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June 6, 2024 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
55:32
Interview with CIA whistleblower Pedro Israel Orta, author of 'The Broken Whistle
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Welcome to today's interview on Brighteon.com.
I'm Mike Adams, the founder of Brighteon, and today we're joined by a first-time guest, a fascinating man.
He is a former CIA operations officer and analyst and served many other roles inside the CIA, and he's also become a whistleblower.
His name is Pedro Israel Orta, and his book is called The Broken Whistle, A Deep State Run Amok.
His website is PedroIsraelOrta.com, and he has a movie there.
If you go to the movie tab, you can see it, and it's called Deep State Gangsters as well.
So welcome, Mr. Orta, to the show today.
It's an honor to have you on, sir.
Mike.
Pleasure to be on your show today.
Thank you so much.
Well, thank you for taking the time to join us and I was really intrigued by your book.
I haven't read it cover to cover, but I've scanned parts of it and I'm really fascinated by your message.
So let's start with your background and what was your history with the CIA and what brought you to the point where you are now as a whistleblower and author?
Well, I'm really a mid-career CIA hire.
By the time I entered the CIA, I had to work 14 years in the Miami business world.
I had to go to school at night to finally get my Bachelor of Arts, Political Science, and International Relations.
I'm a product of the Cuban emigres who fled Cuba in the early 60s, fleeing the tyranny of Castro's Cuba.
So I witnessed firsthand the effects of tyranny on families.
And I had to work full-time, study full-time.
Almost full time at night.
That led to a graduate fellowship at the CIA. I started working for the CIA as an analyst, a graduate fellow, converted to a staff officer, and I did a variety of functions at the CIA. I did very well as an analyst, earning some exceptional performance awards.
I did president's daily briefs, briefed many senior government officials, wrote finished intelligence products.
And at one point in time, I just needed to get out of the analytical realm so that thrust me into operations.
It took me out to Iraq, Afghanistan, a country that I cannot name.
It was a variety of covert action work, human operations, counterterrorism work, some interagency liaison work with other government entities in the U.S. military.
I even ended up in Afghanistan doing counterintelligence.
Ultimately, I end up back at the CIA headquarters area where I started doing some technical targeting work, technical intelligence officer type work, targeting work in counterterrorism that took me out back to the Middle East working on high value targets.
And all these accomplishments led to Being offered an opportunity to be a deputy chief of base in Afghanistan.
Wow, that's huge.
That's huge.
I mean, they don't give you a deputy chief of base or a chief of base position unless they believe you are very well qualified for that position.
And really, that's where I ran into a serious problem where I had to Yeah, and that's your book right now, The Broken Whistle, correct?
Wait, let me bring that up on the screen again for people to see The Broken Whistle.
And I titled it The Broken Whistle for one particular reason.
I blew the whistle on fraud, waste, abuse of authority, significant and specific endangerment of public safety, and some personal harassment issues in that Afghanistan-based 2014-2015.
But the worst part wasn't necessarily that I blew the whistle on these things, although it was bad, considering their lives were being endangered.
But ultimately what happened is the process to blow the whistle And to seek protection if the reprisals are taken against you is broken.
I started blowing the whistle on the broken whistle.
And I started blowing the whistle not just internally to the leadership of the CIA, but externally to the Director of National Intelligence and Congress.
I even used the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act.
And they refused to file my disclosures.
They wouldn't respond to me.
They told me we don't send these things to Congress.
They gave excuse after excuse after excuse.
And ultimately, when I start escalating, they send in the CIA office of security to basically be a big, bad bully to threaten me.
We can take the job away from you, so you better shut up.
And at that point in time, when I escalate again to the director of CIA, director of national intelligence, and even to the director of security, saying, you know, we got a serious problem here.
If you take security so seriously, why not sit and talk to me?
Let's go over these issues.
And they basically send in the personnel security division chief for the office of security to threaten me.
You will sign this letter of warning.
If you don't, I will take your clearance away from you and I will fire you.
At that point in time, he committed an act of reprisal.
He was threatening to take personal actions against me for my whistleblowing, which was lawful whistleblowing.
So I immediately disclosed that to the DNI, Director of National Intelligence, Daniel Coates.
The Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence, Susan Gordon.
The Director of Central Intelligence, Mike Pompeo.
He's number three, Brian Bulatow.
Forget Gina Haspel.
She's basically a defender of the bureaucracy.
So they did nothing.
And Congress was notified through the official channels at CIA Office of Congressional Affairs.
But they let basically, who I name in the book, Salvatore, to execute his perfect Christmas massacre, because this was literally over the Christmas holiday.
To basically run a surveillance operation and be on the lookout list type operation to deny me entry into a building.
And I was basically kicked out of the CIA, put through the personnel evaluation board process, which is really a kangaroo court, call it what it is.
Because I've got basically the Office of General Counsel, the Office of Medical Services, and a few others on that board that only make a recommendation to the Director of Security, for that matter, the Deputy Director of Security, who has the final say of what happened.
So he can basically tell the board, nah, we're not going to do what you tell us to do.
We wanted to fire this guy, we're going to fire him.
So they have to do that.
Let me back up a little bit and ask you a few other questions up front.
So Just in terms of you starting with the CIA, as I understand it, you joined the CIA in good faith.
Your family had escaped, as you said, Cuba.
You were, in essence, living the American dream, or at least invested in the American dream, the American ideals of freedom and liberty and liberal democracy around the world, the new rules-based order, all that.
And stop me if I say anything incorrect here.
And then you're working in the CIA, like you said, counterterrorism, various intelligence operations, all kinds of things.
You then witnessed a gross abuse of power.
And can you tell us what that is?
I know it's detailed more in your book, but tell us here what exactly compelled you to blow the whistle.
The first instance, Afghanistan 2015, early 2015.
We were in Afghanistan to fight a war.
As a deputy chief of base and a chief of base, our number one priority is the safety of personnel.
We were mandated with training, personnel policies, multiple briefings, one-on-one with senior leaders in a group setting.
We're told, these are the things that you will do.
These are the things you will not do.
If you see X, Y, and Z, you will address it and deal with it immediately.
Here I was, working for a chief of base, who couldn't handle the extreme environment of a war zone.
The lack of food, shall we say, decent food.
I mean, there was food.
It was probably one of the better places I had found in a war zone for food, but still.
This officer had served in Europe prior to Afghanistan, so it was quite a shock.
Going from a cafe in Milan or a cafe in Paris to eating meals at what the military calls a DFAC. It's not quite the same.
You've got the dirt.
You've got the grind.
You're literally on call 24 hours, seven days a week.
You're working seven days a week.
We're being constantly bombarded by indirect rocket attacks that, you know, we would be sleeping and all of a sudden we will hear a kaboom, you know, and then you hear the sirens blow off.
So you have to run off the bed, you know, you have to account for all personnel.
You have to find out what's going on.
Is everybody okay?
Where did the rocket hit?
Are we still on alert?
Not on alert?
Very chaotic and The most sensitive part about this is this was a very fine woman who undoubtedly, you know, she was very well prepared for other jobs, but she had very little to no Warzone experience.
And in this particular case, she had young sons back in the Washington, D.C. area who she was very depressed that she was away from her sons and she was concerned about their lack of food and so forth.
So in this space, she starts adopting sons, treating other military officers or actually enlisted personnel as they were sons.
We had a two-man shop, communication shop.
The younger officer worked 8 a.m.
to 8 p.m., the older one 8 p.m.
to 8 a.m., And she babied and treated this younger officer that worked from 8 a.m.
to 8 p.m.
like a son and marginalized the older officer that worked from 8 p.m.
to 8 a.m.
And in this situation, the only thing I couldn't do...
Well, I'm sorry to interrupt, but so far none of that sounds...
Like a serious violation of anything at the moment.
She's favoring some soldiers.
Well, and she was sending us out for food and for yoga classes in places where rockets would impact.
And in one of those trips, a rocket did impact.
And you've got to bring a little bit of context here.
Back up to 2009, where the CIA had sent out an unqualified woman to serve as the chief of base for COAST, And her decision making in Coast in 2009 led to a suicide bomber attacking a group of CIA officers that killed her and six others.
In the context of what we were supposed to be doing, we were not meeting with the military.
The military was constantly asking me, why aren't you meeting with us?
We really need to see you.
I mean, I had to tell them we were busy, and we were busy basically being a social club on steroids, not completing the mission of warfighting, endangering personnel life, and creating a harassment issue in the workforce.
You're saying that her actions...
Because of what you're saying is her incompetence, that she put the lives and safety of your personnel, your colleagues, at risk because they were not properly integrating or meeting with local law enforcement and not properly engaged in defensive planning and things like that.
Is that a fair assessment?
There's an element of that because a lot of the meetings we're having with the military were for Defense purposes, defending the base, looking out for each other as far as suicide bombers, indirect fire, intelligence sharing, getting information for CIA operations, not just in that base, but in other bases in Afghanistan.
I mean, there was one situation where we had a serious incident in one base, and I had to run off and meet with some military colleagues in this particular base to get the information that we needed.
But because prior to when the situation blew up, I had built those relationships, I was able to get the information.
The final point of this is, you're right.
These are really, in the grand scheme of things, despite the fact that potentially lives were at risk, these were easy problems to resolve.
Instead, ultimately what would happen here is, The situation between these two communicators would blow up, and this is where I had to make a decision.
Do I speak truth to power, or do I basically hang an innocent man?
And in this particular case, she started falsely accusing this man of drawing a weapon.
She drew a line that, you know, I have morals, I have ethics, In order to move up the chain of command, I'm not going to step over people and bulldoze people and falsely accuse people of doing things they didn't do.
So by taking a stand for righteousness and speaking truth to power, I found myself being kicked out of that base, going back to CIA headquarters.
And now I'm having to face what I call the devils of CIA headquarters.
Where it seems like every office at CIA was lined up against me to try to get me kicked out of the CIA. Well, there's a culture, as I understand it, but of course, let me pose the question to you.
In the CIA, there's a very strong culture of you go along to get along.
Like, you're either with our culture or you're going to become our enemy and we're going to find a way to get you out.
Did you then very quickly find yourself on the outside of that culture?
I found myself on the outside of that culture.
That culture is the bureaucracy is always right, even if it's wrong.
And you have to play ball by our rules, whether we're wrong or not.
Well, exactly.
But, you know, I think this may be an extension of the overall policy and philosophy of what the CIA has become.
And this is a question I have for you.
I think the average American, especially people watching this show, would say that the CIA lacks any oversight and accountability because obviously the agency can always say, well, that's a national security secret.
How dare you even ask Mr.
Congressman or Congresswoman or Senator?
You can't ask.
These are secrets.
We can do whatever the hell we want, basically, is the attitude.
But it seems like that pervades even inside the CIA. So that's the point of the book.
The main thesis of the book is a lack of congressional oversight over the CIA is what has caused the CIA to run amok.
We are dealing with the same problems of the 50s and the 60s that were exposed in the 70s of the Church Committee that were reportedly to a degree corrected with the Church Committee findings that led to a more robust Senate Select Committee of Intelligence, the House Permanent Select Committee of Intelligence to do oversight But the reality is that that congressional oversight is extremely deficient and lacking.
So the CIA knows that it can get away with certain violations, and they do so.
There have been instances of the CIA breaking laws, and when Congress comes looking for accountability, the CIA basically flips their middle finger, telling Congress, F you.
We're not going to give you the information.
And there's one specific example written in my book about that, dealing with whistleblower protections.
Well, can I... Let me just...
Play the other side here for a moment, but Congress isn't trustworthy, okay?
So if you're the CIA, I mean, we have members of Congress that are actual idiots, as you well know.
We have members of Congress that think the moon is made of gas, or that if you put too many troops on the island of Guam, that the island will capsize and sink.
And these are actual on-the-record statements from members of Congress.
If you're the CIA, isn't it accurate?
And I'm not defending their actions, just to be clear.
I'm prompting you to answer this.
But if you're the CIA, isn't it an accurate claim to say, well, we can't tell Congress all these things we're doing because, number one, they're not qualified to understand this, and secondly, they're not trustworthy.
They're going to leak it for their campaign purposes, and they're going to compromise and endanger the lives of CIA operatives all over the world.
Is that a fair answer?
Well, there's a couple of elements here.
One of them is at times Congress really doesn't want to know.
Yeah.
I mean, there's there's instances of Congress saying we really don't want to know the details of what you're doing.
And that's been documented.
Another element of this is where the CIA seeks always to protect itself.
So even if they make some grave mistakes, there's a lot of spin.
There's a lot of shape the narrative.
So they will tweak truth into half truths or even lies and presented to Congress as such.
Sure.
But now, there is an element here of deficiency in oversight through ill-prepared congressmen.
I mean, my goodness, we had Senator Burr from North Carolina as the chairman of the Senate Select Committee of Intelligence, and prior to his tenure as a senator, He was in lawnmower sales.
He was a sales manager for a lawnmower company.
Spinning blades?
Maybe he could cut the budget occasionally.
I don't know.
And there's an element of truth there.
So you've got career bureaucrats who've been doing the intelligence work for decades at times.
Yeah, they're more knowledgeable than Congress.
There's truth to that.
But our government is a government of checks and balances.
Supposed to be, right.
If Congress demands to see something, they're supposed to be given the information in a timely manner with transparency, and that's not the case.
That's right.
Now, here's another element, too, that happens.
Realize that although you have senators and representatives that sit in these committees, The bulk of the work is done by staffers.
And in the case of staffers, the staffers are not like the representatives and the senators.
A senator or a representative gets a clearance just by being a senator and a representative, particularly if you are in a national security oversight committee.
But the staffers have to go through a robust vetting process to get a clearance.
And those clearances are controlled by the intelligence community.
If the CIA, the FBI or DIA, NSA does not want to give a clearance to somebody, they will say, no, we're not giving a clearance to them.
And we saw this with President Trump early on in his administration.
He had nominated some personnel who were in sensitive national security presidentially appointed positions.
The intelligence community said, no, we're not giving a clearance to that person.
And there was nothing that they could do unless the president wanted to override it.
But in the case of Congress, Congress can't override the intelligence community over these clearance issues.
Well, you speak to checks and balances, and I completely agree with you.
I think our audience does as well, that we need checks and balances.
And the CIA in particular, my understanding and my question to you, is it seems that even though its mandate is to operate outside of CONUS, You know, outside the United States, it is increasingly becoming involved in domestic politics, domestic intelligence operations, collusion with big tech, Wikipedia, to push specific narratives, to blacklist and deplatform certain voices, such as my own, by the way.
And if there were checks and balances, this wouldn't be happening.
But it seems like the CIA does whatever it wants, whether it's lawful or not.
That is true.
I mean, they're able to work their way around some restrictions by some creative means.
I mean, I witnessed firsthand how the lawyers would circumvent restrictions.
They find every single loophole they can possibly find.
It's like, imagine a fence and you stand on the fence and it's like, okay, it's illegal to stand inside this area and But you straddle the fence and you're leaning into it, but you're still on the fence.
One way this is done is, if you are a counterterrorism subject or a counterintelligence subject, in other words, there's reasons to believe that you are a counterintelligence threat or a counterterrorism threat to the United States, the CIA actually can work domestically on those cases as long as they're working with the FBI and the FBI has the lead.
So the reality is the FBI and the CIA work hand in hand domestically.
And that's one way the CIA can't work inside the United States.
Well, that's very concerning because we're now seeing, and I'm not asking you to comment on...
This particular situation.
If you want to, that's fine.
But with Israel and the pro-Palestine student protesters in the United States, we're seeing governors like the governor of our state, Texas, make declarations that say that all of these student protesters, including some academics and professors, should be arrested and imprisoned.
And according to some members, mostly of the GOP in the Senate, such as Senator Ted Cruz and others, that they are seeking to criminalize any student on campus who says something like free Palestine, let's say, and to declare them terrorists.
Now, that would trigger potentially then, according to what you're saying, that the FBI could get involved with a domestic terrorist investigation and then the CIA could get involved.
As long as they call them terrorists, they could kidnap these students, take them to a black site, torture them for information.
What's to stop that from happening?
I mean, there's nothing that can stop it if they're declared terrorism subjects a threat to the United States.
And that's happening.
And potentially, I can't answer if that has happened with any student, but we have seen many cases of such cases during the war on terrorism where subjects were basically put on no-fly lists.
In some cases, people were obviously kidnapped and extradited, or in some cases, kidnapped and taken to a black site and tortured.
We can go back to the Senator Feinstein investigation on extradition and torture, and it's in there.
But what's disturbing about all of this is that the U.S. then attempts to take this righteous moral position This posture to the rest of the world.
Lecturing, for example, Putin and Russia say, you're evil because we are the standard of human rights, America.
We don't do all these crazy things.
Or lecturing China, for example.
How dare you, China, the way you're treating the Uyghurs?
We don't do that in America, but we do do that in America.
Yeah.
It's called the weaponization of government power, which goes into the movie, the documentary that's tied to my book, Deep State Gangsters.
We do have a weaponized government that is abusing its authorities.
And one specific area where we see this is with the technical surveillance, where America's entire communications infrastructure can easily be tapped into by the intelligence community.
And everything that you type on a computer, on a phone or every phone call you make, and even potentially this session that we're having right now could be surveilled or stored in the database and pulled up at times under those counterterrorism authorities without a need for a warrant.
Well, absolutely.
We have no doubt that it will be transcribed and archived.
In fact, we will transcribe it and ourselves as well.
We'll do it for them.
We'll do it for them.
I mean, they're going to do it.
Deep State Gangsters is the film.
When does this come out again?
Sometime probably close to Labor Day.
Production is almost complete.
We've got John Kiriakou, Nate Kane in it.
We've got another FBI whistleblower lined up, myself, and we've got two commentators, Lee Smith and J. Michael Waller.
Okay, I don't recognize any of those names, but it sounds like they're important whistleblowers.
Is that mostly who they are?
John Kiriakou blew the whistle on the CIA torture program.
Okay, I apologize.
It's not my wheelhouse.
I don't...
Yeah, his case is very significant, and the government came after him, again, through abuses of power.
Okay.
That story is where he wrote his own book.
Basically, they...
The order was, DCI Brennan told the FBI, I want this man charged for crime.
Do it.
And the DOJ had previously investigated the Kiriakou case and found no crime.
Kiriakou is the way to pronounce his name.
My apologies.
So they basically cooked up a way to creatively prosecute him.
him.
And the problem that we run into is if you get indicted with espionage charges or any any federal charges, they like to do a stacked indictment.
Yes.
That makes it really difficult for you to defend yourself when you have unless you have literally hundreds, if not millions of dollars.
It takes literally millions of dollars to defend yourself from some of these criminal charges.
And not only that, but the venue in which you're going to be tried is either going to be the D.C. court or for that matter, usually the Eastern District of Virginia.
And these courts are significantly biased against anyone that's against the government in any form or fashion.
And there's another whistleblower out there, Jeffrey Sterling, who there is no proof whatsoever that he leaked any national security intelligence to a reporter.
with the espionage act a stacked diamond as usual and they prosecuted him on circumstantial evidence and based on circumstantial evidence that wasn't uh as they call what's the the uh it has to be beyond any reasonable doubt it was not beyond any reasonable doubt just circumstantial But in a court that's biased, a stacked indictment, they basically declared that he was guilty and he went to jail.
Well, I don't know how you feel about Donald Trump, but clearly what they've done to him is a very strong example of the weaponization of the legal system and the intelligence community.
I mean, the whole anti-Trump dossier, the Russia collusion hoax as it was, and now Trump being dragged through this trial in New York where they can't even really name a crime that he allegedly committed.
Yeah.
Well, the first impeachment, the Ukraine whistleblower, I get into it in chapter one of my book, and then later on in the book I go over my own Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act disclosures.
Here we have a case that the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel ruled that this so-called intelligence whistleblower The Ukraine whistleblower, the telephone call, was not a whistleblower according to the law.
And his disclosures were not about intelligence activities.
So this was not an ICWPA, Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act disclosure.
Yet Congress jumped on it.
The media pounced on it.
Political pundits, activist groups, everybody came to support this whistleblower.
And it led to an impeachment.
But in my case, when I used this intelligence community whistleblower protection act with a first-hand disclosure of having knowledge firsthand, they failed to process my disclosures.
They failed to respond to me one time.
I followed up a second time.
I followed up a third time.
Ultimately, I had an attorney.
We creatively found a way to get the It engaged.
Congress asked for some of the things.
The CIA said, we don't pass all those materials to Congress.
They were refusing to send everything I needed to send to Congress.
Lack of oversight.
And whatever Congress got, I have no idea to this day what they got.
And ultimately what happens is in my entire termination process, eventually the ICIG, Office of Inspector General for the Intelligence Committee, sends me a form that says, if I have first-hand information, I can file on ICWPA. And the way it works is, within 14 days, they have to make a determination whether it is or not a disclosure that Congress needs to know.
And if Congress needs to know, they have one week to pass it to the DNI, Director of National Intelligence, and then within 21 days, the Director of National Intelligence sends it to Congress.
In this particular case with Trump, they completely violated all those.
Completely.
The Inspector General for the Intelligence Community notified Congress.
That's a violation of law.
The Congress was immediately protecting this whistleblower.
And more importantly, it was a hearsay complaint, which according to the form that they gave me, didn't even meet the requirement of a whistleblower protection act.
Well, it was clearly Trump was being railroaded from day one.
That's obvious.
But let's shift gears and let me ask you then.
Now that you're no longer employed by the CIA and you're making this film, you're an author, I'm curious what you are doing in your post-CIA career, and then more importantly, Do you feel like you're still being threatened?
Because you still represent now, I think, as a non-official whistleblower, as a former CIA officer, making this film and writing books and doing this interview, for example.
Some people inside the CIA might perceive you as even a greater threat now than you were when you were inside the system.
Well...
There's validity to that claim that I could be a threat to them and that they could come after me.
But that's where I have to abide by the law.
And the book was submitted to the Pre-Publication Review Board.
And what is published is exactly what they approved for me to publish.
So it does have some redactions that are in black.
As long as I don't violate my non-disclosure agreement and my secrecy agreement and don't disclose national security information, I violate no laws.
And if they decide to come after me, I can use my constitutional right to plead the fifth and keep my mouth shut.
Which, by the way, if you ever get a knock on the door by the FBI or any federal agent, the correct answer is, I need to get back to you with a lawyer.
And if you ever get questioned, make sure that there's a warrant in place that demands you get questioned or a subpoena that demands you get questioned.
And when you do get questioned, I would want to make sure that that is being duly noted, recorded by a lawyer on your side and with witnesses on your side.
Because you never want to find yourself in a situation like General Flynn found himself with the FBI or I found myself with some security officers where both of us were questioned and what we said was turned around, perverted and written up in a different way and then it was then used against us.
Well, the FBI is famous for doing that.
They do not record the interactions.
They make notes and then they alter the notes.
Yeah, that's accurate.
Yes, yes.
Well, so what do you want to see happen here?
More oversight or what exactly?
What do you think would resolve this issue so that the CIA would no longer...
Just operate and do whatever it wants without any oversight.
It's a tough question to answer as far as how can we fix these problems.
Ultimately my aim is to fix these problems.
One area is the lack of engagement by the American populace, the American people.
I mean, we've got people who refuse to vote.
The primaries, 20-30% turnout.
Of course, we're going to end up electing some buffoons into Congress.
The American people need to be more engaged, get involved to ensure that they are sending the best people they can send to Washington.
And not only that, but more importantly, securing their election systems at the state and city levels to ensure that we can have honest elections.
On the other hand, the element of oversight.
My book is basically like a shot across the bow of a boat, Congress, that we have serious problems in this country because you're failing to do your oversight.
And we have just witnessed that in the past couple of weeks, months.
With the Republicans caving in and basically giving these Democrats all they want, particularly with the FISA reauthorization bill.
As long as we continue to give the intelligence community what they want and not hold them accountable, powers will be weaponized against us.
Well, Speaker Johnson, of course, has turned out to be, well...
Very problematic in terms of what he used to promise, you know, America first, pro-liberty, rule of law, and then he jumps in and reauthorizes, leads the reauthorization of FISA. And then send $95 billion to Ukraine and Israel and other countries without a single dollar to protect the U.S. border.
I would think that most of our audience, Mr.
Orta, believes that Congress is gone.
With few exceptions, like Representative Thomas Massey in the House, and let's say Senator Paul in the Senate, and some other exceptions like that.
Most of Congress is already gone.
They've sold out America.
If they were going to do anything, they would have protected the border 10 years ago.
Do you get a sense that it's too far gone, or is there still a chance you think that we could turn this around and restore the republic?
I have serious concerns with Washington Congress and that military intelligence industrial complex.
I don't know if we can ever fix this problem unless we elect a president that's going to be powerful enough to crush it as President Kennedy wanted to do, shatter the CIA into a thousand pieces.
It's going to take a very strong president with correct appointments into positions of power to enforce such an agenda.
On the congressional end, we need to ensure that strong congressional leaders are serving in the committees that have oversight over these issues and not just congressmen or senators who are engaged in what I call political theater, grandstanding, and showmanship.
Now, there's another element to this.
The states have a lot of power.
Governors have a lot of power.
Governors need to step up to the plate and begin to exercise their powers as governor of states to start combating.
And I don't mean combat as in taking insurrection or rebellious type acts.
I'm talking about using every legal power available, using their executive fiat powers to start challenging the overreach of the federal government power.
Well, to some extent that is happening.
The Tenth Amendment is having a resurgence right now.
Some states are nullifying certain federal laws or regulations such as those by the ATF. Some states are working to legalize firearm suppressors domestically.
I think Texas is one of those, by the way.
We saw during the Trump administration many states declaring themselves to be sanctuary status, which means they will not comply with federal illegal immigration laws or deportation laws.
And now with the Biden administration in place, we're seeing sort of the flip side of that, of some states saying they will not go along with federal law enforcement, even Texas defying The federal government's desires to keep the Texas southern border wide open, to allow unlimited illegal immigration into the country.
So it seems to me that what you just mentioned is a process that is already happening.
Many states are, in essence, carrying out what you might call a soft secession from the federal government.
Do you see that happening as well?
That that is happening, and it's been...
A slow process, and it's been limited in nature with a few key states paving the way, like Texas.
But we need every single state in the Union to follow such a path.
And in most cases, each state has their own constitution, and each state is basically structured in the same way the federal government is structured, with the checks and balances of their own Senate, the House of Representatives, and the Senate.
The judiciary branch with the governor, executive branch.
So we need more state legislatures to step up to the plate and begin to take more robust actions and not just wait for their governors to take the lead.
Okay, great answer, and I think that process is underway.
All right, let me shift gears and ask you a what-if question, and of course I do not expect you, and I know you wouldn't violate your non-disclosure agreements in any way, but my question is, what if, you know, in 1991 the Soviet Union suffered a catastrophic collapse, collapse of their currency, of their centralized government structure?
Should such a similar collapse occur in Washington, D.C.? Let's say the dollar is rejected, the Treasury defaults on debt, which some of my other guests believe is going to happen at some point here relatively soon.
It seems to me that the CIA... Well, my question is, what would the CIA do?
Because the CIA is an infrastructure.
It's an infrastructure.
It's a business model.
The CIA has its own revenues.
It has its own enforcement division.
It has guys with guns, very well-trained guys.
It has intelligence and surveillance data.
It's got blackmail information on lots of people.
It has the ability to gather intel.
It's got operatives all over the world.
What would the CIA do, in your opinion, if the central government collapsed?
In my opinion, from what I see how our government structures are framed and how they operate, if we have just a currency collapse and the federal government basically implodes, the power of the federal bureaucracy is going to also implode.
And ultimately, it's going to be up to the states and the local counties and the local cities to exert some kind of governance in this chaos.
So, at that point in time, the states that are well prepared to handle such a catastrophe will be much better off than those that are not.
Like, I would not want to find myself in a place like Chicago or New York if this thing happens, okay?
Because I can't even have a gun to defend myself.
Yeah.
What about the CIA stations in other countries?
You know, you have many, I mean, thousands of CIA employees and operatives stationed all over the world, I would imagine.
And if Washington implodes, what happens to all those people?
I mean, if people can't be paid, you can't work for free for the government.
That's against the law.
It's like a government shutdown.
Basically, at that point in time, they're frozen in place.
They can't work.
And in some cases, they'll probably be recalled and sent home.
No government employee can actually work for free.
That's against the law.
Every time we had a government shutdown, you were either named essential or non-essential.
And if you were essential, there was a loophole in place that would allow you to work while you weren't getting paid.
All right, so then let me ask the next question, which is if the CIA offices or stations were shut down across, let's say, the Middle East, across Southeast Asia, Europe, Eastern Europe in particular, what do Europe, Eastern Europe in particular, what do you think the impact would be in terms of the dynamics of what other nations would respond with if the CIA stations were no longer operational?
Most people don't realize that a lot of government work is called busy work.
The actual hardcore work that yields productive results is probably, you know, you can follow the 80-20% to 20-80%.
Most CIA assets are just basically career-enhancing statistics so that case officers can get promoted, so that they can generate intelligence reports, so that a station can say we're generating X amount of intelligence reports and running X amount of assets.
Historically, for any intelligence agency, whether it's in the U.S., whether it's China, whether it's the Soviet Union, now Russia, or for that matter, the Israelis, usually it's volunteers, people who volunteer and say, hey, I want to be a spy for you and give you information.
You've got the Russian Pankovsky case, you've got the U.S. Walker case, the Hanson case, and So, minimal impact, in my opinion, as far as intelligence collection.
And at the same time, since we rely so much on SIGINT collection, we can still continue to do SIGINT collection in such a scenario.
Okay.
Well, that's interesting because it seems like you're saying that these stations around the world aren't really achieving much other than producing reports.
Yeah.
I mean, you can quantify as far as impact.
There's a lot of activity that's not really productivity, and it's just busy work.
Well, my company's building a very elaborate AI engine.
We could produce all those reports.
Just out of AI. I mean, we could have stations of AI-generated reports.
Here, you want to report his reports.
Statistics, statistics.
You don't even need humans to do that.
No, I mean, nowadays, technology has taken over so many things that you can use technology to do a lot of the intelligence processing, and that's what's actually done.
AI, big point right there.
The OSINT, Open Source Intelligence, is a huge field with tremendous potential.
And on that note, human intelligence collection is becoming much more complicated and complex almost to the point that in some places you cannot conduct human intelligence operations because of all the intelligence collections and mechanisms in place like the smart cities that have all the surveillance cameras.
How do you do intelligence collection of human sources in such a city?
You almost can't because you got to go find black spots the cameras are not seeing you.
Right.
Okay, let me ask an extension to all of this.
If the CIA is doing any kind of a decent job collecting intelligence and signals analysis and so on, you would think that that information would get to the political decision-makers In the State Department, Homeland Security, in the Biden administration, and so on.
And perhaps this is one of the frustrations of working in the CIA is that even if you produce good, solid intel, the political types completely ignore it or they're too stupid to recognize it.
Perhaps.
I'll let you answer it, but let me finish my question.
So why is it that The State Department, the Biden administration, and so on are so wrong about everything, especially, for example, Ukraine and Russia situation.
They were telling us since the summer of 2022 that Ukraine was going to defeat Russia, that Russia was weak, that Russia's currency was going to collapse.
Every single thing they've told us has been wrong.
How can they be wrong so consistently if they're getting any kind of decent information from the CIA? Yeah.
There's an element of groupthink to it where people think the same and you can't be an outlier.
And there's also the taskings that get to the intelligence community where these principles, these leaders, are asking questions.
And the questions they're asking are literally questions that reinforce their world beliefs and their conclusions and what they believe that is correct.
So it produces an atmosphere, a scenario in which They're just feeding their own beliefs.
Russia is enemy number one.
We want intelligence that shows us that Russia is enemy number one.
So the intelligence community goes out and produces reports that show them that Russia is a threat.
So, I mean, pardon my language, but it sounds like you're describing much of what the CIA does as cognitive masturbation.
In many ways, that's what it is.
I mean, we see it with the press.
That's what the press does.
The press continually harps out what they want people to read and hear and see.
It's propaganda.
For that matter, I call the Office of Public Affairs, the CIA, the Office of Propaganda Affairs, because they're there to shape and influence the media with what they want the narrative to be.
Absolutely.
Alright, well, wow.
First of all, this has been a fascinating discussion.
We're approaching the final minutes here.
What would you like to leave our audience with We've covered a lot of subjects, but what else is on your mind?
Well, the conclusion of my book and the documentary, Deep State Gangsters and the Broken Whistle Deep State Run Amok, the bottom line is we are spiraling downward to a tyrannical form of government, weaponized government power.
And if we do not rise up and use our constitutional republic mechanisms to We will lose our country.
I like what Liz Truss, the short Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, wrote in her book, 10 Years to Save the West.
Look at Venezuela.
All it took for a prosperous country with significant oil reserves, you know, a robust middle class, with the wrong leader coming in, Chavez, within 10 years, he destroyed that nation.
We could find ourselves going that same path.
And that's basically the clarion call of the broken whistle.
I show people how they weaponize their powers against me, how they are corrupt and refuse to obey and follow the laws, how Congress refuses to do oversight, and what it all means is who will speak for you when they come looking for you is going to be dependent on who you speak up for.
Do you think that Trump would make a significant change and would he put in place a D&I who would be very effective and so on?
I mean, he has a mandate to really strongly reform the intelligence community if he gets elected again.
If Trump gets elected again, he cannot make the mistakes he made in his first administration of putting in Rens Priebus, William Sessions, Mike Pompeo, Pence.
Right.
I call them deep state stooges.
He's going to have to put in people that are going to be very strong and forceful and clean up these bureaucracies.
Well, I agree with you, but I don't see any sign that Trump is moving in that direction, by the way.
He appears to be continuing to surround himself by the same kind of people like the Mike Pompeo's of the world that essentially refuse to carry out his wishes in his first administration.
It's a valid point.
I mean, that's one concern I've got with Trump.
Can he deliver on draining the swamp?
He failed the first time.
The second time, you know, first of all, I'm not even too sure they're going to allow him to be the Republican nominee.
I hear rumors most recently that, you know, should he get convicted here in New York, that they're going to find a way to basically take him off as the Republican nominee.
Well, the people doing that are clearly playing with volatility in a very dangerous way, and I appreciate what you just said, that we can lose our constitutional republic very quickly.
It can happen rapidly, and some would say it's already happening.
I agree with you that we need due process.
We need transparency.
We need checks and balances.
And there is this power cabal that runs Washington right now that is very dangerous, not just internationally, to the free market system of the world, but is very dangerous to the American people.
And if we don't find a way to dismantle that and redistribute power the way...
The branches of government are supposed to be separated and the way the court system is supposed to function, then we're in real trouble.
We may not make it as a nation.
That is the message.
You nailed it.
Alright, well, if you want to see the destruction of America, just watch the behavior of the judge in the current Trump trial in New York.
It's all on parade, right there for the whole world to see.
Okay, well, Pedro Israel Orta, Is our guest today, folks, and his film coming out is called Deep State Gangsters.
His website is pedroisraelorta.com and his book, which is here, here it is, The Broken Whistle, A Deep State Run Amok.
And I want to thank you, Mr.
Orta, for spending time with us today.
This has been a fascinating discussion.
I wish you the best with your film and your future.
Thank you so much.
It's been a pleasure.
All right.
Thank you.
Have a wonderful rest of your afternoon.
And thank all of you for watching today.
Of course, I'm Mike Adams here, the founder of Brighteon.com, where we have free speech protected, and we are not afraid to ask the deep questions.
We love the founding principles of our constitutional republic.
We hope to restore it, and we will continue to bring you fascinating interviews from people who are part of that process of either blowing the whistle or helping to resolve the problems we now face as a nation.
Thank you for watching today.
God bless you all.
I'm Mike Adams.
Take care.
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