Nov. 23, 2024 - Project Camelot
02:49:03
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| Hi there everyone. | |
| Hopefully you can hear me and we're just about to go live with tonight's broadcast. | |
| And so I'm going to check with the chat and make sure that they can hear me okay. | |
| Okay. | |
| Okay. | |
| Can someone in the chat report that they can hear my voice okay? | |
| Okay. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Looks like you're seeing the right picture. | |
| So what I'm doing right now, Scott, is just getting the framing correct. | |
| And I'm waiting for the response from the chat room. | |
| Okay, yes, they're hearing us okay. | |
| Okay, excellent. | |
| Tonight we have a really fascinating broadcast and it's actually pretty exciting. | |
| This whistleblower having come forward very recently and so bear with me and I will be introducing him shortly. | |
| As soon as I can get him on screen here in a good way. | |
| So I think we've got... | |
| Okay, so Scott, you are live on the screen and that should be all good. | |
| I think we're ready to go. | |
| So everyone Welcome and this is Project Camelot Live and I have taken a break from radio for a few weeks so you haven't seen me or heard me I guess online but I'm actually working on a book behind the scenes trying to concentrate on doing that. | |
| and actually a music project and I'm also investigating new whistleblowers and so here we have Scott Bennett and he has come forward it's a really interesting saga of how he actually ended up contacting me and we're going to talk about that just briefly but before we do anything else And even before I introduce you, | |
| Scott, I think you should give your disclaimer, whatever you want to call that, your statement of intent. | |
| I think maybe it might be a better name for it. | |
| And let me make sure that I've got alternate recording devices going. | |
| And I do encourage anyone who's watching this to feel free to record it. | |
| This is information that is important to the general public. | |
| And we want to make sure that we don't lose it. | |
| I've got an external recording device going on as well. | |
| But this will go directly onto livestream when we're done and be available for everyone. | |
| And it will also go onto YouTube as quickly after that as I can get it up. | |
| Sometimes that takes all night, depends on the download and upload times and all this kind of thing. | |
| So, Scott Bennett, welcome, as I said, and please give your statement of intent and then I will go on to introduce you more formally. | |
| Thank you, Kerry. | |
| Let me just say simply that the materials that I will be discussing and answering will be unclassified. | |
| I will not be discussing anything that is related to my top secret security clearance. | |
| I will not be divulging any material that is classified. | |
| All of the material that I will be discussing was shared with me and came to me through others that can be discussed later on relating to the Union Bank of Switzerland and accounts funding terrorism. | |
| But I want to be crystal clear that nothing is going to be discussed that's in any way violating military or security clearance, which I've taken in the past. | |
| I've taken an oath. | |
| As an officer of the United States Army to uphold and defend the Constitution, and I hold that same percent, and I will be very careful to make sure that everything discussed is within very strict discipline parameters and can in no way serve to damage our military members or our mission. | |
| Okay. | |
| Thank you for that. | |
| So, with that in mind, however, Scott did come out in February, and now I'm putting on the screen a copy of his book. | |
| The book he's released is called Shell Game, a military whistleblowing report to Congress, as you can see. | |
| And I'm just going to actually put on the screen also a... | |
| Oops, wrong... | |
| That's the wrong one. | |
| Hold on one second here. | |
| Okay, I don't have that window. I don't have that window. | |
| I think rather than take the time to get the other window, I'm just going to go off the top of my head here. | |
| From my understanding, he is blowing the whistle on the funds that are funding organizations that are contributing to terrorism and basically, instead of preventing it, are making it possible. | |
| And that includes a money trail that goes through Swiss banks as well as the CIA and other individuals. | |
| He was working for Booz Allen Hamilton and this is where he was a counter-terrorism expert for various organizations over time. | |
| Scott, if you want, because this is sort of an annotated version of the introduction, if you'd like to do the rest yourself, be my guest. | |
| Otherwise, I can actually get the page and read what I was going to be reading that seems to have disappeared off my screen. | |
| Well, you know, I'm happy to read a letter. | |
| Actually, I was going through some of the materials, and I stumbled upon a letter, I believe I've shared it with you, that kind of explains the material of this interview, and it may serve as a good introduction. | |
| To the rest of the discussion and guide some of the questions. | |
| And this was a letter that was sent July 11, 2013, one month after Edward Snowden came forth. | |
| So I'm happy to read that if you think it's appropriate. | |
| This was sent to the Honorable Dianne Feinstein, U.S. Senator, Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. | |
| Now, this letter was also sent to Congressman Mike Rogers, the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. | |
| It was also sent to Howard Buck McKeon, Chairman of the Armed Services Committee, and a few others, Patrick Leahy and the Senate or the House Investigations Committee, and over a hundred senators and congressmen. | |
| Let me read this, and we can go on from there. | |
| I think this will give people a good background into everything. | |
| And it's dated July 11, 2013, to the Honorable Senator Dianne Feinstein. | |
| This was sent through military chain of command, military authorities, specifically my military attorney, Major Avi Stone, judge advocate. | |
| And it's titled, House Intelligence Committee Previously Informed About Materials Leaked by Edward Snowden to The Guardian About NSA-CIA Operations Involving Swiss Banks, Brad Birkenfeld, and Terrorist Financing on September 25th, | |
| 2012. Now, let me preface this with the report that was sent on September 25, 2012, was an analysis and distillation of the intelligence materials that were shared with me by Brad Birkenfeld. | |
| The Union Bank of Switzerland whistleblower regarding terrorist finance accounts going through Swiss banks and the subsequent incarceration of him when he tried to share those materials with various military authorities. | |
| So this came to me and I submitted it up the chain of command on September 25, 2012. And absolutely nothing was done with regards to this report from any military authority and any senator or representative. | |
| And that's what is significant to Americans is that this demonstrates either enormous ineptitude and sloth and laziness or Something more insidious, something more of a cover-up, and it just opens the door to the big banking, too big to fail, and all sorts of other things. | |
| But lest I digress, let me read the letter very simply, and it's quite short. | |
| Dear Senator Feinstein, be advised this is an official communication to Congress by a United States Army officer concerning a national security matter and should be considered a whistleblowing report and afforded all the rights, protections, and privileges therein. | |
| As you are by now fully and intimately aware, starting in the summer of 2012, I have written numerous letters to you and your committee concerning intelligence-exposing terrorist threat financing through Union Bank of Switzerland, as reported by Brad Birkenfeld, subsequently paid $104 million by the U.S. government. | |
| And requested you initiate a debriefing and investigation into this matter. | |
| This matter was also addressed in an Army Intelligence Report, which you received a copy of, which was submitted to General Jeff Jacobs, Commander of U.S. Civil Affairs Psychological Operations Command, on September 25, 2012. A copy of this report was also sent to Lynn Halbrooks, Inspector General at the Pentagon, which her office acknowledged receipt of. | |
| It has been over 10 months since this report was released to you and the Inspector General and no official response whatsoever has been given to me in writing or investigation initiated since its release. | |
| This is an obscene and intolerable failure of government officials considering military service members have been killed or maimed as a result of terrorist and combatant activity financed by the banks and networks described in my report. | |
| Worst of all, these financial networks continue to fund terrorist attacks against our troops because of you and your Intelligence Committee's unwillingness to investigate and address this conspiracy and cover-up. | |
| Had my report been thoroughly examined and the parties and sources debriefed, countermeasures could have been deployed and military members and contractors Would be alive today instead of dead, and many of our troops and those of our allies would not be dismembered, crippled, blinded, or deformed beyond recognition or traumatized into a vegetable state along with their spouses, children, parents, and extended family and friends. | |
| As a result of your failure as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee to utilize information provided to you about terrorist threats and their financial systems, the enemies of America have been allowed to advance, been given aid and comfort, possibly violating Article 3, Section 3 of the Constitution concerning treason, And encouraged to continue their kinetic warfare against American troops. | |
| Or to put it another way, quite simply, you have blood on your hands, as do the members of your committee who are complicit in this failure or manifest depraved indifference. | |
| As you know, my report exposed materials and testimony indicating the Union Bank of Switzerland may have been funding terrorist networks and Booz Allen Hamilton, the same defense contractor that employed Edward Snowden, Played a significant role in ignoring or participating in this. | |
| This information was conveyed to me by the UBS whistleblower himself, Brad Birkenfeld, who also communicated it to Senator Carl Levin's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations and the Department of Justice and others. | |
| This same information was later also communicated to General James Mattis, commander of U.S. Central Command, and the terrorist threat finance operations managed by the Joint Information Operations Center at MacDill Air Force Base. | |
| After that letter was given to General Mattis, which I have a copy of, Brad Burkenfeld was quietly paid $104 million and no questions have since been asked or the issue investigated. | |
| This demands exposure to the American public and our allies, and no degree of national security double talk or deceptive use of security classification will be able to sequester this information from the American people. | |
| They deserve to know, they want to know, and they will know. | |
| And the best person to tell them, if not you, is me. | |
| And I will do exactly that, with ferocious honesty and honorable grit. | |
| For as you know very well by now, I am uniquely qualified and unmatched in my experience to address these issues. | |
| And their mutual inclusivity with Edward Snowden's NSA-CIA disclosures, Booz Allen-Hampelton, U.S. Central Command's terrorist threat finance operations, and State Department's Coordinator for Counterterrorism. | |
| I am qualified because I worked as liaison officer between State Department and U.S. Special Operations Command, interfacing with the Director of National Intelligence, National Counterterrorism Center, National Security Council, and others, And also as a threat finance analyst at the Joint Interagency Operations Center at U.S. Central Command. | |
| So I know everything about everyone and what they've done and failed to do in the tar pit of bureaucratic intelligence, military ineptitude, or with conspiratorial intent. | |
| According to the records, you and your committee were first informed about this material on July 15, 2012. It has been almost an entire year, and you have done absolutely nothing about this material whatsoever. | |
| In this year, how many military members have died or been wounded because of ordinance purchased by money processed through the Union Bank of Switzerland and other Swiss bank accounts, which you were informed about by Brad Birkenfeld in 2007? | |
| And then again by me. | |
| Perhaps it will never be fully known the exact number of lives destroyed or ruined because of your failure to act on my financial intelligence provided, but I assure you it will be felt. | |
| It will be felt by you on a deeply personal level as the outraged screams of mothers and fathers robbed of their precious children vibrate through your office windows, and the wailing tears of babes and toddlers dishevel your young staffers as their mothers carry them into your foyer demanding answers from you, and wives and husbands roar with rage and contempt at your betrayal of their spouses whom they've recently had to bury in a grave over the last year. | |
| And, of course, the military members themselves, who hobble into your office with their broken, mangled, and disfigured bodies, rolling in wheelchairs, limping on crutches, or staring at you from a distant hospital bed with tears slowly dripping down the sides of a comatose, ghostly face. | |
| Please believe me, I desperately wish to spare you and our country this experience, and I'm willing to do whatever I can to heal our military families, but know this... | |
| I will not compromise, I will not retreat, I will not be bought off, and I have no fear of man. | |
| It is my duty as an officer of the United States Army and as a patriot sworn to uphold and defend the U.S. Constitution to report this entire matter to the military, to the Congress, and to the citizens of the United States. | |
| As God is my witness, I will do exactly that. | |
| Given the recent exposure of Booz Allen Hamilton by Edward Snowden's leaks to Glenn Greenwald at The Guardian, and the mounting evidence of constitutional violations against the American people, which the American Civil Liberties Union is now challenging apparently, my material, reports, documents, testimony, and contacts, becomes essential to discovering and authoritatively understanding the full scope of this matter. | |
| Since you are the congressional authority charged with, quote, intelligence, unquote, it is your constitutional duty to expose this material and protect the American people and our allies from further violations, including those done to their civil liberties, as well as from terrorist-financed attacks. | |
| This is especially relevant now since CIA targeted Brad Birkenfeld as their Swiss banker information source, cornered him into a DUI driving under the influence, and then rescued him from intelligence gathering purposes. | |
| If this is now the standard operating procedure of the CIA in its intelligence gathering from American citizens, Then it is only a matter of time before all Americans, particularly those living abroad, are similarly targeted, blackmailed, extorted, or worse by the government elites self-appointed to decide. | |
| Edward Snowden's materials confirm this information, previously reported to you by me, which was also provided by Brad Birkenfeld to the Justice Department in 2007. Hence, the three of us form a unique triad, or three-legged stool, which exposes a larger conspiracy and cover-up involving Booz Allen Hamilton, the Department of Justice, and others against the United States military, especially the Army. | |
| Since I am an officer of the United States Army, Civil Affairs, Psychological Operations Command, and sworn to defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, it is my duty to report this matter to you and your committee, to the military authorities, and to the people of the United States as a whistleblowing report and demand an investigation and hearing into this material. | |
| Failure to do this will be a betrayal against the American people and the military service members fighting terrorism worldwide. | |
| Therefore, if I do not hear from you within 10 days, I will instruct my lawyers to immediately release my report to the American people directly through the media and allow them to decide. | |
| Respectfully submitted, Scott Allen Bennett, Second Lieutenant, United States Army, 11th Psychological Operations Battalion. | |
| And this was copied to... | |
| Major Avi Stone, United States Army. | |
| General Jeff Jacobs, Commander, U.S. Civil Affairs Psychological Operations Command. | |
| General Martin Dempsey, Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff. | |
| General Ray Ordiano, Chief of Staff, United States Army, Lynn Halbrooks, Inspector General, Department of Defense, Chuck Hagel, Secretary of Defense, Senate Intelligence Committee, Senate Armed Services Committee, House Intelligence Committee, | |
| House Armed Services Committee, House Government Oversight and Reform Committee, Representative Howard Buck McKeon, Representative Darrell Issa, Senator Dianne Feinstein, Senator Rand Paul, Incidentally, Rand Paul has been the only person on Capitol Hill to ever respond to this material. | |
| Senator John McCain, Senator Mitch McConnell, Senate Minority Leader, Representative Eric Cantor, House Majority Leader, Fox News, Washington Post, The Guardian, New York Times, CNN, The Hill Roll Call, NBC News, and a few others. | |
| And this letter was notarized in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania on 11th July 11, 2013. So I read that just in the hopes that sort of serves as a good backdrop. | |
| Excellent. | |
| Okay, that's a great start. | |
| Okay, we have a weird echo happening, so I'm going to... | |
| Hi, now you can hear me okay, right? | |
| Yes. | |
| Okay, I'm going to make sure that the sound gets disconnected here. | |
| So, what I want to say here is, you also released this report to Booz Allen Hamilton? | |
| Booz Allen Hamilton... | |
| I did not receive a copy of this report. | |
| Their role was as my employer, as a contractor, I was a terrorist threat finance analyst for them. | |
| I was hired by Dov Zakheim to... | |
| Dov Zakheim, incidentally, as everyone should know, was the Under Secretary of Defense under Bush after he worked at the Heritage Foundation, who He misappropriated or mislocated $2.3 trillion, | |
| and then after his tour at the Pentagon, he went to Booz Allen Hamilton, among other contracts, to do the counterterrorism finance operations at MacDill Air Force Base. | |
| Dov Zakheim hired me to come down and be a terrorist finance analyst. | |
| To make a long story short, when I started making recommendations, making reports, finding out where we were going wrong, making strong suggestions. | |
| Again, how to win the war. | |
| I wasn't down there just to earn a paycheck or to work nine to five. | |
| I was down there to finish a war and come home. | |
| When I started being creative and Pushing the envelope and I guess uncovering things I shouldn't have been uncovering that they thought. | |
| Dove Zakheim fired and invented quite an elaborate court case that we can go into later or I can give you a nutshell about it. | |
| Booz Allen Hamilton ran the counter-terrorism threat finance operations among other things. | |
| I mean, I'm happy to go into my background At U.S. Special Operations Command, State Department, etc., etc. | |
| Okay. | |
| Now, all of this is also on my website for people as well as a downloadable PDF that contains the case, a lot of the letters, some backup material. | |
| In some ways, I think it's sort of like a shortened version of the actual book, Shell Game, for all intents and purposes. | |
| So that's on my website if people are interested in delving further into this. | |
| And there are a lot of documents that we're also going to be posting, but they're also available on your website. | |
| Is that correct? | |
| That's correct. | |
| And everything has been backed up. | |
| Again, nothing is classified. | |
| All of the material that I have put up and published has come to me through Brad Birkenfeld and other sources, but it's all been safely uploaded and safely shared so that in the event anything mysterious should happen to me, all of that material and much, much more Uh, would be released, uh, that, um, will tell even more of the story. | |
| All of the people, all of the agencies, international and U.S., that are involved in a much bigger story, uh, than we are currently seeing. | |
| But it needs to be very carefully unfolded, um, for, for, uh, security purposes and, uh, you know, not to, not to, uh, betray anything that, uh, It may be important for protecting American servicemen. | |
| And that's a very important thing to me. | |
| I still consider myself an officer of the United States Army, and I'm challenging a lot of the ineptitude and issues that I encountered. | |
| And I'm very hopeful and confident that at the end of the day, all of my materials will be properly examined by military officials, and they will be properly examined in court of law, and a lot of the severe unconstitutional and illegal activities that were initiated against me as a result of a lot of my reports will be reversed and rectified. | |
| Right, absolutely. | |
| Okay, now just to get back to Booz Allen Hamilton just for one moment, it is also true that, let's see, his name is Mike McConnell, is like one of the chairmans, is he not, of the board? | |
| Yeah, Booz Allen Hamilton is a fascinating organization. | |
| One, yeah, it's got a lot of the people that are high up on the I mean, military intelligence apparatus. | |
| Maybe I should start in with how I came into Booz Allen and Hamilton and how my connection is with them. | |
| Yes. | |
| What I'm going to do is I did find the overview of who you are, and I know people can read it, but I think for the purposes of this, which is a filmed document, I do want to read this background for you because it does sort of Highlight these various organizations that you were part of, and a little bit of the trail, and then we can delve deeper with you talking about that in depth. | |
| So, Scott Bennett is a U.S. Army Special Operations Officer, 11th Psychological Operations Battalion Civil Affairs Psychological Operations Command, and a Global Psychological Warfare Counterterrorism Analyst Formally with defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. | |
| He received a direct commission as an officer, held a top-secret-slash-sensitive compartmentalization information security clearance, which is a TS-SCI security clearance, and worked in the highest levels of international counterterrorism in Washington, | |
| D.C., and MacDill, He has served in the George W. Bush administration from 2003 to 2008 and was a social science research fellow at the Heritage Foundation. | |
| His writings and lectures seek to enhance global awareness and understanding of modern psychological warfare and the international intelligence. | |
| And that is the short version. | |
| Now, it is key that, just as I want to footnote it here, that Mike McConnell is noted to be one of the heads of the board of directors of Booz Allen Hamilton because this organization factors in many stories as well as MJ-12. | |
| As I happen to have background information on that, as well as Mike McConnell in that way. | |
| And he used to be Director of Intelligence, and I believe he stepped down from that. | |
| And we perhaps can follow his trajectory a bit. | |
| So there are players in this game, such as Dov Zakheim, General Zakheim, I guess. | |
| And also General McChrystal. | |
| Michael Hastings, the death of the Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings. | |
| And of course you said Edward Snowden. | |
| And so there are players in this particular scenario that you've interacted with and have specific information regarding. | |
| So I just wanted to kind of lay that out for people listening in a shorthand. | |
| Now if you will talk about your saga and how this kind of Emerged that you kind of get got sent where you were because you you did get this what you called a direct Commission which I think is a little bit different and a little unusual and factors into your arrest the absurdity of your arrest actually on the base at the gates of the base and So rather than have me jump ahead, please go ahead. | |
| Yeah, well I'll endeavor to give you the shortest most intense version of I moved out to Washington D.C. in 1998 because I wanted to get involved with the political world. | |
| I was a strong conservative and I moved out to Washington and worked in some conservative organizations, got my masters, wrote my thesis on psychological warfare and specifically economic development within the Islamic country's Islamic mind. | |
| I then moved to Catholic University and pursued my PhD and worked at the Heritage Foundation as a social science fellow with individuals, researchers, senior researchers in the marriage family. | |
| From the Heritage Foundation, I was recruited into the Bush Administration, and this was 2003. From 2003 to 2008, I worked in the Bush Administration on a variety of economic development operations and domestic policy initiatives. | |
| And had gathered notice at the Pentagon with some people that I knew and had went to a variety of meetings and actually had spoken with Secretary Rumsfeld and General Dick Myers on our psychological warfare capability. | |
| My background prior to Washington was in advertising and creative writing and So I knew everything about target audience analysis, generating material and advertising that could be the kissing cousin of psychological warfare. | |
| You're basically targeting audiences and influencing and influencing their behavior and their patterns. | |
| So that was always a general interest to me and after working the Bush administration and interfacing with some Pentagon military people and working specifically on economic development, | |
| domestic policy initiatives that were targeting Muslim organizations In the United States, I was recruited by General Jeff Jones at Booz Allen Hamilton. | |
| Jeff Jones was renowned as the father of modern PSYOP. Jeff Jones was a brilliant man who ran all of the psychological warfare military operations. | |
| He was commander of the 4th Psychological Operations Group. | |
| And he liked me, what I could do, my writings. | |
| I sent him some of my material. | |
| He liked my experiences. | |
| Let me just interrupt one moment because I have delved into your background and you're kind of skirting over one small detail which has to do with Rumsfeld. | |
| And I think people would be interested in the anecdotal story regarding how you came sort of under Rumsfeld's Notice or eye, and then that sort of sent you in the direction that you went. | |
| So could you tell that anecdote? | |
| Well, I had went to a town hall meeting with some people that I knew in the Pentagon who had invited me who were high-level officers, lieutenant colonels and majors, and it was General Dick Meyers and Secretary Rumsfeld, and I've got a video actually of the interaction. | |
| Where they were asking for feedback into our counter-terrorism operations and giving just sort of a situation analysis. | |
| And I had stood up and posed a question to Secretary Rumsfeld and said, Sir, you know, what are we specifically doing? | |
| I introduced myself as Scott Bennett working with the President's Domestic Policy Administration and introduced some of the work that we were doing that was Similar to psychological warfare, and I had asked him, what are we doing in the psychological warfare realm on a military level to influence the hearts and minds of the Islamic radicals, | |
| the Wahhabist radicals, who are pursuing, you know, their annihilation agenda of, you know, there's three types of person. | |
| You're either Muslim, you're paying the slave tax, or you're dead. | |
| And I asked, what are we doing to combat that and get out proper messages? | |
| Well, they were saying we were getting a D-plus in that area. | |
| We weren't performing adequately. | |
| And what should happen were creative people should enlist and participate and help the armed services develop their capabilities in influencing and targeting Islamic minds. | |
| And shortly after that, I I went to the Bush administration, or I went to Booz Allen Hamilton, and Colonel Jeff Jones had been at that meeting and had said, I want you to accept a direct commission, or we can develop a direct commission for you in the Army and make you a psychological warfare officer, even though a lot of the training is going to be redundant because you know it from your advertising and writing and other backgrounds. | |
| And I said, well, certainly. | |
| If that's going to help me serve my nation, if it's going to end a war, if it's going to Help us be victorious. | |
| I will do it. | |
| And I was 38 years old at the time and that's kind of late. | |
| All the guys usually were about half my age and I went ahead and joined and went through the whole officer training at Fort Benning and Fort Jackson and all sorts of other places and went through some of the most rigorous intense training ever and was brought in to the army as a direct commission officer. | |
| I was supposed to be a captain And they changed that later to lieutenant because of slot issues and stuff. | |
| But that's how I entered into the Army Psychological Warfare Room, through Rumsfeld and Dick Myers. | |
| Excellent. | |
| And so then we picked the story up where you basically accept the commission. | |
| You're working for Jeffries. | |
| That's correct? | |
| Colonel Jeff Jones. | |
| Jeff Jones. | |
| I'm sorry. | |
| Colonel Jeff Jones was... | |
| Jeff Jones was high up on the National Security Council. | |
| He was, again, the father of modern PSYOP, renowned through the entire community as one of the most brilliant thinkers in influencing target behavior. | |
| He was throughout Haiti, Bosnia, Desert Storm 1, and he had Left the military and Booz Allen Hamilton had hired him to develop a psychological warfare team. | |
| And I use the term psychological warfare, not psychological operations or its new title, military information support operations, mainly because Colonel Jeff Jones used psychological warfare. | |
| Because that gives it the martial spirit that it was always intended to be. | |
| You're trying to target your enemies, getting into their behaviors, their deep id and instincts, and understanding their mythopoetic religious dimensions, everything that's associated with their decision-making process, you are to become a master of. | |
| You are to know them more than they know themselves. | |
| So the warfare component is a very important characteristic to psychological operations. | |
| Jeff Jones had approached me because of my background and brought me on his team because, one, I was not loyal in a sense of bureaucratic addiction to the military or the government. | |
| He was interested in me because I was enthusiastic and hungry to make a difference, to go into the conflict and win it. | |
| My interest in going into the military was not to learn from the military's psychological warfare capabilities, but to contribute what I had developed in the private professional industries of advertising and in other disciplines, complement the military's capabilities in psychological warfare so that they would be able to do things better than they were. | |
| And that's why Colonel Jones brought me onto his team. | |
| Okay, and he actually has passed on since? | |
| He passed on in 2010 of brain cancer. | |
| He had assigned me, when I joined, he assigned me as his liaison officer for Special Operations Command to General Del Daly, who was Ambassador of Del Daly. | |
| General Del Daley was in charge of Joint Special Operations Command. | |
| Then the Bush administration had made him the ambassador for counterterrorism at the State Department. | |
| He was also a roommate of Colonel Jeff Jones, I believe, in the old days when they served together. | |
| And Jeff Jones had positioned me to be Del Daley's liaison officer to all Special Operations Command At the Pentagon and in Tampa, Florida, MacDill. | |
| Specifically to oversee the implementation of military psychological warfare materials into State Department operations and ambassadorial communications and things like that. | |
| Things that they call strategic communications now. | |
| Okay, and so what happened at this point? | |
| Well, The contract that I had with State Department, Special Operations Command, I did work there. | |
| I won't go into the details of a lot of that, but I worked in Washington, worked in the State Department, worked in Crystal City, and after that I went in to go through my Army training, and that was in 2008-2009. | |
| And at the end of 2009 came back out and was recruited by Dov Zakheim and Dov Zakheim's team to go down to U.S. Central Command in Florida as a counterterrorism threat finance analyst. | |
| Specifically looking at the money sources, banks, charities, all of the institutions, systems, processes, personalities associated with the funding of terrorism. | |
| Did you have, let me ask you this, did you have a finance background? | |
| In other words, if you were following the money, did you have a sort of a background that facilitated that? | |
| Yeah, most of my background was in, we've done a little bit of this at the State Department in Special Operations Command, but also in the Bush Administration, in our economic development programs and policies, and specifically looking at the connection between Islamic charities And the jihadist foot soldier, how money trails get to them and all processes revolve with them. | |
| So that's what originally had qualified me in looking at some of this. | |
| And specifically, they were more interested in my understanding of the Islamic mind and being able to generate psychological warfare platforms, communications, Feature films, music, all the things that influence identity on a sociological, psychological level. | |
| I knew the Muslim mind barrier thoroughly. | |
| I also knew the Islamic jurisprudence. | |
| I'd studied all the major authors. | |
| Said Imam was a major one on basically out-Islamicizing the Muslim personality. | |
| Do you speak Arabic or any languages? | |
| No, I don't speak Arabic. | |
| Most of the materials had already been translated, but I had a thorough understanding of the Muslim-minded background and things like that. | |
| Okay. | |
| And so you were looking at the money trail, though, at this point, right, as part of your job in, is this Booz Allen Hamilton at this point? | |
| Yeah, Booz Allen Hamilton, defense contractor in McLean, Virginia, also has offices and contracts with all the major combatant commands around the world. | |
| And a lot of the persons who come into the firm are ex-military, military officers. | |
| So they're recruited aggressively at the Booz Allen Christmas parties and elsewhere to join the firm and become sort of on the circular merry-go-round. | |
| And the contract that I was brought in to by Dove Zakine Dov Zakheim had gone down and he was in charge of the whole terrorist finance operations. | |
| And there's some other people, Bill Lubliner, Troy Hensley, Mike Baravia are some of the names of people that are all identified in court documents, by the way, that are shared already. | |
| So at some point you discovered that they were not really interested in stopping terrorism. | |
| But actually facilitating a funding source through Swiss banks. | |
| So how did that come about? | |
| Well, there were a lot of materials that I was exposed to down there. | |
| Let me just preface it. | |
| I was an army reservist by now. | |
| I had taken my direct commission and I was reserving, doing my drill duty at the Psychological Operations Battalion in Washington, D.C. However, The contract was in Tampa, Florida, and Booz Allen Hamilton had basically recruited me directly out of my training and said, you need to get down to Tampa, Florida, ASAP. So I said, all right, I'll need to coordinate this with the military now that I'm doing drill operations. | |
| And the whole plan of action was to use the military psychological operations position to dovetail with the Booz Allen Hamilton contracts. | |
| So I was coordinating with my military commanders that I was being transplanted down to Florida and that I would need to change commands. | |
| I couldn't be drilling up in Washington and working down to Tampa for obvious reasons. | |
| And they had told me, we'll go ahead and find a unit and transfer down there. | |
| So I had communicated to Booz Allen, I'll need to transfer units. | |
| I'll be flying down on military aircraft, going onto the military base to obtain housing, to find a military unit to transfer into. | |
| I expected a lot of this to be done for me. | |
| It wasn't. | |
| I had to do everything on my own, and I wasn't fully aware of how the military did these things. | |
| Again, I was a direct commission. | |
| I didn't come up through the ranks as an enlisted or go to West Point or anything. | |
| I was sort of pushed into the military to help them out. | |
| And I expected the same service, but little did I know I didn't get that. | |
| So I went down and, to make a long story short, jumped on a plane with Admiral Eric Olson, who was the Special Operations Commander at Andrews Air Force Base, jumped on his private Learjet with him that had been set up with Air Force personnel prior. | |
| They flew me down to McGill Air Force Base and told me to go to temporary base housing to obtain housing because I was a military officer reservist, which allows me to stay on base. | |
| I went to base housing and told them I'm here for setting up temporary base housing until I find an apartment in the Tampa area. | |
| And they had told me they didn't have housing, and I said, well, you told me I had housing, get me the military commander in charge. | |
| They didn't do that. | |
| The contractor had said, we'll set you up with something. | |
| So to make a long story short, they set me up with temporary base housing, and I told them to organize my unit. | |
| And I jumped right into my terrorist finance analysis job, where I won't go into a lot of the details, but I was trained in Booz Allen Hamilton and military operations with finance, | |
| with terrorist institutions and terrorist activities, and for the next four months was assigned to Evaluate the problems, the strengths, all of the organizational assignments of our contract. | |
| I began looking into all sorts of banks and financing instruments and institutions and processes and countries. | |
| I won't go too much into any specific personalities or countries or leadership. | |
| But I was looking at every country in U.S. Central Command's area of operation, and I was making very stern recommendations on how we can do things better, specifically mentioned CIA strategic communications opportunities, DIA opportunities, Army opportunities. | |
| And the consistent reply, and this is what is very important for the American viewer to understand, the consistent reply that I encountered from Booz Allen Hamilton was, we will not be doing anything or implementing any of your ideas or your reports until we have new contracts, until we adapt the current contracts that we already have. | |
| We're not going to be providing any new material until we basically get more money for them. | |
| Until we change our contracts, we're not going to be sharing or giving anything. | |
| And that struck me with a lot of internal conflict because I was being asked by military commanders to provide services and provide products and analysis reports and recommendations and creative platforms to solve problems and stop soldiers from being killed and advance the war mission. | |
| And the contractor was telling me, no, we can't do that. | |
| We won't do that until we have basically more money. | |
| And I went ahead and did it anyway. | |
| I went ahead and presented materials to the military commanders because I was sort of torn. | |
| I was a defense contractor on one end, but I was also a military officer. | |
| I was also expected to serve my commanders' needs. | |
| I had went through various trainings and it was very intense. | |
| We were told, you are a target. | |
| All terrorist finance and PSYOP analysts, you're a target. | |
| Be careful. | |
| People are going to be testing you and coming at you from various directions. | |
| And you're going to be tested by the government and tested by military authorities to determine your capabilities. | |
| And the whole plan of action for me was to deploy me overseas as a terrorist finance analyst within the next six months. | |
| So I was very aggressive, putting forth reports and make a cut to the chase. | |
| I started ruffling, I think, a lot of feathers in the Booz Allen Hamilton hat and specifically Dub Sackheim's smaller team. | |
| And I had my gun safe and various household products shipped down by Booz Allen Hamilton in a moving truck. | |
| And they had been checked in on base and brought into the base. | |
| And I had gone up to register my firearms just to make sure that everything was in accordance with Florida law and base law. | |
| And when I was driving back, and this was April 23rd, 2010, when I was driving back, I was stopped at the front gate, ordered out of my car at gunpoint, and told to basically sit on the side of the road while they searched my car. | |
| And my antenna went up that something was wrong, and I had told the security officer, no, I'm not going to get out, I'm not going to do anything, I'm going to return, I'll come back in the morning. | |
| And they had ordered me out of the car. | |
| They said, no, you're getting out of the car now, sir. | |
| And with men with guns and who had been exposed to combat, I wasn't about to disagree with them. | |
| So I got out of the car and they searched my car. | |
| And the next thing I know, they called Tampa Police down. | |
| And I thought at the time, this was all a training exercise. | |
| I thought this was a test. | |
| I thought this was part of what I had been indoctrinated into. | |
| They are going to Push me, test me. | |
| Part of my military training was to endure the search, evasion, rescue, and escape, SEER training. | |
| And I thought, this is probably part of that, so I'll play along. | |
| And I put up all the legitimate objections, saying, According to the law, I know I'd rather leave. | |
| But they had called the Tampa Police Department down. | |
| The Tampa Police Department had sent an officer. | |
| He said, we've got a report that there's a DUI suspicion. | |
| And they said, there's no DUI. He said, well, I'm going to take you downtown anyway. | |
| Again, I thought it was all part of the training. | |
| I get in the car, I go downtown. | |
| I do the DUI test. | |
| There was no DUI test. | |
| The officer forbid me and stopped me from blowing into the machine, so that made me think, ah, okay, they don't want a record. | |
| They know this is all a training exercise. | |
| And the next day I was released, I drove back to base. | |
| And the second time, I was stopped at the base at gunpoint. | |
| And ordered out of my car. | |
| And I thought, this is very strange. | |
| Maybe they're going overboard. | |
| And I said the same response. | |
| No, I'd rather not get out of my car. | |
| I'll turn around and I'll come back later. | |
| And the guard had ordered me out of my car again at gunpoint and escorted me, if not stood behind me with a gun in my back, escorted me on the base and forced me out of my car onto the military property. | |
| And put me in a holding cell and said, you're to wait here. | |
| So again, I'm thinking it's all part of a training exercise. | |
| This is going to be revealed to me pretty soon. | |
| And a detective, Edward Garcia of U.S. Central Command, comes down and he was a contractor detective who was working base security and he goes on to say, well, your guns were being brought on base and they're not registered yet. | |
| And I basically said, well, everything's in process. | |
| Everything's being done. | |
| I've just been in training. | |
| I work here. | |
| I'm also a reservist. | |
| I was basically taken from him and put into handcuffs, put into an interrogation room, interrogated for about eight hours. | |
| Meanwhile, put into a car and taken down to my apartment in Florida, which is about 100 degrees with the windows up in a police car in handcuffs. | |
| This isn't the most comfortable thing. | |
| Go through and ransack my apartment, and all the time I'm thinking in the back of my mind, this has really got to be a test. | |
| This has really got to be something where they're just seeing if I'm going to break or if I'm going to come apart. | |
| And for the next 8 or 12 hours or so, they go through this intense interrogation. | |
| And then at the end of it, put me in a cell, put my hands behind my back, in handcuffs, in a chair. | |
| I felt like John McCain in his Vietnam experience. | |
| And next thing I know, they released me with a little ticket, and it says, violating a security regulation, not having my guns properly registered. | |
| And I thought, well, that's really strange because there is no time for registering any firearms. | |
| It's within, you know, as soon as you can. | |
| And I had been in training for a week and I had explained this and the detective had also said, well, you're not supposed to be on base housing yet. | |
| I said, well, base housing gave me housing. | |
| This was all pre-planned by Booz Allen Hamilton and others. | |
| Anyway, this I learned later. | |
| I was escorted off base and they said, we're suspending your security clearance because these guns haven't been registered and we haven't got your paperwork all in order yet. | |
| And I said, well fine, it'll work out. | |
| It'll be explained. | |
| I thought it was a snafu. | |
| And the next day I receive a call from Dov Zakheim's team saying, we're terminating you from the contract and the company. | |
| Basically firing me. | |
| Incredible. | |
| And I knew right then and there I had ruffled feathers beyond their liking and it was directly because of the reports and the recommendations that I had been making that was looking into And terrorist financing and these international banks and entities and charities and systems and processes. | |
| And my downfall with them, and also my strength, was I was like a doctor probing a wound. | |
| I was trying to find out where we were going wrong, what we were doing right, to fix it. | |
| And their mentality, and Booz Allen and Hamilton and the general contractors, and I say this with utmost respect, Their mentality is really an old man mentality with castrated imaginations. | |
| They're tired, they're bureaucrats, they've served in the military for 20-30 years, now they're joining the defense contractor industry and they're coming in just looking to shuffle paper around and make a good looking effort without really getting serious and Solving problems and doing things. | |
| Okay, but that's kind of your personal take on it, rather than seeing it as an outright conspiracy. | |
| But there is another way to look at that, correct? | |
| Well, the way to look at it in one light is that A lot of the people who are studying and searching for the terrorist financing accounts don't want them looked for and don't want them discovered. | |
| They don't want them known. | |
| So we're talking about a cover-up. | |
| We're talking about a cover-up, and I didn't really know about this until much, much, much later when all of this sort of came to me from Brad Birkenfeld. | |
| It's, you know, it's a weird cosmic world we live in, and coincidences, things kind of fall together. | |
| I mean, I look at this as a man of faith, that this is a very spiritual, sort of God-centered happenstance. | |
| How I had been down to Central Command as the man in charge of finding terrorist money sources. | |
| And then I was kicked off base and basically later on I met accidentally the Swiss banker Brad Birkenfeld who brought me all of the information that the military and the Senate refused to provide me, refused to provide our team. | |
| And Brad and I sat down for six months and looked at all of this and I said, Brad, all of this should have come to me And someone in a military uniform. | |
| And you're telling me not one time did a military person ever debrief you with your 19,000 bank accounts, a lot of which belong to al-Qaeda financiers, terrorist financiers, Saudi Arabians, Qatar, Kuwaitis. | |
| No one in a military uniform ever came and conducted any sort of debriefing with you? | |
| And Brad said, no, not once, not ever, did any military person ever speak with me. | |
| In fact, Kevin Downing and Kevin O'Connor at the Department of Justice, the prosecutors, had forbidden Brad from talking to anyone about this material. | |
| And I said, well that's where the smoking gun is because this material should have gotten to us. | |
| It specifically shouldn't have came to me because that was my job at Booz Allen Hamilton in the military. | |
| My job was to basically empty your pockets. | |
| You were the golden goose I was looking for. | |
| Empty your pockets and I could have in one night tracked down every terrorist finance bank account. | |
| And working in coordination with the Department of Treasury and others, we could have instantly shut down 19,000 accounts and dried up the money source. | |
| And the significance of this now is all of the money that perhaps we're seeing going to ISIS, in Syria, in the new erupting Islamic State, all of this money could have been shut down in 2010. And we wouldn't have the problem, the issue that we have now. | |
| Now, getting back to your point, why was that not done? | |
| Well, there's a lot of forces, a lot of agencies, a lot of people that perhaps never wanted it done. | |
| They wanted to foment an instability in the Middle East for Control. | |
| There's a myriad of explanations, but stick to the facts. | |
| Yeah, and that's absolutely somewhere that I want to go in this conversation, and we can go down that road. | |
| But before we do that, I want to make sure that we get the Birkenfeld sort of piece put into this puzzle, and then also the Snowden piece and the Hastings piece, because It's kind of a trajectory, and so you're saying it's a coincidence, and how things came to a head, and you actually got thrown in jail, of all things, for two years, if I'm correct? | |
| Yeah. | |
| And I just want to say here, though, that there are no coincidences in my world. | |
| And so I have to think that this is fortuitous and that you have some, we call them white hats, behind the scenes that had seen that you had done a good job, seen that you were a good guy, and that you were being framed. | |
| And they made sure that when you went into prison, you got connected with the right guy. | |
| So can you tell that story? | |
| Well, it's certainly the optimistic and I pray truthful underlining a current of all of this When I returned back to, when I left Booz Allen Hamilton at U.S. Central Command, I returned to my Army unit, | |
| and I had been, had explained that a lot of this was nonsense, and I had requested military counsel to address this matter, and make another direction. | |
| When I returned back, Michael Hastings had done a story on General Stanley McChrystal, and he had also done some analysis of Mike Furlong, who was a colleague of mine that I worked with at the State Department, counterterrorism. | |
| Mike Furlong had, I will go into a lot of the details of his operations, but had been very successful in generating counterterrorism operations and personnel, and I worked closely with him. | |
| And when I got back to my army battalion, our brigade commander, General Burley, had come out and said at a meeting at our battalion, psychological operations is being changed to MISO, Military Information Support Operations, because of Mike Furlong. | |
| Anybody hear that name? | |
| No one raised their hands. | |
| I was the only one, and I went cold because I thought, I know Mike, where is this coming from? | |
| And he went on to talk about Mike Furlong. | |
| And Mike Furlong had been targeted by CIA and they came down on him like a load of bricks because he was so successful in some of his operations. | |
| And I had, Mike Furley, or I'm sorry, Colonel Burley had also said, in a side to the Furlong issue, we are doing the don't ask, don't tell change in the military. | |
| Do you have feedback? | |
| And I had written a report in response to that saying, sir, with regards to the Don't Ask, Don't Tell, that could be used as a psychological warfare platform for recruiting and destabilizing countries within the Islamic radical cleric establishment. | |
| They can propagandize this. | |
| So we have to be very cautious in how we unfurl this. | |
| And the Obama administration and a lot of people in Congress had made a point to determine that they wanted to move forward with that change. | |
| And the significance of this is I wrote a report that's contained in the book in November. | |
| It took me a few months to put together, but in November I submitted a report, sent it up to John Boehner and Buck McKeon and all the people in Congress as well as the Pentagon officials. | |
| Saying, if we change the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy, here are the negative implications. | |
| Here are the radical terrorist Al-Qaeda responses that they will initiate. | |
| And it was very thorough. | |
| It was very technical. | |
| Material from think tanks was synthesized. | |
| So it was a very scholarly report. | |
| And my background was in this at the Heritage Foundation, so I knew what I was talking about. | |
| And one month after submitting that report, which went... | |
| When a lot of the guys in the military, Colonel Joel Droban particularly, went absolutely bonkers and batshit crazy over it. | |
| They were furious that I had submitted a report that went against the President's recommendation of changing Don't Ask Don't Tell and allowing homosexuality in the military. | |
| One month after submitting that report, I was indicted by the Department of Justice for a base housing application paperwork error, and they shifted that to look like a false statement. | |
| I basically filled out some forms for my base housing, which is a questionnaire, and they had charged me, one month after this report, they charged me with making a false statement, 18100-1, Violating security regulation by not having my guns registered and wearing my uniform without authorization or authority. | |
| And the implications of this were quite profound because it represents in the first time in the history of the United States that an active army officer has been prosecuted by a civilian Justice Department for wearing his uniform on base during military duties. | |
| And I thought it was laughable and besides unconstitutional, but I also knew it was vindictive and motivated by other powers that be. | |
| But I had looked at this issue as very important and felt I really had to make this report known to the higher military commanders for our enlisted men We're on the front lines, for our State Department people who are on the front lines. | |
| This is going to have enormous blowback, negative blowback, and you need to be prepared. | |
| That was the purpose of writing this report. | |
| And the significance of that is two years later, Benghazi happened, the Benghazi embassy attacks. | |
| And what makes Benghazi directly connected to my report is that The State Department had published a flyer requesting security forces personnel be hired with language that accentuated that homosexuality was not going to be a disqualifier. | |
| It was not going to be in any way viewed as negative. | |
| In fact, it was encouraged. | |
| And the Muslim radical extremists had been rallied to the cleric calls in the Libya area, specifically around some of the materials the State Department were putting out on this. | |
| And the fires, if you do the research, the fires that were being ignited, they found the flyer that was produced by the State Department with this language. | |
| This flyer asking for Security forces personnel with homosexual and not being a disqualifier, those were lit on fire with matches and ignited the fire at Benghazi. | |
| When I discovered that later, I thought, my God, I'm not trying to be prophetic, but Had you read and appreciated this report, perhaps this could have been altered and changed. | |
| Now, they've subsequently invented all sorts of nonsense, such as, well, this was connected to a film, and all that's propaganda. | |
| And being a propaganda man, I know what I'm talking about. | |
| Okay, very good. | |
| Okay, so at that point, you were thrown into, I mean, did you have a trial? | |
| Yeah, this was in January of 2011. And again, part of me was thinking, this has got to be a test. | |
| They're pushing me for some major operation and they're just seeing how far they can bend me. | |
| I hired a JAG attorney, David Shalala, whose aunt was Donna Shalala, the President of Clinton's Health and Human Services Secretary. | |
| So David Shalala out of Florida, who was an ex-JAG officer, I hired down there, and I said, this is all nonsense and crazy. | |
| I don't know why they're doing this. | |
| And he said, just lay low. | |
| It'll all go away. | |
| It's just they're politically embarrassed, and you've rang the bell with regards to the Don't Ask, Don't Tell issue, and you're around You know, a round peg in a square hole. | |
| And you just lay low and it'll go away. | |
| Well, I laid low. | |
| I wasn't trying to start any fights. | |
| But next thing I know, the... | |
| The prosecutor, Sarah Sweeney, who was a U.S. Department of Justice prosecutor in Florida, had invented a false affidavit from a Wackenhut security guard at Fort Myer, which came to me later. | |
| I was informed by a colonel that I know very close. | |
| I'll keep her anonymous. | |
| Wackenhut is a strong CIA affiliate. | |
| This Wackenhut guard had invented a false affidavit saying I had impersonated a police officer at Fort Myer in Washington, D.C. And I told my attorney, that's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. | |
| If I wanted to go on a military base, I'd flash my military ID any time of the day. | |
| I don't need to dress up as a police officer. | |
| Get the tapes, you'll see whoever it was certainly was not me. | |
| But that opens up a very strong weirdness. | |
| So the CIA, Wackenhut, and this prosecutor, Department of Justice Sarah Sweeney, cobbled together this fantasy that I had dressed up in a police officer uniform, probably to try and get momentum with these other absurd charges. | |
| So I go down with my attorney, expecting this whole thing to be thrown out to a magistrate judge. | |
| And the magistrate judge, my attorney, had... | |
| Either out of ineptitude and incompetence and ineffective assistance to counsel, filed a motion to suppress all evidence. | |
| What he should have done was filed a motion to dismiss, based on constitutional grounds, saying, this man is an army officer. | |
| It is unconstitutional and illegal for the Department of Justice to have jurisdiction over anything that is conducted on a military base. | |
| He is performing military duties in uniform, You do not have the jurisdiction to prosecute him. | |
| These laws do not apply to him. | |
| If the military wanted to charge him, they would have. | |
| They never did. | |
| Instead, this somehow got passed over to the Obama administration Department of Justice, and they have taken an administrative paperwork error and made it into a federal crime. | |
| And they've charged me with wearing my uniform, which means they can basically go to anybody who wears their uniform, who's an active reservist, who goes to school and visits his daughter after coming back from war. | |
| They can prosecute him with the same charge that they've done to me. | |
| But I'm confident all of this will eventually be overturned. | |
| But in the meantime, I've had to suffer through this. | |
| But we appear to the magistrate judge and present a motion to suppress. | |
| And the judge said, no, I'm going to let this go to trial. | |
| Well, that was the first mistake. | |
| We should have appealed and said, you have no jurisdiction. | |
| You can't do this. | |
| And I couldn't talk about a lot of what I was doing. | |
| One, out of concern to the military, I didn't want to open up a Pandora's box. | |
| A lot of the material I was doing was top secret related. | |
| So I kind of had my hands tied behind my back. | |
| And We went to trial and I contacted my attorney and said, put me on trial. | |
| Here's all of my paperwork. | |
| Here's all the documentation that establishes me as being down there for legitimate reasons and everything that they're trying to charge me with, they can't charge me with. | |
| We also had a professional witness who was a military major Who had been 30 years in the military, who came down and appeared as my expert witness, who basically said to the judge, none of the charges that you're trying to charge Bennett with, making a false statement, wearing his uniform without authority, and security violation for his guns, none of these are in contradiction with military law. | |
| And here's why. | |
| He's presenting this, but yet the judge and the prosecutor are allowed to move forward on this. | |
| And they get me in front of a civilian jury, and this is right after the Fort Hood thing had happened. | |
| The jury, of course, are a little bit like frightened kittens anyway, and they see all of a sudden the prosecutor bring in an Air Force major dressed in Air Force uniform, which is, again, a violation because you have an Air Force major prosecuting me, an Army officer. | |
| That had never happened before in the United States history. | |
| So anyway, they put me through a trial. | |
| My lawyer didn't put me on the stand. | |
| He should have. | |
| He didn't present any of the evidence that I gave him. | |
| He should have. | |
| The jury found me guilty of these three charges. | |
| And I instantly thought, okay, they're going to let me appeal this, and now I can go and get military counsel and get this whole thing straightened out. | |
| No. | |
| The prosecutor at that point had said to the judge, we have an affidavit saying he dressed up in a police uniform. | |
| Well, the judge, thinking a police uniform, says, where is that material? | |
| And the prosecutor says, we're having trouble with our witness. | |
| We're no longer going to present that. | |
| It was all false in the beginning, in the first place. | |
| But they had poisoned the judge's mind, giving them the false impression that I dressed up in a police uniform. | |
| The judge, thinking this guy is, you know, trying to dress up and shoot up a bass or something, puts me in prison. | |
| And I was in prison for the next five months, writing and trying to get to military authorities to have this rectified. | |
| And I show up at sentence day, and I explain to the judge, this is a massive misunderstanding. | |
| I fired my first attorneys, and I've requested court counsel because of the miserable job that they've done in misrepresenting me, and I'm going to appeal it. | |
| And the judge... | |
| Gave me an enhancement from one to seven months. | |
| Should have been my guidelines. | |
| Gave me an enhancement of 36 months. | |
| So instantly sends me to prison. | |
| Unbelievable. | |
| So I never, you know, never, you know, done anything and thought this was a big misunderstanding. | |
| But this is where the silver lining on the cloud, of course, opens up. | |
| It's presented in the book. | |
| I go on a bumpy bus wrapped in shackles and an orange jumpsuit, and I make my way up to Federal Prison Camp School Kill in Pennsylvania, where doctors, lawyers, engineers, tax guys are at Federal Camp. | |
| And I meet Brad Birkenfeld. | |
| Brad Birkenfeld was the UBS, Union Bank of Switzerland, whistleblower, who had come to He had been imprisoned, but he had brought to the Department of Justice all of the tax account information, Swiss bank accounts. | |
| Swiss bank accounts funding terrorism, Swiss bank accounts not being brought to the IRS, etc., etc. | |
| Well, in any case, I sit down with Brad Birkenfeld, and for the next six months, we go over every document, every experience on his timeline, and came up with an amazing story That just meshed perfectly with what I had been doing at U.S. Central Command. | |
| To make a long story short, I said, Brad, you were the man I was looking for. | |
| All of this material and information I could have used and the military could have used to win the war, to empty the bank accounts that are being used to fund all of these terrorist operations. | |
| And he said, Scott, never, ever did any military person ever come and debrief me. | |
| Now, Brad went on to tell me his whole story, which I'm happy to jump into and tell you what he said if you want. | |
| Yes, I think that would be very good. | |
| I think that people need to understand and hear the story that links up to him actually flying over to the U.S. to present his material, how he was treated, and the link up with Vanity Fair and that phone call, etc. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Well, we'll start off again in sort of a movie. | |
| It's important for people to kind of write this down on a piece of white paper because there are so many different personalities, but they slowly begin to coagulate into the center, and you see all their interconnectedness. | |
| But Brad Birkenfeld, wonderful man, one of the brightest men I've ever met, extremely sharp, I was in Switzerland as the Union Bank of Switzerland banker who was discovering a lot of funny business that was going on with the Union Bank of Switzerland. | |
| Things were tied to US politicians, things that were tied to Geithner and a lot of people in the Obama administration as well as the Republicans. | |
| And Brad had been Making a lot of noise in the Union Bank of Switzerland hierarchy, professional hierarchy, about problems and issues. | |
| Well, he had been approached by some people who, to make a long story short, had got him out, went to a bar, got him drunk, and got him stopped with a DUI, the same thing that they tried to pin on me. | |
| A DUI charge. | |
| He was put in jail, and next thing he knows, the people that had approached him came into the jail cell in Switzerland, Geneva, flashed a CIA badge, and got him out. | |
| Approached him for information, then tried to recruit him, and Brad, getting nervous and wary of it, goes over to the United States with his bag of material and information to release as a whistleblower. | |
| Now what's significant about that is Edward Snowden, in his material revealed to Glenn Greenwald in 2013, his first interview, which you can look at, said his turning point was when he was a Geneva CIA analyst and he saw the Swiss banker Brad Birkenfeld being targeted For CIA recruitment in a phony DUI. So Snowden is up here and he sees Birkenfell being targeted by the CIA. | |
| That's pretty significant. | |
| So you build the bridge between the two of them right there. | |
| Edward Snowden, Brad Birkenfell. | |
| Brad then packs his bags, flees like a bat out of hell to get out of there and comes over to the United States and goes to the Department of Justice. | |
| Sits down with Kevin Downing and Kevin O'Connor says, I've got all this information about terrorist financing and Swiss banks and accounts and Abdullah Aziz, a major al-Qaeda financier. | |
| I want to give it, but I can't give it without a subpoena. | |
| You have to subpoena me. | |
| And the Department of Justice said to him, You're not a whistleblower. | |
| You're a tipster. | |
| And they refused to give him a subpoena. | |
| They refused to hear any of his information. | |
| They refused to take any of the papers that he had, which were incredibly significant. | |
| 19,000 bank accounts, lots of which are belonging to bad guys in the Middle East right now that have been used over the last five, six, seven years to kill Americans and our allies. | |
| So the Department of Justice don't want any of that. | |
| They don't want to talk to him. | |
| They won't give him a subpoena. | |
| So he runs right over across the street to the IRS. And the IRS, again, this is all information that Brad has told me and sat down with me over six months, and we've diagrammed it and written down exhaustively. | |
| He goes over to the IRS. The IRS refused to give him a subpoena. | |
| So that's significant. | |
| So he next goes over to the United States Senate into Carl Levin's office, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. | |
| And they give him a subpoena. | |
| He goes in. | |
| He testifies behind closed doors on all of the material that he has. | |
| And next thing he knows, he is... | |
| He returns to Switzerland or something. | |
| And he tells a very significant story, and that is he had a friend in – when he was over giving a lot of this material, he was, I think, flying back and forth. | |
| He had a friend who was a London banker who had a Middle Eastern name who was on his way to Mexico and called Brad up and said, hey, I'm going to Mexico. | |
| Where are you? | |
| I'm in the United States. | |
| He said, great, I'll pick you up. | |
| Now, this is a rich – Very wealthy banker. | |
| He has his own private plane. | |
| He flies down into the United States, picks Brad up, they go to Mexico, have a good time, and flies back. | |
| Well, that banker in London had been written a letter, and that letter, Brad showed me a copy, and I have a copy of it. | |
| The letter had said, Brad Birkenfeld is releasing information, I'm sorry, That letter had been written to UBS. This letter had been written to UBS saying, Brad Birkenfeld is giving information to the American authorities. | |
| And it was signed his friend's name. | |
| UBS had called Brad's friend and said, why did you send us this letter? | |
| And his friend had said, I never sent you any sort of a letter. | |
| And UBS had faxed him a copy of this letter. | |
| And it said, July 2007... | |
| To Union Bank of Switzerland from Mohammed, whatever his name was, Brad Birkenfeld was giving information to the American authorities. | |
| You should be advised. | |
| And Brad's friend said, I never sent this letter. | |
| And he called Brad up and said, what is this all about? | |
| I just got a letter that was forged. | |
| And Brad said, I can't go into it, but send me a copy of the letter. | |
| He sent Brad a copy of the letter. | |
| Brad went in with his lawyer and said to the Department of Justice, what is this? | |
| And the Department of Justice, Kevin Downing, Kevin O'Connor, well, we don't know, we'll investigate it. | |
| They never did. | |
| It just disappeared. | |
| What's significant about that is the only way that that could have transpired is if Brad Birkenfeld had walked into the Department of Justice, gave his cell phone and his email and all that information saying, here's what I've got, contact me. | |
| They then in turn took that, and I've written this up in my analysis, Which was presented September 25, 2012, to military commanders in the Congress. | |
| That material was then given to CIA, NSA, and they tracked Brad, tracked his friend, flying in from Europe, picking him up and going to Mexico. | |
| They tracked that information and used that information to cobble a false fraudulent letter and sent that to Union Bank of Switzerland, hoping that Brad, when he returned, would be killed, thrown in jail, something. | |
| And that struck me as very profound. | |
| So you do have the intelligence agencies in the Department of Justice working in tandem just on Brad's situation alone, where they're tracking him and they cobble this false letter together. | |
| Well, in any case... | |
| That's significant. | |
| But they then, the Department of Justice, approached Brad and said, we're going to indict you for conspiracy because you didn't tell us everything pertaining to your various clients, such as Olenikov. | |
| And Brad had said, excuse me, I did tell you this. | |
| I told it in the Senate testimony. | |
| Go back and you'll see it. | |
| In fact, you emailed me prior. | |
| My attorneys advised you that I did release that information. | |
| And they said, oh yes, well, we'll check into it. | |
| And they came back later and said, No, we're going to indict you for conspiracy based on the Olenikoff issue. | |
| And Brad said, well, get my transcript from the Senate testimony and you'll see I revealed that. | |
| And they told him, no, we cannot because they are sealed. | |
| And because they're sealed, you can't use them as defense. | |
| And they then... | |
| Brad had no way to defend himself. | |
| It was his word against their sealed transcripts. | |
| Now that's significant, too, because they did the same thing to Joe Nachio. | |
| Joe Nachio was the CEO of Quest Communications, who had been involved with NSA phone issues. | |
| Just prior to 9-11, a lot of this is open source material, so you can Google and look up Joe Nacho and a lot of the story behind that. | |
| And he had been approached by the NSA to release a lot of the information on clients for Quest Communications, and he refused to do that. | |
| And Quest Communications subsequently dried up his contracts. | |
| He sold stock. | |
| Next thing you know, they come at him for insider trading. | |
| And he said, All this material is in the transcripts about NSA coming to me, asking me to do this, and I wouldn't do it. | |
| And they said, no, those transcripts are sealed. | |
| And they threw charges at him, and he had to cop a plea because they said, we'll face 20 years or give you five. | |
| And a man who's married with children, they make a pretty quick decision, go for the five. | |
| But that's an illustrated version of their tactic of sealing materials, sealing information, and then forcing the person into a plea bargain. | |
| They did that to Brad. | |
| They did it to Joe Nachio. | |
| Joe Nachio's son was in Georgetown and had been stabbed in the arm by two men in suits who said, say hi to your dad for us. | |
| So there are some real dark elements and dark characters involved here, and I know your audience is sufficiently intellectually equipped to appreciate that and probably have far more interesting research levels of that than I do. | |
| But all of this came to me through unclassified sources and directly from word of mouth who the people, who it happened to. | |
| And when you sit down with someone and look them eye to eye for months on end and they tell you this story exhaustively from every angle, you know it's true. | |
| You can see it together. | |
| I had come from the terrorist, counter-terrorism threat finance analyst, so I saw all the connections that Brad Birkenfeld had been bringing. | |
| Okay, but what about the phone call, the Vanity Fair story? | |
| Yeah, that was interesting. | |
| Brad was in a limo with a Vanity Fair author, journalist, who was writing a story. | |
| Brad had a lot of material he was putting forth. | |
| 60 Minutes was doing an interview with him because he was mad as hell that they were doing this to him. | |
| Here's a man coming to the United States government about every piece of information relating to terrorist bank accounts run by Switzerland, run by UBS, And various other Swiss banks. | |
| He has 19,000 bank accounts waiting to give them, to say, use these materials to track down terrorists and, among other things, help our government, help the American people, the American taxpayer. | |
| He brings all that information to them, and they do nothing. | |
| Well, he's talking to journalists and putting materials together, and a Vanity Fair journalist is with him in the In the limousine, and he says, Brad, I just got a text from the CIA substation chief telling me not to do this story. | |
| And Brad says, what? | |
| He said, yep. | |
| And he's looking at his phone. | |
| He said, the guy is telling him, Karzai is much worse. | |
| Do not do the Birkenfeld UBS story. | |
| So right then and there, you see CIA telling a Vanity Fair journalist not to do anything with regards to Birkenfeld, his Swiss bank accounts, his terrorist finance connections. | |
| And that blew me away when I heard that, too. | |
| Right. | |
| Well, that's important because that shows the hand of the CIA over major media, which is, this is a commonplace, actually, behind the scenes. | |
| Yeah. | |
| So that was appalling and frightening at the same time, but Brad goes into court and they sentence him to 40 months in prison. | |
| And he's blown away. | |
| He fires his attorney and goes through all sorts of trying appeal stuff. | |
| And the criminal justice system takes years to get your appeals. | |
| It's like a wheel of fortune. | |
| It takes an enormous amount of time to get them back up in front. | |
| But he's sentenced to prison for 40 months and he goes to school killed up in Pennsylvania. | |
| Well, lo and behold, like your point, I am sentenced to 36 months and I am sent up to Pennsylvania. | |
| And that's where I meet Brad and we sit down and we compare notes and it was everything falls together. | |
| And like I had written, it was almost like an operation where I had been specifically commissioned to go in and obtain the bank account information for Abdullah Aziz and a variety of other outside financiers and Middle East financiers. | |
| And all the material pertaining to UBS and the Swiss banking accounts. | |
| Had I been a commission to do that, this would have been the perfect example of a successful mission because that's exactly what I got. | |
| And I sat down with Brad and we put together letters and materials and, I mean, We couldn't believe what was happening and what we had discovered together. | |
| And we had sent a letter to General James Mattis of U.S. Central Command, and I told Brad, here are all the people that we need to contact about this. | |
| This is significant and important. | |
| Me, as a military officer, this is material that my commanders at UCAPOC, General Jeff Jacobs and General Mattis, need to know about. | |
| And because I had asked Brad, No one has ever approached you or talked to you about this information. | |
| Never. | |
| We need to get it out. | |
| So we put the letter together, sent it down to General Mattis. | |
| Then got out of prison, and he was very concerned for his safety. | |
| He was going through Conan Colapinto, his lawyers in D.C., and one month after submitting that letter, he was paid $104 million, and Brad has never been heard from since and has went underground and been very quiet. | |
| My speculation is he's Threatened and in no uncertain terms, not to discuss about any of this material. | |
| Okay, now at a certain point, and if you have something to add there, then go ahead, but I'm going to kind of try to move this along a bit quicker because it's excellent what you're covering and I'm hoping that people are listening Understanding this trail and how important it is because it reveals a lot of things. | |
| Not just, you know, that you were framed and that he was framed and that, you know, the inner workings really, but how our cover-up happens and how what people call conspiracy theory. | |
| This is actually a conspiracy and this is how the conspirators are acting upon you guys who are actually trying to do the right thing, the good thing, and report the truth. | |
| Now, there is a link-up, however, to not only Michael Hastings, but also to Edward Snowden and the journalist at The Guardian, and you submitted your material to them, and there was a stop there as well, and I'd like to reveal that here. | |
| The... | |
| The letter that Brad had sent out to General Mattis after he was paid off, I then took and formulated a report to General Jeffrey Jacobs saying, sir, this material has just been revealed to me. | |
| I was still an officer in the United States Army. | |
| I'm in a federal civilian prison as an active Army Reserve officer, which is the first time in the history of the United States that's ever been done. | |
| They basically The Army never charged me with anything, yet the Civilian Justice Department comes in and charges me. | |
| Now what's interesting is that Lanny Brewer, the Assistant U.S. Attorney General, and Eric Holder both work for a firm called Covington& Burling. | |
| Covington& Burling represented Union Bank of Switzerland and a variety of other international banks and organizations. | |
| So Lanny Brewer and Eric Holder leave Covington& Burling and join the Obama administration. | |
| And they then prosecute Brad Birkenfeld, who's making a lot of noise about UBS. Now, Brad Birkenfeld also brought a lot of WikiLeaks material, WikiLeaks cables. | |
| Julian Assange, God bless him, brings a lot of material that comes from the State Department and others that clearly state under Hillary Clinton, That Brad Birkenfeld is going to be used as a scapegoat and Swiss concessions are going to be appropriated if we basically sell Brad Birkenfeld down the river. | |
| So the United States government under Hillary Clinton at the Department of State in coordination with Eric Holder and Lanny Brewer focus on Brad Birkenfeld to make him a scapegoat and target and prosecute him for material that he's bringing to the American people to help them and help the government. | |
| So, Lanny Brewer, Eric Holder, and Hillary Clinton come at Brad, and this is all in the WikiLeaks cables. | |
| Brad brought all those to me and showed me them, and I have a lot of experience with military and State Department cables. | |
| I said, Brad, you'd be amazed, but see this cable right here, which identifies you and all this? | |
| This comes from State Department Counterterrorism in 2008. I was at the State Department Counterterrorism Office in 2008. So all of the material that was relevant, I was there. | |
| I was Part of the organization and the team. | |
| But my report went up September 25, 2012. Edward Snowden, who was a Booz Allen Hamilton contractor working out of Hawaii, who knew and was overseen by one of my friends who worked at Booz Allen, I won't name who it is, but he worked under the management of guys that I knew at Booz Allen. | |
| Including Mike McConnell. | |
| In U.S. Cyber Command, I knew all the people that he was working with, and I knew... | |
| Which, just for my listeners, there's a direct link between Mike McConnell, who was basically named by Dan Beerish, in an interview and behind the scenes with us numerous times as the head of MJ-12 for the listeners. | |
| So you see there's a direct link between Booz Allen and Hamilton, And MJ-12, and what I would say is the secret space program and the Black Projects, where a lot of this money is being waylaid, so to speak. | |
| So, okay, to get back to the story here, so your report somehow... | |
| My report bounced through the TSSEI communication channels, the Nippernet, the Sippernet, and Edward Snowden saw it, read it, and recognized Brad Birkenfeld in it, and thereby recognized his own position in it as the Geneva, Switzerland CIA analyst, and all the bells went off. | |
| He saw Birkenfeld targeted by UBS or CIA, NSA, Department of Justice, recognized that he was the Swiss banker that was targeted for DUI, saw my report as a military officer as a terrorist finance analyst and a Booz Allen saw my report as a military officer as a terrorist finance analyst and a Booz Allen Hamilton contractor, and recognized me and my name in the Booz Allen directory, and basically chose to take the money and | |
| run and took all of and basically chose to take the money and run and took all of the reports he could and began to do his exodus, which eight months later involved him flying out of Hawaii, going to Hong Kong and revealing it So he's conveniently in Russia. | |
| But that was significant because it draws the three-level connection, the three-legged stool of Birkenfeld in Switzerland, Snowden in Switzerland, and Bennett in Booz Allen Hamilton military terrorist financing. | |
| So Snowden and I are connected by the terrorist financing Booz Allen Hamilton connection. | |
| Brad is connected with me because of our joint experience in the federal prison camp and Brad having all the Swiss banking information that I found enormously informative and valuable. | |
| It was like finding a treasure on the seashore and Snowden I hadn't seen a lot of this. | |
| Now, this is the other interesting thing, is Jessalyn Raddick, who you see coming out with Kirk Wiebe and Thomas Drake and Snowden, she's in fact, I think Snowden's direct attorney, had represented Brad Birkenfeld as well. | |
| And Brad had talked to her just when he got out and said, you need to contact Bennett because he is the military expert who will confirm a lot of my financial terrorist account information from UBS. So Jessalyn Raddick is the connection, also at the center, to Birkenfeld, Snowden, and myself. | |
| She knows all three of us. | |
| A lot of this material hasn't really gotten out until now. | |
| You're the first intrepid reporter, really, To begin to expose this and identify it. | |
| I don't think it's enormously complex. | |
| I think it's just been a lot of fear. | |
| Michael Hastings also was looking into this and had gotten reports, and we know what happened to him subsequently later. | |
| I think he was drawing the connections between I think he had angered a lot of McChrystal's people that perhaps used that as an excuse to take him out. | |
| But it was told to me that he was taken out with a thermite charge in his vehicle. | |
| And it's significant that he was looking into this. | |
| And what is most significant is this story shows that The United States government under the Department of Justice, Eric Holder, Lanny Brewer, who were working for Covington& Burling, which is the law firm that represented UBS, and Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of State, | |
| coordinated a targeted prosecution of Birkenfeld, and all of the financial accounts that he came to the Senate with to say, give these to the military, give these to the terrorist finance experts, to track down the terrorist money sources that Could be going to bad guys in the future, which now we see that future is ISIS in Syria, in the Middle East, through Kuwait, through Qatar, through Saudi Arabia. | |
| All those accounts we had in 2009. Actually, we had them in 2007, 2008. Okay, there's still the link up with the Guardian reporter, because Greenwald had an assistant that you submitted this material to, who basically seemed to have sat on it. | |
| Is that correct? | |
| Yeah, Andrew Fishman is his name. | |
| He is Glenn Greenwald's assistant, and Andrew Fishman had contacted me after I had been exhaustively... | |
| Again, I sent my material out to over 100 senators and congressmen, As a military officer, I'm writing letters saying, dear members of Congress, I'm a United States Army officer being held in a prison and The material that I am presenting to you directly relates to terrorism, terrorist financing. | |
| Please debrief me. | |
| Please immediately contact me. | |
| This is not an ice cream man or a car mechanic. | |
| This is an officer in the United States Army who's worked with a top-secret SCAI clearance at the State Department, at Special Operations Command, at Central Command. | |
| At Booz Allen Hamilton, at the Bush administration, at Heritage Foundation, with a bachelor's, with a master's, with a PhD. | |
| Who has got something to say? | |
| Don't you think you should pay attention to them? | |
| Not one person except Rand Paul ever responded, ever looked into this. | |
| In fact, there were vilifying attempts. | |
| Senator Jim Nelson in Florida. | |
| Florida is where a lot of it happens, so there's something funny there. | |
| Was, was after this letter, which I read in the beginning, had submitted to Senator Feinstein, Senator Jim Nelson jumps on and starts berating me and telling Senator Feinstein, we don't know what this guy knows. | |
| We don't know who he is. | |
| Basically trying to say, we need to get rid of him or silence him or keep him in prison. | |
| But no one in the United States military or the Congress ever contacted me or Birkenfeld about these materials. | |
| It was extremely significant. | |
| Andrew Fishman, Glenn Greenwald, his assistant, had said, do you have proof that these documents exist and Birkenfeld is connected with the Snowden revelations? | |
| And I said, absolutely, I have proof. | |
| I have everything documented. | |
| Contact me for details. | |
| I'm happy to send it to you. | |
| Meet me. | |
| And... | |
| I never heard from Andrew Fishman again after that. | |
| So I would hope that it was an ineptitude, bureaucratic blunder, failure. | |
| But something's very funny when Glenn Greenwald, the quote supposed champion of getting the Snowden information out, doesn't contact the very source that says Edward Snowden and Brad Birkenfeld are connected. | |
| And it's significant because Brad Birkenfeld is the number one Union Bank of Switzerland guy who threw out all the news in 2009 about tax accounts. | |
| Now they've subsequently spun his whole issue to be more about tax havens for the rich and all that. | |
| That was only part of the argument. | |
| The main thrust of his revelations were these Swiss bank accounts are being used to fund terrorism and I'm taking 19,000 and I'm presenting them to the Department of Justice so that we can begin to track them down, so that we don't lose more soldiers, so that we win the war. | |
| So he can from a patriotic duty. | |
| That was my whole impetus, but yet No one in the government, no one in the military had ever done anything about it. | |
| And I think that's what motivated Snowden to take his material and go directly to the public. | |
| He saw what happened to us, and he also saw what happened to Bill Weeby and Thomas Drake and Benny. | |
| Okay, but Birkenfeld has been silent. | |
| And is he still living in Switzerland? | |
| Do you know? | |
| No. | |
| Brad is in New Hampshire. | |
| And he's keeping a very low profile. | |
| They had subsequently approached him and tried to ensnare him with another DUI, apparently. | |
| And perhaps that was a threat to say, you better not say a single thing that corroborates any of Bennett's materials or any of this stuff. | |
| Because they realized the cat was out of the bag. | |
| The thing was frothing beyond a level they could contain. | |
| And all the material has already been downloaded and is out there. | |
| And Brad is in New Hampshire keeping a low profile. | |
| I think his lawyers have said, wait until we can get you out of the country to be safe. | |
| Okay. | |
| Now, the Swiss bank accounts, that's something like, what, 19,000? | |
| 19,000 bank accounts. | |
| That's just astronomical. | |
| Now, I assume that... | |
| These are charities. | |
| These are... | |
| Every entity, every organization, every middleman, every individual donor, the biggest one was Abdullah Aziz. | |
| And, I mean, Brad gave me copies of all that material. | |
| Abdullah Aziz was a major al-Qaeda financier, Saudi connection. | |
| All of that material was gold that was never used, except 4,000 accounts, and the rest have They have, I think, intentionally been allowed to disappear. | |
| And the tragedy is, all of those bank accounts, when the bad guys started getting a whiff, basically when they went public and said, we're prosecuting Birkenfeld, all the bad guys' money, they took and they hid, as well as, I think, CIA accounts, they just reshuffled the deck. | |
| Okay, but those accounts and the documentation that goes with them, I assume, is this either part of your book or your backup materials, or is it secreted away somewhere by Birkenfeld? | |
| A lot of this is secreted away. | |
| Birkenfeld has copies of a lot of this material. | |
| A lot of this material that he's given me, specifically related to the individual accounts and the banks and such, I haven't wanted to release I don't want to go into anything until it's safely, thoroughly vetted with lawyers and military officials. | |
| But I have uploaded everything and safely distributed it to people that I trust. | |
| Should anything happen to me, all of it would come out. | |
| And you can rest assured that you would get a copy of it. | |
| Okay, well thank you for that. | |
| Now, I have a few other questions. | |
| Do you have any, because we've kind of painted the picture here, and you've been doing a great job, and I would even understand if you would want to take a break and start with the next part, just to, you know, to take some questions from the audience as well. | |
| A few more questions from myself and a few people in the back sort of here that are quite in a position to actually have some questions for you. | |
| So if you'd like to take maybe a five minute break, we can do that or we can continue on as we're going here. | |
| We can continue on. | |
| I have no problem with that. | |
| You're in charge of the procession of this. | |
| Okay, well then we will stick with it because I'm always into just sticking with what I've got at the moment because you never know what might happen. | |
| So at this moment, I'd like to ask you some questions that may seem kind of coming out of nowhere, but I want to make sure that you've been able to get out. | |
| At least in this forum, the way we're doing it with somebody reading your materials and your book and all of this putting it together. | |
| Is there any other sort of threads that we've sort of forgotten to mention? | |
| Well, we've got... | |
| The Brad Birkenfeld connection with UBS and his story of being targeted by the CIA in a false DUI charge and running over here as a result of that with his suitcase of banking information and Snowden being in Geneva, Switzerland at the time witnessing all of this and reporting to Glenn Greenwald later that that was his turning point when he saw the Swiss banker being targeted. | |
| That's significant. | |
| Then Brad comes over and its connection with Department of Justice. | |
| They're taking his information and targeting his friend in London who flies over and picks him up and then fraudulently form a letter, send it to UBS to try and have him in jail or assassinated. | |
| And that's hugely significant because that affirms the entire fear or You know, suspicion that people have about the whole NSA, CIA surveillance of citizens, | |
| because what happened to Brad is the nightmare instinct that every American has felt, which is, I don't want people reading my email or targeting my phone calls because they could give it to the Department of Justice and prosecute me with some cobbled together crime. | |
| That's exactly what they did to Brad Birkenfeld. | |
| And it's startling because here he comes into the Department of Justice, a department that you grow up in America hoping and expecting that your Department of Justice is like Captain America. | |
| They're for truth and they're for righteousness and they're for protecting citizens' rights. | |
| And they do exactly the opposite. | |
| They target a good American with, I mean, a deadly game and try and have it assassinated. | |
| Next thing you see, the CIA telling a Vanity Fair journalist not to run the Birkenfeld story, and 60 Minutes and everyone else drop the story. | |
| Vanity Fair drops the story, and Birkenfeld conveniently is sentenced to 40 months For being the man who brings all this information up front, and yet he's put in prison? | |
| Well, I mean, that's exactly the same trajectory that happened to you, in essence. | |
| You were bringing forward information that was crucial, making, you know, if anything, just warning, giving warnings with documentation, with your area of expertise in certain areas. | |
| Certain reports that you're giving, and then that's actually turning you into a target. | |
| So here you're doing your job, and on the other hand, you're being targeted by the very people you're reporting to. | |
| Now, I don't know if you can implicate, for example, Dove Zachheim, or whether there are certain top generals that you feel were Sort of implicated, if you will, in the trajectory that you're on, or whether you want to even go down that road to mentioning them. | |
| But it may be, well, instructional, for one thing. | |
| And then I think you're also saying that the Obama administration, at a certain point, is culpable here. | |
| Oh, absolutely. | |
| And so that has to mean, I mean, we do think the air colder, as you've even stated to me, Is quite possibly stepping down because this is getting too hot and then you're even seeing a trail to Benghazi. | |
| So, you know, Hillary Clinton is certainly implicated. | |
| There have to be some other players that you haven't named who are equally I mean, I don't know, you know, you don't really... | |
| Here's one thing, and a lot of this I've written down exhaustively and put it all in it, but it comes to me again that some of the things we haven't mentioned, for example, President Barack Obama, when he was Senator Barack Obama, was on the Senate Investigations Committee that heard Birkenfeld. | |
| So Barack Obama, when he was a Senator, was on Carl Levin's Senate Committee on Permanent Investigations and heard all of this material on terrorist financing through his banks and UBS. So Obama heard it all. | |
| He was there. | |
| And it's very suspicious that all this happened to Brad when Obama became president. | |
| And also suspicious is that Robert Wolf, the chairman of UBS for the Americas, became Barack Obama's fundraising guy in 2008. So the guy in charge of UBS for all of the Americas comes over and joins Obama's team, giving him money. | |
| In exchange for what? | |
| For making Brad Birkenfeld a scapegoat, for telling Lanny Brewer and Eric Holder to prosecute Brad Birkenfeld, and telling Hillary Clinton to aid in securing Swiss treaties in exchange for prosecuting Birkenfeld. | |
| That's a pretty significant story. | |
| That's why Brad was really mad as a hornet that They were all coming to him and trying to dogpile on him for giving information that was in the national interest of the United States. | |
| And that's where, I mean, you can judicially and legally look at this to say, is this treason? | |
| Is this in violation of constitutional government powers? | |
| Absolutely. | |
| Profoundly, I think so. | |
| I think with you, there are some brilliant lawyers. | |
| Step in and really examine or articulate a lot of this material and pull in Birkenfeld's story, my story, and Snowden's story, and it creates the perfect storm. | |
| You have three fronts that come together. | |
| Now, I found it very significant that Eric Holder has just resigned in the last few days, and Dov Zakheim made an appearance on Russia Today yesterday. | |
| First time I'd seen him, suddenly he pops up just after I agreed to do this interview with you. | |
| Eric Holder just resigns after I agreed to do this interview with you. | |
| And not only that, but you and I both know that Russia Today called you to try to scoop me, as journalists call it. | |
| Last night, when they obviously got wind that we were going to do this interview today, so they wanted you to go on the air, I mean, immediately, and so wanted to circumvent, I guess, or cut this, you know, whatever they wanted to do, spin it their way. | |
| But I want to ask about the other Swiss banks, because isn't it true that there are other Swiss banks that are also implicated in this sort of money trail? | |
| Absolutely. | |
| That was the beauty of Birkenfeld's material. | |
| He brought together all of the intelligence that, as an intelligence analyst, I could have laid out on a big white table and had basically... | |
| The whole World War II outline of all my major targets. | |
| And those were Credit Suisse, HSBC, besides all the other European banks and Middle Eastern sub-banks and contractors that are used by the Swiss banks. | |
| He brought a wealth of material. | |
| He had worked in the Swiss banking area for like 10 years. | |
| He knew where all the bodies were buried. | |
| He knew... | |
| All the major bankers and their phones, their cell phones, their hotel rooms and their calendars of events and when they come and their conferences and their clients. | |
| He had enormous wealth of information that staggered my mind because I was just blown away. | |
| And he also had all of the WikiLeaks cables that he couldn't quite make sense of. | |
| But me and my background with them, I'm looking at them. | |
| And it's like looking into one of those photographs you have to stare at for a long time. | |
| And suddenly you see the image on the other side. | |
| That was what I saw when Brad bought all this stuff to me. | |
| Suddenly I studied it and I could see the multidimensional connections and the people and the agencies. | |
| And I was flabbergasted. | |
| I was appalled and that's what triggered me, again, out of a sense of patriotism as an officer of the United States Army. | |
| How is this information being used to protect my enlisted soldiers on the battlefield, my Marines, my special operations, my CIA assets? | |
| How are we utilizing this? | |
| Okay, and what about the general that you reported to or initially brought you in, Tabooz Allen, Jeff? | |
| Earl, Jeff Jones. | |
| Yeah, now he passed on at what point during this trajectory? | |
| Because he wasn't there to back you up, is that right? | |
| No, he had passed on in... | |
| I think it was 2010. Yeah, he had passed on before all of this had unfolded. | |
| And I think perhaps because he had passed on... | |
| That was the green light for some of the powers-to-be to come and prosecute me because he would never have stood for it. | |
| He knew everybody who was the high up in the Pentagon brass that if anything needed to be done, he could have made a quick phone call and everything would have disappeared. | |
| But I didn't... | |
| Again, I didn't... | |
| I didn't think there was anything there to make it disappear, and I didn't call in any of those favors. | |
| I probably should have, thinking back now after what they've done. | |
| But had I not gone through all this, I would never have met Brad Birkenfeld. | |
| And if I didn't meet Brad Birkenfeld, I wouldn't have all this Swiss banking information that's directly being used right now by ISIS and Syria and all the bad guys in the Middle East that, quote, were supposedly trying to put those fires out. | |
| Okay, have you heard of an organization, a front organization actually, No, not off the top of my head. | |
| Okay. | |
| And are you able to name any other, let's say, front organizations that would have been associated with these accounts? | |
| Yeah, there's what Brad revealed to me in the materials that he had shared with me. | |
| The Optimist Foundation It was a major foundation within the Union Bank of Switzerland architecture that was used for a variety of courier and money laundering transfer operations. | |
| All of that was significant because Booz Allen Hamilton had put me through extensive training and I had all of the materials from Booz Allen Hamilton And this was in 2010, and when I go back through all my material, I see all of the material that Brad was mentioning was directly being utilized in the PowerPoint slides and the training that Booz Allen Hamilton was using in counter-terrorist finance training. | |
| So when I met Brad, it's like I'm meeting the guy who has all of the information that Booz Allen Hamilton was directly putting into his training platforms And yet, not doing anything about on a warfighting level. | |
| Okay, so you must have been having sort of talks during the time when you were going through all these experiences. | |
| Did you not have any other counterintelligence officers Or people, maybe even above you, that you tried to tell this story to? | |
| When I submitted this report to General Jeffrey Jacobs, who was in charge of U.S. Civil Affairs Psychological Operations Command, who was my head-up general in charge of my whole combatant command, I sent it to him first. | |
| As an officer, going up my chain of command, I was adamant to make sure I was doing this through proper channels, I didn't send it to the media or anyone. | |
| I was sending it to the Inspector General, military authorities, my military lawyer. | |
| After a month, nothing is being done. | |
| I then send it to the Congress, Armed Services Committee of the Senate, Armed Services Committee of the House, Terrorism Committee. | |
| In the book, I list every single member of Congress who got a copy of this. | |
| I'm happy to read through. | |
| Exactly who got this. | |
| And would this be also sent to Eric Holder directly? | |
| Or would it be sent to someone who reports to him? | |
| Well, this was sent to the courts, too. | |
| I didn't send it directly to Eric Holder. | |
| I sent it to the court. | |
| Because quite honestly, after what Brad had said and what I had seen them do, I knew that they would... | |
| Trust me, the Department of Justice has a habit of mimicking the Nazis when it comes to treating prisoners, and I have seen men die in the federal prison camp of heart attacks. | |
| I've seen men lose their legs because they're left to the medical neglect. | |
| People do not understand how tragically horrific the Department of Justice and the Bureau of Prisons is to people when you're in prison. | |
| One side note, Another very, and I've shared with you I think before, when I was released, I was just released in February. | |
| Now, I had been writing everybody for two years. | |
| I sat down at a typewriter and sent out every piece of mail I possibly could. | |
| Nothing was responded to. | |
| Nothing was done. | |
| The only person who came up was Michael Isikoff. | |
| Now this is significant. | |
| Michael Isikoff of NBC News and Tom Hamburger of the Washington Post had come up to interview me based on the Navy contractor who went to the Navy Yard in Washington, D.C. and shot up the Navy Yard, if you remember that. | |
| Yes. | |
| Well, he had gotten a security clearance and they were questioning his clearance. | |
| Well, anyway, they sent me a letter saying, "I'm going to go to the Navy Yard." We'd like to interview you about security clearances. | |
| And I said, certainly. | |
| Come up. | |
| And Tom Hamburger and Michael Isikoff came up and I shared with them this entire story, which I'm sharing with you, and showed them all the documentation and said, this is, you know, bizarre tragedy and no one is doing anything. | |
| Please get the story out. | |
| And I also said, you know what's interesting on your security clearance issue is Booz Allen Hamilton is owned by the Carlyle Group. | |
| Carlyle Group also owns USIS, which gives security clearances. | |
| So Carlyle Group owns the company that gives the security clearances and it owns the company that gets the security clearances, that needs security clearances. | |
| So it's like, you know, they own both entities and no one, and I wrote All members of Congress, again, over two years, on all these issues that I knew about, hoping that someone was going to say, what have you got to say? | |
| What do you know? | |
| And I reported that to Isikoff and Tom Hamburger, saying, look into this. | |
| No one else is reporting that USIS and Carlisle Group and Booz Allen Hamilton are all incestuously connected. | |
| And for two hours, they sat down with me. | |
| And they then left, you know, and the next thing I know, they wrote a story on clearances and had like three sentences devoted to our meeting conversation, in which they basically said, Bennett is another contractor who's in prison. | |
| Not any discussion of why he's in prison. | |
| Not any discussion of the propaganda and the illegality and the unconstitutionality. | |
| He's a military officer. | |
| No, nothing like that. | |
| It was quickly abandoned. | |
| Now, Michael Isikoff had also attacked Jessalyn Raddick. | |
| Jessalyn Raddick, who represents Snowden and also represented Birkenfeld, Jessalyn Raddick had originally come out in her challenges against the Justice Department for their behavior against the U.S. Afghanistan citizen, the U.S. kid, I can't remember his name, but they had gone and violated his rights. | |
| And Jessalyn Raddick had stood up and said, you're doing unconstitutional activities. | |
| And they had come against Jessalyn Raddick for that. | |
| And Michael Isikoff had attacked her and written a variety of nonsense about her. | |
| So anyway, that's an interesting connection. | |
| Well, I think Hastings was also doing a story on that young man. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Hastings was the man who had the courage and the gumption and the fearlessness, probably based on a lot of his Canadian spirit and upbringing. | |
| He didn't have the beaten down fear of the American government, as perhaps Americans have. | |
| He came at it much more just battling the war drum. | |
| And he received the whole story and the reports on the UBS-Switzerland Counterterrorism Threat Finance, Snowden Connection, and was putting together the story. | |
| Matt Taheebe had also been educated in this, and as we know history shows shortly after, Michael Hastings was taken out of the picture. | |
| Now I do have, if you wanted to hear, all the people that received copies of this report, so they have nowhere to go. | |
| General James Amos, Marine Corps, Commandant of the Pentagon, Senator John Coburn, Senator James Inhofe, Senator John Thune, Senator Kelly Ayotte, Representative Dave Reichardt, Representative Ruppersberger, Senator Saxby Shambless, | |
| Senator Jim Risch, Senator Angus King, Representative Jeff Sessions, Senator Pat Roberts, Senator Orrin Hatch, Senator Marco Rubio, Senator Dana Rohrabacher, Representative Michelle Bachman, Representative Michael McCall, Representative Henry Waxman, Representative Eric Cantor, Representative John Boehner, Senator Mitch McConnell, Senator Rand Paul, the only one to respond. | |
| Okay, but there was also a problem with Rand Paul in the sense that he did respond, but it actually didn't go anywhere. | |
| He didn't do anything, yeah. | |
| Now, I'll chalk that up to political calculation, and he's preparing for the presidency and all that, but that's still inexcusable. | |
| It's still inexcusable that the totality of this material has not been thoroughly exposed, examined, and brought in front of a congressional hearing. | |
| And that was really the whole plan that Brad and I had sat down. | |
| I said, Brad, when you get out, you really need to take this military dimension, this special operations, psychological warfare, special forces dimension, and take it to the United States Congress to say, This material you need to examine. | |
| The American taxpayer needs to examine because it is funding terrorism right now. | |
| And his plan was to get out, reappear in front of the Senate, and say, here's all this material, but don't talk to me about the terrorist financing dimension. | |
| Bring in Scott Bennett. | |
| Lieutenant Scott Bennett, United States Army, who I met in prison, who worked in this capacity as a terrorist analyst with a top-secret clearance for Booz Allen Hamilton. | |
| Bring him into the room. | |
| And let's talk together and we'll share all this information. | |
| That was the plan from the beginning and it never happened. | |
| Now, I have a person who's asked a question here, and what it is is, does your top secret clearance delegations, or I mean, I'm sorry, top secret security clearance obligations override your oath to the Constitution? | |
| And this is, on a certain level, it's philosophical, because you have to weigh these two, you know, these two obligations, basically. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Well, the easy answer is, of course, anything that's a violation of the U.S. Constitution is not law. | |
| Anything that violates the U.S. Constitution is not a security clearance. | |
| It's like saying someone was murdered in cold blood under a secrecy issue and it was illegal, it was a murder, but because it's a secrecy issue, it can't be reported. | |
| Well, the Constitution would say, no, that's not covered, that's not an issue. | |
| I think Snowden's lawyers have articulated that in a very successful way, that anything that violates the U.S. Constitution is not protected under secrecy laws. | |
| Now, that being said, I have made painstaking efforts and have, throughout my entire journey of this, including this interview, I have not divulged anything that is of a TSSEI nature that was not given to me and put to me while I was in the SCIFs at State Department, Special Operations, or U.S. Central Command. | |
| So I have gone out of my way not to violate any of my security oaths. | |
| And what's amazing is Snowden sort of picked up on this too. | |
| If you go the route of filing it up the chain of command, you'll be in prison and it'll take two years before you meet with a reporter and talk about it, which is exactly what they've done to me. | |
| Okay. | |
| Now, I'm going to allow the questions from the audience here and asking them as I do this, what I do every time, which is basically ask them to put their questions in all caps. | |
| I assume you may have been asking questions during this. | |
| It's quite an extensive... | |
| But if you could now put your questions in the chat, one right after the other, in all caps, it will be helpful for me to go down the list and just read them as we go. | |
| But in the meantime, what I wanted to ask you was, first of all, have you been in contact with Snowden at all? | |
| Are you able to be in contact with him through any channels? | |
| Well, I really think it's probably prudent for the eyes and ears that are listening in and watching this who are not inclined to protect a lot of the liberties or are more inclined to the super state, police state impulse. | |
| I think it's probably prudent not to divulge my communications with Snowden Or any other party at this point for their safety as well as mine, just not giving them more information. | |
| That will come out eventually and it's just being coordinated properly. | |
| Okay, now there's another aspect to this that I find interesting, and this is going way back, and I'm sort of asking for your sort of take on what you think about this. | |
| It would appear that since you served under the Bush administration, kind of, I'm assuming that you didn't try to push the envelope too much there. | |
| You didn't make a name for yourself the way you certainly were doing later on. | |
| You seem to come forward as somebody that they would trust as being on the same page as them, hence Rumsfeld seeing you ask some good questions on some level, being on the same page and having drunk the Kool-Aid in the sense that you saw the Arabs as the enemy. | |
| Or the Muslim, whatever you want to call that. | |
| In other words, you seem to be right on the right page at that point. | |
| You've gone through an incredible sort of trajectory. | |
| It's very rich material for a movie, let me say that. | |
| But the thing that comes to mind is that it seems that they would have perhaps misinterpreted who you really were. | |
| Within your, what appeared to be a sort of a conservative Bush, you know, excuse the language, but flunky, doing the right job at the right time, kind of got, you know, by drinking the Kool-Aid, as I'm saying, and then suddenly you get put in a position where you actually can run with With something. | |
| And get your teeth into something. | |
| And you actually show yourself for who you really are. | |
| And that becomes a horse of a different color. | |
| Somebody that they can't... | |
| They never wanted to let into their secrets. | |
| Right? | |
| And it was too late for them. | |
| Yeah, I think that's an accurate assessment. | |
| I think you've got your finger on that. | |
| I think there was... | |
| There was a sense in the military and in the intelligence community where you... | |
| Come in and you're boiled slowly. | |
| You're boiled slowly in indoctrination. | |
| You're boiled slowly in the career path. | |
| You're enriched. | |
| You're given all sorts of stability and permanency and job. | |
| And to a lot of men and women, that becomes an addictive, irresistible temptation. | |
| And they just don't have the desire and the impulse to rock the boat. | |
| I am not I'm temperamentally prone to conflicts and fights, and I don't look for things to challenge and be problematic to, but as an old Korean War vet told me one time, he said, Scott, it's in your DNA to challenge bullshit, and it's probably based on my Scottish upbringing and temperament, and when I see something that's wrong, And it just strikes me. | |
| My hair stands on end, and I do go and attack it. | |
| And I did a little of this in the Bush administration. | |
| I saw, for example, California child support agencies charging fathers 10% on arrearages and not telling them that they were due in any arrearages. | |
| And on a $50,000 debt, suddenly the father who's paying $500 a month for 10 years, thinking that he's one month away from paying it off, is told, oh, you've just been paying me interest. | |
| And the father says, I was never informed about that. | |
| And next thing you know, the powers that be in the state of California and other states have got him between a rock and a hard place and you have a lot of fathers that kill themselves or disappear and all sorts of tragic stuff happens. | |
| Well, I discovered that and reported it up the Bush administration and reported it to Senator Sam Brownback, who was We're good to go. | |
| We did a lot of sociological analysis into the stability of families directly correlating to the safety and stability of the United States. | |
| So here's an example of the United States government doing destructive things to families and fathers and children's lives that can be easily fixed, but yet it was not fixed, it was covered up. | |
| And I was sort of yelled at and screamed at and went through all sorts of stuff by the Bush people that were in charge. | |
| I wasn't a Kool-Aid-drinking Republican, even though I was and I worked in the Republican National Committee and worked at Heritage and all sorts of conservative organizations. | |
| I had ruffles and feathers there, but I kept moving up the chain of command. | |
| He had hired me because he saw that ability and he told me, I want you because you're not afraid of anyone and you're not going to kowtow and you're not going to be loyal to anything. | |
| You're going to go in and you're going to fight. | |
| You're going to identify problems. | |
| You're going to devise solutions and you're going to do it in a bone-tearing manner. | |
| And I like that and I want that. | |
| Join my team. | |
| And he pursued me for a few months and finally I said, you know what? | |
| I'll join your team. | |
| And that's when we started devising incredible solutions Psychological warfare material, a lot of which has been utilized, but then I also started discovering a lot of the failures. | |
| The thing that's significant about this is we find ourselves now into an evolving war, and this can be very quickly overpowering and destructive for the United States, because you've got a whole... | |
| You've went around and stirred up every hornet's nest in the Middle East, hoping that you're going to be able to calm them into becoming little Democrats, sprinkle the fairy dust of capitalism and institutions, and we've miscalculated the whole Muslim identity and the romanticism that they associate with jihad and heroism and fighting for their religious call. | |
| We have failed because we've never engaged them on the psychological warfare level and articulated We've never done that because we've been afraid to touch the religious dimension. | |
| And that's sad because that's the only way to defeat them. | |
| And at the same time, it's like you have bureaucrats in uniform in the political circles that don't want to extinguish the fire. | |
| They just want to dampen down the flames, but keep it going so that they have a job and so that they can move on to their next career post in a military generalship. | |
| Or retire and jump right into Booz Allen Hamilton. | |
| Well, we would also say, fuel the war machine. | |
| Yes, absolutely. | |
| Keep the war machine afloat and generating money because the war makes money. | |
| And I did not join the war machine to be part of the machine. | |
| I joined the war machine to put the war out of business, to end it, to end the enemy, to defeat them, and come home. | |
| As General Maximus and Gladiator, I went up to Germania to fight it, to win it, and come home to my crops. | |
| And the problem was, Nobody wants to do that. | |
| They wanted to simply continue it and grow it. | |
| And it's enormously dangerous because suddenly we wake up and we're in a police state. | |
| Suddenly half of our constitutional liberties are gone. | |
| Suddenly the Department of Justice is now prosecuting a military officer in the civilian court for things that were done on base that subsequently other courts have been throwing out similar cases. | |
| But it's very disturbing. | |
| So the whole point of this is to educate people about, okay, what's been done, and hopefully bring all this together to hold people accountable. | |
| Okay, now you've mentioned Wahhabism and there's also the money trail that goes to funding terrorists and also training those terrorists, from what I understand, in Saudi Arabia and the links between certainly the Bush administrations, as we know very well. | |
| And Saudi Arabia. | |
| But this trail of money must implicate certain countries more than others. | |
| And Saudi Arabia has to be, you know, way high on the list. | |
| Isn't that true? | |
| Well, I think other open source media analysis have very accurately identified some of the key countries that are involved with this whole funding of Jihadist terrorist impulses. | |
| RT Today has done a lot of significant stories into the Sunni countries, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, not so much Yemen and Somalia. | |
| They're crumbling already. | |
| But you've got very wealthy states that are Basically, a lot of very rich people that are giving money away to individuals and organizations, a lot of which are based in Europe, that are funding through Swiss banks, that are directly plugging into the pipeline of terrorist recruitment. | |
| Okay, when you're saying based in Europe, is there any particular European country that they're based in more often than not? | |
| Well, that was what Brad Birkenfeld had divulged, that Switzerland and the Union Bank of Switzerland and Credit Suisse and HBSC and the whole Swiss banking establishment was, in Brad's argument, was the quintessential center point, | |
| the choke point that needed to be properly controlled and The Department of Treasury, in coordination, in synchronicity with the military, and, quote, supposedly, you would have expected CIA, needed to coordinate the constriction of the bank accounts that were being opened, that were flowing into these countries and these individuals. | |
| So his argument was, UBS, in his background, was a major hub for finances that were coming Right, but what about Germany, for example? | |
| What about Germany? | |
| Well, you have in Those countries, a lot of terrorist organizations, terrorist individuals who are sympathetic with the cause that are using soapboxes for rallying and recruiting. | |
| I mean, you see that with the reports of 3,000 British or 3,000 Europeans, big segments coming from Britain and Germany, all joining the Syrian Jihad. | |
| The human capital is coming out of the exodus of the Islamic dual citizens, if you will. | |
| Their citizenship may be in Germany, may be in France, may be in Britain. | |
| But their passion and loyalty and spiritual connection is with their Middle Eastern Muslim identity, and specifically their sense of jihad. | |
| Their sense of, and there's a Mozen Beg, I think it was, who came out, who was released from Britain today, and he appeared on Julian Assange's talk show, had come out, and Him and another individual were articulating the Islamic Jihad theory and why a lot of these people are moving into the Middle East, you know, Sunni Islamic State. | |
| And it's not for economic stability. | |
| It's not for having condos in a nice piece of property in the Middle East. | |
| It's for the thrill and the fulfillment and the promise of eternity in heaven for fighting Jihad and all that goes along with it. | |
| That's why they're going over there. | |
| That's why they're fighting. | |
| And the dollars that are being funded to buy them the guns, the ammo, the uniforms, the food, buy them the wives. | |
| There is a massive exodus of females from the European countries and Islamic who are going over there as part of this Disneyland exodus. | |
| The Middle Eastern Islamic State fighting of Syria and Iraq. | |
| That's the Disneyland for these people who are wound up and excited and They want fulfillment, and they don't equate fulfillment with the material enrichment of the European Western society. | |
| They attribute fulfillment through their sense of living as, you know, representatives of, you know, God's will. | |
| Well, in a sense, I mean, you can relate as a soldier, they see themselves as warriors for, you know, Allah, so to speak. | |
| For their spiritual beliefs. | |
| That's the whole reason that the Iraqi forces are crumbling is because there is no, in fact, there's a prohibition of the spiritual purpose of them standing on Humvees defending against the Sunnis that are coming in. | |
| There's no similar Zeal that the Iraqi military forces have. | |
| And the sense that we're going to go in and train moderate, non-religious, zealot people to topple Assad and to topple the ISIS state, the notion of that is either so devoid of any common sense logic, | |
| and the people who think of that need to be Fired, if not thrown into an insane asylum, or it's a purposeful cover-up just to continue this endless war. | |
| Because, you know, all of a sudden, if you're the man with a fly swatter and you're getting paid for every fly, the last thing you want is for all the flies to go into some hive and settle down. | |
| You want them to be stirred up. | |
| You want them to be flying all over the place. | |
| They're not that dangerous. | |
| They're easy to take out. | |
| Now, airstrikes and all that, That's silly. | |
| The only way that you're going to battle these people from inside out, you're going to go into their hearts and minds as an Islamic thinker and articulate for them, like Said Imam did, the truth that they will not get to heaven by engaging in this sort of behavior. | |
| And in fact, Said Imam, which is a brilliant Islamic scholar, which we were all influenced by at the State Department, Has basically said the entire radical Wahhabist Al-Qaeda modus operandi is un-Islamic, and these people are risking their eternal salvation by following it. | |
| And that right there, from an Islamic scholar, that is the strategy that we should have been directly imposing into all of our psychological warfare, strategic communications, messaging throughout the whole Middle East. | |
| Okay, very good. | |
| At this moment, I'm going to go down some questions and then we're going to try to wrap this up because it's been going on for quite a while and you've been amazing, just, you know, really very, very disciplined and delivering all of this so clearly. | |
| I don't think anyone will have a problem understanding what it is you're trying to get across here. | |
| So that's great. | |
| Okay, someone wants to know... | |
| Al Jazeera, it appears they're trying to ask the question, has Al Jazeera been interested in this story? | |
| Al Jazeera has not contacted me and has examined this. | |
| As I've said, you're the first intrepid reporter who has had the courage to take on this. | |
| I mean, a lot of reporters who I have talked with are in crouching, shuddering fear of Well, you know, everyone that you're associated with has been killed. | |
| They've been saying that to me. | |
| Yeah, so am I supposed to be crowding down? | |
| This is the United States of America. | |
| We're either slaves or we're running and controlling our government. | |
| We're either a country with a military or we're a military with a country. | |
| And we need to be, you know, the former. | |
| We are a country, the United States of America, where freedom and liberty is the Envy of every human being on the face of the planet and with that, every notion of freedom and capitalism and letting your imagination and earning the fruits of your labor, | |
| we're either a country that defends that or we're a country of a police state, slaves, where everybody lives in fear and they're persecuted by the Justice Department and thrown in prison and the military, CIA apparatus, we're cowering from them. | |
| No, I'm not going to live like that. | |
| I'm not going to cower down to anything. | |
| I will present the truth that was presented to me by Birkenfeld to anyone, any person in Congress, anyone in the military uniform, anyone in the military intelligence community, because my motivation has been the men and women in uniform and their families who are on this path of endless war and that are suffering and dying. | |
| Now, I am not Saying we need to completely pack our bags and leave with our tail between our legs and allow the Middle East Islamic terrorist state to consolidate and claim victory and follow and attack us in any way. | |
| I'm all about victory and winning and doing it but doing it intelligently and that's where we've sort of lost track and it's very dangerous but A lot of professors, a lot of congressmen, and a lot of media people have all ran away from this and have not talked about it. | |
| I think now that this is now getting out, that they can actually hear and question and see that Everything's documented. | |
| You can go to Birkenfeld, and he will confirm everything that I've said. | |
| You can go to Snowden, and he will confirm everything that I've said. | |
| You can go to Jesselyn Raddick, and she will confirm everything that was said. | |
| The question is, will they? | |
| Have they been gotten to? | |
| It's very significant that a Vanity Fair reporter is messaged by the CIA substation chief telling him not to do any Birkenfeld story. | |
| Why? | |
| Well, I mean, The Guardian, Greenwald, Russia TV, obviously, is stepping forward. | |
| They have an agenda that would allow for this kind of disclosure. | |
| So, in theory, you'll be going to them next. | |
| Well, let me just point out, when I first got out of prison, I immediately I started writing and contacting every media entity I could, including everybody at Fox News. | |
| Let me just put that right out there. | |
| I wrote Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, Monica Crowley, Charles Krauthammer, Roger Ailes, everybody that you could imagine who was associated with Fox News. | |
| I wrote, and not a single one of them Did anything. | |
| Did any sort of response. | |
| And it flabbergasted me. | |
| I thought, how in the world could you be representing the Constitution and freedom and then you have Swiss banks and government corruption and cover-up and all this stuff that you're not even going to examine and ask questions about? | |
| That's your whole role. | |
| Or is your role just to be a pom-pom cheerleader for the endless war on terrorism so that you have a, you know, a job. | |
| You know, flash news alert. | |
| We've got a Homeland Security. | |
| Warning of orange-level code. | |
| Stay tuned for details. | |
| That's what it, sadly and disgustingly, seems to have devolved into. | |
| But let me point out, I did reach out to RT today. | |
| I reached out to Abby Martin, who I think is very respectful, and she's a personality that may deal with something like this. | |
| I haven't heard her back from others in there that I've reached out to. | |
| But... | |
| Let me just applaud you for being the person who has uncorked the genie in a lot of respects and gotten this out to the American public. | |
| I would hope that this answers a lot of questions. | |
| I'm more than happy to follow up and do any sort of post-interview analysis or discussion as times go on because this This is a very important issue that can help shape our future geopolitical decisions in the November election and beyond. | |
| Every single person, I would encourage to pick up the book that's on the website to really read through this, because among other things, there's three books up there. | |
| There's Shulgain, then there's the letters to Congress, and in that book is a letter, every single letter that was ever sent out to members of Congress and the military, so people can see That clearly, all these members of Congress were communicated with, were given this material, and they did nothing. | |
| They need to be held to account in the elections. | |
| That's, as we as Americans, that's how we hold our politicians to account. | |
| We are not people here to serve you and to keep you inflamed with a job. | |
| You are in a position of political power to Take these sorts of materials and revelations and intelligence failures and do something about them and basically keep our soldiers safe and avoid us going into endless wars where you could do something about it. | |
| They should have taken all of these bank accounts when Brad Birkenfeld brought them and We would never have the problem that we have right now. | |
| That's the sad reality of it. | |
| Yeah, absolutely. | |
| Okay, another question. | |
| Who were the other Dove Zakheim key associates at Booz Allen Hamilton? | |
| Well, Dove Zakheim was the man in charge of the Booz Allen Hamilton terrorist threat finance contract down at U.S. Central Command. | |
| Bill Lubliner was another immediate manager. | |
| Troy Hensley was another manager. | |
| Mike Maravilla. | |
| And there was a A few others, you know, it's all contained in the book. | |
| One interesting thing about Booz Allen Hamilton that no one really knows and talks about is that Booz Allen Hamilton in the McLean, Virginia headquarters has an entire floor where all of the top secret documents of the United States government can be couriered over and stored. | |
| So you have a civilian contractor that has the capability of taking Every top secret SCI document out of various military intelligence agencies and Booz Allen Hamilton has contracts with every intelligence and combatant command and State Department agency. | |
| They theoretically have the ability to take those documents out of the United States government and store them into the Booz Allen Hamilton McClain office. | |
| Now that's very disconcerting to me that that material is up there in a private Contracting firm? | |
| It flabbergasted me. | |
| And then you have, well, I mean, politicians today talking about taking the NSA material out of, you know, storing it with a third party. | |
| Well, we've already been doing that. | |
| Booz Allen Hamilton is a prime example of a third party who's got top secret documents. | |
| And Edward Snowden would confirm that. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| We haven't talked about this, but did you notice or did Birkenfeld talk about the link to the City of London to the British? | |
| Because there's a direct link that we know of that goes from the NSA to the GCHQ. In Britain. | |
| And for all intents and purposes, they work hand in hand. | |
| And this has been shown to me and I've also investigated it. | |
| So... | |
| Did Birkenfeld sort of talk about that at all? | |
| Because we've also got the Brits who are, you know, I mean, obviously we've got, you know, that population that is working with America to get embroiled in these wars, supposedly not sending troops on the ground, or necessarily, | |
| but they're certainly hand in glove with America and the agenda to go over into Syria, where we're bombing right now, etc., So was there a money trail going through the Swiss banks, going through England, that he spoke about in that regard? | |
| Well, I won't... | |
| I won't go on to try and talk about things that I'm not an expert in. | |
| Birkenfeld really was the expert in all of the Swiss banking operations throughout the world in London, in the United States, in Switzerland, in Germany. | |
| They were not really... | |
| Well, I won't go too much into what he described, Britain's role in it. | |
| I would probably defer a lot of that because I don't want to misquote him and misstate anything. | |
| I would encourage everyone who has questions to file a letter, a Freedom of Information Act request to Brad Birkenfeld, care of Cohn and Colapinto in Washington, D.C., As well as Jessalyn Radek at the Government Accountability Project and make the question direct to her and to them. | |
| And simply state, I'm curious about Brad Birkenfeld and his revelations about terrorist financing through Union Bank of Switzerland to Lieutenant Scott Bennett, United States Army. | |
| Can you provide me more data? | |
| Can you provide me information? | |
| Can you provide me the answers about Swiss banks being connected through London and Britain and other agencies and see what the response is? | |
| That's really the sunshine that All of your listeners and every American really needs to do. | |
| I'm speaking to a Republican group of women in a couple of days and they're very interested about why is this significant? | |
| What can we do? | |
| Well, the American patriot The American listener and I think all of the people who pay attention to your show are particularly intellectual and sophisticated and adept to say, how does this influence my country, my freedom, my government? | |
| And I've laid out very clearly what's happened to me and happened to Birkenfeld can happen to you. | |
| It can happen to anyone. | |
| It's happened to Joe Nacho. | |
| It's astounding. | |
| It almost happened to Snowden. | |
| He picked up and ran forth. | |
| It's happened to Assange, except they haven't been able to get him. | |
| You need to take this information and go to your members of Congress and say, why didn't you respond to this? | |
| What have you done about it? | |
| And put a Freedom of Information request into your member of Congress Pick up, you know, the book and the list of everybody who's been contacted and say, I'm requesting what your information is on this subject matter. | |
| What have you done about it? | |
| What has your response been? | |
| Because that's where we have to hold these members of Congress accountable. | |
| Otherwise, they're being paid off by the UBS powers and by the, you know, a lot of the Booz Allen Hamilton connection with Dove Zakheim and others It has been the American-Israeli Political Action Committee. | |
| There's been a lot of talk that the Israeli intelligence, Mossad, is infiltrated and riddled throughout Booz Allen Hamilton. | |
| There's some brilliant people who have articulated that, that I don't need to go through, but American citizens should take that to their member of Congress and question them about it. | |
| Okay, and did you notice this to be the case? | |
| I mean, what I was kind of interested in was, Dov Zockheim, you talked about this amount of money that somehow disappeared on his watch, which is the $3 or $4 trillion. | |
| Something around that. | |
| And I'm not sure if that's the same chunk of money that Rumsfeld said, oh, I'm sorry, we lost it. | |
| It disappeared. | |
| Yeah, that's exactly the amount of money. | |
| Donald Rumsfeld, who appeared on September 10, 2001, and said we're missing $2.3 trillion, one day later was September 11. And conveniently, all of the auditors that were working on that We're in a naval intelligence skiff in the section of the Pentagon that was destroyed. | |
| Barbara Honiger has done a wonderful analysis, proving, I think, without a shadow of doubt, that one, it wasn't a 757 that crashed into that Pentagon. | |
| It was a drone that was That was his watch. | |
| He was in charge of that. | |
| Now what's interesting too is Dov Zakheim was also connected to SPS, which was a firm in New York which ran The automated plain remote control technology devices That a lot of people who have studied a lot of the September 11th issues have stated the theory that the planes that were crashed were controlled by remote control, | |
| that had remote control devices on the bottom of the fuselage. | |
| Well, Dov Zakheim ran the company that developed that sort of technology. | |
| Booz Allen Hamilton has an entire Dov Zakheim's at the Pentagon overseeing the money. | |
| Before that, he was SPS, Remote Control Plane Technology, and he was also at the Heritage Foundation. | |
| I was at the Heritage Foundation. | |
| He then joins Booz Allen Hamilton. | |
| He goes right into the contract in the Gill Air Force Base tracking down the terrorist money sources and the money banks. | |
| That's where he called me in to join the team. | |
| Now what I think they thought, as you correctly identified, they thought I was going to play the game. | |
| They thought I was going to go down and do whatever I was told that I had been sufficiently lobotomized, quote, indoctrinated under the military And that I wouldn't ask questions. | |
| And that just wasn't my nature. | |
| I went in to solve problems, fix issues, and win a war. | |
| I was not loyal to my defense contractor firm, Booz Allen Hamilton. | |
| I was loyal to the United States Constitution. | |
| And I had a general affection and desire to save men and women who were in uniform, who were overseas, Fighting. | |
| And there was, that was my whole motivation for joining Booz Allen Hamilton and as well as joining the military. | |
| Okay. | |
| But Dov Zakheim has some interesting connections. | |
| And all the paperwork that I have, you see Dov Zakheim all over it. | |
| He was the one who hired me. | |
| He was also the one who fired me. | |
| Okay, but McChrystal also has some kind of connection with that group. | |
| You actually said he was involved in that group. | |
| Stanley McChrystal was closely associated with some of the personnel that we had at Booz Allen Hamilton who were all ex-military, Marine Corps, Army, Delta Force. | |
| Stanley McChrystal had communicated to certain members of our team who were high up on the professional level That anything they wanted, anything they needed, he would provide and facilitate. | |
| It was sort of a working man's close relationship, I think. | |
| So those two generals would be working together? | |
| General McChrystal would be, yeah, he was closely associated with Troy Hensley. | |
| Troy Hensley was a Delta Force, Booz Allen Hamilton guy who had told me when I was first stopped, oh, don't worry, this will all go away, we'll get you on another contract. | |
| And the next thing I know is I'm contacted by Dove Zakheim and told, we're going to remove you from the firm. | |
| So, Troy Hensley was a good guy, ex- Delta Force, I think he may have left the firm. | |
| A lot of the guys had left after that. | |
| I think they got wind that there was some funny business going on. | |
| But Dov Zakheim's all over my paperwork, and I think it's more to follow. | |
| Okay. | |
| Somebody's asking about Long Westerland. | |
| I don't know what that's about. | |
| Yeah, I'd have to get back to you on that. | |
| Okay, but are you understanding that there is, that makes some sense, that name? | |
| Is that a name? | |
| A person's name? | |
| No, it's ringing some bells, but I can't quite... | |
| Yeah, the Westerland part, I think I've seen somewhere, but I don't know what they're referring to, so maybe the person could explain in text here if they want more answers. | |
| Someone, let's see, I'm looking, somebody's saying, what about John Pearson at the DIA? Do you know anything about him? | |
| Well, Defense Intelligence Agency is the equivalent of the Central Intelligence Agency only run by the military. | |
| It's to do the same operations that the CIA does, but for military persons. | |
| I won't go into who I worked with within DIA, but it's a significant player and organization. | |
| I think Colonel Jones had it right when he identified DIA was really our only hope to get a lot of the material that CIA has into the military hands of commanders, because CIA hadn't been doing it, and Birkenfeld is a prime example. | |
| They weren't doing it. | |
| But DIA couldn't gain a lot of this information. | |
| One thing that struck me that's an interesting Pandora's box to open in the future is that If Osama bin Laden had been, and I say that with a very high if, if he was taken in Afghanistan and all of his computers and financial information was taken by the Central Intelligence Agency and put on a boat when they took him out from the country, | |
| all of that information, bank account, computer technology that was taken at the time should have immediately Okay, but you are... | |
| Maybe, I mean, not knowledgeable of the fact that Salma bin Laden was a CIA agent, was trained by them, or you know that trail, but do you also know that he was taken out in like 2001, I think it was. | |
| So this thing, whatever operation was going on, I mean, you understand the inside story. | |
| Yeah, I'm putting that out to say, okay, if you're going to believe that he was not taken out in 2001, that he was actually taken out a year ago or two years ago, Okay, if you believe that, then what happened to all of his banking? | |
| Okay, somebody's telling me our video just quit and there's no audio, so I don't know what that's about. | |
| So hold on one second here. | |
| I'm going to stop it one second. | |
| We'll start up again, okay? |
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