the FBI didn't come up with that. | ||
| No, I'm saying, no, no, hang on. | ||
| You're saying something totally different. | ||
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unidentified
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Hang on. | |
| I don't, this is my point. | ||
| Glenn Beck and Steve Baker are on the outside pushing in. | ||
| Julie Kelly's on the outside pushing in. | ||
| You guys are coming around this, and clearly now more than ever, people realize there's something very suspicious here, right? | ||
| And you got to back up into the public conscience. | ||
| Is the government, is the FBI, the people that should know all the information or have absolutely everything and have every foot people walk because they had drones up or they had every piece of technology. | ||
| You can't walk a foot in DC that you're not monitored by 100 cameras. | ||
| Have the official government apparatus. | ||
| Because what frustrates me is Tom Fenton at Judicial Watch, Julie Kelly over the Substack, Glenn Beck at the Blaze, all these people, the revolver team, you guys are spending time, money, effort. | ||
| And hey, there's, you know, this is a Trump administration run by Trump people. | ||
| This should be something that we should get to the bottom of, like immediately, every piece of information. | ||
| And I'm sure there are hundreds of thousands of pieces of information about this, just in all the different details of how technologically you're tracked in the current era. | ||
| So why are we not getting any information that are helping you, helping Beck, helping Revolver, helping, you know, Judicial Watch told me, Fenton the other day, who's my hero, told me he's got more FOIA requests. | ||
| He's fighting harder than in the Obama administration. | ||
| Forget Biden. | ||
| He said, Biden, we're nothing compared to this is back to Holder. | ||
| So why are we not getting full cooperation by the official apparatuses we control, ma'am? | ||
| Well, I mean, I haven't heard a lot from my sources on this particular story. | ||
| I think there is work being done looking into whatever is publicly available. | ||
| But I share everyone's frustration that we don't have better answers, that we're coming up on the five-year anniversary of January 6th and statutory limitations expiring on certain charges, certainly for whoever planted the pipe bomb and obscured any sort of investigation. | ||
| But we know from testimony that this investigation was basically shut down in spring of 2021. | ||
| And there really was not much happening. | ||
| So the question is, and we know that this continues to be an ongoing problem at the FBI and DOJ and DNI and everywhere else, is that evidence was hidden, evidence was buried. | ||
| We had testimony that the cell phone data from January 5th was corrupted. | ||
| And then I think that they've been digging into that, trying to see if they can access cell phone data from that night. | ||
| That seems completely impossible to believe. | ||
| So I do trust that there are, I know that investigation is still active and ongoing. | ||
| Not to sound like an FBI spokesman there. | ||
| But I share everyone's frustration that we don't have answers. | ||
| And that's why, unfortunately, that vacuum can be filled with bad information, which is what this report represents. | ||
| 60 days within 60 days, we're going to be on the fifth anniversary of this. | ||
| 60 days. | ||
| Unbelievable. | ||
| Julie Kelly, where do people go? | ||
| You've got a couple of great pieces up on Substack. | ||
| You do an analysis of all this. | ||
| Where do folks go? | ||
| So my Substack is declassified with Julie Kelly. | ||
| I post a lot on X, as you know, Julie underscore Kelly 2. | ||
| I have some thoughts and criticism about that piece on there. | ||
| And then, of course, also have pieces up on Real Clear Investigations. | ||
| Fantastic job. | ||
| Thank you so much, Julie, for joining us tonight. | ||
| Thanks, Steve. | ||
| The last 600 meters. | ||
| Tonight, after 17 years, is it? | ||
| 17 years, it will have its national broadcast at 10 o'clock. | ||
| I think it's a great honor to the men in the film, in the mission they were on, that PBS would think that this is emblematic of kind of the heart of what the Marine Corps does, right? | ||
| And We have one of the great warriors from that, Scott Cuomo, is on. | ||
| Tell us about Scott before we bring him on. | ||
| Well, Scott was in the section on the Battle of Najaf. | ||
| As you know, the film is the first Battle of Fallujah in the North against Sunni insurgents, then the Battle of Najaf in the South against Shia militia, and then back to the Second Battle of Fallujah in the North again. | ||
| And Scott was, I think, a lieutenant at the time. | ||
| He can correct me, but he was one of these guys that had to follow these orders. | ||
| He tells the story, I should have him tell it, of when he was called, and he had to kind of just go. | ||
| Ride to the sound of the guns. | ||
| Right to the sound of the guns. | ||
| One of the most powerful parts of the movie. | ||
| Scott, you join us now. | ||
| First off, your feelings, you were there live when we did the premiere a week or so ago, and it was amazing your guys' participation and how great it was with the audience afterwards. | ||
| Talk to me about the 250th anniversary of the Marine Corps, of how few institutions have been around for 250 years, and that PBS has decided after 17 years to show this film as its prime time representation of the United States Marine Corps, sir. | ||
| No, Steve, and my thank you so much, especially on this day, Veterans Day tomorrow. | ||
| What do I think? | ||
| Just grateful that that would be the Marines who fought Najaf both. | ||
| And then the documentary covers obviously Fallujah 1 and Fallujah 2 as well. | ||
| And just to tell the story of the young warriors that busted their ever-living butts to execute some incredibly demanding missions. | ||
| So I'm just incredibly grateful that I'll be on PBS this evening. | ||
| And America will get to learn. | ||
| You know, for 250 years, you send the Marines. | ||
| You got the hardest missions in the world that need to get executed. | ||
| You need us to do them and we're going to do them. | ||
| Period. | ||
| Scott, can you hang on with us? | ||
| I want to spend some more time. | ||
| I think you've got a few more minutes. | ||
| We're going to take a break. | ||
| Do we have the, we're going to go out in every section of this Michael Pact in honor of the film and in honor of the 250th anniversary with the Marine Corps hymn. | ||
| Tonight at 10 p.m. I want to make sure everybody in the audience and spread the word. | ||
| Let's be our first multiplier. | ||
| Then Amazon. | ||
| Sorry, tomorrow. | ||
| Amazon started 10 p.m. | ||
| You're getting to be pretty entrepreneurial. | ||
| We finally taught PAC. | ||
| 10 p.m. Eastern Standard Time tonight. | ||
| And I believe it's going to be in your time zone as it goes around the country. | ||
| It'll still be 10 p.m. Eastern Standard Time tonight. | ||
| The premiere of the last 600 meters, the battles of Fallujah, 1st Fallujah, Najaf, and 2nd Fallujah, told through the eyes of Marine riflemen, which is Jan Becker. | ||
| Bender. | ||
| Bender says in there, everybody's a rifleman in the Marine Corps. | ||
| He was a combat, he was a combat photographer. | ||
| He's got a great line in there about being on the trigger. | ||
| Lieutenant Scott Cuomo joins us. | ||
| We're going to take a short commercial break. | ||
| The Marine Corps hymn will take us out. | ||
| We'll be back in a moment in the War Room. | ||
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We'll be back in a moment in the War Room. | |
| Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon. | ||
| Michael Pack, the great filmmaker, is riding Shotgun. | ||
| We're going to talk about Abby Gate, the new film you're working on. | ||
| But tonight, the premiere at 10 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on your PBS station, totally free. | ||
| Check it out. | ||
| The last 600 meters. | ||
| Colonel Scott Cuomo joins us, who was a lieutenant at the time. | ||
| Tell us about Najaf and why on the 250th anniversary of this institution that has lived longer than the Roman Republic, that why did PBS, when they looked at who were not fans of this film initially, think it was emblematic enough of the work of the Marine Corps to put it up tonight on the 250th birthday, sir? | ||
| Yeah, no, Mike can, I'm sure, cover the details of what led to the decision there a little bit differently, but specific to the battle, I am grateful to have the opportunity to just talk with you guys about it. | ||
| You know, hot, intense, close quarters, intimate, very personal. | ||
| You know, for me and the Marines that I had the privilege to serve in that battle, it started with a helicopter Huey helicopter getting shot down. | ||
| We were in another province and got a fragmentary order of Frago, as we call it in the Marine Corps, to get our butts to Najaf immediately and go help out our teammates and to go fight. | ||
| And that was very early on the morning of 5 August. | ||
| And for the next 22 days, it was just battle nonstop in weather that is almost, you know, up to that point in my life, it was never experienced anything like that. | ||
| And then the battlegrounds, we had trained in urban environments a lot before going over. | ||
| I had the privilege to be a rifle platoon commander on the march to Baghdad. | ||
| So I had fought, but never in a cemetery that's 15, 20 square kilometers, depending on the way you measured it. | ||
| So yeah, I'm just grateful that PBS put that out or will put it out later today so that America gets to see what do Marines do? | ||
| What have Marines done for 250 years, no matter the challenge? | ||
| We'll battle our butts off to do whatever we need to do to help keep America safe. | ||
| The temperature was, correct me if I'm wrong, 100 to 115 degrees during parts of the day that you guys were fighting through this vast cemetery. | ||
| And folks, you'll see tonight, it's a cemetery like you would see in New Orleans, a cemetery that's above ground, where the, I guess, esophagus or the all the tombs are actually above ground. | ||
| One on top of each other, but there's also a huge subterrain. | ||
| So it's just vast, both up and down. | ||
| Catacombs were unbelievable. | ||
| Scott, what was it like to fight through that at those temperatures? | ||
| Yeah, no, during the day, it was not uncommon for it to be 130 degrees. | ||
| At the time, I was called CAT or a heavy machine gun anti-armored platoon commander. | ||
| So we had infantrymen or riflemen. | ||
| We had machine gunners. | ||
| We had missilemen. | ||
| And so we were one of the forces that could maneuver because we had vehicles. | ||
| Sometimes we were clearing buildings. | ||
| Sometimes we were maneuvering, providing supporting fires. | ||
| But, you know, what was it like? | ||
| It was just more personal, up close for all the Marines. | ||
| There was about 1,200 Marines in our unit. | ||
| At some point in the battle, most all of them got involved. | ||
| And it was just one of those. | ||
| It was almost impossible to describe. | ||
| They're obviously throughout history. | ||
| Marines have fought in some very, very close, up-close environments. | ||
| I think this was, just thinking about it now, 21 years later, I don't think we've fought in cemeteries, but nothing like this. | ||
| Nothing in this proximity, this density, the catacombs, the roads that moved in and out of the cemetery were just very narrow. | ||
| So yeah, so it was intense, in short, intense. | ||
| The reason that you take that people, I think, take such pride when they see this film, no matter how bloody it is. | ||
| In the second, excuse me, in the Jaff, you're essentially fighting in what is the Vatican of the Shiite religion. | ||
| And to the degree that you guys are told by your senior officers and that you're promulgating to the troops that the mosque, which is like St. Peter's Cathedral to the Shiites, it's their Vatican. | ||
| You've got to take extra care with that. | ||
| I mean, particularly extra care of that, even to the degree that you might put some Marines in danger. | ||
| Tell us about that. | ||
| Yeah, that was incredibly tough. | ||
| The enemy, what we refer to as rules of engagement or ROEs, the enemy knew what ours were. | ||
| And so many aspects of their command post, their mortar firing positions, their casualty collection points were at times inside the Imam Ali mosque complex. | ||
| And like you're saying, it is huge, a multi-kilometer complex. | ||
| So it was very difficult to be struck by mortar barrages that were launched from inside the complex and then to have to find other ways because the rules of engagement as the battle progressed. | ||
| Initially, they were very restrictive, as the documentary lays out. | ||
| And as the days went on, very similar to something for those for the Way City veterans from 1968, you'd find the same thing. | ||
| The opening days of the battle, much more restrictive rules of engagement than it went on. | ||
| So it was very, very challenging. | ||
| That said, Marines, as we've done, you find a way to adapt. | ||
| You attack the enemy in a different direction. | ||
| You attack them with a different weapon system. | ||
| But yeah, it was definitely, definitely challenging. | ||
| I mean, yeah, it is very moving just to hear their stories. | ||
| I mean, it was so hot. | ||
| Colonel Mayer describes how they would have IVs in their arm. | ||
| They'd come out of the fighting in the cemetery and they'd have to be hydrated with IVs. | ||
| And they leave the IV stints in so that they can come in and out faster. | ||
| And you can see them in the film lying there, nearly passed out, getting hydrated. | ||
| I mean, it's a surreal kind of landscape. | ||
| And then the mosque, I mean, in the end, you know, the Marines pushed them out of the cemetery into the mosque where they couldn't attack. | ||
| They were going to send in, because, of course, U.S. troops can't go into the mosque because, as you say, it's one of the holiest sites in Shia Islam. | ||
| So they were going to send in Iraqi commandos. | ||
| And they were all set to do that when another Shiite leader, Sistani, shows up and boom, and Sadr gets away. | ||
| Sadr and the Mahdi army, you know, survive to escape another day. | ||
| And you can hear the frustration in some of the Marines at that moment that they didn't get a chance to finish the job and deal with the Mahdi militia that actually plagued Iraq for a long, long time, even to today. | ||
| I believe Makar Sadr is still active. | ||
| So what was that like, Scott? | ||
| We didn't talk about that too much with you in the film. | ||
| I mean, what was it like to sort of suddenly the thing is over, the thing you're preparing for doesn't happen and the thing ends? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, you joked when we were offline a little bit about the difference in interviewing two years after and then reflecting on it now. | ||
| You know, in short, incredibly frustrating. | ||
| You know, the Marines, and I'm confident I speak with all the guys that were in BLT-14, you fight your butts off 22 days in that heat, and you finally, finally get the enemy. | ||
| You kind of got the bull by the horns, if you will, or we've got him with our hands right around his neck, you know, and get ready to finish the job. | ||
| And then I told us to Stani, I'm not exactly sure what happened between the night of 25 and 26 August. | ||
| I just knew we were ready to go into the very final assault and we got word to stand down and some agreement had been reached and were met. | ||
| And it was frustrating at the time. | ||
| Ready to launch. | ||
| Yeah, go ahead. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| But yeah, you know, you mentioned that I joked about how you guys were different 17 years ago, but you still have the fight. | ||
| I was really impressed. | ||
| I think I mentioned this in the break too, about what you said in the screening. | ||
| Marines can win any battle. | ||
| You know, they can't make the strategic decisions. | ||
| They can't make the deals with – But they can't lose. | ||
| They can't lose. | ||
| You said that. | ||
| They can't lose. | ||
| Send us in there. | ||
| We can't lose. | ||
| You said that just a couple of weeks ago. | ||
| So I think everyone in the audience was impressed. | ||
| There's some truth. | ||
| There's truth to that, right, Scott? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, I mean, at the end of the day, you know, just reflecting on this now, having a privilege to serve for almost 25%, so 10% of the Corps' history, had, you know, served Marines in three different combat environments. | ||
| The missions are hard. | ||
| But no matter what happens, if you need Marines to do something, it doesn't matter how hard it is. | ||
| We will find a way to get it done. | ||
| We will work together. | ||
| We will depend on non-commissioned officers. | ||
| And this isn't just, this is just what Marines do. | ||
| Steve, you asked about why 250 is so important. | ||
| Because literally for 250 years, non-commissioned officers, junior officers, staff non-commissioned officers in the Marine Corps just find a way to get it done. | ||
| The missions are, combat is chaotic. | ||
| It's uncertain. | ||
| It's nasty. | ||
| But it doesn't matter. | ||
| We learn from those who've gone before us. | ||
| Our instructors train us really well and we depend on each other. | ||
| And yeah, what was it like on a scale of one to 10, a million furiating when we were finally ready to close? | ||
| Yeah, but it's not uncommon throughout history, the Corps' history. | ||
| And so our job, when you all tell us to go, you know, for those who are watching this, you tell us to go, we are going to go, and we are going to attack 100 miles an hour. | ||
| And if you tell us to stop, we're going to stop, as frustrating as it might be. | ||
| But yeah, if that answers your question, Mike. | ||
| You know, Michael was, Mike was going to, Michael was going to make a film about high technology and how to change the battlefield. | ||
| And he came back and said, after doing his research, he realized that what was happening in Iraq was a war that was being fought by teenager infantrymen with non-commissioned officers, not much older above them, and these junior officers, first lieutenants, second lieutenants, and captains. | ||
| And that's what comes out. | ||
| You do have a few generals spreading in there, but the first person participants are all teenagers or in their early. | ||
| How old were you, Scott, when you were in Nanjov? | ||
| 20, what was I, 22, 23? | ||
| I'm trying to think. | ||
| I was born in 2020. | ||
| 22 or 23. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I'm telling you, the whole thing, this is one of the powers of the film. | ||
| These are such young people. | ||
| And talk about this battle. | ||
| The majority of the Marines are, yeah, I'm sorry, Steve, go ahead. | ||
| No, no, go ahead, Colonel. | ||
| Yeah, I was saying the majority of the Marines in the battle, 19, 20 years old. | ||
| When you're seeing the scenes that Michael and the team recorded just so powerfully inside fighting, whether that be from Tombstone to Tombstone or inside the catacombs or inside the old city at the end, these are 19, 20-year-old Americans predominantly. | ||
| They're non-commissioned officers, you know, plus or minus 21 to 24 years old. | ||
| And they are, they're intense. | ||
| They're young. | ||
| They're angry when you click us off safe, as we say in the Marine Corps. | ||
| They're angry. | ||
| And they're going to do whatever they have to do to protect America, to protect each other. | ||
| Colonel, do you have social media? | ||
| Is there any way people can get your coordinates? | ||
| Generally speaking, I'm not on social media, but you've got to be careful. | ||
| He's still in, Steve. | ||
| Yeah, I'm still have the privilege to serve and do my best to just serve Marines and do what we got to do. | ||
| So, yeah, I don't know. | ||
| Michael's got my contact info. | ||
| I'm sure he'll figure out if someone wants to reach out. | ||
| Yeah, it was nice of the Marines to give Scott permission to talk as a private person, not as a person of the Marine Corps. | ||
| Colonel, want to thank you very much. | ||
| I'm sure we're getting a lot of feedback tomorrow. | ||
| It's a magnificent film, and you guys represent the best of this country. | ||
| So, sir, thank you so much. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Happy birthday, fellow Marines out there, Semper 5. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Remember, we're going to talk about when we come back why PBS, why this has been 17 years. | ||
| When Michael first turned this in, this film was very powerful. | ||
| Of course, we were still in the Iraq war. | ||
| And it wasn't that they didn't like the political message, because some things said, well, hold on, the political side looked totally screwed up. | ||
| It's the fact that they could not believe that you just went into this group and that these were typical standard Marines, right? | ||
| They refused to believe that. | ||
| They thought that you had actors or that you were curated and just gotten the best of the best. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| That's what they did. | ||
| They thought I curated. | ||
| They thought you curated just to, it wasn't. | ||
| You just went in and got the best. | ||
| Scott Cuomo. | ||
| He's Scott Cuomo. | ||
| What am I going to do? | ||
| It's not going to change. | ||
| Short commercial break. | ||
| Michael Pack, we got Jack Bisovic. | ||
| Going to catch up on some news. | ||
| A lot going on today. | ||
| Believe it or not, as mind-blowing as it is. | ||
| Yes, the Syrian, the ISIS leader, I guess, in Syria in the White House today. | ||
| We'll talk all about it. | ||
| Short break, back in a moment. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Here's your host, Stephen K. Bass. | |
| There are very few institutions in world history that have lasted for a quarter of a millennium. | ||
| Very few. | ||
| 250 years. | ||
| Pretty amazing. | ||
| Older than the country. | ||
| PBS, when they first saw this film, rejected it. | ||
| I shouldn't say rejected it. | ||
| They just put it into the lockdown bin. | ||
| We're never going to show it. | ||
| In fact, if President Trump had not won twice, I'll tell PAC's story in the next hour. | ||
| Michael Pack is one of my all-time heroes. | ||
| You talk about tough as bootleather. | ||
| PAC is tough as bootleather because they tried to literally destroy him. | ||
| But this film, and I hadn't seen it on a big screen in a long time, it was so overwhelmingly powerful when I saw it on the big screen with the sound and how beautiful the photography is, or how stunningly it's so realistic and see the photography. | ||
| When you see, you're so proud of these guys that you can understand PBS with their kind of political slant. | ||
| When they first saw it, they go, PAC had to gun deck this. | ||
| This could not just be the average Marines that fought in these three battles. | ||
| It's just two, because each, the first Fallujah crowd's amazing, the Najaf crowd's amazing, and second Fallujah is amazing. | ||
| They had to think in their mind this thing was gun-decked, right? | ||
| That was one of the things. | ||
| I mean, look, we've tried to get it on it every few years for 17 years. | ||
| We've gone through lots of different heads of programming at PBS. | ||
| So they all say different things. | ||
| And who knows what they really think? | ||
| But one of the things they said was I used, I was like central casting that I called from you curated. | ||
| I curated it and I looked for ones that looked good on camera, but I really didn't. | ||
| I found the footage first. | ||
| And although Colonel Cuomo compliments me, I'm not entitled to those compliments. | ||
| Jan Bender, who's going to be on later, was one of the combat cameramen whose footage I used. | ||
| And we used some still photographs by commercial photographers like Lucian Reed. | ||
| And they're the brilliant, it's their eye that's brilliant. | ||
| Lucian Reed risked his own life at Howe House to take these photos. | ||
| Extraordinary photos. | ||
| And Jan Bender in the Second Battle of Fallujah. | ||
| And so I've seen a lot of combat cameraman footage. | ||
| Most of it is because these guys are scared, not great footage. | ||
| Jan's footage was actually good footage. | ||
| So I rely on them. | ||
| And I had the footage, and then we look for the people in the footage. | ||
| You know, once you found Jan Bender, you got to go with the footage of the people, his squad that's in the footage. | ||
| I can't cast them. | ||
| I can't pretend different people are in them. | ||
| I had like no power over that. | ||
| You know, PBS attributes more power to me than I've got. | ||
| But they said other things too. | ||
| They would say at one point that it was too pro-military. | ||
| Not sure what that meant. | ||
| At one point, they said, even though this is contrary to the essence of the film, that I needed to put in more political, historical background. | ||
| I needed to interview politicians. | ||
| No, should we or shouldn't be in the war? | ||
| So they wanted me to do that. | ||
| The film was already 90 minutes, right? | ||
| They wanted me to add whatever, 15 more minutes, and they wanted to give me any money to do it. | ||
| I didn't want to do it anyway. | ||
| And so who knows? | ||
| I mean, a lot of these things were fancy ways of saying no. | ||
| The thing they never said and couldn't say is it isn't a good film. | ||
| And I've had 15 films broadcast nationally on PBS, including another one with you on Admiral Rickover, after you know, after this one was finished. | ||
| And so they couldn't say it was a bad film. | ||
| So they had to think of things to say. | ||
| And these are the things they said. | ||
| But I do think it's courageous of the current president, Paula Kerger, to reverse those 17 years of no's and give us a yes, as you say, on the 250th birthday of the Marine Corps and the day before Veterans Day. | ||
| And she did that knowing that part of the story would be the 17-year delay. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And that can't, it's not a good look for PBS, and she did it anyway. | ||
| So I think that's a courageous stand on Paula's part. | ||
| Very courageous, incredible. | ||
| We're going to have Lindell in a second. | ||
| We've got a whole second hour to go here. | ||
| And I think Posa, we're going to try to get Posa was up at Philadelphia today, a very moving commemoration of the Marines 250. | ||
| One of the groups that fought in Vietnam had a memorial at the Vietnam Memorial for all the fallen, all the KIAs, all their brothers in this band of brothers that died there. | ||
| And they read the individual names and they rung a bell every time. | ||
| It was incredibly moving. | ||
| In the cold and in the rain, Jack Bisovic was there, and then Jack was able to interview some of the individuals, Ernie Priate, and his team, which is just the camaraderie those guys have, you know, what, 50, 60 years after the event is just absolutely extraordinary. | ||
| So we're going to get to that in the second hour. | ||
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| Mike Lindell. | ||
| Today, they gave the pardons for the Trump electors, right? | ||
| Now, these are federal pardons, not state pardons. | ||
| We had Ed Martin in at the beginning. | ||
| Ed Martin was dropping the hammer. | ||
| He's the pardon czar. | ||
| Sir, you've been so involved in this. | ||
| Tell me what you think. | ||
| And then I need the war room posse needs your Veterans Day special, sir. | ||
| Right on. | ||
| Well, I mean, the pardons are great, but everyone's been texting me. | ||
| Mike, are you going to get pardoned for all your battles? | ||
| And you can't get pardoned for lawfare. | ||
| So the law fare against me, though all that stuff's still sitting out there. | ||
| You can look at mypillowtrial.com. | ||
| MyPillow has been sued over and over again for defamation, and that's what we keep fighting daily. | ||
| And then that, and plus Arctic Frost against us. | ||
| So I wish I could get pardoned for all that, for just speaking up against our government private contractors. | ||
| But what we do, we just keep fighting back. | ||
| And the way we fight back is to give you the specials, you guys. | ||
| This is a war room made in America sale, especially for Veterans Day tomorrow. | ||
| You guys, you can get as many as you want, $14.98. | ||
| We brought back the MyPillows, $14.98 for the standard. | ||
| Queens and Kings, just a few dollars more. | ||
| But if you go to mypillow.com forward slash war room, you guys, there it is, the Made in the USA sale. | ||
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| Okay, we'll see you tomorrow in the 10 o'clock or 11 o'clock hour on Veterans Day. | ||
| Stick around. |
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