Murder, drug trafficking and the training of death squads. Just Fort Bragg Things. Journalist and author Seth Harp dropped by to chat with us about his explosive new book — The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces. We talk about Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), Delta Force, and a variety of horrors beyond human comprehension.
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https://qaapodcast.com
QAA was known as the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
Welcome to the QAA podcast, episode 336, Fort Bragg fever.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rakitansky, Brad Abrahams, and Julian Field.
Sometimes a book comes along that truly elucidates the opaque power structures of the American Empire and manages to shock even a cynical piece of shit like me.
I'm thinking, of course, of the Jakarta Method, a couple of years ago, by Vincent Bevins.
We covered that at the time, but this week's guest, journalist and author Seth Harpe, has written a book that astounded me not just by what it revealed, but also by the recency of so many of the topics and situations it covered.
So he's been dodging, I'm assuming, various hitmen to make it to this recording.
We're very grateful for that.
The book is called The Fort Bragg Cartel, Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces.
Welcome to the show, Seth.
Hey guys, thanks for having me.
You know, one thing that I really found amazing about this book is how it manages to take situations that feel extremely anecdotal.
Like it opens with just two guys, you know, who are in this very specialized spec-ops force.
And they're not doing anything professional.
They're just coming back from Disneyland on a garden variety of like every hard drug on Earth, basically.
And they've got their daughters in the back.
Oh, no.
You know, it just gets paranoid.
And, um, and of course., things kind of get to a pretty gruesome conclusion.
But what I loved about that is that, you know, you're kind of like reading this as a kind of personal tragedy or a personal, certainly a personal situation.
And then it kind of spins out to reveal certain aspects of how special forces work, why, you know, they arose in the first place.
And I think my favorite part of that is just that they decided that the CIA black ops teams had too much oversight.
Is that correct, Seth?
They just were like, hey, we're just, there's too much, too many over the shoulder people.
I mean, I think that you're joking, but I think that there's a a lot of truth to that.
One thing I figured out as I was researching the creation of Delta Force, I wasn't planning to go too, too deep into it.
And also the Joint Special Operations Command, was just how soon after the church committee hearings, after those were held and after laws were passed, putting oversight over the CIA really for the first time, mandating that they report cohort actions to Congress.
Like within a matter of months, they had stood up Delta Force.
And it was not long after that that that they formed JSOG.
And these organizations have many of the same capacities as a CIA.
And in fact, arguably, they have more or greater capacity in a lot of respects, certainly in the Par paramilitary operations they do.
And what's more, JSOC almost never leaks.
And I don't think we can say that about the CIA at all.
So you managed to, you know, I mean, get a get some pretty decent, I'd say, leaks here.
I mean, how did you even get these guys who who essentially, I think like most people wouldn't even know what the hell you're talking about if you talk to them about JSOC or Delta, you know, they would they would obviously like have more familiarity with with some of the other like parapolitical and paramilitary organizations of the past, you know, like you said, you know, the church committee was was like a big moment of supposed disclosure or whatever.
I mean, it always seems kind of paltry to me.
And then I realize, oh, that for them.
was a huge disaster that they had to kind of plug up.
So what makes JSOC less visible, I guess, to the public?
And yeah, could you kind of walk us through how Delta came to be?
Because these guys are pretty scared.
And it might help just, just even like a one-liner on on what JSOC is, because a lot of people don't know what that means.
Yeah.
So Delta Force was formed, I believe, in 1978, and its first mission was the Operation Eagle Claw disaster in Iran.
It was originally supposed to be a counter terrorism force, a small elite commando unit that could be used for.
for really exceptional circumstances where there was some kind of high level geopolitical event that necessitated a very precise military response where failure wasn't really an option, such as the, you know, the hostages that they kidnapped and kept at the, or they didn't kidnap them, you know, they took over the US embassy in Tehran and turned them into prisoners of the Islamic Revolution there.
And so President Carter decided to send a Delta Force team to Iran to free them.
And it was a complete disaster.
You know, I won't belabor the details because a lot of people are already well familiar with this case.
But the fact that it failed was significant because the operators never got close.
There's about 100 Delta operators that were sent there and they were supposed to assault the embassy.
They never even got close because a helicopter crashed into a transport aircraft and exploded and killed a bunch of guys, eight guys.
So the lesson, one of the lessons they took away from that was that, you know, Delta Force needed to be supported by its own sort of organic aviation assets and maritime assets.
So it was built out with Navy units, Air Force units, and then that superstructure is called the Joint Special Operations Command.
So Delta Force is really the core of JSOC, but JSOC includes other units from other service branches, including, I think, pretty significantly, SEAL Team 6, which a lot of people have heard about.
That's kind of like Delta Force's sister unit.
So that's what JSOC is.
Would the Green Berets also be part of JSOC?
No, the Green Berets are sort of what we call tier two of the special operations community.
The things that they do are secrets.
That's the Army Special Forces.
The Green Berets is just another name for the Army Special Forces.
And the Navy SEALs are the same thing.
So the SEALs and the Green Berets, they're special forces, but they don't do covert operations.
They don't do clandestine stuff.
They still wear uniforms.
They still carry ID cards.
They don't operate, you know, in disguise in foreign countries like Delta Force does.
So Delta and JSOC are significantly a cut above and include far fewer personnel, a much more select, small and select organization.
And everything that it does is covert.
And in fact, the government doesn't really admit its existence to kind of dance around or play koi.
They have like way better skins than everybody else probably.
Okay.
Yeah.
Maybe before we get like too much deeper, it'd be nice to hear more about you, Seth.
And I think as a disclaimer, I should say that we're friends.
You know, we met at a party like not that long ago, maybe a couple years ago, right?
And even if that, yeah.
And became like fast friends, having extremely dark conversations every time we meet.
And then you came to my wedding with your lovely partner.
Yeah, that was a beautiful event.
Thanks for having us there.
We don't always talk about dark things, but yeah, we're not always getting it most of the time.
Yeah.
Get into it.
This is hugely discrediting to Seth that he's friends with you, Brad.
So good job.
You're already shitcoating this whole interview.
I was just going to say, like, and Julian and I weren't invited.
Well, that's the thing is, guys, if I invited one of you to have to invite all of you and I didn't want Travis there.
It's true.
Yeah, making Seth sit through this is very important, Jake.
Thank you.
It's true.
Please continue, Brad.
For people that don't know you well, like, can you kind of just, you know, tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got to writing a book about Fort Bragg?
Sure.
I'm from Austin, where we both live.
I'll keep it really relevant to the book.
In college, I was in the Army Reserve and was deployed to Iraq for a 15-month deployment from 2003 to 2005.
And during that, I completely opposed the Iraq war.
I was I was 19 years old.
I didn't really know what I was doing when I signed up.
I mean, it's it's on me.
I don't have any excuse, but that's just how it was.
Like, it seems kind of contradictory when I try to explain it in retrospect how sure.
Like, I wasn't in favor of the Bush administration.
I wasn't in favor of the Iraq war.
I still thought that the Army Reserve would be a cool thing to do to, like, pay for college and, like, improve my camping skills.
You know, that's what I was about at that age.
But I was just very naive about it.
And the recruiters obviously was a complete liar.
I remember I asked him if I could sign up one of those two year contracts and he was like, no., we're fresh out of those.
We only got these eight year babies.
Sorry.
Wow.
Wow.
And then, you know, before I even got out of basic training, I had been deployed to Iraq.
Like, I never, it was two years before I went back to college.
But I completely believed the whole two weeks a year, one week and a month pitch for the reserves, which turned out to be not the case.
But, um, you know, because I thought I, I was forcefully or strongly disagreeing with the Iraq war and also being there, of course, just, um, further entrenched, you know, that opposition to it.
And I started writing for the Daily Texan because I went to UT, University of Texas.
Yeah.
And I wrote for the paper there.
And so I started writing, you know, articles about the Iraq war and what I saw in the paper.
the Iraq war and what I saw as the truth of the Iraq war and using my own experiences there to kind of illustrate some of the horrible things that were taking place.
Then instead of, uh, continuing in that path as a writer or journalist, I actually went to law school and practiced law, uh, for, uh, five years before deciding that I wanted to go back to being a journalist at that point.
I went to grad school for journalism and ever since then I've been I've been working as a reporter full time for about the last nine, almost ten years.
And I've done a lot of reporting in Iraq and Syria, also other war zones, including Ukraine and Mexico, war reporting basically, otherwise writing about the military armed conflict, that kind of thing.
And this story that turned into the book started off as a series of pieces for Rolling Stone, three pieces for Rollingolling Stone, that eventually just got turned into a book.
So yeah, that's how I came to write this book.
That's how it started.
Yeah, yeah.
And the book, like, it really thoroughly destroyed me reading it.
Like, I had insomnia like every, you know, every night almost that I would read it before bed and I learned not to read it before bed.
But like, even every time I just read a chapter title, I would have to brace myself because they had, they have titles like, you know, I kill people for a living or they do what they want or he was seeing bad things.
I'd be like, oh no.
What am I in for for the next like hour or so?
To be honest, man, it hasn't been great for me either.
Um, because it was the writing the book was actually the idea was the idea of my editor Viking.
She got in touch and suggested I write the book.
I actually didn't pitch it as a story.
And so I was definitely on board for the project and was happy to have the opportunity.
But immersing myself in this world for the past two or three years, it hasn't been great because it really is a world of darkness.
And it's, you know, the underbelly of kind of the worst features of the U.S. military.
But I tried to keep it.
I mean, for the book itself, like I don't want people to get the wrong idea.
It's not just the most depressing slog in the entire world.
I try to use like elements of murder mystery.
I try to make it informative.
I try not to recapitulate a lot of stuff that people already know about the military.
Hopefully it includes lots of new revelations, revelations in every page, I would hope to kind of, you know, to keep the, to keep the reader engaged despite the fact that, yeah, you are, you are having to wait through some really dark, dark stuff.
Yeah, but at no point did I think it was a slog.
In fact, kind of the opposite, like it reads like a thriller.
Yeah.
Throughout.
It does.
Yeah.
And you did such a good job too.
You know, a lot of these people at first, they're sort of presented in a monstrous way, right?
But you did a really good job at kind of fully diving into all of their backgrounds and dimensionalizing them, like how they got to where they got to and how they really did seem like completely different people after experiencing things they experienced and doing things that they did, which are monstrous.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Interestingly, you know, my main character, Billy Levine, who's the Delta Force operator who was found dead on Fort Bragg, murdered on Fort Bragg in 2020, you know, he, despite having done 14 deployments and having been an operator at the most elite level of the military and participated in all these assassination programs, as well as doing all these stateside crimes, trafficking drugs, killing people, working with Mexican cartels, working with corrupt cops and stuff, he wasn't a one-dimensional character.
In fact, one thing that seems to have sort of precipitated his downward spiral was the fact that he lost faith in the wars.
And, you know, earlier in his career had been sort of just like a unquestioning gung ho patriot, but at some certain point, maybe around 2015 or early 2010s, he realized that, you know, that they weren't doing it for the reasons that he thought and that he just kind of lost faith, like, in the righteousness of what he was doing and turned into, you know, someone who holds opinions kind of like, you know, I do and you do about the wars and would go around telling people that what the US was doing in these foreign countries was wrong.
So he was not a one-dimensional character.
He was some, somewhat of a complex character.
And, you know, what happened to him, although he wasn't a good guy, what happened, what befell him was tragic, ultimately.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
And to, you know, Julian already kind of painted the picture of your opening, but I need to talk about it again just because it's kind of like a Safdie Brothers film opening.
The anxiety is just palpably through the roof reading that.
And so just to give a tease, it's like opens on two special forces soldiers on a Coke and MDMA fueled Disney trip with their children, which ends up with one murdering the other.
which is almost like a best friend, family friend, while the person who got murdered, while his five-year-old daughter witnessed it.
And then the, you know, Levine who did the murdering faced no repercussions whatsoever.
And it was completely covered up.
And it was just such a like a riveting way to open it, such a like nail biting kind of slow motion train wreck.
And it also touched on all the themes you were going to get at later in the book in this very complex tale you were telling.
And I was just kind of curious if this was always your way to get into the story and how you developed that.
Definitely, because although that scene takes place in 2018 is a little bit out of time i really wanted to illustrate the blatantness of the cover-up that the military and the civilian law enforcement did because the the murder was so clear-cut and the cover-up was so clear-cut that i wanted to impress on readers just how exceptional this unit is and the members of it are how untouchable they are because yeah the reality is if you're an operator on dull divorce you are not going to prison for any reason like that's just not an acceptable outcome from like a us national security perspective
A guy who's done 14 deployments and assassination operations in Syria and Iraq.
A guy who's been stationed in Israel doing God knows what with the IDF.
He's not going to prison for any reason.
And Levine never went to prison, although he was arrested on felony charges at least six times, including for first-degree murder, including for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, including for drug charges like manufacturing crack in his house, weapons charges.
He was arrested for all these things.
And every single time, the DA dropped the charges against him.
So I'd i'd like to talk a little bit about like this image that we uh have of operators, you know, because it's like, you know, obviously I was aware that, you know, there's some, there's some drug use.
There's definitely like, you know, just kind of violent personalities involved.
But these people seem to just be constantly drunk and on drugs and just like killing people.
Like it's just kind of, it's just kind of extremely sloppy for what you said, which is that they are like supposed to be the, the very.
top tier operators.
First of all, I'd like to get into that a little bit, like the culture, but also like what is like what is the USA doing at this point?
Like what are we even fucking attempting to accomplish by basically destroying these people's moral frameworks and minds and turning them into essentially killing machines.
And how much do you think their kind of personal volition, you know, it's like obviously like the army or JSOC is not telling them, hey, you should go to Disneyland and take MDMA and cocaine and bath salts.
Oh, that one to me is just like, yeah.
Dude, you have access to all the good shit and you're taking bath salts, bro.
Like, can we?
So just, yeah, it kind of paint a picture of like the culture, I think, of impunity and especially like just drug use and sloppiness.
Because it seems like they have to cover up a lot more than they would if they had a little bit more discipline.
Yeah, I mean, I've got to say by way of a disclaimer that I've been told by sources close to the unit, people who know this community pretty well, they will draw a distinction and say it's kind of half and half, like the unit guys kind of separate themselves into two types.
And there is a sort of half of the unit that isn't immersed in this world of drugs and criminality and punity.
They're more of like the guys who are Tito tallers who, who don't drink, who are super Christian, you know, warriors for God type of attitude.
Those guys definitely exist.
And although, you know, they have a set of ethics that I don't personally share because of what they' do and their work, nevertheless, they're not complete criminals whacked out of their heads like some of the other guys that are in the unit, you know, they're just complete derelicts in the words of one of my sources constantly doing nefarious shit.
But I think that those guys are more, um, sort of identified or more like the public face of this community in places like Fayetteville and Southern Pines and where they live and getting into the world, that world for the first time.
I was really amazed by the extent to which it was normalized and accepted and people just kind of naturally associated like cocaine binges with being in the Green Berets.
I really wasn't tracking that at all.
I didn't know that was part of that world, you know, as a war reporter and even serving in the military myself, I just hadn't been aware of that.
And I do think it's something that has arisen relatively recently.
And I try to use more than just anecdotal evidence in the book because there's so much of the anecdotal stuff.
And I wanted to kind of get past that and see some of the things I was able to use to really nail it down were casualty reports.
So I obtained the entire set of casualty reports for the special forces for the last twenty years and sifted through those and was actually able to chart the frequency of deaths from drug overdose.
And that showed a really, really sharp rise in drug overdoses around 2012 to 2015, let's say, and into 2017, accelerating even more in 18, 19, 20 and so on.
on.
So because that kind of corroborated with the anecdotal stuff, I was led to the conclusion that this is something real.
Like, these guys are all doing drugs.
They're all on drugs and the Navy SEALs too.
And it's crazy.
Yeah.
Considering, you know, because I'm not a drug warrior, I don't think drugs should be illegal.
I think drugs should be legalized and regulated.
I think it should be treated just like any kind of pharmaceuticals.
But we're talking about, you know, the military, and the military is the exception, is exceptional because, you know, they're, and to a large extent, the ones responsible for prosecuting the war on drugs.
They pertain to the U.S. government.
So it's the element of hypocrisy there that I think makes it a worthy target for criticism.
Yeah.
And you mentioned, too, I think an important point is that when they get deployed, they're the ones who are responsible for the war.
When they get deployed, they basically by default by medics are being prescribed, already prescribed, like amphetamines to stay up for days on end, and then tranquilizers and like Ambien to go to sleep at night.
And then benzodiazepines, like they basically develop an addiction that's been prescribed to them.
And then when they're back home, it's additive, they just start adding more and more to that cocktail.
After Levine's like fifth arrest, Billy Levine, central character who was murdered, who murdered the guy, got away with it, and then was murdered.
At the time of his death, after his arrest on manufacturing drug charges, he was also arrested for harboring a escaped.
I don't know what that was about, I never figured out.
It's kind of ominous.
After that set of arrests, he was in the process of being kicked out of Delta Force.
And one of the people who was on the review board or on the panel that was charged with determining how he should be, how he should be separated from the army told me that Levine when asked about his out of control drug use, because he was doing, he was smoking crack every single day and smoking crack wasn't doing it for him anymore.
He was actually boofing speedballs on a daily basis.
Jesus Christ.
For the bystander that is a shoving it up your ass.
Oh, I thought you were going to explain what a speedball was.
No, I guess we'll need that too.
Yeah.
It's an upper and a downer at the same time.
So, oh my God.
Coca and heroin offense.
It's what killed Chris Farley, right?
It killed many.
It took many.
Yeah.
Sorry.
Go ahead.
I learned about this for the first time while writing this book that people take drugs as a suppository.
I didn't know that.
But he was asked about his drug use and he, to take it back to what you're saying, Brad, he told them that his problem began when they prescribed him dextroamphetamine when he first made the cut for Delta Force.
So I think just like a lot of addiction problems in the United States, it is traceable back to culture and society giving prescription drugs to young people for various reasons to do well in school or to excel in the military, what have you.
Yeah.
To Julian's like, uh, original sort of question and point about the sloppiness of Delta Force, like, I was, I was struck by that too.
Like, it's sort of like failed mission after failed mission and just like indiscriminate rage induced murder.
Like, why did Julian and I have, uh, the impression that, you know, operators were at least good at what they were supposed to be good at?
And is that, is that just, you know, the military controlling that identity and image?
Or is it also just like film too?
You know, you watch, you know, a whole litany of Hollywood films that show these people as, as incredibly, um, effective.
I think they are, uh, incredibly effective at being a death squad in countries like Iraq and Afgghanistan, you know, people who make the cut for Delta Force, you have to be, or most of them, you can try from any branch, but most of them are green berets or army rangers who are already tops in their field at what they do.
So to give credit where it's due, these are guys who have an extraordinary level of physical fitness and just like a savage level of physical fitness.
I mean, imagine like a guy who can, you know, run two miles in ten minutes while hungry and then smokes a pack of cigarettes afterwards.
Like that's the type of physical fitness I'm talking about.
Yeah, but they're also, you mentioned they're also like, you know, blitzed on, on steroids, like some of those.
That makes it even harder.
The more, the more drugs I add into my system, at least even, even in my, like, younger days in my twenties would just continually slow me down eventually.
Yeah.
And so they're also really good at shooting.
I mean, their marksmanship is, is top notch.
I mean, these are guys who drill constantly and shoot, and, um, I've read before that Delta Force uses more ammo per year than the entire Marine Corps on their drills.
So I think that they're quite good at, you know, when they're pointed at a target and they say just go there.
And, you know, anyone who resists dies that they're good at.
Now, when it comes to more sophisticated operations, the more difficult operations like let's say hostage rescue.
That's very difficult to carry out.
And no, they're not, I don't think, as cracked up as we might like to believe from, like, Hollywood portrayals of these guys.
Their record of hostage rescues is pretty middle lane, maybe 50/50, or where, you know, in half the cases the hostages die.
And they also, you know, a lot of times, uh, they fuck up missions that should be pretty routine, like the killing of Osama bin Laden by SEAL team six, which is considered this great tactical success, but actually they made kind of a mess of it and are lucky that they got out of there.
You write in the book, for the past two decades, Delta Force had functioned as a high-tech death squad dedicated to covertly liquidating the male population base of recalcitrant ethnic and tribal groups that resist U.S. military occupation.
So is that really, I mean, when you kind of get down to it, is that their purpose?
Essentially to just go in and wage a kind of hidden part of a war that involves essentially committing like small to medium scale genocide in targeted ways.
I mean, how does that like, I guess, play into how American foreign interventionism has evolved like since the kind of like heyday of like the 70s and 80s and, you know, what we, what we kind of imagine when we talk about like, um.
about, you know, Central American interventionism and all that?
I think that they do play the role.
You know, I think that quote that you're talking about is definitely applicable, remains applicable.
It depends on the time and the place.
So that sort of template was definitely set during the Iraq war.
Starting around 2007 when the war was going poorly, it was absolutely the case that the JSOC commander, Stanley McChrystal stepped up and offered the administration a new plan of action.
That's when you really saw Delta Force become Delta Force on steroids.
And one of the operators I spoke to for the book told me that after 2007, 90% of insurgent deaths in Afghanistan were from offensive Delta.
And it's distinct from infantry operations because regular infantry, what they do is they pile up in their vehicles and drive around, wait for someone to shoot them, and then they go and close with that group or that person and kill them.
Whereas Delta Force operates in a different way.
They identify their targets from a distance, usually using like informants or technology or signals intercepts, and they have the mission all planned out, and then they go to that place at night, and then they kill their target.
So after about 2007, everything in Iraq was done that way.
I talk about the assassination programs in my book, which is new.
It's not terminology that you often see because in most of them the mainstream press or people who have been following the news for years will have seen references to this.
It'll be called by the euphemism night raids, drone strikes and night raids.
We're all familiar with hearing about that from the Obama years.
So what they mean by night raids is just this type of offensive operation that I'm talking about, and Delta Force is the key unit that does that, and so does SEAL Team 6.
And so, you know, one thing that shocked me about the way you covered the night raids was just that when they ran out of credible targets, they were just like, well, just go out and kill people.
It's like, oh, it makes me think of like, you know, early in these wars where the government and and the kind of higher ups in the military, they just allowed a lot of like fighting age men to just become unemployed.
And of course, what happens then?
You know, I mean, they they start to get hired by people to essentially, I mean, become their own death squads.
But yeah, so tell us a little bit about like how indiscriminate the killing was.
And, and do you think that it's, it's like they're just like kind of mopping up the fuck ups of like higher up decisions.
It's really chilling to think about how hard it is to assess the accuracy of these raids and how little.
there is to go on about that because there's no accountability.
In the most basic sense, there is zero accountability over Delta Force and JSOC.
We don't know who they've been killing and how accurate their intelligence is.
But having looked into it and assessed as much as I could in the way of sources, the sense that I get is that they have a high error rate, talking about maybe at least fifty percent being their error rate, where half the time the target that they're hitting is not someone who is a combatant under the laws of war.
They may have possessed guns.
They may be armed.
They may have been acting in ways that signals that, you know, certain.
that surveillance specialists found to be suspicious, but when it really comes down to it, they were not planning to attack.
You know, and you have to keep in mind, in countries like Iraq, there's a lot of people who own guns.
In countries like Afghanistan, there's a lot of like militias and like small armed groups for all kinds of reasons.
We know that their language capabilities are piss poor.
I mean, there's, there were, at least during the Iraq war, Delta Force had all of JSOC.
McChrystal says in his memoirs that they had basically no Arabic speakers.
And as far as how the scale of this, how much, you know, I tried at one point, we ultimately didn't include this in the book, but I made a good faith effort to estimate, you know, the kill count just from the 2007, 2008 surge in Iraq.
And it came up with a lot of number of around 100, 110,000.
That means that, you know, if accurate, then over a, you know, an 18 month period, this small group of guys, like 100 guys that are in country at any time, let's say 200 to be on the generous side, killed 100,000 people.
And that's consistent with some of the things that, you know, the people who I interviewed, like these guys, ex-wives or moms or girlfriends, sisters, who would talk about, you would, who would relate the sort of casual conversations they would have, in particular, like bragging about their kill counts.
And I gathered that it was pretty routine for individual operators to boast of having more than 100 confirmed kills.
So you're talking about, you know, a group of guys where it's just normal for them to have killed a hundred, to have personally killed a hundred people.
So, I mean, you don't have to think about that too long to imagine what kind of, like, psychological and cultural and societal repercussions it's going to have.
And like, there were euphemisms that they would use like mowing the lawn and wet work for assassinations.
And like, you know, they would watch helmet cam kill videos as entertainment among themselves.
And like, even feeding their dogs like human brains.
What?
It's just, yes, like, it's just, it's just unimaginable.
And this is all sort of like casually looked at and talked about.
Yeah, on the dog thing, you know., Billy Levine, I got that from multiple people.
Yeah.
Billy, and you have to keep in mind, Billy Levine in this community was like one of the sort of more introverted, soft spoken, like nice guys.
But even he would show videos.
He would show people like, here's a video of my dog ripping this guy's fingers off.
Here's a video, you know, of my dog doing whatever because they have the dogs are a big thing in Delta, of course, by the way, which I can talk about later.
But he also told the sister of Mark Leschicker, the guy who he ended up later killing, you know, when she visited his house, he introduced her to his dog, which had been retired from the unit apparently because the dogs have apparently have some kind of augmented dentures.
Oh, God.
Made out of titanium.
What?
And when they're retired from service, they're attack dogs.
And so when they're retired from service, they have their teeth surgically removed.
So he had this dog with no teeth that was eating like, you know, some slop that he was feeding it from dinner.
And he told her, he was like, Oh, yeah, I used to let him like eat people's brains when we were in the field.
Like if there was a dead body on the ground from the aftermath of an airstrike or if they had just done a night raid, he would let the dog just eat people's brains like out of their skull.
And she was like, Oh, my God, that's disgusting.
was horrified by that, as you can imagine.
I just kind of wonder if there was a big body of good reporting on this that we would maybe make decisions about foreign intervention differently, or are we just so far gone that like the kind of slaughterhouse, like essentially, I mean, what you're describing is just like genocide, you know, I mean, this is, it's, you can't pretend it's targeted just because it happens at night and, you know, they go in specifically, you know, kind of liquidating whole households and such.
But dude, we've got 250,000 people in the queue for battlefield six no they we this is what we play what is this is real life you can't do video games no more skin references yeah I mean what what does this say about like management of empire at this point?
Because it just feels like we've maybe even lost sight of what were already incredibly callous and cruel goals.
You know, while I was sort of reporting and writing the book, there was a certain sense in which I was kind of impressed by how well they keep the wraps on all of this for so long.
I mean, there's a very real sense in which they got away with it.
I mean, the surge in Iraq returned to it again.
There was also a surge in Afghanistan that we can talk about that was like from 2012, 2000, which is just a very, very high tempo of assassination.ation operations for a year plus where the goal is we're just going to decimate the middle ranks of the insurgency.
And if we if we hit fifty percent of wrong targets, that's an acceptable cost.
And in Iraq, it was perceived as having been a huge success.
It was never talked about, never filmed.
Keep in mind, Delta operators don't wear uniforms.
These guys go out at night wearing whatever the fuck they want.
And they're not on film.
Like you've never seen any pictures of them operating.
Those don't exist.
You never see videos of them.
You never see any documentaries.
They certainly don't allow reporters to come around and see what they're doing.
And they certainly don't tell reporters about it, you know, with strategic leaks like you see from the CIA and other intelligence agencies that are constantly leaking to reporters.
And then after 2008, attacks on US troops really did drop significantly in Iraq.
And it was considered to be almost, I mean, it was enough that Bush could declare victory on his way out the door.
That's all he wanted was a way to say, look, the violence has been tamped down.
We have the situation is stable.
And among insiders in Washington, DC, it was Delta Force assassination operations that were primarily created, JSOC assassination program that was considered to have worked.
And that's why Obama, when he took over the war in Afghanistan, decided, I mean, he he appointed Stanley, he took Stanley McChrystal from commanding JSOC and put him in charge of the entire war in Afghanistan, basically turned Afghanistan into a JSOC war, which it remained there after.
And Afghanistan's kind of the same story.
Like it just was completely out of the news during Obama's term and Trump's first term.
You just never heard about it, even though they were they were doing this every single day.
So it's chilling to me to think about how they got away with it.
And the savagery of empire now is different.
It's not the same thing.
I don't think Delta Force is still doing assassination operations in Iraq and Syria and Somalia.
Trump earlier this year, because Biden never talked about it and his people never talked about it, but Trump being Trump, he bragges about these things and only if you're a specialist will you like will you notice it because i was reading one of his transcripts and it was just a one sentence remark he made where he said you know this was a few months after being inaugurated and he said since my inauguration we've eliminated 68 terrorists in iraq and syria and somalia and so a light went off my head and i i realized he's talking about the expeditionary targeting force which is a
delta force troop that i talk about in the book that's like basically permanently stationed over there like i knew he was talking about them so they're still doing scores of assassinations a month apparently but i mean it's not nearly at the same scale as the iraq surge or in afghanistan when they're fighting the taliban now.
Now there are other horrors that have taken place, like an entire generation of people dead in Ukraine or the genocide in Gaza that are being supported, not with the direct participation of large numbers of U.S. troops, but are being managed by our military and intelligence sort of superstructure over there.
So it's very much a moving target and a complex organization that has played a very, very significant role in the past and still does, but it's a role that's constantly adapting.
Yeah, you mentioned how this has kind of been continuous throughout presidents.
And we're often told, hey, you should vote if you care about foreign policy and and if you care about you know the lives of the people abroad that you know we're you know ending and or affecting obviously this is like the kind of stuff that leaves a scar that um you know does not not heal quickly you know these these are these are countries that then are very often plagued with like violence and death squads even beyond uh the american interventionism but i wanted to go back just slightly
to the demographics involved here you know one thing that really blew my mind uh every time it came up in the book is just like how young these guys are and how they were recruited so how are we currently recruiting and training our death squads?
Well, they get taken up the pipeline young.
I mean, Billy Levine was 17 when he joined.
He made the cut for Delta selection when he was, let's see, 2009, so he must have been 25.
That's super young for Delta Force.
And the time is significant because at that time the unit was rapidly expanding and needed lots of people in more normal times.
I think that the actually Delta Force soldiers are typically a lot older than regular soldiers.
They tend to be at least 30 years old.
Most of them are in their mid 30s and there's plenty of room them that are in like their early forties.
And you really don't see that outside, you know, you don't see that like in the regular airborne infantry.
So they're they're a lot more mature than other soldiers.
And there's a compartmented element of Delta Force called G Squadron, where I gather that they're even the guys are most of the most of them are even older than that.
But certainly they start off young.
I mean, at that point they've been in the military for twenty years.
They've spent their entire lives in the military.
It's not something that you just start doing when you're thirty five.
Certainly not.
I was surprised when you mentioned that in their psychological screenings they they actually go for people who are anti team and like introverted for the most part and even those who are creative that have artistic hobbies like painting or playing a musical instrument.
I mean, the guy who told me that, James Reeese, I think he was indulging in a little bit of self-mythologizing.
I included the statement.
I thought it's interesting.
They do like people that are good at working solo, which isn't everyone.
I mean, especially in the military when your teamwork is just beaten into you.
But they absolutely favor people that have the ability to work on their own.
Often there's Delta missions where it's like one guy doing stuff by himself, which takes a certain psychological type, like to go into Syria by yourself, set up some bugging devices.
Yeah.
You know, when you were deployed and when you were out in the field reporting, doing war reporting, did you have run-ins with spec ops and with with Delta Force in particular?
Or would you just not even know if you'd run into a Delta Force person?
I wouldn't.
I probably wouldn't know if I saw if I saw Delta Force.
But I did run into a lot of special forces guys in Syria.
But most of them, I'm, I think were regular green berets.
You saw those.
I saw those guys all over the place.
It's kind of like what I'm saying before, like the stuff that they do isn't publicized.
It's secret in the sense that it's like there's secrecy around military operations.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But they're not doing things where it's like the point is to disguise the hand of the US government.
Like that's what Delta Force does.
It's like if they're if these guys are caught on camera, you won't be able to prove that it was the US.
Well, it's actually easy to pro prove who they are because they just look like they're in a black rifle coffee ad.
Like the way you described each one is beards, tattoos and fake patches.
Yeah.
So that I think definitely is true of the operators who make up the four main squadrons.
Yeah.
But Delta also has compartmented elements where I've been told that, you know, they're encouraged not to lift so much weights and do so much steroids.
In fact, there's a, there's an in-house tattoo removal technician at the Delta Force compound where they will help guys remove their tattoos over time because to be like in G Squadron, you need not be all tattooed up.
You need not look recognizably like an operator.
You know, so this is their job, which is already pretty fucking grim.
Now, the name of the book is the Fort Bragg Cartel for a reason, because there's a whole other side of this in which they are drug dealers, you know, criminal kingpins in and around Fort Bragg.
And of course, this is connected to a kind of nearby kind of air base or airstrip that is kind of infamous.
So can you kind of lead us into that aspect of Delta and Fort Bragg?
Yeah, and Fayetteville too, I think is good to touch on.
Yeah, Fayette Nam, baby.
So having laid the foundation of like the sort of impunity and secrecy that exists around these units, the culture of drugs, drinking, criminality.
I try to then go on to show how certain of these guys, including Billy Levine and his associates, were actually trafficking drugs at a high level around Fayetteville and farther out in North Carolina and in the south.
And they were working with other special forces soldiers.
They were working with Marines from Camp LeJune, corrupt police officers, corrupt state troopers.
And they were importing large amounts of cocaine from the Losetas in Mexico, cartel that's in the north of Mexico, which is interesting and kind of takes things full circle because the Losetas actually were originally a Mexican.
Special Forces Army unit that was trained by the Green Berets at Fort Brad, of course.
Also at Fort Benning, and also they were trained by Israeli trainers.
But that was the origin of Los Cetas in the 1990s.
They defected long ago and became this completely independent cartel that today in modern times has, doesn't have a lot of military personnel, but that's where it comes from.
And so there was some poetic, you know, irony there in the fact that that's who they were buying drugs from.
But this just feels like the natural progression.
You come back home with like a set of skills or you know, you finish your job with a set of skills and it's like, well, what am I good at?
Is like killing people and organizing, you know, kind of logistics to make myself money off of drugs.
It seems so consistent that this is like the fallback or the the second stage of your kind of career.
Yeah.
It's a natural fit.
And not only that, I mean, it's also something that's very stimulating.
A lot of these guys, they need stimulation like constantly because of their natural inclinations and because of the work that they've done for so many years.
They're addicted to adrenaline, they're addicted to being in danger, they're addicted to trying to get away with things where this people trying to stop them.
Like psychologically, you can see.
And I'm not, I'm not saying this by just inference.
I've had people tell me this.
Like I tried to interview as many people as I could who had been in the military in special ops and then had been convicted of trafficking in drugs.
So I had a correspondence with Master Sergeant Daniel Gould, who is in federal prison for trafficking cocaine, who is a seventh group green beret, his partner Henry Royer, who was trafficking drugs with him.
They were importing bricks of cocaine, millions of dollars quantities from Colombia on military planes to the United States.
And Gould told me straight up.
He was like, Yeah, the money was nice, but dude, I was just bored.
Like, I really wanted something to do.
I was in Colombia alone.
It was so easy to get cocaine.
And so another thing is proximity and crimes of opportunity.
Because these guys are often in places that are just flooded with drugs.
Not coincidentally, sites of US intervention tend to be places where there's massive drug production.
And of course, Afghanistan being the preeminent case of that.
Yeah.
I had a.
quote from Master Sergeant Gould that I highlighted here.
Jake, do you want to read it?
Jake, you ought to do this in the voice of a guy who once personally killed ten Taliban by himself, like by charging in enemy lines after he had been shot.
Elite soldiers have access to whatever they have the balls to get into, horse, guns, drugs, you name it.
We are far from the flagpole and expect it to be incorruptible.
It's such a direct extension to, you know, the CIA, obviously, like, and drug trafficking and, like, raising money through these kind of back, you know, these backdoor methods.
It's like a kind of a long tradition.
But then you take away even that tiny bit of oversight that maybe gave us, like, a vision of, like, you know, how drug trafficking and the CIA work together during, you know, like, the kind of, like, early days in Afghanistan and, of course, like, Iran-Contra.
But, yeah, I don't really know where I'm going with this other than, like, this seems to be a direct extension.
I mean, yeah, absolutely.
You see, like, Schizos on Twitter still talking about, you know, the Dark Alliance, right?
or whatever the contras and it's like bro that's nicky mouse like hamid karzai was the biggest drug lord in the entire world and he just shook hands with the president like every single year across three presidencies.
I mean, it was so out in the open, the support for the heroin cartels in Afghanistan.
And they produced so much more drugs than like the Medayin cartel ever produced or the Contras ever trafficked.
You know, it's actually, you can't even say that they produce all the world's heroin because they actually produce more heroin than the world could absorb.
One weird fact is that there are believed to be massive stockpiles of heroin somewhere, maybe Pakistan, maybe Tajikistan, maybe Iran that were produced in Afghanistan but never sold because, you know, we know that they produced an amount that outstripped global demand.
And so that's why, even though the Taliban has eliminated all heroin, it's also mixed up with fentanyl.
So it's kind of hard to talk about the price fluctuations, but the price of heroin has not risen despite the fact that the Taliban have eliminated the whole industry.
Yeah.
And it seemed like, you know, where you ended up was about, was about the drug smuggling and the cartel.
But what got you into the story was it was the murders, right?
Like this sort of over-representation of murders in and around the base and starting with, you know, when soldiers came back from Iraq on that first deployment, immediately like four wives were murdered.
Yeah.
And then ever since then, it's just been this, this cycle.
of overdoses of suicides of murders that seem to outpaced every other base?
And is it even like the population in general as well?
Is it overrepresented?
Yeah.
I mean, it's always been like that.
Um, Fort Bragg has always been associated as a place that has, uh, a Fayetteville, you know, it's kind of infamous for bizarre murders that are linked to the military.
You can find those cases going back to the, to the 1970s.
But I think there was a real inflection point around, I mean, you mentioned the case in 2002 of the, of the Fort Bragg of the four wives who were murdered by their husbands.
After that, you really didn't hear too much about Fort Bragg for years.
I think the real inflection point was.
around 2020, around when the war in Afghanistan started to wind down.
That's when you saw like the drug abuse rates, the overdose rates off the charts.
And then there was a succession of really disturbing murders.
I mean, the murders of Levine and Dumas were not the only ones in 2020.
There was also the case of Enrique Roman Martinez, the paratrooper who was beheaded.
And Keith Lewis who killed his wife and then himself, it just went on from there.
I'm tracking something like 24 murders since 2020 involving Fort Bragg soldiers.
And as far as how that compares to the civilian population, that is a question that seems simple to answer.
Yeah.
But a coherent answer eluded me to the end because of the fact that Fort Bragg isn't a civivilian city.
It's a population that you don't find anywhere else.
It's 50,000 young men.
So it's really hard to make apples to apples comparisons.
I even resorted to asking AI about this because I thought I thought that AI would be able to I had a question that seemed like the type of answer that AI should be able to provide.
I said, I asked Rock, or no, it was ChatGBT to identify an American city with a population of 50,000 or less that had a high murder rate.
And the answer it gave me, it said, Saint Louis has a population of like 300,000 and has a high murder rate.
And I was like, it couldn't do 50.
Yeah.
Zero credit for that answer.
Failed to read the question.
I digress.
I digress.
Don't get me started on AI.
I'm not qualified to talk about it.
But yeah, it's hard to compare Fort Bragg to other like cities of similar size.
But what you can compare it to is other military bases.
And there is no way that, you know, you can make the case that there's any other military base that is troubled with these type of issues to nearly the same degree.
One thing that I did want to kind of bring back up is the role that JSOC and um and fort bragg plays in training various entities that uh are quite famous like for example fort bragg attendees training al-qaeda.
Are we just basically the main exporter of death squads and then we just kind of like as when they go rogue we use them in the media to get more funding for war.
I mean, is this just a cycle?
Well, so I mean, that's kind of a question of that's a matter of interpretation I would say.
But certainly, you know, Fort Bragg is kind of a black hole of these, I don't know, deep events that are ambiguous and open to multiple interpretations.
It sounds like the thing about al-Qaeda is a reference to Ali Muhammad, the Fort Bragg soldier that I profile in an early chapter of the book.
You know, most of the book has to do with relatively recent years.
I mean, the majority of it takes place from 20, let's say, let's say 2018 to present.
But I do go back all the way to the beginning, to the 1980s and the formation of Delta Force and JSOC.
And as I'm bringing it up to the present day and talking about 911, always with an emphasis on Fort Bragg and the role that Fort Bragg has had in these events, I learned about a very, very interesting character named Ali Abdul Sued Mohammed, an Egyptian-born American citizen.
So for folks who don't know, and there's very little reliable information about this guy on the internet, don't bother reading the Wikipedia page.
There's really nothing.
Just only read my book, please.
I gotta say.
Absolutely.
I mean, buy the book.
I mean, buy the book.
Because a clear understanding.
of who the hell this guy was was so elusive that I dedicated myself to reading everything that's ever been written about Ali Muhammad in order to present the essential facts.
And so he was a guy who was, uh, who was an Egyptian Special Forces officer who came over to Fort Bragg originally in the 1980s to train at the, you know, Fort Bragg does a lot of exchanges with army officers in foreign countries.
That's how the Mexican Special Forces ended up being trained there.
So Ali Muhammad's an Egyptian.
He comes here and he's approached by the CIA because that's the place where that, I mean, that's what they do there as well.
They recruit assets.
That's one of the purposes of the JFK School.
And he becomes an asset of the CIA.
How long that relationship lasted, no one know is quite sure, but that was early on.
He goes back to Egypt and joins Egyptian Islamic Jihad and becomes a close confidant of Ayman al-Zawahiri, who of course is one of the two founders of Al-Qaeda, him and Osama bin Laden.
But this was before Osama bin Laden kind of came on the scene.
then, having already joined Islamic Jihad, Ali Muhammad moves back to the United States, gets U.S. citizenship by marrying a woman who's 10 years older than him, goes to Fort Bragg, and actually joins the U.S. Army at the age of 34, joins the U.S. Army Special Forces.
And then, while he's an active duty member of the Special Forces, he makes dozens of trips to Afghanistan, to In fact, he was in Somalia.
Weirdly, he was like in Mogadishu at the time of the Black Hawk Down incident.
Whether there's anything to be made about that, we're not sure, but he was there at the time.
What was he doing?
Well, he seems to have been participant or he definitely was participating in the Afghan Jihad against the Soviet occupiers when the Russians invaded Afghanistan.
Now, was he doing that on his own initiative or part of a CIA program, part of a special forces program?
Again, the case is open to interpretation.
However, while he was still a member of the US Army, he became close with Osama bin Laden and trained Osama bin Laden and all of Osama bin Laden's core group, the group that would go on to become Al Qaeda using manuals that he took from Fort Bragg, special forces manuals that were taken from the Green Berets.
They trained Al Qaeda in terrorism, basically because irregular warfare and terrorism, that's kind of the same thing.
I mean, one of the things that Ali Muhammad is known to have taught these guys is how to hijack planes because we have a copy of his the manual that he made using green beret materials, using special forces materials.
And that was one of the things that, again, this active duty member of the US military special, US Army special forces taught Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda how to hijack planes.
Let that sink in, please.
Where does it go from there?
From there, he was instrumental in bombing the US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998.
He was also one of his trainees bombing the USS Cole in the Gulf of Aden.
So he was a core member of Al Qaeda, basically.
And he was an integral part of their operations.
And he was also continuously in contact with his American handlers.
Among other things, he met with Patrick Fitzgerald, who is the federal prosecutor in charge of the counterterrorism unit in the Southern District of New York.
So, you know, a high level US official in the counterterrorism department is sitting down with Ali Mohammed in, I think, like 1996 or 1997 at the same time that Ali Muhammad is training Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda and plotting the attacks on the USS Cole and the embassies in Africa.
After the Africa bombings, which killed hundreds of innocent people, Ali Muhammad was reeled in is the way I put it in the book.
He was arrested in the United States and then he was charged with terrorism in closed door anonymized court proceedings that were not reported on.
And he was never, to my knowledge, he was never convicted.
Or if you look at the docket of the case, he was not convicted.
He just disappeared into the bowels of the U.S. government.
Like they just disappeared him.
So we know that Ali Muhammad is.
Well, we don't know anything about him since he disappeared.
The last reference I can find to him came in 2008 when a former Delta Force commander said in his memoirs that he visited Ali Muhammad at the prison where he was being held.
And he said it was like a basically a black site, like a secret prison in a major metropolitan area, ten feet from a newsstand bustling with business people, is how he described the location in his book.
He went there and interviewed Ali Muhammad about Al Qaeda, getting information out of him.
Now, I know I've been talking a long time, but to sum up like the significance of Ali Muhammad, if you read mainstream accounts of 911, like the kind of canonical accounts of 911.
Of course, there is, you know, it's acknowledged that the Operation Cyclone and CIA intervention in Afghanistan contributed to the formation of Al Qaeda.
But it's said that Osama bin Laden himself is not known to have had any contact with CIA officers.
So there was never any like direct contact between bin Laden and US spies.
And you hear that over and over.
You hear that from, you know, the most mainstream, credible and accomplished writers and historians on this subject, like Steve Cole, like Lawrence Wright.
I just heard someone else say it the other day.
In any case, what that leaves out is that bin Laden was in direct contact with a member of the military.
In fact, he was with a member of the special forces.
And to the extent that Ali Muhammad gets talked about at all, it's said that he was a triple agent.
In fact, the only book about him by Peter Lance is called Triple Agent or Triple Cross, excuse me.
And okay, that's fair enough.
From the known facts about Ali Muhammad, you could say that he was a very adept terrorist operator who managed to infiltrate the US Army special forces and smuggle out all these training materials and all this knowledge.
But the same set of facts is also susceptible to an alternative interpretation, which is simply that he was a double agent or simply that he was an agent of the of the us who was involved in training all these guys first to fight the Russians and then you know for these more let's say freelance endeavors so I mean after 2001 and after 9-11 Israel's role kind of changes a little bit in terms of its relationships to like lobbying and assassinations could you kind of describe a little bit how
Israel plays into all of this you know I think Israel has played a really nefarious role in our foreign policy for a long time.
And more and more people are seeing that with the genocide in Gaza and the kind of breaking down of the sort of media institutional omerta that is surrounded, you know, Israel's atrocities and, you know, the apartheid nature of its society.
But the relationship goes way, way back.
And certainly, they have a close relationship with JSOC Delta Force routinely, uh, they have a cell that's constantly in Israel.
And in fact, Levine, one of my main characters, although, you know, he's a relatively low level guy because he's in, he's enlisted, he's not an officer.
He's just an enlisted guy, sergeant first class on his enlisted record.
He has deployments to Israel.
So that tells you that it's not just the, you know, the sort of elite officer corps that's going over there and training with the IDF and sharing intelligence with them.
It's everyone in the unit.
It's de rue for Delta Force operators.
And I think that they're especially, they cooperate especially closely with respect to Syria, I think, where you have the most intense, like, active collaboration between the IDF and Delta Force.
You describe in the book, you know, a kind of like.
active involvement of mainstream media in covering up like let's say the Afghan opiate explosion and all of that but but could you kind of speak a little bit about how you see the role of media in relation to Delta, in relation to JSOC and I guess what you've been speaking about regarding the war on terror as well,
like the links between essentially these guys training people to become better terrorists and the attacks that then are kind of like painted as like, oh, look what they did to us because they hate our freedom.
Now it's time to, you know, invade this country or do this foreign intervention.
Well, I think there's relatively few mainstream reporters who even know what Delta Force is or understand what its function is.
And because the unit's so secretive, because they never give statements, I mean, I'm publishing an excerpt of my book in Politico in a couple of days or maybe tomorrow.
And I saw comment from the special forces at every step of the way, but Politico's doing it again.
So they asked them for a statement about some of the allegations that I make in this excerpt.
And the response I just got, the email I was reading before I hopped on with you guys, you know, they said explicitly something like, you know, they never use the term Delta Force.
That's a colloquial term.
They call it an Army Special Mission Unit.
So all, every JSOC unit is what's called a Special Mission Unit or SMU, SMU.
So Delta is a SMU and Team 6 is a SMU.
And that she said, the, you know, this public affairs officer said, you know, because your question implies a special mission unit, we can't, we can't answer it.
This is essentially what she said.
And so a lot of journalists who are working in the space, especially if they're less experienced, you know, they come up against a total brick wall.
And even if they're in the field, they're not really good at keeping a low profile.
I mean, you never hear about them writing books.
You never see them going on TV.
I mean, they live by this code of silence.
And that silence, I think, is there even more than the sort of just natural craveness and jingoism of our mainstream media.
I think the secrecy and the silence around it is the main thing.
And your book is then claiming that they're running basically a drug cartel out of the base.
And so I have to, you know, it leads me to the cliché question that I'm sure every single person asks you that, you know, are you worried for your safety at all or your, you know, reputation being assassinated?
I mean, I don't allege that they're running a cartel out of Fort Bragg.
A lot of sources I interview say that.
And then I also document a lot of cases that would tend to suggest that there is some large degree of truth to that.
I can't say for sure what's going on there and if it's still going on since the early 2020s when these murders took place.
But I think we can say with a high degree of confidence that, or we can say with complete certainty that this type of criminal entrepreneurialism is widespread in the special forces and in Delta Force.
How extensive it is, how organized it is, and how high up it goes, harder to say.
But they seem to have at a minimum turn a blind eye to these things because that airport you mentioned the Rafer drop zone.
I mean, it's just crazy to me how much drugs were coming through that little Delta Force airport right by Fort Bragg.
And the guy who is running it, Tim Thacker, is now in prison for 40 years, you know, and prosecutors in North Carolina, federal prosecutors in North Carolina say that he was the biggest methamphetamine dealer in the state's history.
And this is a guy who ran the airport for them and was the Delta Force pilot on a lot of their training missions and whose father was at OG Green Beret before Delta Force even existed, who was all caught up with the, you know, the drug fueled shadow war in Laos that the CIA ran for all those years and was evidently trafficking hundreds of kilos of cocaine up from the Caribbean to North Carolina in the 1980s on the same at the same little airport.
So this is nothing new.
It's been going on for a long time.
How do you the second part of that question though like have you had worries?
I was hoping you would forget that.
No, I'm not.
I'm not.
I'm not.
I mean, there's just no way that they don't have like at least a briefing where they go, hey, there's an issue here.
We got a fucking book being published.
Like, we don't even like a single news article to reference us.
We now have a book coming out.
Yeah.
So, yeah, speak a little bit on that.
I mean, obviously without, I don't know, endangering yourself or whatever.
You know, I was going to ask Brad to house it for me, uh, this week, you know, if you wouldn't mind, we might go to Washington.
Yeah, I'm not home right now.
Could you also cut your hair a little bit like Seth?
Uh, no, no, no.
Um, I really have not.
People ask that question.
It's actually kind of ironic because, you know, before Viking asked me to write this book, I was working in Syria and Mexico and Iraq.
And so when they proposed it, I was, I actually thought, well, this will be relatively safe compared to what I've been doing.
Like this will give me a chance to not put my life at risk for my work to such a flagrant degree as I have been doing.
So I originally saw it as something, but then, yeah, at a certain point.
point it dawned upon me.
You know, I talk about a woman named Courtney Williams in the book who was a civilian employee of Delta Force who was subject to really awful gender discrimination and harassment.
And she got into this really bitter employment dispute with the unit.
And she said, one day she's sitting at a traffic light in Fayetteville and she realized, oh shit, like I'm involved in this acrimonious legal dispute with this organization whose whole specialty is like killing people in secret in ways that can't be traced back to the government.
Like, is that, am I putting my own life at risk?
And then of course my predecessor, Roland Stone, Michael Hastings, you know, died at a young age in a car accident that was caught on camera after he got Stanley McChrystal fired from command of the war in Afghanistan.
I mentioned earlier that McChrystal was put in charge of Afghanistan, but he wasn't in charge long because that Rolling Stone reporter, you guys may remember this when he published that runaway article, a runaway general's article, and then, yeah, he was killed in a car accident.
So I don't know anything more than what's been reported about Michael Hastings' death, but a lot of people think that it may not have been an accident.
But that said, I don't know, man.
I really can't concern myself with that.
Of course.
Because it's outside of my control and it's impossible for me to assess, like, what are the, I have to think, man.
I've got to think think that it's a line that they wouldn't cross.
I just hope it's a line that they wouldn't cross to kill a journalist.
Like, I haven't been doing anything wrong.
I'm not the one trafficking drugs and killing people.
Exactly.
Like, I'm just reporting on things that are fucking illegal.
Like, you, you're not allowed to shoot people, you know, in the streets in Fayetteville.
You're not allowed to traffic drugs.
If they want to defend their impunity to do that kind of thing by assassinating a journalist on US soil, I mean, that's so off the rails.
I just have to still believe, as cynical as I am about some of this stuff, I have to believe that's a line that they wouldn't cross.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Congrats, Brad, on this question that you want to ask him, which is what didn't make it into the book for legal safety or personal reasons?
Are you literally trying to get Seth killed?
What is going on here?
Do you want to also give him like a plane ticket to like a third party country?
No, I just we've had convos together and some things weren't kosher.
Oh, then go ahead.
Ask it.
No, I'll tell you what didn't make it into the book.
So for years, every single day, I'm reading the Fayetteville Observer and I'm reading the website of WRAL.
The local embassy, NBC affiliate.
And over time, I start to notice that there is case after case.
case of like child sex crimes that fort rex holders are committing and at a certain point i start saving them because I'm like, this is kind of a lot.
So I start assembling an archive And then, you know, the number of cases in there just keeps increasing.
And I finally realize, okay, this is a story in itself.
This is not normal that you have so many cases of four-bag soldiers being arrested or convicted of.
and often in many cases of horrific cases of because you know there's the sort of routine and not to downplay it at all but there's a there's a certain routine type of case where you have let's say a 20 year old infantryman and a 15 year old girl they get caught in their car or something like that but that's statutory rape and that's serious crime but i'm not talking about just cases like that i'm talking about abuse of children i'm talking about like kids kids like young Like young kids and also child pornography.
And I've posted about this a few times and even pitched this story to, you know, to magazines.
And it's hard to know what to make of it.
But I can tell you that it is a really dark and ugly feature of this world as well.
You know, the abuse of children in these military communities.
And that was something that didn't make it into the book just because it has nothing to do with drugs.
It doesn't really relate directly to the main subject.
And because I'm kind of at a loss as to figure out what's behind it.
Yeah.
It's so just before, I guess, we should probably conclude this interview.
of you soon, but I did want to kind of wonder at this nomenclature of a special missions unit and then you explaining that like they killed over 100,000 people.
Like at what point are these operations not so special?
Do you know what I mean?
Like it feels like originally it's like, okay, well, we're going to get these like really these guys that are very good at what they do and they're going to go in for like that one assassin.
You can't kill too many people.
Yeah, but now it feels like it's just you're kind of using like precision tools, but like on a, I don't know, like a much wider scale to kind of continuously liquidate, as you put it, kind of commit genocide abroad and combined with like this recent Lancet study that shows that you know the financial sanctions and and all of these other um uh elements like basically kill half a million people a year it's really difficult not to come away from this thinking that we are the bad guys and
on a scale that is like historically unprecedented and that the comparisons with you know other potential big bad empire actors on the international stage even even like Russia or China that we love to accuse of all these terrible things that we're basically just looking in a mirror or something.
I don't know.
What do you what do you make?
of that on a kind of broader scale?
Yeah, we're definitely the bad guys.
And it gives me no pleasure to say that.
It really doesn't.
It's not a joke to me.
It actually makes me really depressed about my country.
It's not the case that these are such special exceptional operations anymore.
That hasn't been the case for a long time.
It's been completely normalized.
And it ebbs and flows, like I was saying before, like the tempo of operations.
Continuous assassination operations has been an integral feature of U.S. foreign policy for almost 25 years now.
where for all we know they're doing an assassination tonight like in the in Darazur Syria or something like that or in the scrublands or outside of Somalia.
And in fact the probability is that they are because like I was saying earlier it looks like maybe twenty, thirty assassinations a month currently in 2025.
And this is a this is a relatively low tempo right now.
So I think that there's a there's a writer named Alexander Cochburn.
Alexander Coburn.
God, he would kill me if he heard me pronounce his name that way because he's British.
Coburn who has written a lot about this.
He's the he's Harper's DC, Washington DC editor.
And he's w an underappreciated feature of our foreign policy that, you know, it's not always the case that people, that militaries, that countries, that nations at war consider assassination to be a legitimate or even like a useful tool.
And actually, for most of history, it's not considered a useful tool.
You don't assassinate the enemy's leaders.
In fact, that's considered kind of dirty.
You try to beat them on the battlefield like fair and square, basically.
And the US and also Israel, you know, I think this is definitely something that you can lay at the feet of this close Israel-US alliance.
We have adopted this logic and implemented it continuously, where, according to which, the main way of achieving national security objectives or foreign policy objectives is by killing as many of the command and control structure of the enemy as possible.
And it's not just in night raids.
It's also in bombings and all these strikes and stuff.
I don't know, man.
It's it's it's uh, it's bad.
It's bleak.
It's really bleak and it continues up to the present day.
And I just hope something stops it.
And it may be that the internal rot of the military itself proves to be a hard limit on how much longer this can last because the judgment of history, I think, will be severe.
You know, you talked about that Lancet study.
I mean, the people who have are said to have been killed directly by violence in the global war on terrorism is north of four million, maybe five million.
And I'm sorry, but that's like Hitler level shit, because especially when you consider that they all belong to the same religion, Islam, and that they all have basically the same skin color.
And I think that we will be, that this era will be remembered, even before the genocide in Gaza, will be remembered as an atrocious attack on the values of our shared humanity and global peace.
And as for what can finally bring it to a stop, I think it's possible that this sort of internal institutional rot that we see in the military that gets manifested in things like these operators trafficking drugs and killing each other combined with their inability to recruit and the shrinking size of the army and the morale that's just in the tank.
I mean, that you could see a point at which, you know, the military is actually unable to continue mounting operations.
I don't think we're that far off from that situation.
Thank you so much, Seth, for, you know, sitting with us and answering some of these awful questions and that have awful answers.
So, you know, obviously, if you're listening to this, you absolutely have to pick this book up.
This is essential reading for our era.
So we will have links in the description.
Is there anywhere else that people can go and check your stuff, Seth, or anything you'd like to plug?
Yeah, just follow me on Twitter and then buy the book.
On August 12th it's out.
Tomorrow it's out.
You can get it at your local bookstore.
You can get it on Amazon.
You can get it wherever you buy books.
If you don't want to read a book, you can download the Audible.
But look, Viking Press took a risk when they assigned me this book.
I push against a lot of the mainstream norms and a lot of the proprieties that other reporters observe.
And the way to reward that and get other books like this commissioned and published is to show your support if you can.
If you can afford it, please buy the book.
Yeah, of course.
And really masterfully done, Seth, like huge undertaking and you know really bold and thanks for putting it out in the world thank you guys for having me yeah it was great talking to you well that was quite a conversation thank you for listening to another episode of the qa podcast obviously we've got a patreon that's patreon.com slash qa you can subscribe for five bucks a month i'm sure you're familiar with our pitch at this point you'll get a second episode every week uh at on top of the main and then uh you know we've also got cursed
media we just finished a a wonderful series by liv agar and spencer barrows you can go and binge it now at cursed media dot net to find out all of the kind of like history up until today of the anti-trans backlash and the medical and political forces that have led us here.
So really recommend you go to cursemedia.net and sign up.
You're supporting a longer term project for us and there'll be three mini series within the first year of Curse Media and then we'll be continuing from there.
So we really hope to build this into a bigger project and we appreciate the people who've already supported and listened.
So that being said, we've also got a website, qapodcast.com.
And Brad, what you got for us, buddy?
You want to plug some shit while you're here?
You know, it's like, I feel like you're constantly coming off some sort of documentarian tour of duty, like with fucking wide eyes and just wandering into the recording like, what the fuck?
Yeah, no, it's been a lot this last half of the year.
Simon and I were still plugging away at our feature length dock and getting there.
We have a full rough cut of all three acts that we'll send your way soon to get beautiful.
And congrats also on your Bigfoot erotic.
We still need to find real funding for that.
Oh, but yeah, but I mean, what's important is that you got a magazine to mention the podcast.
Exactly.
The rest is, yeah, the rest is for the birds.
But I mean, can anyone, maybe, that's listening help you with this funding?
Like, what, what can they do?
Just send me an email if you have a line on, on anyone interested in interspecies romance.
If they liked Bustin for Bigfoot episode that Jake and I did, then if you're horny for Bigfoot and you've recently come across a cache of like gold bullion or something, just hit up Brad.
Yes.
But yeah, where can people like go and find your stuff, buds?
Yeah, I'm just bradabrahams.net is good.
And Instagram, I'm more active on Brad WTF and on Twitter, love and saucers.
But I'm barely, barely on there now.
I'm going to plug my Twitter because I'm fucking, they deleted my entire following after I had to go offline to get the green card, which I now really just would like to just return to the government and move away to somewhere else.
But there's nowhere good left because there never was anywhere good and it was always just an illusion.
What is my Twitter?
Julian Field.
Julian F E E E L D. on Twitter.
Jake, you want to plug anything, buds?
Nah.
I'm here.
No, this was awesome.
I can't wait to listen to the book on audio tape.
And I, uh, no, I'm just, honestly, I'm like, so depressed listening to all this.
Seriously, it was, it was, once again, I came in looking for a wild ride.
I thought, you know, maybe I'd get some cool operator lore.
And I've just left feeling that, like, that nothing means anything.
And it's dogs eating human brains.
It's like dogs eating human brains.
It's all darkness.
It's like all darkness.
And I'm just, I don't know.
I guess I'm waiting for the I'm waiting for the surfboard to kick itself out from under me and I just, you know, tumble forever amongst the surf.
Have you ever surfed, Jake?
I have, yeah.
Okay.
It's not all darkness and I think the human spirit will prevail and I don't think you can erase our links to each other, our love for each other and our support for each other.
Just wanted to put that there.
We're not a doomer podcast.
Thank you, Julian.
I need that.
You know what?
I'm honored to be on a podcast that can have an interview like this, that can have a discussion like this, that can ask the kind of questions that you and Brad came up with.
I, you know, if I hadn't met you guys, I would never be part of a project like this.
It's just not, this is not where I would end up.
And, um, you know, I just, I just was sitting back kind of like, wow, this is really important that, like, I think people should hear this.
And like, wow, this is something that, like, I'm a part of.
And like, wow, I, I think I'm, I think we're doing something good.
And, and, and that felt good above the, the information that we learned which felt that.
You keep my heart alive and my loins on fire.
Listener, until next week, may the deep dish bless you and keep you.
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Delta Force is almost perfect.
That was my sentiment for this game when it released back last December.
It ticks a lot of boxes for me.
The gunplay feels great.
The operators, which I initially was worried about, aren't too reliant on their abilities while keeping them each unique.
The gunsmith system, which is probably the best of any of the games that I've played for building weapons, sharing loadouts, the diversity of the builds, the tuning.
I was always surprised that more people were Four people weren't actually playing the game.
It really felt like there was something for everybody.
It was far more accessible of this very hardcore extraction shooter while still maintaining an extreme high level of difficulty.
