Sean Hannity Show - An Insider's View - 12.21

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Dec. 22, 2016 - Sean Hannity Show

01:38:35

An Insider's View - 12.21

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	Those who would trade our freedom for the soup kitchen of the welfare state have told us they have a utopian solution of peace without victory.
	They call their policy accommodation.
	And they say if we'll only avoid any direct confrontation with the enemy, he'll forget his evil ways and learn to love us.
	All who oppose them are indicted as warmongers.
	They say we offer simple answers to complex problems.
	Well, perhaps there is a simple answer.
	Not an easy answer, but simple.
	If you and I have the courage to tell our elected officials that we want our national policy based on what we know in our hearts is morally right, we cannot buy our security, our freedom from the threat of the bomb, by committing an immorality so great as saying to a billion human beings now enslaved behind the iron curtain, give up your dreams of freedom, because to save our own skins, we're willing to make a deal with your slave masters.
	Alexander Hamilton said a nation which can prefer disgrace to danger is prepared for a master and deserves one.
	Now let's set the record straight.
	There's no argument over the choice between peace and war, but there's only one guaranteed way you can have peace and you can have it in the next second.
	Surrender.
	Admittedly, there's a risk in any course we follow other than this, but every lesson of history tells us that the greater risk lies in appeasement.
	And this is the specter our well-meaning liberal friends refuse to face, that their policy of accommodation is appeasement.
	Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Sean Hannity Radio Show.
	Guest hosting today, this is Rich Higgins, high above New York City.
	I'm in studio here with my Navy SEAL buddy John Iodonsey, and Sean has vacated the premises and given us operational control of the battleship.
	Uh-oh.
	We are here 29 days, eight hours and 51 minutes away from the departure of President Obama.
	I know all of you have that clicking down on your counter.
	I know I do.
	It has been eight long years.
	And we're here today.
	Linda's asked me to give you an inside perspective of the war on terrorism, what it means, what we see going on in Berlin and then in Cara, and to give you a take on how the guys that I go to, my trusted allies inside the system, are looking at things.
	We have some incredible guests coming on today.
	The best in the world at this stuff.
	And I think everybody's sitting back and discussing, you know, the hacking, the Russians, the Chinese, all this stuff.
	I think we want to take a look today at the war on terrorism, free of fear, free of intimidation, free of distraction.
	We're going to put aside the hyperbole.
	We're going to go down to the facts.
	We're going to get a brass-tax look at things.
	We see what's happened in Berlin in the past couple days, really over the past couple years, on Angela Merkel's suicidal decisions in terms of her immigration policies.
	And we really have to ask ourselves: is that the future we want?
	And I think the American public has already answered that question.
	They answered it on November 8th.
	We need to make sure our leaders in Washington understand that that is what we expect of them.
	We see an attack right now on the mandate that Trump has.
	And I believe Trump has a real mandate.
	If you exclude California and New York, he won the election by over 3 million votes.
	So those other 48 states have given him a real mandate, one that if he comes in there and pushes forward with his agenda, the American people are going to back him.
	They're going to back him for real.
	So as we look at things moving forward, when I kicked in today with the Reagan speech, I think it's a timeless discussion because it really drives at the essence of what we're dealing with today.
	Again, no fear, no intimidation, no distraction.
	When you go to the truth of what we're dealing with, and when you really look at how decisions are being made inside the national security policy establishment, we are fixated on narratives.
	We're fixated on adhering to some sort of politically correct, contrived version of reality.
	And we hear often said we're going to have a return to truth and we're going to have a return to reason, but it's going to be harder to do.
	I guess one of the things I wanted to accomplish today, and as somebody who was a Trump surrogate and out there advocating for him, is he's got a real mission ahead of him.
	Just because he comes into office, he's got a lot of work to do.
	The system has been polluted and deformed, not only for the past eight years, really, but for the past 15 years.
	We took our eye off the ball.
	Europe took its eye off the ball.
	They're probably 15 or 20 years ahead of us in terms of what they're actually dealing with.
	But the guys I talked to over there, their security forces are completely overwhelmed.
	Networks running all over the world.
	They're bad guys ferreting back and forth.
	And it's a matter of time before we see a true conflagration, a true conflict break out into the open.
	We're seeing the beginning edges of that right now, but I really think we have to spend some time looking at it.
	So drilling down on the incident in Berlin, we look at that.
	And again, a guy that the security services knew.
	They'd known about him for months.
	He had been arrested, traveling with false documents.
	What is it that we refuse to accept in the West that this enemy is who they say they are, not who we want them to be, not who we wish they were, not who they think they're going to become?
	They are who they say they are today, now, and decisions can be made when you're not operating out of fear, when you're not operating out of intimidation, that we can set policies in place, we can set security apparatus in place, we can formulate national security positions that accept the reality of the nature of the fight that we're in.
	Now, I know a lot of the people that Donald Trump is bringing into his administration.
	My time in the Pentagon, I knew General Mattis, General Kelly, General Flynn.
	These are excellent leaders, and they are going to require staffs that are going to support what they're trying to accomplish.
	When you think about these leaders, they're going to need your support.
	They're going to need your public support for what they're attempting to accomplish.
	And the way you're going to be able to do that is you're going to support them by doing your part in the war effort.
	Now, I'm not saying run outside and buy a gun or anything like that, but when you see political decisions being made at your local school board regarding the content of your textbooks, local legal structures that are being put in place, you have to act on your own at that local level.
	And I think when we look at the war on terrorism, guys who've been inside the system fighting the war, and John's smiling at me going, yeah, exactly.
	If we accept that we have this subversive movement, and it is a movement operating inside the United States today that has deformed and polluted our deliberate decision-making process, then we are going to have to first extract ourselves from this false reality, from this narrative-driven decision-making, in order to begin to formulate foreign policy that actually makes sense.
	You can do that by beginning to recruit people in your own circle of friends, in your own family.
	I think one of the things that concerns me is we're so divided right now as a nation, you can't discuss this subject.
	And with Christmas coming up and you're going to see your families again, I'd encourage you to reach out to people with facts about this issue.
	No drama, don't get angry, no rhetoric, just facts.
	And you don't have to provide those facts.
	Just encourage them to go find their own facts.
	John, you got a comment?
	Yeah, you know, Richard, it's thanks for having me on, first off.
	But, you know, every single one of us now seems to have a military member we know or can call that is going to be asked about at the dinner table.
	I know it was with my family as well.
	And, you know, I think that as we enter this new change on a global level, I think our families, we can ask those people that are serving right now, what is it like over there?
	What are you seeing?
	Get the grassroots facts from family and loved ones to make your own determination as opposed to just watching what every other media outlet's putting out.
	Exactly.
	I think, you know, I always tell people, anybody who's ever seen me speak publicly, I always tell them, our grandfathers were smarter than us.
	And, you know, think back to that.
	I mean, when I listen to President-elect Trump, I'm often reminded, you know, he's brusque, he's brash.
	He speaks with passion.
	He speaks sometimes too bluntly for people to take.
	But the reality is, 99 out of 100 times, maybe 100, he's right.
	We just don't like the message.
	And so as we look at this, I think we the people now have taken back the government.
	And you, as a listener and somebody who's informed on this issue, you need to start recruiting people in your little sphere of influence to get them to understand this.
	Not to bring them over to make them a conservative, not to bring them over, but for them to understand that what's a threat here is not a political issue.
	It is an American issue.
	As I look at things right now, you see here, you know, it's been reported on Fox.
	I mean, Obama's set to release 22 more detainees from Gitmo.
	It's insanity.
	It's insanity.
	I actually received phone calls from friends in the Middle East saying, we don't want them.
	Don't send them here.
	And yet here we are, we're going to release them.
	They'll be back on the battlefield.
	John and I, his buddies will be downrange shooting them again here soon.
	It's crazy.
	And, you know, you see Berlin and this guy, Omri, again, arrested with forged documents, traveling through the refugee flows, and still we're pushing to have more refugees brought unvetted, uncleared.
	We don't know who they are, and we're going to bring more of them here.
	We have a mayor down in Texas, I think he's in Austin, who's basically trying to end run his own governor to bring these people into his city.
	That's insane.
	It's insane.
	So that's where we are in the country today.
	I think, from a national security perspective, I have a lot of hope, but I'm a realist.
	And I understand when Mr. Trump or when President-elect Trump hits the ground in Washington, he is coming into a, you know, he's coming in on an LST, the Omaha Beach.
	The establishment, in many cases, is going to be up against them.
	If they're not overtly hostile, they'll be passively hostile because this isn't an easy issue to get your hands around.
	And when we get our guys moving in the right direction at the state and local level, the police already are starting to understand.
	The intelligence and military guys have been fighting the war for 15 years.
	They understand.
	We need the citizens.
	The citizen army has to take on this issue and has to make it personal and make it your job to inform others about this.
	We've got a great array of guests here today.
	We have former FBI counterterrorism training lead.
	We have the former advisor to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Islamic Threat Doctrines.
	We have Pat Poole, who is just irreplaceable.
	We have Mike Waller, political warfare guy.
	We will be back in about five minutes.
	We'll be back here.
	We're going to give you a little taste for what's coming in the next four years, probably eight.
	God bless.
	You're listening to Sean Hannity.
	Calling numbers 1-800-941-7326-800-941.
	Sean, God bless.
	This is the Sean Hannity Show.
	Folks, welcome back.
	You're listening to Sean Hannity Radio.
	This is Rich Higgins.
	I'm guest hosting for Sean while he's away on Christmas break.
	Joining me here in studio is former Navy SEAL John Iodonasy, President of Visense.
	You want to say hi, John?
	Hey, everybody.
	Thanks for having me on, Rich.
	Appreciate it.
	Hey, you know, we've been talking a little bit here in the intro on, you know, what is the Trump administration mandate?
	And, you know, when I think about it, I really think he was elected on five core things.
	And, you know, those five core things were economy, immigration, Islamic terrorism, border security, and then, you know, the overarching theme of America first versus globalism.
	And I'm interested to know, John, you know, as somebody who's fought in the war, you know, Purple Heart, wounded in Iraq, you know, what are your thoughts on the election of Donald Trump and what it means for national security?
	I think this is one of the first times in history that we actually get to reset everything.
	I mean, reset our expectations and actually instill this notion of hope for the country to make America first.
	It's not a crime to be patriotic, and I don't understand why you get demonized if you want to make America first.
	We really have to ask ourselves as citizens, do you want to be number one still or not?
	And that's, I think what you saw on the election day was the outpouring of Americans at every level from every local town and city saying, we want to make America first.
	I think, you know, looking back over the past several years, we've seen this sort of static inertia where there's very little movement in terms of new thinking in the national security establishment, just introducing a new idea.
	I know this is near and dear to your heart as somebody who's been fighting the digital war against ISIS for the past several years.
	Any thoughts on what innovation and what innovation and national security is going to look like under a Trump administration?
	Yeah, I think the innovation and not just the figurehead, but also the vision, the driving vision behind them is General Flynn.
	I mean, I think Mike Flynn brings with him a vision to say, we are going to change the way things are because they're broken.
	We are going to be more agile.
	We are going to decentralize decision-making to people that actually have expertise and aren't just policy experts.
	You know, General Flynn's an Army guy.
	I was an Army guy, you know, and I think people generally say.
	And I'm a Navy guy, and I just said that.
	Yeah, we'll give you your points later.
	People generally think of the Marines as kind of the guys who follow the orders, right?
	But I can tell you, as somebody who was on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan with those guys, they are the most innovative and creative guys.
	And to see General Flynn surrounding himself and surrounding Donald Trump with guys like General Kelly and General Mattis, I'm just convinced these guys are ready to take it to the next level.
	And furthermore, bringing in somebody as brilliant as Monica Crowley.
	I mean, she brings this whole other dimension that Mike Flynn knows is necessary to be number one.
	Right.
	I think as things move forward here, it's going to be critical that we get the guys inside the system.
	So all you folks who are out there inside the system right now, all those guys in the Pentagon, up at the agency who are working, listening to us on your screen right now, these guys are on our side.
	National Security is making a comeback.
	We're going back to reality.
	Again, no fear, no intimidation, no distraction.
	Theme of the day is our grandfathers were smarter than us.
	This is Rich Higgins in for Sean Hannity.
	I am a former Defense Department official.
	Linda told me to say that.
	And God bless.
	Be back in a minute.
	The one
	thing you can always count on.
	Sean Hannity is back on the radio.
	Welcome back, folks.
	This is Rich Higgins in for Sean Hannity, former Defense Department official in studio with me, John Iodonisy.
	John, you want to say hi?
	Hey.
	John is a former Navy SEAL, combat wounded in Iraq in 2005.
	He and I have known each other for 10 years.
	So if we go Boston on you and start using words you don't know, like wicked car and stuff like that, don't worry about it.
	We'll try and avoid it.
	Linda has a choke collar on me to make sure I don't do it, but we're going to go there.
	I guarantee it.
	We've got some guests coming up in this next section here.
	I know both of these guys pretty well.
	And, you know, for me to read their, they gave me this bio sheet on them.
	And I've just got to tell you, this bio sheet is ridiculous, Linda.
	Kim Jensen, he is the hands-down best counterterrorism officer to come out of the Federal Bureau of Investigation that I've ever met, period.
	It says here, former FBI counterterrorism center instructor, legal attache to several countries in the Middle East, subject matter expert on Islamic extremism.
	And that doesn't give you the full picture.
	Kim was involved in almost every FBI major terrorism investigation you can think of going back for the past 25 years.
	A true expert, a gentleman, and a scholar.
	Kim, are you on the line?
	I am.
	Hey, sir.
	It's great to talk to you again.
	And let me introduce our other guest here.
	I just wanted to make sure you were there and to say hello because everybody knows Steve Coughlin, our next guest.
	He is the founder of Unconstrained Analytics Incorporated.
	And again, his bio is even smaller than yours, Kim.
	The reality is, Steve was the Islamic legal advisor to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and was eventually, due to a run-in with some bad guys inside the system, chased out of the system and literally chased, bureaucratically chased out of Washington by the Obama administration.
	And Steve, are you there?
	I'm here.
	And he's here joining us today.
	He's taking a dive back into work.
	I know you're on Christmas break.
	I appreciate you joining us today, Steve, both of you guys.
	So let's dive right in.
	Kim, thoughts on what's happening in Europe right now?
	Well, what's happening in Europe right now is basically being an extension of what's been happening since about 2001, 2002.
	I mean, it is a steady strain, a torrent that is going to grow in depth and in strength.
	The longer we go down this path, it will not stop.
	It will continue until someone has the chutzbutt to put a stop to some of it.
	I don't think we're going to be able to stop all of it, but we can certainly defeat a lot of it.
	Now, my observation is, as somebody who's touched in various aspects of this, you are far more on the operational tactical side of things than I was.
	What's your sense inside the community right now across the counterterrorism community?
	Is there a sense of frustration that the operational and tactical guys feel with what's going on?
	I mean, what does the incoming administration need to do to give the operators the space they need to be successful?
	Well, my opinion on this is based on my experience for 30 years.
	And I just retired six months ago.
	So, in my opinion, I feel that there is a great deal of frustration on the part of people that are actually involved hands-on at the base level in dealing with extremism and extremists.
	And that basically is a result of being hampered by the current administration.
	I personally have suffered some blows at the hands of this current administration.
	All of my material was deemed inappropriate, and all of it was actually banished at one time, about 750 pages of material that I used to give specific instruction on how to confront extremism and how to deal with extremists and how to be successful in operational manners and dealing with extremists and extremism.
	I think that continues until today.
	Hopefully, with the new administration, I think, and I'm hopeful that the constraints will be lifted on the operators and the individuals that are dealing directly with extremists.
	So, Kim, what you're telling me, okay, is, you know, I hosted this show once about six months ago with a guy named Phil Haney, and he tells me that his content, his material, his training material, his analytical materials were purged because he'd speak in a factual way about the threat doctrine of our enemy.
	And because some of that was derived from Islam, the administration and inherent to some politically correct naivete basically shut you down.
	Is that what you're saying?
	Yeah, that's exactly what I'm saying.
	Okay.
	And Steve, I know, I mean, I saw what happened to you, Steve.
	But again, let's go back.
	What does the incoming administration need to do to start to fix this?
	Well, I think the first thing they need to do is understand, you know, following up with what Kim was saying, is there was an actual purge.
	There was a purge of people and work product that identified the nature of the terrorist threat in a factual manner.
	You know, the very language that we've constructed in the national security community to deal with terrorism keeps you from ever being able to talk about it.
	And I think the greatest threat we face is allowing the leadership to come in, picking people maybe from the establishment side or whatever, that will impose the same narrative that overwrites the facts on the ground.
	So, Steve, let me interject there for a second.
	So, what you're telling me is your fear is rather than doing the full reset, meaning going back all the way to pre-9-11 and then getting a fact-based, you're thinking we're going to go back to how it was during the Bush years, which you're saying wasn't correct either.
	Yes, I am saying exactly that.
	I'm saying that hostile narratives have been imposed on analytical processes that ensure that you will not get to the fact of the matter when you're analyzing it, and that that is at some point intentional.
	You know, one of the things we miss is that we think of war and then we think, or terrorism, we think of violence, but there's political warfare, and political warfare operates on the idea that sometimes you have the violent reinforced nonviolent actions, for example, subversion.
	One of the things we find, or I have found, is that the way we talked about the war is a form of reality dislocation.
	So long as you're talking about violent extremism, so long as you're talking about leaderless jihads, you're not talking about the people we're actually engaged in.
	And you transfer responsibility for fighting the war on terror from the FBI special agents or the general officers and the ops people to professors who come up with these weird scientific ideas.
	You had to throw the professors under the bus.
	I appreciate you doing that.
	I agree.
	I mean, I can say as somebody who's worked inside the Defense Department for a long time, there's an academic nature to threat analysis.
	And that is what Steve is talking about, folks.
	When you use your own words to define the enemy, you're wrong.
	You have to understand the enemy as the enemy understands himself.
	When the enemy says he fights you because he doesn't like your iPhone, believe him.
	When the enemy says he fights you because you watch the wrong TV show, believe him.
	We have created these mental models that get us off of doing that, and it's perverted our entire national security process.
	What I'm hearing from both of you guys, though, and tell me if I'm right, that what it's actually happening is these models that have been created are now being forced down onto the operators and the tacticians, and they're having to do these mental backflips to be able to even explain the events that they're seeing in front of their face.
	Is that correct?
	Well, I think it's only correct.
	You know, Sun Tzu had a phrase, tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.
	And that's the idea that so long as you don't have a strategy to fight your war, you can't win it.
	And we had General Magadha just a year or so back say, this was a special operations general say, we do not understand the movement, and until we do, we are not going to defeat it.
	We have not defeated the idea.
	We don't even understand the idea.
	Well, when you're fighting a war and in the information battle space, your leaders don't even know who they're fighting.
	15 years into a war, and it said publicly, don't you think our enemies understand that we are lost?
	It created a situation of complete strategic incomprehension.
	Kim, when you Kim, when you hear these stories, and I guess my question is, who can the guys inside the system that are still dealing with this stuff, are they prepared to come forward with the alternative, the truthful, the fact-based, the real way forward when the Trump administration comes in?
	I mean, I guess I'm trying to manage expectations.
	How long is it going to take us to fix this, to get the training, to get the analysis correct?
	Because we're not going to turn out guys like you and Steve in a day.
	I think it's going to take a couple months after a transition takes place.
	And, you know, what Steve was talking about is precisely what got me in trouble.
	The reason why all my material was purged back in 2011 was because I attempted to define the ideology of extremism in precise and specific terms without paying attention to what's politically correct.
	And identifying them in precise and specific terms, calling them what they are, basically the major groups are Salafi jihadi groups.
	By using that term Salafi jihadi groups, somehow that undermined the administration's ability to deal with extremism.
	And so for using the word, for example, Salafi jihadism, all of my material was purged and I was ordered to eliminate everything that had to do with Salafi jihadism.
	Now the problem with that is that groups like Al-Qaeda, Dawl Islamiyah, which is the Islamic State, Boko Haram, Al-Shaba, Al-Muhajirun, Ansar al Sharia, Ansar al-Islam, Lajkari Taiba, all those groups, and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, are all, without exception, Salafi jihadi groups.
	So if you are mandated to look away from the commonality, the common core of that group, how can you undermine or defeat that group without understanding who they are?
	It's impossible.
	It's impossible to fight a cloud.
	It's impossible to fight a theory.
	You just can't do it.
	You have to be able to define them in specific terms.
	Sorry to interrupt.
	This is John.
	Just so everybody understands, can you kind of unpack just the term Salafi jihadi and help our listeners understand what that is comprised of and why possibly was it banned from your vocabulary?
	Yes, that's a great question.
	The Islamic community is divided basically into two distinct and two separate groups.
	One of them is the Shia and the other one is the Sunni.
	Now, 70% of the Islamic community is Sunni.
	But within that Sunni group, there are many, many, many, many, many subgroups.
	Just like in Christianity, you know, we're divided in half of it Catholic, half of it Protestant, but there are many Protestant groups.
	And the same is true with the Islamic groups.
	There are many, many different Islamic groups within the Sunni realm.
	However, one of the very small segments within the Sunni realm is the Salafi ideology.
	And all those groups that I just mentioned to you, Al-Qaeda all the way to Lajkari Taiba, every group that I mentioned to you on that list, they all subscribe to one particular methodology, which is called the Salafi methodology.
	It's a little bit confusing because the Salafi methodology, there is a fundamentalist component and an extremist component.
	The terrorist groups that I mentioned to you before all subscribe to the terrorist component of the Salafi ideology, and there are no exceptions.
	That is why it is paramount to understand the underpinnings of that ideology so that you can identify those individuals and that you can penetrate them and you can stop or disrupt any of the plans that they have.
	If you do not understand that ideology, it's almost impossible to identify who the enemy is and disrupt their activities.
	Is the larger Sunni population easily able to identify this ultra-small sect that you just described?
	I mean, are they policing their own, if you will?
	Very, very easy.
	They are divided.
	The Sunni, the larger part of Sunni Islam, which is 70% of all Muslims, are divided into two major groups.
	One of them is the Salafi group, which is the minority, and the overwhelming majority are the Sufi group.
	And in the Sufi component is where you find the Taliban and the Haqqani network.
	Those are Sufi extremist groups, and they do not like each other at all.
	The Sufi extremists hate the Salafi extremists, and as well, the Salafi extremists hate the Sufi extremists.
	Hey, Steve, I want to ask you a quick question, Steve, and we can kind of wrap this up.
	You're somebody who worked up at the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff level.
	You've advised very senior political officials.
	What needs to be done going forward?
	The two or three key actions that we could take immediately in the new Trump administration.
	I think the first thing we need is a campaign plan to fight the war that starts afresh and recognizes that what got us to this point has failed.
	And I think we have to be clear, sure, that we don't bring back in the same people who brought us here.
	I'm not saying that everybody who was fighting the war before is bad, but I do think they come in with narratives, and the question becomes: are they willing to have a fresh break?
	And I think that the line over which people can reasonably disagree over, but so long as they orient on it, is that facts dominate.
	Get people out there.
	Steve, that is a great point to close on.
	Facts dominate.
	Again, no fear, no intimidation, no distraction.
	Guys, thank you both for joining us today.
	Great little segment there.
	I know you could have gone on all day.
	This is Rich Higgins sitting in for Sean Hannity, former Defense Department official, Bostonian, and it's wicked cool to be here with you.
	We'll see you on the other side of the break.
	Welcome back, folks.
	This is Rich Higgins sitting in for Sean Hannity, former Defense Department official, wicked tough guy out of Boston, as Linda likes to keep telling me.
	I'm in here by another wicked tough guy from Boston, John Iodonse, former Navy SEAL, Purple Heart.
	John, say hi to the folks.
	Hey, everybody.
	We're in here today, and we're talking about national security, terrorism, subversion, political warfare, all the cool stuff.
	We're having a little fun.
	It's Christmas for us today.
	This is our Christmas present.
	You know, the theme that we're going with, I think, is we're going to be fact-based, and our grandfathers were smarter than us.
	It's amazing.
	At the time, I was a kid, my grandfather was a World War II vet.
	He fought in Europe.
	He was actually a medical collection company guy for those medevac folks out there.
	Those are the guys that drove the ambulances back and forth to the front, ferrying the wounded out.
	And I'm sure all the listeners out there have a father or a grandfather like that, right?
	And he wouldn't talk about the war.
	And I mean, he would not talk about the war.
	As a kid, 8, 9, 10 years old, I'd ask him, tell me about it.
	Never talk about it.
	Those guys were strong.
	They were real men.
	And we need to get the real men, the alpha men, the alpha males, back into our culture and to stand up on the wall.
	John, you're looking at me, you got something to say, buddy?
	Yeah, I know.
	I mean, I can share the same with members from my family, and I think that, you know, there was a sense of not talking about it because they deeply admired their service, but they also faced a lot of horrors and probably didn't want to relive those.
	Now, I'm glad that with our generation, people are actually reaching out for help and to combat those things so they can have a little bit of joy in their life.
	Because, I mean, after all, that's the point, right, Rich?
	Joy.
	There you go.
	You know, I think when I look at the election of 2016, I see it as an accountability election.
	The left was accountable.
	The establishment has been held accountable.
	And now President-elect Trump has a lot of work to do to bring back some accountability into the system.
	We have a couple guests coming up here with us today, Patrick Poole and Terry Strada, that they're going to talk about accountability, accountability for one's actions through something called the Justice Against the Sponsors of Terrorism Act.
	And we're going to talk about a little bit of the background behind it.
	So I'll give you a little background.
	Pat Poole is familiar to the audience, national security correspondent for PJ Media.
	Somebody new to me today and haven't met her before is Terry Strada.
	She's the national chair of the 9-11 Families and Survivors United for Justice Against Terrorism.
	And she's at the vanguard of this fight for justice for the victims of the 9-11 attacks.
	Are you guys both there?
	Patrick, Terry?
	Yes.
	Thanks for having us.
	Yep, I'm here too.
	Hey, Terry, it's great to meet you.
	I've known Patrick for a number of years.
	It's great to meet you now, Terry, too.
	And so, Terry, this is really, I know you're a leader supporting this act, trying to get Congress to do the right thing.
	If you don't mind, would you give the listeners a kind of a JASTA 101 overview?
	What you're attempting to accomplish, what the goal is.
	Right.
	Okay.
	So we had to enact legislation to help the victims' families hold any nation accountable that finances a terrorist attack on U.S. soil that injures or kills American citizens.
	I lost my husband on September 11th, and we hit roadblocks in the courts.
	And so we enacted legislation, or we introduced it called JASTA.
	And it took four years of my work.
	I think the bill was actually introduced nearly seven years ago.
	But once the families got involved and started to really engage with Congress, this bipartisan bill became law on September 28th.
	And I understand the Obama administration did what when the bill hit the White House?
	He vetoed it.
	He did not like it one bit.
	And he sent out false arguments regarding the bill.
	His veto message did not reflect the language of the bill or the actual work that had been done in the Senate prior to the bill being passed out of the Senate.
	So they had actually addressed the concerns that the White House had, but he kind of just ignored everything and went ahead and vetoed it.
	We came back, the families, back down to Washington and met with our sponsors and our co-sponsors and our supporters and, you know, worked hard and came back with a 97 to 1 vote in the Senate and 348 to 77 in the House to override his first one and only veto.
	Okay.
	Well, here's the question I have.
	And Patrick, maybe you can jump in here with this.
	Why did they veto it?
	And who are these people that aren't supporting it on Capitol Hill and why?
	Well, Rich, first off, hats off to Terry and the 9-11 Families and Survivors for their yeoman's work in getting this JASTA bill through.
	And what we're seeing here, now that the bill is passed, is this massive lobbying effort by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
	They're pouring in $1.3 million of lobbying through 14 different lobbying firms every month trying to gut this bill.
	And we see the predictable, the usual suspects, John McCain, Lindsey Graham, who are kind of leading the push to gut this bill as a result of this Saudi pressure.
	And I think the media really haven't stepped up to ask, what exactly is this?
	Because as Terry pointed out, the very things that whether it was the White House or John McCain and Lindsey Graham now are complaining about the bill, those elements are already in the bill.
	So, you know, it's a complete mystery, except for all this massive Saudi lobbying effort, why they want to gut the bill now.
	Terry, are you, as you're talking to people on Capitol Hill, Terry, what do you sense from them in your discussions with them?
	I mean, is there a hidden hand here?
	Do you feel that?
	Do you feel that hidden influence as you're talking to them?
	I mean, what is going on there?
	Yeah, absolutely.
	I wouldn't say so much that Congress tells us that other than the families in our discussions amongst ourselves, we're seeing that.
	You know, it's evident that some of them are caving to the pressure of the Saudis.
	You know, they go into these offices and they threaten economic warfare.
	They threaten to stop in there assisting us in the fight with ISIS.
	And I think they do a lot of economic threatening to companies as well.
	So you'll see some people kind of giving into that a little bit and saying, you know, well, let's take pause here.
	Maybe we should be listening to the Saudis over the American people.
	It's absolutely insane.
	It really doesn't make any sense to us.
	So they throw out all of these misconceptions about the bill and say that it will harm our military, which it cannot do because JASTA only deals with nations that have funded a terrorist attack or given material support to a designated, and actually knowingly to a designated terrorist organization.
	So like Patrick just said, that's already in the bill.
	That was the one thing that McCain and Graham went on the floor and said, you know, we want knowingly in there.
	Well, knowingly is in the bill.
	And Senator Graham has been on this bill for the last seven years.
	He was one of the original co-sponsors seven years ago.
	He actually put a hold on the bill before it came out of the Senate to make sure that every single thing in the bill was, you know, okay and all the issues had been worked out.
	So it really is a mystery to us why now, after he voted yes again to pass it in the Senate and then override the President's veto, he voted yes.
	Why, after the Saudis come back again with this onslaught, would he want to choose to give them what they want as opposed to sticking with his son?
	So, Terry, this is John.
	You know, that's just amazing to me.
	I'm a little bit flawed.
	Let me back up.
	So two basic questions to you.
	Number one, what is the prevailing narrative from Senator McCain or Senator Graham's office as to the opposition on this bill?
	Question one.
	And two, why are the Saudis lobbying and spending $1.5 million a month against this bill?
	Well, clearly the reason the Saudis are lobbying against is they don't want to face us in a courtroom.
	And that's what we got it.
	So it's money.
	It's money.
	Okay, got it.
	It's money.
	And it's culpability.
	They do not want to admit to the world that they had any role in the 9-11 attacks.
	But didn't the Commission already illustrate that?
	Like, we're fighting over something that's already been proven factually, right?
	Not really, because the Commission didn't have enough resources or enough time to fully investigate the Saudis.
	And that's really the conclusion.
	Okay, what about the second question relative to the offices?
	Sorry, can you repeat the first question then?
	No, the first question was to the lobbying efforts and the resources applied thereof.
	The second question is, which you answered.
	The second question is, what is the primary opposing narrative that is echoed by Senator McCain and Senator Graham's office against this bill?
	They'll tell us that they don't want to see reciprocal laws like JASTA passed in other countries, but a reciprocal law is perfectly fine.
	We do not finance designated terrorist organizations to go out and carry terrorist attacks.
	They want to put in discretionary function into the language of the bill, and that would then allow the Saudis to say, well, yeah, it was at our discretion to give to al-Qaeda, you know, to keep them from attacking us, but what they did with the money isn't our responsibility, which you can't give to a terrorist organization knowing that they have a fatwa out and a jihad, you know, to kill Americans.
	You know, Osama bin Laden made that claim twice and say, well, we didn't know if we actually gave them the money that they would actually do it.
	Gotcha.
	Okay.
	Pat, let me jump in here.
	This is Rich.
	Pat, when you're observing this, I mean, what are the things, I mean, as I'm listening to Terry Teller's story of trying to move this through, I'm hearing political warfare, influence operations.
	What's your take on what's going on here?
	Well, I think what Terry just talked about, about this discretionary state function, which basically allows the Saudis or any of these countries, including Qatar, who were, you know, in both cases were selling billions of dollars of weapons to, that they say, look, you know, funding these terrorist organizations is part of our foreign policy and national security, so therefore we should be immune.
	But the situation is right now, we're almost right back to where we are globally before 9-11, where we're seeing that the Saudis continue to pour money, men, all kinds of various instruments to be able to prop up Wahhabism around the world.
	In fact, there was just here last week a leaked German intelligence report that fingered Saudi Arabia and Qatar for funding extremism in Germany, talking about tens of thousands of adherents.
	They're funding extremist mosques, madrasas in these countries, sending in Wahhabi preachers and dawah groups.
	And this is the atmosphere in which terrorism, domestic terrorism, jumps out of.
	We're looking at this incident just a couple of days ago.
	Hey, Pat.
	And these things just don't come out of nowhere.
	Hey, Pat, it's Rich.
	Hey, we're coming up on a break here, but I wanted to thank you and Terry for coming on here today and illuminating this.
	This is the part of the war most people don't see.
	It's the war that's going on on Capitol Hill.
	It's the war that we're, frankly, getting slaughtered in from an influence perspective.
	And you can do your part out there, you listeners.
	You let your congressman know what you think of JASTA.
	You let your congressman know what you think of these influence operations that these foreign states are running on We the People's House.
	Again, fact-based, no fear, no intimidation, no distraction.
	This is Rich Higgins in studio here with John Iodonsey.
	Going to break.
	See you on the other side.
	More contacts than anybody.
	More friends behind the curtains.
	Sean Hannity is on.
	This is Rich Higgins in for Sean Hannity, former Department of Defense official, wicked Bostonian, in studio with John Iodonese, former Navy SEAL.
	Say hi, John.
	Hey.
	Well, we're here talking today about a world without narratives and fact-based assessments of threat doctrines.
	So we're going to dig in a little bit on, you know, we talked about influence operations, and we talked a little bit about how countries like Saudi Arabia and Qatar use their ability, their financial resources, to influence our political decision makers.
	And I think it's an area that most people don't spend a lot of time thinking about.
	But when you see groups like the Council for American Islamic Relations is headquartered on Capitol Hill, you know, founded in 1993 as the Islamic Association of Palestine, became CARE.
	We know they're founded by Hamas.
	And the reason we know that is because the FBI recorded the entire meeting.
	Now they are up on Capitol Hill having hundreds of meetings with your elected representatives.
	How is that possible?
	Now, do you think your grandfather would let that happen, John?
	Absolutely not.
	So maybe it's a Boston thing.
	Maybe the rest of the country allows this type of stuff to happen.
	But I just, I look at this.
	I look at this and I just say, are we clinically insane?
	You need to ask, this is something the listeners can do.
	You need to ask your political leadership, your congressman, your senator, have you met with CARE and when?
	And if they tell you they're meeting with them, you have a problem.
	That's the benchmark.
	That's the metric.
	It's that simple.
	You know, Rich, I think this is about the American First narrative that we started.
	America First transcends local, state, and government boundaries.
	Your neighborhood or your home, your neighborhood, your town, your state, your country.
	And we need to make sure that we're vigilant to protect each one of those families against people that want to do away with us.
	So as we look at this, you know, and I think the challenge that guys have, and I am a creature of DC now, I admit it, is explaining to the voters, explaining to the listening audience how these policy decisions are made.
	We hear that interests of governments like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and their economic influence that they have, Trumps are, you know, are survivors from the 9-11 attack.
	And, you know, we have to step back and really, you know, as the Trump administration comes in, reassess our priorities when everything's important and nothing's important.
	And we need to understand, you know, are we making the decisions, like Ronald Reagan would say, are we making the decisions under a moral framework that is just and right under the American political philosophy?
	Or are we simply agreeing with appeasement and willing and not willing to challenge the very principles by which we were founded?
	I mean, that's what it comes down to.
	Well, I think, you know, we're about halfway through the show today, guys, and we've got some great stuff coming up for you.
	We have Ayan Hersi Ali.
	For those of you who read her book, now they call me Infidel.
	We've got Dr. J. Michael Waller coming on board.
	This is Rich Higgins in for Sean Hannity.
	We'll see you on the other side of the break.
	Stay in
	touch with the Hannity faithful.
	Join the message board at Hannity.com.
	Hey, folks, this is Rich Higgins.
	Welcome back to the Sean Hannity Radio Show.
	Rich Higgins guest hosting here in studio with me, John Iodony, a couple of wicked smart Boston guys.
	Linda tells me we're wicked tough, but we're not really.
	So we're talking today about our grandfathers were smarter than us.
	And I think they weren't necessarily smarter.
	I just think they knew a fact when they saw one.
	They knew, to tell the truth, they didn't live in the world of spin and narratives and metadata.
	John?
	And I think it's also something that Steve said earlier.
	They didn't have a complex theory for there's a bad guy that wants to kill me.
	Right.
	I mean, it was that simple.
	Right.
	They didn't question Hitler's psychoanalytical profile.
	Right.
	Or the social disorganization theory as it relates to the increase of violence outside a city.
	Well, you know, I think the only person in the world who's happy that Adolf Hitler happened is probably Angela Merkel right now because, you know, she's the second worst German leader ever.
	It's just amazing to watch what's happening in Europe.
	Known by German Intel.
	I mean, that's the latest, right?
	Well, you know, I swear, you know, it's another truck, another known jihadi, another attack on the citizens of a sovereign state.
	Previously identified.
	And the leadership of that state is put the policies in place to let it happen.
	It's insane.
	I mean, it's critically insane.
	It's absolutely unbelievable.
	So theme here today is no fear, no intimidation, no distraction.
	And, you know, I asked John to come up here with me today.
	You know, he and I have known each other for a number of years.
	John's an expert on digital warfare, digital warcraft, cyber influence.
	And joining us on the phone today is Dr. J. Michael Waller, who is a senior fellow for information operations at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C.
	And Dr. Waller is also on the editorial board of NATO's Defense Strategic Communications Journal.
	Mike, are you there?
	Yeah.
	Hey, Rich.
	Hey, how's it going?
	Good.
	Good.
	You're from Boston, too.
	Yeah, yeah.
	We're sticking with the theme today.
	Linda didn't know that.
	You blew our cover.
	She's coming.
	Oh, no, okay.
	She's staying in.
	She's staying in the back engineering room there.
	Okay, I thought she was going to come in and grab me.
	So, you know, in pulling the show together, I wanted to talk a little bit about the information age, political warfare, and subversion.
	And, you know, John Iodonsey, you know, he's an expert on the digital side of it.
	You, you know, in my interface with you has been in understanding subversion as a concept.
	And, you know, with the Russian hacks going on and, you know, the OPM hack and the total digital compromise of all of our intelligence information and data on DOD and government officials.
	I just, I'm going to kind of turn it over to you guys and have a little, I'd like to see and have the audience see you guys have a little dialogue about what are you guys thinking about as experts in this space.
	So, John, go for it.
	Yeah, I want to, okay.
	You know, I look at the space and Mike, I know you're going to sort of unpack and simplify for us all the theories, but I see a collection of facts.
	And beyond that, I see that there's three fundamental informational elements that comprise news as we know it, right?
	And a good friend of mine, John Gallagher, came up with these.
	I think they're great.
	They're facts, context, and characterization.
	If you manipulate context, which is easy to do, or characterization, the entire story is now sent down a different road with different conclusions.
	The digital age allows us to not only manipulate context and characterization, but also facts themselves.
	I mean, we can actually create fact now based on a false premise of millions of stories going on seven different newspapers online in a matter of minutes.
	And now we can distort facts as we know it.
	So what this means to somebody like me who's sitting over here listening to you is that we have a very hard time even recognizing the truth when we do hear it.
	That's right.
	Because what are you actually hearing?
	Okay.
	Well, Mike, I know you're real, you're really an expert on the Russian and Soviet use of political warfare.
	I mean, what are you seeing going on right now?
	And here it is in the headlines.
	It's like we're back in 1984.
	What are your thoughts?
	What are the big things that keep you up at night?
	Well, it's pretty simple, and it's so simple that it's amazing that we can't deal with it.
	Because really, Vladimir Putin's in a weak spot.
	So what do you do when you're in a weak spot?
	You mess with somebody's head.
	And so this whole idea of political warfare is if you can't fight your enemy head-on, or if it's not a smart thing to do, then you mess with his head and mess with his policy.
	So in this case, Putin's not trying to persuade us of anything like the Soviets did with their communist ideological propaganda.
	They're not trying to change our behavior.
	They're just trying to make us lose confidence in ourselves and in our institutions and in our leaders and just mess things up for us and mess things up with our allies and cause us to question ourselves.
	And therefore, we're empowering Putin every time we overreact.
	Mike, let me ask you.
	So from that context, would you say that really the objective is to drive a wedge between the American populace and patriotism?
	I mean, is really that what he's trying to do?
	Is to turn us against each other, and in doing so, we weaken?
	Yeah, and weaken our leadership.
	For example, since when has Hillary Clinton or any of her friends ever cared about Russian propaganda and subversion and all this other stuff?
	You know, since when has she ever been concerned about somebody being Putin's puppet?
	You know, certainly not when she and her group were making money from the Putin regime.
	They would never tolerate this.
	They'd call us a bunch of McCarthyites if we dared make these allegations.
	But she literally called Donald Trump Putin's puppet.
	And she literally said there's Russian subversion going on that we have to investigate.
	And you know what?
	I agree.
	There is.
	So let's investigate it.
	And I think if we do a thorough investigation, we're going to see how deeply this has been rooted for decades in American politics.
	But the politicians who are most inclined to have been part of Russian subversion are not conservatives.
	Right.
	And here's my concern with that.
	I agree with that.
	Here's the danger, though.
	This subject is being discussed in the context of Donald Trump getting elected, which is really the troubling aspect.
	So that in itself is subversive.
	Do you not agree?
	Yeah, absolutely.
	And if they mess with us, let's investigate it.
	We should investigate it.
	We should investigate every last aspect of it.
	But look where they have us now.
	They have American society wondering, is the next president of the United States, Donald Trump, Putin's tool?
	Right.
	And beyond that, I think they also have Americans wondering, is it morally right for us to put America first?
	I mean, isn't that the question that they're positing in the youth of today and many other people?
	Like, it's like the trophy society, the trophy generation, right?
	Like, hey, Bobby, everybody's going to get a prize today.
	And here we have nobody can be the winner because somebody's feelings might get hurt.
	I mean, is that wrong for us as Americans to want to be first?
	And is this not a subversive tactic to totally dismantle that?
	Exactly.
	It's to make us lose confidence in ourselves.
	It's like giving the number one prize to the worst kid on the team to make him feel better.
	What incentive does that give the best guys on the team?
	I'll tell you what it does from my perspective.
	Those guys didn't do too well when they were under heavy automatic weapon fire because they were so used to getting trophies anyways.
	That's not the type of people that I can tell you right now the military wants to deal with is everybody gets a trophy.
	Yeah.
	So now we have people questioning Trump.
	And if you look at Trump's, the people around Trump who he's appointing on his national security side, they're pretty hardcore counterintelligence people, warriors and so forth.
	They're no tools of anybody.
	But for people to even be discussing this in itself is absurd.
	But from the Putin political worker perspective, it doesn't matter if it's true or not.
	It just matters that we fight each other.
	And you notice what the Clinton camp has done.
	It's got us, we're no longer talking about what Podesta's emails said or how Hillary Clinton was.
	Exactly right.
	Change the subject.
	So let's cast all the blame on Trump and then let Elizabeth Warren and then Bernie Sanders and everybody else rebuild their party from within.
	But all the attention has been drawn away from the contents of what's been in those leaked emails to, oh, it's all Trump's fault.
	And questioning the very basis of the legitimacy of the emails.
	I know Sean had Julian Assange on a couple of days ago, and they really dug into this.
	But I think it's fascinating.
	I think it's planned.
	I think it's deliberate.
	And I think that the subversion tactics to destabilize and chip away at the foundations of our country is something that is persistent, ongoing, and if unchecked, may in fact win.
	Rich?
	Yeah.
	Well, Mike, here's a question I have for you.
	And this is because you're one of the few guys in the national security circles that I run in that understands subversion.
	And I think for the audience who may not be familiar with the concept, can you unpack that a little bit at kind of the 101 level so Bobby, the trophy kid, whoever he is, can understand it?
	Sure.
	Subversion is really simple, and it happens all around us.
	It's simply rather than attacking something head-on, frontally, and visibly, you go in and you infiltrate, and you decay from within.
	So subversion is kind of like rust on steel, where if you don't take care of it right away, that little bit of water and oxidization is going to destroy an entire structure.
	And so subversion eats away gradually from within.
	It causes us to change our policies from within without even realizing that we're changing or why we're changing our minds and our policies.
	It causes us to stop believing those things that were so important to us.
	It causes us to stop identifying with who we are and what we stand for.
	So Mike, Mike, here's a quick question for you.
	Earlier in the show, we had Steve Cogg on, we had Kim Jensen on, and they were talking about the 2011 purge of material in the fact-based training intelligence analysis.
	Is that an example of a hostile, subversive act?
	Absolutely.
	And I was there, too, for that.
	It was started really in 2006 where I was training the U.S. military, pre-deployment training for our mid-level officers prior to going to Iraq and Afghanistan.
	And they were being taught things in there about how to view Islam that were simply not true.
	You know, you're going into a Muslim country.
	Here's what you need to know.
	Well, the people they had as instructors were from the Muslim Brotherhood.
	Perfect.
	And they were giving a line about Islam that was simply pure propaganda, but it was distorting our officers' entire orientation to understand what Islam is about because they trusted the instructor because the instructor was there through the army.
	I mean, brilliant strategy.
	I mean, brilliant strategy on their side.
	Yeah.
	So now, when I had testified against this one instructor in Senate testimony in 2003, and I find here he is sitting next to me.
	This is at Fort Hood three weeks after the shooting.
	And so I filed a complaint about him saying he's a danger to the program, danger to the soldiers, and I was then removed from the program.
	So this is really widespread.
	It's going on in the FBI.
	It's going on in the CIA, Department of Homeland Security, and it's warping our very views about the enemy that we're fighting.
	That is a really pernicious kind of subversion when you're subverting the actual worldview of our security people and our military and our police.
	So here's a question.
	So I get questions a lot, and I'm sure there's going to be, I can see our phone calls ringing off here, but how do you combat, Mike, the person that says, hey, Mike, so you're telling me like this is a giant master plan?
	I mean, this is a giant, how do you defend against being called a conspiracy theorist and saying that, you know, pretty soon we're going to have Roswell being involved as a generation of the subversion materials.
	How do you defend against that?
	Well, first you have to prove that it's a fact and not a theory.
	And that's easy to prove.
	You just have to show the evidence.
	And it's like any political campaign.
	That's what political warfare is all about.
	Some of them are centrally planned.
	Some of them are planned from the grassroots.
	Some of them are just networks of like-minded people who get together and they get together and then they do whatever messaging and actions that they do once they start identifying with each other and build a network or a movement.
	And that's all subversion is as well.
	Yeah, and I'll tell you, one of the things that I see, I deal with influencers every day.
	And I run a company that we handle millions of influences around the world.
	And one thing I see is you can actually now organize, create, and manage those movements digitally.
	And this is totally changing the game.
	Ten years ago, it might have been a whole collection of people to do this, but now one person can be multiple identities doing exactly what you said.
	So right out of your kitchen.
	Exactly.
	Bobby, sorry we bothered you today, but bottom line is, it sounds like we need to pull together a counter-subversion effort.
	And it sounds to me based upon the scale of what Kim and Steve and you, Mike, have brought forward today, the scale of this, it's going to have to be directed by the incoming administration.
	This is a White House down-level counter-subversion, counterintelligence effort to get things back on the right path.
	Is that a good assumption?
	Yeah.
	All you need is leadership because we have some wonderful people already there in the system, but they feel like they're not free to move or act.
	But once they have great leadership coming from the top, you're going to see some big changes.
	Roger that, Mike.
	Well, thanks for joining us today.
	We are with you guys.
	All right.
	Take care, Mike.
	Thanks, Mike.
	So sticking with the theme, our grandfathers were smarter than us, you know, and with all apologies to Bobby back there in Boston.
	He got a trophy, though.
	He got a trophy.
	He did.
	We're back to reality and truth.
	We'll talk to you on the other side of the break.
	This is Rich Higgins and for Sean Hannity.
	Welcome back to Sean Hannity Radio Show.
	This is Rich Higgins, former Department of Defense official, Counterterrorism, Irregular Warfare.
	Call-in number today, 800-941, Sean, 800-941, Sean.
	We are going to be taking some phone calls today.
	So, you guys who've been on for a while, hang in there.
	And we've been talking about a return to reality and truth as the basis for decision-making in government.
	I mean, when did telling the truth become so controversial?
	No fear, no intimidation, no distraction.
	Trump's administrative mandate from the American people, I think, is fix the economy, stop the nonsensical immigration policies before we look like Germany.
	Islamic terrorism, deal with it, factually, border security, and then an America-first domestic and foreign policy position.
	We have a guest on with us now, and she is one of the true experts on the threats posed by Islamic terrorism.
	She's been a victim of it herself.
	She is a true scholar and a patriot and a truth speaker.
	And Ayan Herciali is the founder of the AHA Foundation, and the AHA Foundation is the leading organization working to end honor violence that shames, hurts, or kills women and girls, thousands of them, including in the U.S., each year and puts millions more at risk.
	And her foundation was built on the belief that there is no culture, tradition, or religion that justifies systematically violence against women.
	And Ayan, can you hear me?
	I can hear you, Rich.
	Hi, Ayan.
	It's great to hear you again.
	So, earlier in the show, we talked about subversion, political warfare, Islamic threat doctrine.
	And, you know, I know you and I have had conversations over the years about these things, but you've introduced me some concepts recently that I think I'll let you elaborate on for our listening audience.
	And in studio with me here is a former Navy SEAL, John Iodonassi.
	He may jump in with a question or two as we go forward with the conversation, okay?
	All right.
	So go ahead.
	Yeah, Rich, you and I, we've talked a lot.
	I just want to take a listeners back to the opening of my book, Heretic, which is we open with the Paris atrocities against Charlie Abdo and the Jewish Delhi.
	And then I have a laundry list of Muslims invoking their religion and killing people all across the globe.
	And I think the latest incident now is the one in Berlin, but also in Jordan, in Yemen, and in Switzerland.
	And the one thing that I wish that Americans and other people in the West would take away from all of this is it's not just enough to condemn the terrorist act itself or to neutralize those who are conducting the act.
	It's very important to look at what it is that is put in the heads of these people and who is doing it.
	So this has its foundation in Islam.
	There's an infrastructure that is called the Dawah.
	It is financed by countries like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait.
	They have mosques that they finance here on U.S. soil, all over the West.
	The content and the amount of spread, they come from there.
	And that infrastructure, it has to be dismantled.
	But it can't be dismantled if we want to de-link Islam from the atrocities that's committed in its name.
	So, Ayan, you are yourself a former politician.
	And how come, I mean, just your opinion.
	Why do you think it's so difficult for American political leadership to speak factually about this threat?
	Well, I've had many reasons.
	I've had that Americans respect religion and tolerate religion, but the misunderstanding here is that religion, only part of Islam is religion.
	The other part is politics.
	And we're talking about warfare right now.
	But a key element within the DNA of Islam is jihad.
	That is the conversion of infidels, those who are not Muslim, to invite them to Islam.
	And if they refuse, to wage war against them.
	This is in the Quran.
	And so I think there's part of that misunderstanding.
	And then there is, I also hear the argument that it's, you know, we can't, we're not at war with all Muslims.
	Sure, it's true.
	We are, of course, not at war with all Muslims.
	But to go after those who are at war with us, we do have to talk about Islam.
	And we do have to talk about the Muslim community and why they allow those guys who believe and practice jihad to hide amongst them.
	So one of the concepts you threw out there a moment or two ago is this concept that you and I have talked about in the past called dawah.
	Can you unpack that for the listening audience?
	What it is and how it interacts with jihad?
	How does jihad further dawah?
	Jihad is part of dawah.
	It's the natural outcome of dawah.
	You invite people to come to Islam and they refuse.
	And the fact that they refuse makes you believe as a Muslim that then you have to resort to jihad.
	But before you do that, you have to build a following made up of Muslims.
	And so the first dawah effort is a whole system of information and imams and books.
	And there are nation states involved.
	There are non-governmental organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood, the one that's well known here in the U.S., and of course, individuals.
	And if you want to stop terrorism, which is jihad, you have to go to the root of this.
	You have to dismantle their system of dawah.
	This whole system of indoctrination, first of Muslims, and with the intention of bringing along non-Muslims.
	It's asymmetric warfare.
	It is like penetrating a society and eroding institutions from within and then taking over.
	That is dawah.
	So one of the questions that I get asked often is: you know, we Americans, we want to put a number on everything.
	We want to quantify things.
	My question for you is: why does the Muslim community in the United States not take it of their own initiative to push back on this?
	Can you unpack that for the citizens?
	I think many Muslims just hate to be confronted with the truth that their religion is in fact a weapon of violence and misogyny and subjugation.
	But for the ones who are promoting dawah and eventually engage in jihad, I think they are silent for a reason.
	They are patient.
	They're gradualists.
	They're waiting until Islam expands to a place where you get to a tipping point.
	And if you think I'm exaggerating, please take a look at some of the communities in France and now in Germany, in the Netherlands where I lived and worked, in Scandinavian countries, but also in a country like Somalia.
	I mean, I grew up in Somalia and it was, people were Muslims, but they were not radical.
	And it is through this process of dawah that large waves of the population were radicalized.
	And even though the others were protesting against radical Islam, you know, they get defeated.
	Sorry.
	No, that's okay.
	This is John.
	Thank you for coming on.
	I've got a question.
	So we know that senior people of the administration are listening to this program.
	What message do you have for the incoming Trump administration?
	How do they tackle this without immediately being labeled as hateful towards Muslims?
	I mean, what's the message you give them?
	What's your guidance?
	Well, I want to say first, it is heartening to me that the administration has started calling things by their name.
	They're talking about radical Islamic ideology.
	And I think there lies the answer.
	And this is a very long war.
	Unlike the previous administrations, we should not focus only on the violence element, but on the ideology element of it.
	And that then involves, of course, nation states, the countries that pay for this infrastructure of dawah, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, in the past, the UAE.
	I don't know if the UAE is doing this anymore or not.
	These countries have never been held to account for the fact that they have destroyed or nearly destroyed many, many societies.
	And I think it is linking the ideology to the violence that comes out of it and calling things by their name.
	This is embedded in Islam.
	Islam needs a reformation.
	It's not the job of the United States of America to reform Islam, but for us to protect ourselves from what is within Islam, jihad, sharia law, dawah, we need to acknowledge and fight it.
	So, Ayan, I think that's a great point you're making there.
	A, the acknowledgement of it.
	Here's a question for you.
	In terms of priorities, I mean, you know, General Flynn, General Kelly, General Mattis, the president-elect, they're going to have a million things coming at them.
	How important do you feel it is in this, you know, huge array of issues that are coming at them?
	How important do you think this is in terms of, you know, is this the most important and pressing national security issue that's facing the United States right now?
	It is, in a way, the most important and pressing issue because the people who are engaged in this asymmetric warfare have no respect for human life.
	And I think it's key.
	I think this week, President-elect Trump said he was going to annihilate ISIS.
	But ISIS is just one entity.
	You need to go after the ideology.
	And that is a long, long-term war.
	And I think for them, for the administration, this administration and the next administration and all the other Western administrations, it is important that we don't get distracted from this with the day-to-day events.
	Otherwise, we're going to have to do what some of the people within the Obama administration were saying, which was we just have to learn to live with terror.
	And I think that's the wrong approach.
	Couldn't agree more.
	I think when I think about this subject and my personal experiences in trying to even discuss it inside the national security community were examples of being shut down on specific terrorism cases that we were making, whether they be informing our foreign policy decisions, informing our intelligence collection.
	I think as I look at this, I remain concerned by what you just said.
	And General Myers, who was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 2001 until 2005, says in his book, the tyranny of the urgent trumps the need to actually develop a strategy.
	And I think what you're talking about is forming a strategy.
	And Steve Coughlin spoke about this earlier today, the need for a campaign plan, a strategy that's transcendent and cuts across the entire national security community.
	What role do you and folks like you, experts on this subject matter, lived it?
	What role do you see for yourself?
	And how can we better empower people like you to help us educate the public on this issue?
	Well, honestly, I would say listen to us.
	Just as I was coming on the program, your producer said that I was her hero.
	And I said, you know, I was saying this for 15 years.
	And people, you don't listen to people like me.
	I grew up a Muslim.
	I know what I have been taught.
	I know how people are brainwashed.
	I know through what channels.
	Listen to people like us.
	And again, I am not saying this is easy.
	This is going to take a long time.
	But let's have an honest discourse about what this problem is and who is responsible.
	Let's hold them accountable, these countries, and let's take, let's show them that we are capable of developing a working strategy to stop them on our soil and everywhere where we have an interest, which is the world.
	Ayan, from your perspective, who are the key figures in the United States that, aside from yourself, that could actually carry this message and have a united representation from the Muslim side?
	Well, I have been in touch lately, and I hate to list the names of organizations.
	I mean, you know.
	Organizations.
	But I think your listeners are probably even familiar with Asra Normani, they're familiar with Zuri Jassar.
	These are individuals who identify as Muslim, but who have come out to themselves to say, this is what's going on within our communities, and it is within scripture, it is within our Imams.
	We need to face this.
	And these people were marginalized completely by the last two administrations.
	And I think it's time that we now switch alliances and make and work together with the true allies.
	These are people who love the American Constitution more than they love the Quran.
	And they're risking their lives for that.
	There is a Middle East country, one of the members of the royal family of which actually said to me about a year and a half ago, you Americans don't know who your friends are anymore in the Middle East.
	And I think that that applies on this issue.
	I guess as I sit and I look at things, our theme for today, Ayan, has been back to reality and truth.
	No fear, no intimidation, no distraction.
	And I think when Linder, the producer, was commenting here is you are somebody who has stood up to these guys and not backed down.
	You weren't a trophy kid.
	Bob's out there.
	He's envious of you.
	And I think as we look at this, what are the last two or three points that you'd want to tell the, you know, this is the security mom who's at home with a couple of kids, the school teachers, the people out at the universities.
	What are those last two or three nuggets that you want to leave them with?
	Well, first of all, I want to ask the administration, what is in our relationship with Saudi Arabia, with Kuwait, with Qatar, what is it that makes them so indispensable to us that they can come here and finance this mind poison, this radical Islamic ideology on our soil?
	And then number two, why is it so important to us that we maintain the Muslim Brotherhood and all its sponsors to carry on ASIC gas in the United States of America?
	And I know that with everything, there is a trade-off.
	It is a trade-off, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, etc.
	But these organizations and these countries are using our freedoms to destroy our freedom.
	Ayan, that is a great note.
	Using our freedom to destroy our freedom.
	That's a great note to end on.
	Thank you so much for calling in today, taking time off your break.
	This is Rich Higgins, in for Sean Hannity.
	We'll see you on the other side of the break.
	The Kennedy Show, home for true conservatives.
	And we only ask for three hours a day.
	Isn't that right, President Obama?
	This is the right thing to do for the American people.
	I didn't ask for an argument.
	It is the right thing to do.
	is the sean hannity show come back
	This is Rich Higgins and for Sean Hannity, former Department of Defense official in studio with me, John Iodonnessy, former Navy SEAL, Purple Heart.
	Say hi, John.
	Hey, thanks for having me, Rich.
	Hey, we're hitting the theme today of back to reality in truth.
	And no fear, no intimidation, no distraction.
	As Ian Hersey Ali, the personification of that, she is great.
	She's a hero of mine, too, Elinda.
	We'll see you on the other side of the break.
	Breaking news straight from the source.
	This is the Sean Hannity Show.
	Those who would trade our freedom for the soup kitchen of the welfare state have told us they have a utopian solution of peace without victory.
	They call their policy accommodation.
	And they say if we'll only avoid any direct confrontation with the enemy, he'll forget his evil ways and learn to love us.
	All who oppose them are indicted as warmongers.
	They say we offer simple answers to complex problems.
	Well, perhaps there is a simple answer.
	Not an easy answer, but simple.
	If you and I have the courage to tell our elected officials that we want our national policy based on what we know in our hearts is morally right, we cannot buy our security, our freedom from the threat of the bomb, by committing an immorality so great as saying to a billion human beings now enslaved behind the iron curtain, give up your dreams of freedom, because to save our own skins, we're willing to make a deal with your slave masters.
	Alexander Hamilton said a nation which can prefer disgrace to danger is prepared for a master and deserves one.
	Now let's set the record straight.
	There's no argument over the choice between peace and war, but there's only one guaranteed way you can have peace, and you can have it in the next second.
	Surrender.
	Admittedly, there's a risk in any course we follow other than this, but every lesson of history tells us that the greater risk lies in appeasement.
	And this is the specter our well-meaning liberal friends refuse to face, that their policy of accommodation is appeasement.
	Welcome back.
	This is Rich Higgins filling in for Sean Hannity.
	And we're spending a little time today going over what is reality, getting back to reality in the national security space.
	Ground rules, no fear, no intimidation, no distractions.
	Joining me in studio today is John I. Donesy, Navy SEAL, combat vet Purple Heart, wounded in Ramadi, 2005.
	And we've been discussing during the break, you know, what we went through today in terms of our experiences.
	And we decided we're going to open up this last little segment to some callers.
	And we have some really interesting callers on the screen.
	I don't know what Linda did, but she's got some really interesting callers today.
	We can go to Yuri, calling from Sparta, in Sparta, New Jersey.
	Yuri, Yuri on your line?
	Yes, I am.
	So how are you doing today, Yuri?
	What's on your mind?
	Just as good as you are doing.
	I love Trump.
	I'm very happy, relieved.
	In many years.
	But what is on my mind is very simple.
	Two things.
	One, I had this.
	I talked to Russians.
	I'm from Russia.
	I came here 40 years ago, from the Soviet Union.
	I lived there, 30 born and lived there, 35, 34 years.
	Five of them in Communist labor camp.
	I know Russia, I know Russia, Russians.
	Never went there because I just don't feel like.
	But I talk to them on the phone.
	Some of my old friends are ex-members of the government.
	Some are very educated, literate people.
	And their common opinion of Hillary Clinton is that she is crazy.
	After this first incident when she tried to lure Sergei Lavrov into a conversation with that stupid red button, Russians never heard of this button.
	They have different technologies.
	I talked to engineers, Russian engineers, they never heard of it.
	And two, Sergei Lavrov is a career diplomat.
	His parents were diplomats.
	He sees through her.
	Sure.
	He's a serious man.
	We understand.
	He's a very thorough man, indeed.
	And maybe, just maybe, they want to make amends with us.
	Maybe they want to talk to us, which might be controversial, but indeed, I'm quite sure.
	And like I say, I talk to Russians and they like Trump.
	So you believe that President-elect Trump is going to actually sit down and negotiate from a basis of mutual respect.
	Is that what you're saying?
	Putin will talk to him.
	And seriously, no nonsense.
	With Hillary, they would never talk.
	Why, Yuri, this is John.
	Why, why?
	Why may I say an A word on the radio?
	She has too big an S for someone to talk to.
	Because Russians have an idea of a diplomat.
	Their first diplomat was Sofia Klantai.
	She was a beautiful woman.
	And they believe that a woman can be a very good diplomat.
	And they would talk to her, but they would never talk to an ugly Hillary because she really, you have to admit she's really an ugly woman.
	No one man wants to talk to her.
	That is one point.
	Two, what we should be aware of now, and you can only talk about ignoring radicals.
	They'll never stop.
	They very seldom mention how Lenin, the founder of Soviet Union, ended his life.
	He was shot by radical progressive Yuri, we're running out of time with you, Yuri.
	But bottom line is, you believe that the president-elect is going to be taken seriously because he's a serious man, and the Russians want to deal with serious people.
	Is that what you're saying?
	Bottom line.
	Lenin was shot by this woman, Fanny Kaplan, who believed that he was not doing it.
	All right, Yuri.
	Hey, Yuri, we gotta go.
	I've got to take some other callers.
	Have a good one.
	Thanks for the call.
	Can we go to Sophia in Tennessee?
	Sophia, are you there?
	Yes, I am.
	So The way that it works here is Linda tells me that you are yourself a persecuted Christian and that Sophia is actually not your true name.
	What do you want to share with us?
	Well, I want to say speaking about Islam, Islam is like an octopus with one creature with multiple arms.
	And this is how they seeks the total destruction of the communities or a country when they start to go into a country.
	They seek the total destruction.
	Jihad is the total destruction.
	The meaning of jihad is a total destruction, hatred, envy, animosity toward the non-Muslim.
	That's the meaning, one of the meaning of the jihad.
	Sophia, do you have confidence that the incoming administration is going to be able to deal with this factually, understanding what you're discussing?
	I have hopes in this administration.
	Well, Michelle Obama says there's no cause for hope.
	I mean, is Michelle Obama just full of it there?
	You're saying that the Trump administration does give you some hope.
	Yes, definitely.
	Definitely.
	But the thing also, we need to understand Islam is not just individuals.
	Islam is there is countries behind that system that support that system.
	And it does not come to you in one form.
	It does not come to you that the killing of the infidel, this is the least of it.
	There's more than one way to do the use to destroy a country.
	And it's not only the killing.
	Exactly.
	Sophia, you're singing our song here.
	I mean, what we wanted to do today with the show is really talk about the fact that not all of the violence is violent per se.
	That the subversion, the non-violent actions, the things that they've done to pollute the way we think about the problem are actually more dangerous than the attacks themselves are.
	Thanks for your call.
	We're going to go to Evan in Long Island.
	Evan, you there?
	Hi, how you doing?
	Thanks for taking my call.
	I just want to say after hearing your speaker before talk about the pernicious nature of the subversion going on, I wanted to call and use Ms. Hirsi Ali, who's a great hero of mine, as an example.
	And much to my amazement and delight, she was an actual guest on your show.
	So thank you so much for having her on.
	And I just wanted to point out, just as an example, you know, your guest had said that, you know, in order to establish that this is not a theory or conspiracy, but a fact, you just have to look at the evidence.
	You know, a piece of evidence that exists that I don't hear talked about much is the Egyptian-born Imam.
	His name is Fuad El-Bailey.
	He called for Mrs. Ali's death in a fatwa after she was so outspoken in her position.
	He's an extremist, and he was hired by the Federal Bureau of Prisons to do what?
	To teach Islam to prisoners in our government on our tax time.
	So I've got to wonder what's going on in those federal prisons during these Islam teaching classes that they'd have such a guy be the one to teach the lessons.
	I mean, there's a perfect example of it, you know, right in our faces.
	Fascinating, Evan.
	Fascinating.
	One question I have for you on that.
	So what do you do?
	I mean, what do you do if he's currently the sitting director of instruction in these prison systems?
	You know, I'm not sure that he is the current instructor right now.
	Hypothetically.
	You hold your elected officials accountable for these appointments, and you make it clear that you're not going to abide by these administrative decisions that they're making that are clearly undermining our democracy and teaching prisoners in our federal prisons an extremist version of Islam that is inimical to our democracy and freedom.
	And I think what you do is basically what nearly American people did largely on November 8th.
	You go to the polls and you make it clear to them that if they're going to pursue these types of inimical policies that are harmful to the United States and subvert our democracy, we're going to vote them out.
	Hey, Evan, I've got a tip for you.
	Are you living out in Long Island, New York?
	I am.
	Well, there was a gentleman who lived out there in the 1980s.
	His name was Shameem Siddiqui, and he was at the Islamic Center of Long Island, and he wrote a book called The Methodology of Dawah Laha.
	And in that book, it specifically says that we are going to go after the prison system.
	We are going to subvert it.
	We are going to target particularly African-American converts for the purpose of bringing them into the jihad mission.
	I'd encourage all of you listeners out there looking for something to read, pick up a copy of Methodology of Dawah.
	You can get it online.
	It's free, and you can see exactly what they're doing.
	Let's go to another caller now.
	Let's go to Robert in Denver.
	And he's been on the line for a long time.
	He's still there, Robert.
	I'm still here.
	Can you hear me?
	You sure can.
	So, what's on your mind, Robert?
	Well, I've been listening for a while, and I appreciate a lot of your comments.
	And I would consider myself more of a liberal, more socially liberal, and financially conservative.
	And I've had a lot of discussions with people about the election and the debates, and Hillary and Trump and all that stuff, and Bernie, whatever.
	And the most common thing that I ran into, whether people were conservative or liberal or whatever, is most of us believe in the same common core human decency towards others.
	And this whole debate, you guys talking about bringing over the people from, oh, God, now I'm losing my train of thought.
	Refugees and stuff.
	It's like my argument to them is we're not even taking care of our own people.
	We have homeless veterans.
	We have a huge homeless population in Denver.
	And we're not taking care of our own people, but yet we're going to consider bringing in people from other countries that we know nothing about.
	So if you just think it through logically, then you can kind of have a logical discussion with people.
	But people get caught up in the name-calling and the, you know, the different types of labels, and that doesn't do any of us any good.
	Robert, Robert, you're giving us great advice.
	And I think this goes to what we ask the listeners to do here.
	This Christmas dinner, I know nobody wants to talk about the election.
	Do me a favor, talk about this.
	You don't have to sell anybody.
	Suggest the book, Heretic by Ayan Hersey Ali.
	Just an example.
	Get people to open their eyes to this.
	This is a very real problem that we have.
	And Europe is the canary in the coal mine for us.
	Pay attention to what's happening over there in the next two or three years.
	Let's go to another caller now.
	Let's take Pam in Hampton, Virginia.
	Pam, you there?
	How are we all today?
	All right, Pam.
	What's going on?
	Well, when you all were talking about subversion later, it just seems like Obama has been the king of subversion for the past eight years.
	He keeps the race baiting and the warmongering and things going on big in the nation.
	And meanwhile, he's either A vacationing or he's signing all of these executive orders.
	And before you know it, things are happening.
	And it's, oh, well, it's an executive order.
	We passed it three weeks ago.
	It's, you know, it's happening.
	And he has kept the right hand busy while the left hand has been backhandedly doing things.
	And to me, that is like the hugest form of subversion in the United States over the last eight, or 12 or 15 years, actually.
	Yeah, there's a rider truck full of executive orders backing up to the White House right now.
	I mean, it's, it's, look, as a person who works in Washington, it will blow your mind to see what's going on down there.
	You want smart political talk without the meltdowns?
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