True Anon Truth Feed - [9/11 week] Bush did 9/11 Pt. 1
Aired: 2020-09-07
Duration: 01:13:40


=== Days Before 9-11 (04:11) ===

[00:00:00]  What kind of man is named Steph?
[00:00:02]  Stefan.
[00:00:05]  What could I name his name, Brace?
[00:00:08]  Just kidding.
[00:00:08]  I like your name.
[00:00:11]  Okay.
[00:00:12]  Welcome to 9-11 week.
[00:00:14]  That's right, baby.
[00:00:15]  It's 9-11 week.
[00:00:17]  Not only is it not 9-11, it's days before 9-11.
[00:00:22]  Meaning there's a whole week.
[00:00:24]  And you could even say it's the days leading up to 9-11.
[00:00:26]  People love saying the days leading up to a certain date.
[00:00:30]  Yes.
[00:00:30]  That's a big thing.
[00:00:31]  Phrase.
[00:00:32]  Yeah.
[00:00:34]  Go ahead.
[00:00:35]  No, welcome.
[00:00:36]  9-11 week here on Truan.
[00:00:39]  From now on, when you think 9-11, think Truanon.
[00:00:44]  I don't know.
[00:00:44]  Maybe that's not a good idea.
[00:00:46]  Don't say that.
[00:00:47]  Okay.
[00:00:49]  But I'll say something.
[00:00:51]  So we got astute listeners might realize that, in fact, this episode is not a new one.
[00:00:59]  I can't remember what day we recorded this because my brain's so filled with images of Carmen Electra.
[00:01:05]  But we recorded a few 9-11 episodes with a close friend of the pod, Ben.
[00:01:10]  That's Housetrotter on Twitter.
[00:01:13]  And this episode was free, but we are re-releasing it with the intro because what we're doing is we are putting out a new or excuse me, N 9-11 episode every day of this week up until Friday.
[00:01:26]  And there's an astute among you who I called out earlier might recall we only did three before.
[00:01:31]  That means we've got a couple of new ones that are, in my opinion, very good coming at the end of the week.
[00:01:37]  But yeah, this is all 9-11 all week.
[00:01:40]  Well, let's get to it.
[00:01:43]  Hello.
[00:01:45]  Hi.
[00:01:46]  Oh, no, I wasn't talking to you.
[00:01:48]  Oh.
[00:01:48]  Yeah, I was talking to a ghost.
[00:01:52]  Guess what, Briece?
[00:01:54]  I'm not playing these games with you, but what?
[00:01:56]  Guess what?
[00:01:57]  What?
[00:01:58]  We are not talking about the Democrats today.
[00:02:01]  No, so we are, I want to let you guys know here.
[00:02:04]  We are done with the Democrats.
[00:02:06]  We're probably not done, but I can't fucking spend another little brain cell on them.
[00:02:12]  They can suck me off.
[00:02:14]  Fuck them.
[00:02:15]  I hate every single fucking one of them.
[00:02:17]  I'll tell you what.
[00:02:18]  I'm a Peace and Freedom Party man.
[00:02:20]  This is ridiculous.
[00:02:21]  Well, except for the whole Roseanne thing.
[00:02:24]  Remember they ran Roseanne?
[00:02:25]  She should have hosted the Oscars.
[00:02:28]  Oh, my God.
[00:02:29]  Yeah.
[00:02:30]  It would have been hurting in touch with like Real America, by which I mean.
[00:02:33]  You can say it's not even in touch with Real America.
[00:02:35]  Can I just say, like, it would have been so great to have someone there who just didn't give a fuck.
[00:02:39]  Did you watch the Oscar?
[00:02:40]  I did.
[00:02:40]  Of course I did.
[00:02:41]  One, I'm a girl.
[00:02:42]  Two, I love an award show.
[00:02:44]  Three, they call her Hollywood Liz.
[00:02:46]  No.
[00:02:47]  Once, by the way, if you want to talk to Liz, call her Hollywood Liz.
[00:02:50]  She'll respond because she'll think you're friends with her.
[00:02:54]  No.
[00:02:56]  I just want to say that I'm sick of Hollywood having politics.
[00:03:01]  Oh, you are?
[00:03:02]  It's like it's just like non-it's bipartisan or something.
[00:03:07]  No, I just, I don't care about what Brad Pitt has to say about impeachment.
[00:03:12]  It's like, shut the fuck up.
[00:03:14]  Talk about impeachment.
[00:03:14]  He was like, I get 45 seconds tonight, and that's more than John Bolton got.
[00:03:19]  Ooh.
[00:03:19]  And it's like, well, he shut the fuck up.
[00:03:22]  Actually, in his defense, there's a little bit of ambivalence that could be about technically about hanging John Bolton.
[00:03:29]  I just, you know, Hollyweird.
[00:03:33]  Yeah.
[00:03:34]  Get rid of all of them.
[00:03:35]  Yeah.
[00:03:35]  Those are the ones that you mean.
[00:03:36]  Just be, look, you're rich, you're famous, you're gorgeous.
[00:03:40]  Just do that.
[00:03:40]  You don't have to have an opinion.
[00:03:42]  Guess what?
[00:03:42]  I don't care.
[00:03:43]  It's like, yeah, I know.
[00:03:44]  Oh, I hate, because, you know, it's for me, I can't watch stuff like the Oscars because I know you want to.
[00:03:49]  No, just like a lot of the people involved in it, like, I've had sort of weird stuff with.
[00:03:54]  Oh, God.
[00:03:55]  And, like, it's, it's, you know, it brings up like a lot for me.
[00:03:59]  But.
[00:03:59]  Like Judy Dame?
[00:04:00]  I, yeah.
[00:04:01]  Well.
[00:04:02]  Who's Judy Dame?
[00:04:04]  Why did I say that?
[00:04:05]  Dame Judy Dench.
[00:04:07]  Dame Judy.
[00:04:07]  I don't know who that is.
[00:04:08]  Judy Dame.

=== James Corden's Housekeeping (05:35) ===

[00:04:11]  This is not helping.
[00:04:13]  What about who's the other cat?
[00:04:15]  James Corden.
[00:04:16]  I don't know who that is either.
[00:04:18]  I like him not up on stuff.
[00:04:20]  I think it's fucked up that you don't remember your long affair you had with James Corden.
[00:04:26]  James Corden?
[00:04:27]  Oh, yeah, I bust it on his face.
[00:04:37]  What are we talking about?
[00:04:53]  We are.
[00:04:54]  All right, so to change the subject, we are talking about today, well, we're not even talking about it today, but we're talking about it.
[00:05:02]  Okay, wait, before that, I'm sorry.
[00:05:05]  Let me stop talking.
[00:05:06]  Go on.
[00:05:09]  Welcome to Tronan.
[00:05:10]  Yes.
[00:05:13]  I'm Liz.
[00:05:14]  My name is Mohammed bin Salman.
[00:05:18]  I am the king of Saudi Arabia.
[00:05:20]  Or actually, I'm still a prince of Saudi Arabia.
[00:05:22]  I am joined by my faithful man servant, Young Chomsky, who carries my baggage for me and also procures me various treats from the far reaches of the empire.
[00:05:36]  Liz, I am permitting to speak today.
[00:05:38]  Yeah, still can't drive, though.
[00:05:40]  No, no.
[00:05:40]  But that's only because I don't actually have a driver's license.
[00:05:43]  I also can't drive.
[00:05:45]  So Young Chomsky is technically in the driver's seat here.
[00:05:48]  But yeah, so we are talking.
[00:05:50]  Nope.
[00:05:51]  Okay, okay.
[00:05:52]  One more thing.
[00:05:53]  Fucking hell, lady.
[00:05:55]  Jesus, just a little bit of housekeeping.
[00:05:56]  You're humiliating me in front of my subjects.
[00:06:00]  We have a live show coming up.
[00:06:02]  Oh, yeah.
[00:06:04]  Brooklyn, New York.
[00:06:05]  I won't be there, but these two will be.
[00:06:08]  Wednesday, March 18th, 7 p.m.
[00:06:11]  Sold out.
[00:06:12]  If you snooze, you lose.
[00:06:14]  10 p.m.
[00:06:15]  I think we still have tickets.
[00:06:17]  I don't check my email, so we might.
[00:06:19]  And if we do, they can buy them.
[00:06:21]  If we don't, they'll be rejected.
[00:06:23]  It's at the Bellhouse, somewhere in Brooklyn.
[00:06:25]  I'm assuming Bushwich, maybe?
[00:06:27]  It's on East 66th Street.
[00:06:29]  No, it's not.
[00:06:30]  No.
[00:06:32]  So we're doing that.
[00:06:33]  Also, Philadelphia, Sunday, March 22nd.
[00:06:37]  I don't say where this one is.
[00:06:38]  No, it's at Johnny Brenda's.
[00:06:40]  I know.
[00:06:40]  Okay, that's it, though.
[00:06:42]  No.
[00:06:44]  No, no, no.
[00:06:46]  Okay, okay, okay.
[00:06:47]  Let's cut to the chase.
[00:06:48]  We, okay, we've got part one of a two-part, possibly three-part.
[00:06:53]  Yeah, that's not even the little.
[00:06:55]  You know how like Seth Abrams, I think, is like one slash.
[00:06:59]  Question mark?
[00:07:00]  We're one slash question mark in this.
[00:07:02]  Oh, yeah.
[00:07:02]  Good call.
[00:07:03]  Because we have a lot to talk about.
[00:07:05]  Yeah.
[00:07:06]  We have had some listeners bring up in the past that they were interested in learning more about the events of September 11th, 2001.
[00:07:19]  And like any good royal family, we have decided to say yes.
[00:07:24]  Yes, we will oblige our good subjects.
[00:07:27]  We are starting our part one of the Truan 9-11 experience, which doesn't sound right, but let's just go with it.
[00:07:39]  We've got foremost Professor Dr. Gumshoe of all gumshoes, Ben, also known as At House Trotter.
[00:07:49]  You should follow him.
[00:07:49]  He's a follow.
[00:07:50]  He's a kid white Muhammad Ada.
[00:07:53]  He's coming on to red pill everyone.
[00:07:56]  We're going to start this episode with a bit of rich tapestry, the background of leading up to the event.
[00:08:04]  Like a fine Persian rug.
[00:08:06]  Yeah, we are.
[00:08:07]  We are.
[00:08:09]  Take this as a bit of context.
[00:08:11]  This is a context episode almost.
[00:08:13]  And a lead-up episode.
[00:08:14]  Yes.
[00:08:15]  Because we are very excited about this.
[00:08:19]  I am.
[00:08:20]  I fucking love it.
[00:08:21]  You guys don't understand.
[00:08:23]  Well, maybe you do.
[00:08:23]  I don't know.
[00:08:25]  I have never met a tinfoil hat I didn't like.
[00:08:28]  No.
[00:08:29]  Nor one that didn't look great on me.
[00:08:32]  Yeah.
[00:08:32]  Oh, shapely hat.
[00:08:34]  I look great in hats.
[00:08:35]  Yeah, and without.
[00:08:37]  Thank you, Brace.
[00:08:51]  All right.
[00:08:52]  Welcome.
[00:08:53]  Welcome, welcome.
[00:08:54]  The day is upon us.
[00:08:56]  Liz?
[00:08:57]  I'm here.
[00:08:58]  Are you excited?
[00:08:58]  I am.
[00:08:59]  I'm ready, baby.
[00:09:00]  Oh, yeah.
[00:09:00]  We've got a, we've got, well, by this point, we should have done an intro, although we'll record that after.
[00:09:06]  But we have a hell of an episode for you today.
[00:09:09]  We are joined by the one and only housetrotter, Ben.
[00:09:12]  That is Ben at Housetrotter on Trotter on Twitter, to talk about everything from Afghanistan to Anthrax to Mika Brzezinski.
[00:09:23]  And everything in between.
[00:09:25]  Everything in between.
[00:09:26]  So, Ben, how you doing?
[00:09:27]  I'm doing well.
[00:09:28]  Thank you very much for having me.
[00:09:30]  Absolutely.
[00:09:31]  So let's just dive right in.
[00:09:35]  We're talking about Afghanistan, but we're also talking about West Asia, Southwest Asia.
[00:09:39]  Why?
[00:09:41]  Yeah, well, if we want to start, the only history I know basically starts in 1945.

=== Pakistan-Afghanistan Border Tensions (14:39) ===

[00:09:46]  So if we want to start there, you know, the whole point of Southwest Asia, the whole point of America wanting to have control over Southwest Asia goes back to the British wanting to have control over Southwest Asia for basically the same reasons.
[00:10:02]  Oil.
[00:10:04]  And the whole plan around sort of having this relationship with Saudi Arabia, which will play very heavily into the 9-11 story, really has its roots in that.
[00:10:15]  And there was a security arrangement that Roosevelt set up with the Saudi royalty to sort of basically in exchange for the United States guaranteeing protection for the royal family, not just Saudi Arabia in general, but the royal family very specifically from threats both externally and internal.
[00:10:31]  The idea was in exchange for that, the United States was going to get oil and access to this oil.
[00:10:37]  And our first Rockefeller connection was that they basically picked Saudi Arabia because a Rockefeller-descended company had the rights to the oil in Saudi Arabia already.
[00:10:48]  So it was very easy to sort of make that arrangement.
[00:10:51]  It's scary when you find out little details like that that feel so arbitrary and it's completely and totally altered the course of history.
[00:10:59]  Yeah, totally.
[00:11:00]  I mean, right.
[00:11:01]  And, you know, obviously if it had been, if Iran had been more important than, you know, the 1979 revolution would have been, probably wouldn't have happened.
[00:11:09]  The United States probably would have invested a lot more in securing that, which I think is basically why there's never been anything similar in Saudi Arabia.
[00:11:16]  Well, I know there was that, you know, there were those revolutionaries in the 60s and 70s on the Arabian Peninsula, P-F-L-O-A-G and stuff, which is probably got to be the worst name for a revolutionary.
[00:11:29]  P-FLAG.
[00:11:31]  And they fought pretty well, but in Saudi Arabia, they did not have much of a chance whatsoever.
[00:11:36]  It was mostly Oman, the sort of more provincial part of the peninsula.
[00:11:43]  Yeah, and so That sort of agreement between the Saudi royal family and Roosevelt really set the stage for this kind of like relationship, basically, where they provided us with oil, we provided them with protection, but they also did like it's very similar to like mafia type relationships because they did a bit they do a bit of dirty work for us as well.
[00:12:05]  Oh, yeah, absolutely.
[00:12:06]  And I definitely started talking about 9-11, I think the GID and the ISI also, which is the Pakistani intelligence agency, did a lot of off-the-books things that helped to, I mean, there's basically a lot of the 9-11 stuff, there's no paper trail.
[00:12:19]  Yeah.
[00:12:20]  And a lot of that is because the GID did a lot of it, the ISI did a lot of it, and they have no paper trail that's accountable to, for example, Congress.
[00:12:27]  Yeah, literally nothing to find.
[00:12:31]  Yeah, I mean, and Pakistan, so for those of you, for our zero IQ listeners, which are the ones that like Liz that are listening, Afghanistan is located sort of in this area above Pakistan, below Russia, in what's called Central Asia a lot, right?
[00:12:50]  I mean, I would say Afghanistan, Central Asia, I guess.
[00:12:53]  Central Asia.
[00:12:55]  And it is a very mountainous country, but it's been sort of this, it's been fought over for a long time.
[00:13:03]  I mean, because as many people know, Britain controlled all of India, which before the partition.
[00:13:09]  And that sort of area along the Afghani-Indian border was basically where they sent to train a lot of their troops because there was always sort of fighting going on there with whoever was, you know, peasant rebellions, etc.
[00:13:22]  And it's crazy.
[00:13:24]  It's still kind of like that today.
[00:13:25]  It's kind of where America trains its troops.
[00:13:28]  But it is sort of strategic because many people have heard maybe references in literature and media to the great game between Russia and the British Empire.
[00:13:40]  And a big part of that was Afghanistan as sort of a corridor to India and a place where trade flowed through.
[00:13:49]  And so there's been a lot of sort of big country attention on this little country for a long time.
[00:13:55]  And I mean, definitely going forward, it also was a gateway to the Caspian.
[00:14:01]  Yes.
[00:14:01]  Afghanistan, gateway to the Caspian.
[00:14:03]  Yes, yes, yes, yes.
[00:14:04]  The post-Cold War world, Afghanistan is a very important, it borders a lot of the Soviet Turkic republics in Central Asia, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan.
[00:14:15]  So these were important for those purposes, which we may talk about later.
[00:14:20]  Yeah, and it's really, there's been a long sort of weird relationship.
[00:14:26]  Well, not that long considering Pakistan hasn't been a country for that long.
[00:14:29]  But Pakistan and Afghanistan have a pretty weird relationship too, where they basically, At certain points, have funded essentially like peasant rebellions or these sort of jacquaries on each other's side of the border, particularly Pakistan sort of stirring up trouble in Afghanistan.
[00:14:47]  Yeah, definitely.
[00:14:47]  And it's even become a part of the Pakistan-India conflict.
[00:14:52]  There's a lot of Indian influence in Afghanistan as well for that reason.
[00:14:55]  It's definitely a battlefield for multiple different conflicts, much to the sucks to live there.
[00:15:05]  There's a lot of times people are trying to invade for various reasons.
[00:15:08]  Exactly.
[00:15:09]  I mean, there's been decades straight of war at this point.
[00:15:11]  So let's go through quickly this little timeline road up.
[00:15:15]  So just let's start in the 70s.
[00:15:17]  So in 71, Pakistan, there used to be two Pakistans.
[00:15:23]  I'm not going to go too far into this, but there was East Pakistan and West Pakistan.
[00:15:26]  East Pakistan was sort of the more dominant force.
[00:15:29]  They were actually, West Pakistan was an exclave.
[00:15:32]  It was all the way on the other side of India.
[00:15:34]  It's now known as Bangladesh.
[00:15:36]  In 71, basically, due to a regional politicians gaining more prominence and more seats in the parliament, East Pakistan essentially invades West Pakistan and commits basically a genocide.
[00:15:50]  Kissinger backs them, but the State Department goes behind his back and cuts off aid, which is important because we'll get to stuff about this later.
[00:15:59]  And in 73, the king of Afghanistan is overthrown by his cousin, which much respect, a guy named Dawood Khan, and who turns into a republic.
[00:16:11]  And then Soviet aid is forthcoming.
[00:16:14]  The Communist Party gains more prominence.
[00:16:16]  And then in 79, 78, the Sao Revolution happens, and the Communist Party in Afghanistan overthrows the king's cousin.
[00:16:29]  And America is not very happy about this, right?
[00:16:32]  Yeah, I mean, this was kind of the beginning of, you know, Brzezinski is now, apart from being Vika Brzezhinsky's dad, he's kind of hailed as a hero.
[00:16:42]  Like very mainstream accounts paint him as the person who helped bring the Soviet Union down for pulling them into their own Vietnam.
[00:16:48]  Yep.
[00:16:49]  And that was the idea.
[00:16:50]  I mean, he was kind of the originator of this idea of let's try to draw the Soviet Union into a war in Afghanistan and that's going to bog them down.
[00:17:01]  That was the, I mean, that's the conventional story.
[00:17:03]  I think there's a lot more to it than that, but that's that's the conventional story about what happened.
[00:17:06]  Just really quick for our listeners, do you want to explain who Brzezinski is?
[00:17:11]  Yeah, so he was Carter's national security advisor.
[00:17:15]  He's like an old Rockefeller guy.
[00:17:18]  This whole period between Nixon, well, really from Nixon to Reagan is basically a huge power struggle between the sort of Rockefeller foreign policy, which I think is represented best by Kissinger, but also by Brzezinski, versus what would become the neocons, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Scowcroft, those people.
[00:17:40]  And they kind of traded off.
[00:17:41]  Like in the Ford administration, they became more powerful.
[00:17:43]  And then Brzezinski was back in 76 with Carter.
[00:17:48]  But it was very similar.
[00:17:49]  I mean, they very much followed up on each other's plans.
[00:17:52]  So Brzezinski begins his plan to let's fund these.
[00:17:55]  It originally started off just being people already in Afghanistan who were not, for various reasons, not happy with this new government.
[00:18:04]  And that started to pull Soviet attention to Afghanistan.
[00:18:07]  I don't know much about it from the Soviet side of things, but I'm assuming like the U.S., they probably had all kinds of special forces and spies involved already.
[00:18:17]  And eventually by the mid-80s, it turned into full-blown Operation Cyclone where, I mean, that's where the Dean comes from.
[00:18:28]  That movie with Tom Hanks is that congressman.
[00:18:31]  Yes.
[00:18:33]  I know.
[00:18:34]  I didn't either.
[00:18:34]  I didn't either.
[00:18:35]  But I think it's based on Charlie Wilson's war, this book.
[00:18:39]  Yes.
[00:18:40]  Yeah.
[00:18:41]  And which again, very much does not do a lot to illuminate what actually did happen.
[00:18:47]  No.
[00:18:49]  But yeah, the idea was let's, I mean, by the mid-80s, under, obviously Reagan became president through suspicious circumstances involving Iran.
[00:19:00]  October surprise.
[00:19:02]  Yes, the October surprise.
[00:19:04]  And his campaign manager was William Casey.
[00:19:08]  Sure.
[00:19:09]  Who was very close to H.W. Bush, who we'll probably talk about a lot more.
[00:19:14]  Yes.
[00:19:15]  And Bill Casey became the CIA director, which first off, everybody at the time was kind of appalled by that, the idea that this very political person who had been running a campaign would become the CIA director, but people didn't really understand it.
[00:19:28]  Yeah, it kind of like violated a lot of like bureaucratic norms.
[00:19:33]  Yeah, totally, which is such a weird, funny thing to say.
[00:19:36]  But it was like seen as a politicization.
[00:19:41]  Yeah, like a politicization, but also like breaking ranks.
[00:19:45]  I mean, because the whole idea is that these guys train to move up in these positions, and it was seen as like a reward for, I mean, clearly kind of what he managed to pull off.
[00:19:55]  Well, if anyone, yeah, yeah.
[00:19:57]  I mean, if anyone knows about the CIA, it's HW.
[00:20:01]  Well, exactly.
[00:20:02]  And I mean, obviously the CIA is completely interlinked with, especially the Houston oil financial elite that HW is a key member of.
[00:20:13]  Once Casey came in, he really started to really push that.
[00:20:18]  And they used their key allies, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and started raising this militia, this Afghan Arab mujahideen, that would go fight in Afghanistan.
[00:20:29]  And that's really what took the war to the next level.
[00:20:32]  I mean, obviously, people are going to be unhappy.
[00:20:35]  And so far as you're funding them, they're going to have the arms to do something.
[00:20:38]  But when you start raising a military outside the country to go fight, it really pushed things to the next level.
[00:20:44]  Yeah, let's pause for a second and talk a little bit about the mujahideen.
[00:20:47]  And I think I don't, I mean, I know that that gets thrown around a lot.
[00:20:52]  I don't know how much our listeners or people understand how vast this program was.
[00:20:58]  Oh, it's huge.
[00:20:58]  I mean, so Mujuhuddin, for those of you who are not, so for instance, I am technically a secular Mujuhuddin because I went on secular jihad.
[00:21:08]  But a Mujuhuddin means one who engages in jihad in Arabic.
[00:21:12]  And by the way, we'll get to some of that later.
[00:21:17]  A lot of the people that were coming to Afghanistan to fight were not themselves like, you know, dissident Afghanis who had been out of the country, but they were what was called Afghan Arabs.
[00:21:27]  And of course, not all of them were Arabic, or excuse me, not all of them were Arabs to begin with in the first place.
[00:21:32]  But the Majuhuddin were essentially this force that was raised both internally in Afghanistan and then externally in Pakistan and then in Saudi Arabia and other sort of countries that were Muslim dominant countries that were allied with the U.S.
[00:21:48]  It is there are both Shia and Sunni Mujuhuddin who do not always get along.
[00:21:54]  But it was at one point, I mean, they were raising seriously full-on armies just on the border in these refugee camps right outside on the Pakistani Afghan border.
[00:22:08]  And Brzezinski, there's actually footage of both Brzezinski and one of the most notorious thoughts in history, Margaret Thatcher, addressing the Majuhuddin on the border there, which is just, I mean, in context, pretty wild.
[00:22:22]  But not all Majuhuddin, it wasn't all.
[00:22:25]  I think a lot of people think that Mujuhuddin directly all became al-Qaeda, which I'm going to increasingly pronounce in more insane ways.
[00:22:33]  Qaeda.
[00:22:33]  Al-Qaeda.
[00:22:35]  In more insane ways in an attempt to sound smarter as this episode goes on.
[00:22:39]  But no, there was a lot of different of these groups.
[00:22:42]  I mean, there was a ton, and they engaged in both like intersinine.
[00:22:48]  I do not think I pronounced that correctly.
[00:22:50]  The kind of warfare where you kill your friends too.
[00:22:53]  Intersinine?
[00:22:54]  Intersening?
[00:22:54]  Internicine.
[00:22:55]  Internicine.
[00:22:56]  Damn.
[00:22:56]  First time saying that and not reading it.
[00:22:59]  Internicine warfare and against the Soviets.
[00:23:03]  And at first, so this aid starts In 79, right after the Sao Revolution, with non-lethal aid, quote unquote, which is, by the way, the same kind of non-lethal aid that they gave Al-Qaeda in Syria.
[00:23:18]  But they were already, I mean, they were already familiar with the program.
[00:23:21]  Yes, I remember this.
[00:23:25]  But the ISI, the Pakistani security services, and the Saudis, they had already been funneling lethal aid to the rebels, right?
[00:23:33]  Oh, yeah.
[00:23:34]  I mean, the ISI, and we haven't touched on drugs yet, but I know already.
[00:23:40]  Yeah, so there was already a lot of drug running, a lot of drug production happening in both Afghanistan and also the border region of Pakistan.
[00:23:48]  What drugs?
[00:23:50]  Opium, heroin.
[00:23:52]  Yes.
[00:23:52]  I know.
[00:23:53]  Oh, yeah.
[00:23:53]  The good one.
[00:23:56]  One other thing I, you know, I mean, this, because this, one of the parts of the popular history of this is that this was spurred by the Soviet Union invading Afghanistan.
[00:24:05]  Yeah.
[00:24:05]  That that's when it started.
[00:24:06]  And that's not the case at all.
[00:24:08]  Brzezinski said in an interview in 98 that they that the United States began funding groups in Afghanistan before the Soviet Union invaded with the belief that it would cause the Soviet Union to invade.
[00:24:21]  I mean, that was the whole point of this program to begin with.
[00:24:25]  Yeah, it was a bait.

=== Drug Trade in Afghanistan (05:54) ===

[00:24:26]  Yeah, oh yeah, absolutely.
[00:24:28]  And they took the bait and it worked by all indications.
[00:24:34]  Yeah, but definitely Pakistan and definitely Saudi Arabia were already involved.
[00:24:38]  So it was not a huge lift for the United States to start getting involved themselves.
[00:24:44]  And they did all kinds of weird, I mean, selling them quite advanced Stinger anti-air missiles, sending them anti-air guns, like pretty heavy, heavy weaponry.
[00:24:55]  Even I think after the first, I don't remember when exactly it was, but they definitely sent Iraqi, captured Iraqi tanks to Afghanistan at one point.
[00:25:04]  All kinds of stuff.
[00:25:05]  I mean, they were dealing with heavy, pretty heavy equipment.
[00:25:10]  I mean, maybe, should we start talking about the drug?
[00:25:12]  I was just going to say, like, maybe right now is a good point to mention before we kind of get into, you know, more of the Soviet intervention.
[00:25:22]  Maybe we should talk about the drug running.
[00:25:24]  Let's talk about drugs, baby.
[00:25:26]  All right.
[00:25:26]  Welcome to BlueLight.com Forum Radio.
[00:25:29]  It's a drug forum, isn't it?
[00:25:31]  Yes, it is.
[00:25:31]  It's still extant, I believe.
[00:25:34]  So we have someone who isn't me here to talk.
[00:25:36]  That's the slang they use on drug forms.
[00:25:39]  They say someone who isn't me.
[00:25:40]  Right.
[00:25:40]  To refer to myself.
[00:25:42]  Anyways, my friend.
[00:25:43]  Ben, lay on some opium to this jive turkey over here.
[00:25:49]  Yeah, well, so I mean, this is a nice confluence of probably the two most important commodities to the economy, which is oil and drugs.
[00:25:57]  Yep.
[00:25:57]  And especially heroin, which is quite easy to grow, quite easy to produce, and very profitable.
[00:26:04]  So, I mean, like you get billionaires in any business or very rich, powerful people who can control the way that the government works in the drug industry, you get these people, particularly in countries on the margins, countries like Pakistan, where, yeah, I mean, a lot of the people who were, for example, regional governors were straight up protecting drug traffickers, taking a cut of the drug trade.
[00:26:29]  I mean, it does look, you mentioned mafia.
[00:26:30]  I mean, it definitely does look a lot like a sort of a protection racket.
[00:26:35]  It's very similar to what was happening in Laos in the early 70s as well.
[00:26:39]  Absolutely.
[00:26:39]  And in a lot of ways, actually, it was a direct continuation of that whole program.
[00:26:44]  I mean, the idea of using drug funds to fund a militia is definitely something that was prototyped in Vietnam.
[00:26:52]  Not even prototype, I mean, was quite successful in Vietnam.
[00:26:56]  Yeah.
[00:26:56]  And yeah, so I mean, some of the, I mean, one of the people who shows up both at this time and then later as part of the so-called Northern Alliance that helped the United States invade Afghanistan in 2001 was Gulbudd Hekmatiar.
[00:27:10]  Yes.
[00:27:12]  Yeah, he's a definitely Pete Budig worked for him.
[00:27:15]  Oh, he was like, I mean, he was, I mean, at one point, I think he was just being openly and directly paid by ISI, but he was, I read this book by William Vollman.
[00:27:23]  Do you know who he is?
[00:27:24]  No, no, I don't.
[00:27:26]  He is like a very psychotic, like kind of outsider art.
[00:27:29]  Not really, but he's like a real freak writer, one of my favorite writers.
[00:27:34]  But in his youth, he traveled to Afghanistan to join the Majou Hedin.
[00:27:38]  He's from like Sacramento.
[00:27:40]  And he's like a little skinny guy who like saw all these pictures of orphans and stuff and was like, I want to join them.
[00:27:45]  And he wrote a book about getting diarrhea in the Khyber Pass and never actually be.
[00:27:51]  It's basically like a really self-effacing book, like, I'm a fucking idiot.
[00:27:55]  This is insane.
[00:27:57]  But he's like, he talks about his run-ins with Gilbertin's people, and it's very entertaining.
[00:28:01]  But yeah, Gobadin was the warlord of warlords, pretty much, right?
[00:28:05]  Oh, yeah.
[00:28:06]  He was definitely the top.
[00:28:07]  And most of the people who were involved in the drug trade.
[00:28:10]  Hakani also got a start at that time.
[00:28:14]  Of Hakani.
[00:28:15]  Yes, yeah, exactly.
[00:28:17]  But most of the people who were doing that sort of thing were mostly trading sort of raw opium and it was going elsewhere to be processed.
[00:28:24]  But Hekmatiar actually had processing himself and was able to take that much more money.
[00:28:30]  He's scaling.
[00:28:30]  He knew how to scale up.
[00:28:31]  Oh, yeah.
[00:28:33]  He was a girl boss.
[00:28:33]  McKinsey would be proud.
[00:28:35]  Yeah.
[00:28:38]  He might have gotten tips.
[00:28:39]  Yeah.
[00:28:39]  Get some business goal, some Harvard Business School people in there.
[00:28:43]  Yeah, and I mean, this remains super important.
[00:28:46]  I mean, obviously, Hekmatiar became very important to the 2001 invasion.
[00:28:51]  So definitely the drugs, the drug networks are a huge part of this, for sure.
[00:28:56]  I mean, we should mention that, too.
[00:28:58]  Like, you know, the opium production out of Afghanistan has not ceased.
[00:29:03]  I mean, that is still very much.
[00:29:05]  Ironically, it did at some points, like, it did during the shuttle banana.
[00:29:10]  Yeah.
[00:29:10]  But obviously, not totally.
[00:29:12]  I mean, I think that's sort of been a little overblown about how much they shut it down because they, I mean, if Syria has taught us anything is that if you aren't a hardcore orthodox, you know, Wahhabist, you will still sell dope.
[00:29:27]  But yeah, I mean, famously, there's pictures of U.S. troops walking around protecting opium fields and stuff like that.
[00:29:33]  Yeah.
[00:29:33]  Yeah.
[00:29:34]  And I mean, the D, I mean, obviously the DEA is corrupted in its own way, but there are definitely instances of DEA agents complaining about certain people being protected by the State Department or by other agencies.
[00:29:47]  Yeah.
[00:29:48]  Yeah.
[00:29:48]  And it's, it's, we should, we should say again, like, so the CIA or the U.S. government, but the CIA in particular, using drug profits that they take from sort of these regional warlords and refine, I mean, you know, Gulbuddin could refine it there, but often refined in Europe and France a lot of the time, Marseille, and using the funds from that to purchase weapons for militias they equip or to purchase explosives for terrorist groups in, for example, Italy, is,
[00:30:18]  I mean, there is absolutely no reason to think that they've stopped this.

=== Dark Money Laundering Scheme (15:19) ===

[00:30:21]  And they've also moved on.
[00:30:22]  It's like a big black market money laundering scheme because it's like just basically controlling an entire black market to move drugs into weapons into drugs into weapons to control like conflicts from all sides.
[00:30:36]  Exactly.
[00:30:37]  And also just like it lets you fund off the books operations.
[00:30:42]  If you have an unaccountable black market source of funds, then nobody can FOIA it or like, you know, no coked up senator can figure it out.
[00:30:54]  But I mean, so they were, they were actually getting some advanced weaponry too.
[00:30:58]  I mean, some of the weapon systems that the Taliban received, I mean, you're talking about the tanks, but they famously received Stinger missiles and the sort of handpads.
[00:31:10]  They got stingers and a lot of those found their way elsewhere and were used in other conflicts as well.
[00:31:16]  I mean, a lot of this, like the ISI was the intermediary for a lot of the weaponry and they just kept a lot of it for whatever they were.
[00:31:23]  I mean, wouldn't you?
[00:31:24]  Yeah, you got to kill your prime minister at some point.
[00:31:27]  I mean, you got to have eyes on everyone.
[00:31:29]  You know what I mean?
[00:31:30]  Like, why would you just be like, sure, we'll just run these over to you without the army, the army in Pakistan is sort of the prominent force in that country to begin with.
[00:31:43]  But yeah, so, I mean, they had a pretty good run finding this Muchu Hedin.
[00:31:50]  I mean, they were very successful.
[00:31:53]  Yeah, and I mean, ultimately, they did what they wanted to do.
[00:31:56]  I mean, they pulled the Soviet Union into a costly war for them.
[00:32:02]  I mean, the Soviet Union wanted to get out.
[00:32:04]  And one of the things that made it very difficult for them to get out is that Casey sort of went even further and escalated beyond where he had been, which is they started to plan, and there started to be raids across into the USSR proper.
[00:32:20]  Oh, wow, from Afghanistan into the Soviet Union.
[00:32:22]  Yeah.
[00:32:23]  Okay.
[00:32:24]  Into those Turkic republics in sort of Central Asia.
[00:32:29]  And this, obviously, this was not something that the Soviet Union was okay with.
[00:32:33]  So it became very difficult for them to leave for that reason.
[00:32:36]  Yeah.
[00:32:37]  Yeah.
[00:32:38]  I mean, there's long been sort of, I mean, the West has long been fascinated with the peoples of Central Asia.
[00:32:45]  But this is all like, I know that sort of stirring up trouble in those republics has been a plan from various different countries for a while to sort of neutralize and to get the USSR tangled up, you know, sort of fighting its own people.
[00:33:00]  Oh, yeah.
[00:33:01]  Yeah.
[00:33:02]  And literally, do not get me started about Turkey.
[00:33:04]  We could go on about Turkey for a while.
[00:33:05]  The country Turkey?
[00:33:07]  Yes, the country Turkey.
[00:33:08]  You might be surprised to find that I am also not a fan myself.
[00:33:13]  Not, you know, not the people, not the, you know, but the people about deep states.
[00:33:20]  Well, that's where the term comes from is, yeah, the Susserlik incident.
[00:33:26]  Yeah, yes.
[00:33:27]  Yeah.
[00:33:27]  And that, and what was that?
[00:33:28]  Was that the car crash?
[00:33:30]  It was a car crash that, yeah, one of the people was a regional police chief.
[00:33:36]  Yes.
[00:33:37]  One of the people was a member of, I don't remember if it was the Turkish parliament or a regional parliament.
[00:33:41]  And then one of the people was a top, top heroin dealer.
[00:33:45]  Yeah.
[00:33:45]  So they find these people in this car, what is going on?
[00:33:49]  Why would these people be together?
[00:33:50]  From that stems, like all, I mean, if you talk to a Turkish left-winger, I mean, every, there are so many, I mean, that really put some weird stuff into that movement there.
[00:34:02]  There's like talk about one of the biggest terror groups there sort of being, not terror groups, like left-wing sort of communist militant group, DHKPC.
[00:34:12]  A lot of people think that they are controlled entirely by MIT, the Turkish intelligence service.
[00:34:16]  We'll have to do a whole episode about that because it is some crazy shit.
[00:34:19]  I hang out with a lot of old Turkish, or a few old Turkish Stalinists who have very strong opinions about this kind of stuff.
[00:34:27]  Well, to get back on what we were saying about dark money and all the, it's not really even dark money, but all the off-the-books funding and markets that the CIA runs.
[00:34:39]  They need banks, don't they?
[00:34:40]  Yeah, let's talk BCCI, Ben.
[00:34:44]  Oh, boy.
[00:34:44]  Yeah, BCCI.
[00:34:47]  Because this is another big force in the story that we're kind of, or the painting, the tapestry that we're weaving as the background to, you know, the events leading into 9-11, the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan in 2001.
[00:35:03]  So, okay.
[00:35:05]  Yeah, I mean, definitely BCCI is part of a long string of financial organizations that are kind of the glue that holds the whole thing together.
[00:35:15]  I mean, you need to get money from opium to politicians in the West.
[00:35:20]  I've been saying that.
[00:35:21]  It has to happen somehow.
[00:35:23]  And BCCI was sort of the way that that, and it went through all kinds of convoluted, but it basically was a giant money laundering scheme that took chiefly drug money, but also illegal arms sales and that sort of thing, and was a way for that money to move around.
[00:35:39]  Yeah, like I said, including to a lot of politicians in the United States, a lot of politicians in the Gulf as well as in Pakistan.
[00:35:47]  And it was kind of the key conduit.
[00:35:49]  Yeah, just to be clear to our listeners who don't know what this is, so BCCI stands for Bank of Credit and Commerce International.
[00:35:55]  It was literally a bank.
[00:35:56]  Like it was a bank like any other bank.
[00:36:00]  I mean, it wasn't a bank like any other bank.
[00:36:02]  I mean, like, it looked like a bank like any other bank.
[00:36:04]  But it was basically what you would call like a CIA cutout.
[00:36:07]  I mean, it was just, like you said, it was a way for them to funnel, you know, they had to funnel all the money and drug money and off-the-book money in and out, you know, to various, like you said, various politicians, various, you know, actors.
[00:36:25]  But they needed something that, you know, made it kind of look reputable.
[00:36:30]  Yeah.
[00:36:30]  And it was, I mean, it was investigated as if it was a normal bank.
[00:36:35]  You know, there was a Kerry that was good friend John Kerry, who definitely, I mean, a lot of the report is definitely a whitewash.
[00:36:45]  And there's also a lot of good stuff in there that's very interesting.
[00:36:49]  But yeah, I mean, it was nominally just a regular, a regular old bank and lots and lots of people, including the Bushes.
[00:36:56]  You know, it had some involvement in the savings of loan crisis in the 80s.
[00:37:01]  It had tendrils that went really everywhere.
[00:37:04]  And now, I mean, a lot of that stuff is basically legal.
[00:37:07]  Right.
[00:37:08]  A lot of the, you know, a lot of the very mainstream banks get slapped with fines all the time for laundering money for drug cartels.
[00:37:16]  And that's, you know, that in the past had to be done completely below board and now is in kind of a gray zone, effectively.
[00:37:24]  But there's also groups like Carlisle that also help connect those elite politicians.
[00:37:28]  Yes, yes, they do.
[00:37:29]  Carlisle group.
[00:37:32]  So the Bush family has pretty deep connections to BCCI, right?
[00:37:38]  Yeah, and they, I could go down, we could talk for probably three hours about George H.W. Book.
[00:37:44]  Absolutely.
[00:37:46]  But he, you know, there's this whole Houston oil elite that includes Bush, that includes his dad.
[00:37:54]  You know, his dad was making money in Germany during the Nazi times.
[00:38:00]  Alan Dulles was helping him hide that money.
[00:38:02]  I knew Alan Dulles did a lot of sort of financial wrangling for, let's just say, not just the Allied side on that war.
[00:38:09]  Oh, certainly.
[00:38:10]  Truman called him a traitor.
[00:38:11]  I mean, Truman straight up called him a traitor in the newspaper one time.
[00:38:14]  Jesus, fuck.
[00:38:15]  Yeah, Prescott Bush was a pretty senior person.
[00:38:18]  This is H.W. Bush's father, was a pretty senior person in Brown Brothers Harriman, which is a big early investment bank at this time.
[00:38:27]  So this is, I mean, this goes way back, this kind of involvement in this dark, not even dark money, theoretically legal, but going all kinds of weird dark places.
[00:38:37]  Yeah, and Bush had some pretty direct connections to a lot of Gulf, in particular Saudi money, via this guy, Jim Bath.
[00:38:48]  No, we got some stuff on Bath, but let's just, let's talk about Bush's oil stuff real quick.
[00:38:54]  Yeah, I think we need to give our listeners just maybe a short, I mean, you did a good job, but just like a short history of the Bush.
[00:39:02]  I mean, not if you can give a short history of the Bush family.
[00:39:05]  You can't really.
[00:39:06]  But just so people understand.
[00:39:08]  Because I feel like, especially for people who are maybe younger or newly politicized or feeling newly politicized, like, you know, the Bushes have kind of receded from public public profile.
[00:39:24]  Yeah, their memes or, you know, it's not even just the like goofy Ellen stuff with George W. Bush, but like even the idea of the Bush dynasty is like kind of like been erased from public memory.
[00:39:36]  Because there's still this sort of thing where like Trump is this uniquely evil person.
[00:39:41]  It's like, I mean, Trump is incredibly, he's a horrible person.
[00:39:46]  He's evil.
[00:39:47]  But like this stuff is much more, I don't know, this stuff makes you go more insane.
[00:39:53]  Like Trump charging Secret Service $650 a night for his hotel room.
[00:39:58]  Like, yeah, obviously that's corrupt and bad.
[00:40:00]  This stuff is like...
[00:40:01]  Yeah, that pales in comparison to, like, anything that the Bush family has touched.
[00:40:08]  Like even, like you mentioned, Prescott Bush, like going back and back and back.
[00:40:12]  Like this dynasty is like I just like feel like we don't even properly appreciate the like insanity of this.
[00:40:22]  When the Iraq war started, I was pretty young, but I remember very vividly.
[00:40:26]  I was eight.
[00:40:27]  Just kidding.
[00:40:28]  Yeah, no, I took Liz there on my knee as a baby.
[00:40:32]  But, you know, the protests and all these things, I remember very vividly a big thing running through it is that Bush has financial ties to what is going on.
[00:40:41]  That Cheney is, of course, I mean, I found out, you know, I was 12 and I was like telling kids at school about like Kellogg and shit.
[00:40:48]  Like, I was like, hey, check this out.
[00:40:52]  And I think that sort of receded more where it's like become almost a meme, like, oh, yeah, no blood for oil.
[00:40:58]  They're doing it for oil.
[00:40:59]  Like, no, they, like, literally, it was for oil for them.
[00:41:03]  Yep.
[00:41:03]  Like, and, and, I mean, for their friends as well.
[00:41:06]  But, like, give it, yeah, give us a little history of the Bushes.
[00:41:10]  Yeah.
[00:41:11]  I mean, right, you mentioned 9-11.
[00:41:13]  Like, I mean, H.W. Bush has some pretty close ties to the JFK assassination as well.
[00:41:17]  Like, it's, like, speak on it, sis.
[00:41:20]  Speak on it.
[00:41:21]  Maybe he did it.
[00:41:23]  Totally, absolutely.
[00:41:24]  I mean, there's a lot of, so I want to say first off, I have not written any books.
[00:41:28]  All of this is just from books that I've read.
[00:41:30]  But definitely a book about the Bushes that people should read is Russ Baker's Family of Secrets.
[00:41:36]  Yes, basically everything I'm about to say is just cribbed straight from that book.
[00:41:40]  But the, yeah, so the Prescott Bush stuff going all the way back to the Nazis.
[00:41:45]  But H.W. was part of that whole Yale thing.
[00:41:51]  And, you know, the whole, I mean, the Skull and Bones, everybody has this idea of it's like the Illuminati.
[00:41:56]  But it's just a club of basically the sons of rich people who get together and that's what H.W. Bush was very, very good at doing.
[00:42:06]  He very famously, he would send out Christmas cards to like 3,000 people or something like that.
[00:42:11]  Pathetic.
[00:42:11]  And it was really useful.
[00:42:13]  I mean, he knew people everywhere and it served him really well.
[00:42:17]  So very early on, there was this oil company, Zapata Oil, that by all appearances was just a CIA front.
[00:42:25]  It was very closely associated with another oil services company that later merged with Halliburton, very interestingly, called Dresser Industries.
[00:42:34]  And that was run by a guy named Neil Mallon, who was very close with Alan Dulles.
[00:42:39]  And Neil Mallon is who Neil Bush is named after.
[00:42:42]  So obviously very close to H.W. Bush.
[00:42:44]  Weird.
[00:42:46]  So there's this very clear connection already back at this point in time.
[00:42:49]  This is like the 50s.
[00:42:50]  Yeah.
[00:42:51]  Between intelligence and oil and then later, a little bit later, finance.
[00:42:57]  Well, that's a good idea.
[00:42:58]  But not intelligent leader.
[00:42:59]  Prescott was definitely finance.
[00:43:00]  I was about to say all the intelligence guys, I mean, the OSS was basically all Wall Street lawyers.
[00:43:06]  Totally, of course.
[00:43:07]  You know, Alan Dulles was basically brought into the OSS to protect various people's because people like Prescott had been investing in sometimes illegal and sometimes not necessarily illegal German industry.
[00:43:21]  And they didn't really want people to know about this.
[00:43:24]  So they placed certain people like Alan Dulles in positions in the OSS to kind of protect this money.
[00:43:30]  And then obviously he knew a lot of very important people, which led to him becoming very powerful.
[00:43:37]  But yeah, right.
[00:43:37]  I mean, Alan Dulles was a lawyer for a lot of different finance firms, groups like the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, which is obviously very important to what the CIA did in Iran.
[00:43:53]  I mean, they basically overthrew Mossadeh.
[00:43:56]  Yeah, for oil money, essentially.
[00:43:59]  I mean, just straight up for the oil rights, for other reasons as well, but that was a huge part of it.
[00:44:04]  And yeah, HW was, grew up in this, right?
[00:44:07]  I mean, he was raised in this milieu of people, to use Dave Emery's favorite word.
[00:44:14]  And he, yeah, he just became kind of the favored son and carried it on to all kinds of shady dealers.
[00:44:23]  I mean, obviously, we could talk about his involvement in Iran-Contra, in the October surprise, and getting rid of Nixon.
[00:44:30]  I mean, he pops up again and again and again.
[00:44:34]  And he's always, you know, he always stays in the background, obviously, because he's the president.
[00:44:38]  Right.
[00:44:39]  But he's present for all of these things and is calling the shots on a lot of them.
[00:44:44]  Yeah, he's like much more of a shadowy figure than people give him credit for.
[00:44:49]  Yeah.
[00:44:50]  I mean, he was a spy.
[00:44:51]  That was what he did.
[00:44:51]  Yeah.
[00:44:52]  I mean, literally, his job was spy.
[00:44:56]  And also, no one knows what he was doing in Dallas on the day JFK was shot and he refuses to say.
[00:45:00]  Is that correct?
[00:45:01]  He does not.
[00:45:02]  He says he doesn't remember.
[00:45:03]  Yeah, which no one remembers where they were that day.
[00:45:06]  Yeah.
[00:45:07]  Yes.
[00:45:08]  Yeah.
[00:45:08]  Yeah.
[00:45:09]  He was reading books to children at a school in Florida.
[00:45:12]  That's right.
[00:45:13]  Somebody whispered in his ear.
[00:45:15]  Yeah.
[00:45:16]  So there is a letter that Barbara Bush supposedly wrote on the day that is in her memoir.
[00:45:24]  And it literally, she starts the letter before JFK is killed.
[00:45:28]  And she finishes the letter as JFK is dying and talks about how awful it is.
[00:45:34]  It's beyond parody the letter itself.
[00:45:36]  It's just ridiculous.
[00:45:38]  It's obviously meant to provide an alibi for it.

=== Bin Laden Construction (16:11) ===

[00:45:40]  Describes where he was and what they were doing and all this.
[00:45:43]  God, she's such a fucking bitch.
[00:45:46]  Yeah.
[00:45:47]  I really hate her.
[00:45:48]  I know.
[00:45:48]  I didn't want to say anything because I fucked her.
[00:45:51]  I can say it.
[00:45:51]  I'm a woman.
[00:45:52]  It's fine.
[00:45:53]  Well, no, I mean, I just.
[00:45:54]  I'm just saying, woman to woman.
[00:45:56]  I don't like her.
[00:45:57]  Yeah.
[00:45:57]  I have like a weird history with her, and I would really rather we move on from her in particular.
[00:46:02]  Okay, so we've talked a little both.
[00:46:03]  Also, George W. Bush's wife killed somebody.
[00:46:07]  Really?
[00:46:07]  Did she?
[00:46:08]  I know that.
[00:46:08]  No, he did.
[00:46:09]  No, she did.
[00:46:10]  She ran someone over.
[00:46:12]  I thought he did.
[00:46:13]  Laura Bush killed somebody.
[00:46:14]  Hold on.
[00:46:15]  Let me Google this real quick.
[00:46:17]  Laura Bush killed somebody.
[00:46:18]  I thought.
[00:46:19]  Bam!
[00:46:20]  Laura Bush killed somebody.
[00:46:22]  Wow.
[00:46:23]  Great Google search result.
[00:46:24]  Yeah, she killed her best friend.
[00:46:26]  Very cruel.
[00:46:26]  Don't look up that.
[00:46:27]  I thought, oh, God.
[00:46:30]  Sorry, really quick, back to HW, because, You know, you had, you know, we started the episode.
[00:46:38]  Um, I know we're like going all over the place, but that's how we like to do true.
[00:46:42]  But also, this is all related, so absolutely all the same topic.
[00:46:45]  No, I love it.
[00:46:46]  But I do want to just mention because we did start the episode talking about kind of how the United States, particularly United States business interests, started with Saudi Arabia.
[00:46:58]  And the relationship between the Bushes and the Saudis is like very important.
[00:47:03]  Yes.
[00:47:05]  And so, can you give a little brief kind of intro to that?
[00:47:09]  Yeah, so I mentioned Jim Bath very briefly earlier.
[00:47:14]  But Jim Bath is kind of the key intermediary between the Bushes and the Bin Laden family in particular, actually.
[00:47:22]  And maybe people don't know much about the bin Laden family.
[00:47:24]  Oh, Osama bin Laden, perhaps they've heard of him.
[00:47:28]  Well, the bin Laden family is fucking huge.
[00:47:30]  No, I know.
[00:47:30]  I'm just making a joke.
[00:47:32]  Yeah.
[00:47:32]  I mean, my man was nutting and busting in pretty much every by the way, bin Laden's mother or Osama bin Laden's mother, an Alawite from Syria, which I learned.
[00:47:41]  I didn't know that.
[00:47:42]  Interesting.
[00:47:43]  Yeah.
[00:47:43]  I'm very curious to know the story behind that, actually.
[00:47:45]  I know she, yeah, as am I.
[00:47:47]  I think she was secular as well when she first, and she's made a lot of statements like, I still love my son, which respect.
[00:47:53]  I do love you know, respect the mother's love.
[00:47:55]  Exactly.
[00:47:56]  That's true.
[00:47:57]  So, yeah, well, we got he bath was the intermediary here, right?
[00:48:02]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:48:02]  So, Bath met Bush when they were in the Air National Guard.
[00:48:05]  He was a he was naturally a good pilot as opposed to Bush.
[00:48:08]  He was not a good pilot.
[00:48:09]  HW basically identified him as a useful person, and he was a very useful person.
[00:48:14]  And yeah, he became the intermediary between, in particular, Salem bin Laden and the Bush family.
[00:48:21]  And the Bin Ladens were early investors in Bush's, W. Bush's Arbusto Energy, which later became a part of Harkin Energy.
[00:48:30]  And, you know, this is a lot of fun.
[00:48:32]  So Harkins owned, I think, a part of it too.
[00:48:34]  Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
[00:48:36]  I mean, a lot of this, I mean, a lot of this is just legit oil business, right?
[00:48:40]  I mean, this is how oil business works.
[00:48:42]  I mean, this is how it works.
[00:48:44]  So if you're going to invest in oil, you're going to get invested in some of these intelligence-associated companies.
[00:48:49]  Not to say that Soros isn't intelligence connected.
[00:48:51]  I'm sure he probably is.
[00:48:53]  But yeah, so the Bush connection goes through to the Harkin oil deal, where HW was technically the president of this company.
[00:49:01]  And it happened right when he became CIA director in, I guess, 78, I believe.
[00:49:10]  But they got this deal to take over to start these offshore oil rigs, which they had no experience doing.
[00:49:17]  They'd never done it before.
[00:49:18]  Yeah, and they were a fairly small company, too.
[00:49:20]  Like compared to the title.
[00:49:20]  They were tiny, yeah.
[00:49:22]  Yeah, totally.
[00:49:22]  They were very, very small.
[00:49:23]  It was a weird, it was a weird pick.
[00:49:25]  Everybody thought it was weird at the time.
[00:49:26]  They didn't understand why Harkin had been picked.
[00:49:28]  Obviously, it had been picked because it was very closely connected to some prominent American politicians.
[00:49:35]  So there's these ties that go to Saudi money between the Bush family and very important.
[00:49:41]  I mean, the Bin Ladens are a big infrastructure.
[00:49:45]  The Saudi bin Laden group's a big infrastructure construction, civil engineering company.
[00:49:50]  And the Bin Laden family is one of the most important non-royal families in Saudi Arabia.
[00:49:55]  Yeah.
[00:49:56]  Along with the Khashoggi's would be the other big one.
[00:49:59]  Oh, the Khashoggis?
[00:50:00]  They have a little bit of a Mujahideen connection too, considering they've got them running.
[00:50:04]  And they also have a wonderful Robert Maxwell Epstein connection, too.
[00:50:10]  And of course, the Queen connection with the song Khashoggi's Boat by Queen.
[00:50:14]  Oh, really?
[00:50:15]  Well, I was going to song a fellow.
[00:50:16]  They have a song called Khashoggi's Boat.
[00:50:18]  No way.
[00:50:19]  Yeah.
[00:50:19]  Well, I was going to say it's good that you mentioned this because I do think that people, again, who aren't familiar with this history or this cast of characters, like there is this idea that either Bin Laden is some singular figure or it's this sort of like rebel family or they're not.
[00:50:37]  I mean, you know, they're one of the biggest dynasties in Saudi Arabia.
[00:50:43]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:50:44]  And even like the New Yorker version of the mainstream story is that Bin Laden, Osama bin Laden was like the black sheep of right.
[00:50:53]  Not at all.
[00:50:54]  His family disowned him in the 90s.
[00:50:56]  Which is not true at, you know, maybe they officially disowned him or whatever.
[00:51:01]  But it's, you know, everything that he was doing with the Mujahideen in Afghanistan was totally fine with them.
[00:51:08]  I mean, he brought Saudi Bin Laden Group construction equipment with him.
[00:51:11]  He used trucks.
[00:51:12]  He used branded trucks of his company's, like, and it's not like it was in Pakistan.
[00:51:17]  Right.
[00:51:17]  And by the way, the bin Laden company also, I think, didn't, Osama blew up some barracks, right?
[00:51:25]  Yeah, there was a barracks bombing.
[00:51:26]  Yeah.
[00:51:26]  I mean, well, check out who rebuilt the barracks.
[00:51:30]  The bin Laden construction.
[00:51:32]  Yeah.
[00:51:33]  But the thing is that they also do totally legit stuff.
[00:51:35]  Like they're building the metro system in the UAE, you know, like ride the subway to work in the UAE.
[00:51:44]  And it's like bin Laden construction.
[00:51:45]  No, but just like all the seats are just like Filipino slaves that you bring.
[00:51:50]  I know, it's fucked.
[00:51:51]  I'm not even making a joke about that.
[00:51:52]  That should be a lot of fun.
[00:51:53]  Yeah, it's really kind of, you know, yeah, the connections between the Bush, but the Bush family and then specifically the Bin Laden family are quite close as well.
[00:52:04]  Not just like the Saudis in general.
[00:52:06]  Yeah, definitely.
[00:52:07]  Because I think it sounds, if you say like Bush did 9-11, it sounds kind of absurd.
[00:52:12]  And yet.
[00:52:13]  Because you're like, he's alive, dude.
[00:52:15]  He wasn't in the plane.
[00:52:18]  Right.
[00:52:18]  That's right.
[00:52:19]  Exactly.
[00:52:19]  And he's not a good, he stopped flying in the mid-70s.
[00:52:22]  Exactly.
[00:52:22]  He wasn't.
[00:52:22]  Well, that's, I mean, it did hit a building.
[00:52:25]  Maybe it was all.
[00:52:26]  That's true.
[00:52:26]  That's about part for the course.
[00:52:28]  But yeah, it's mocked.
[00:52:29]  like saying it's like well yeah i mean bush did 9-11 whatever you know like i it's you sound they kind of treat you like you're you're uh a wing nut or something but i mean there are very real there's not like most people have never met anyone in the bin laden family right like i don't think anyone listening to this has ever gone into business with a bin by the way salem bin laden which you mentioned earlier he died in a plane crash in texas yes as did his father Yes.
[00:52:59]  And, you know, he was a good pilot.
[00:53:02]  The witnesses who were there were like, yeah, he just kind of crashed into the ground for some reason.
[00:53:06]  Like, there's no obvious reason why it happened.
[00:53:09]  It was not a mechanical issue.
[00:53:11]  I mean, you can go look at the NTSB report.
[00:53:12]  It's just pilot errors.
[00:53:15]  I would like to mention a certain other famous person died in a plane crash, Lin Bao of China.
[00:53:22]  And I think there's also some things that people should look into there.
[00:53:25]  I've been reading a lot of his works and getting really San Francisco Red Guard, baby.
[00:53:32]  Speaking of ISIS, I think they're funded by the ISI.
[00:53:37]  So, yeah, I mean, they have a ton, a ton, ton of connections, and a lot of them through the Carlisle group, too, right?
[00:53:44]  Yeah, so the Carlisle Group is kind of semi-Twitter famous, I guess, for a weird reason.
[00:53:51]  But yeah, the Carlisle Group is, again, by all appearances, a legit financial services company.
[00:53:58]  One of those ones that's not quite a hedge fund, not quite like wealth management.
[00:54:01]  Not sure what exactly it is.
[00:54:02]  It's just like a money company.
[00:54:04]  It is a money company.
[00:54:06]  Everything gets lumped into just calling it private equity, and no one wants to even question, like, what is that?
[00:54:11]  So they just go, oh, it's private equity.
[00:54:13]  They move on with their day.
[00:54:14]  Yeah.
[00:54:15]  And that's what Carlisle is, except that Carlisle has, for example, H.W. Bush was on the board and lots of very senior Pentagon intelligence connected people on the leadership.
[00:54:27]  Oof, James Baker.
[00:54:28]  Yeah, his World Bank Prez.
[00:54:31]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:54:33]  Lots and lots of people like that.
[00:54:35]  And members of the Bin Laden family were very senior and had money invested through Carlisle.
[00:54:42]  We love it.
[00:54:43]  And actually, the morning of 9-11 was a meeting with Carlisle Group directors and some other senior people in Carlisle Group.
[00:54:54]  And among those in attendance were members of the Bin Laden family and George H.W. Bush.
[00:54:58]  We love it.
[00:54:59]  We absolutely love it.
[00:55:01]  Yeah, they were actually about like, I think like three weeks after 9-11, there was a news story that was like, the Bin Laden family is withdrawing some funds from the Carlisle group.
[00:55:11]  Because the Carlisle Group, they are not just like a hub for just bloodthirsty freaks and pedophiles.
[00:55:19]  They also own a lot of, they own defense companies.
[00:55:22]  They own famously Beaufort's, which makes the Beaufort's gun.
[00:55:27]  I think they're Swedish, but they own United Defense, which makes the Bradley fighting vehicle.
[00:55:31]  And so there was, I mean, there is an entirely, not only a real possibility, there is a giant possibility that the Bradleys that the Americans fought in Afghanistan and later were like the money made from purchasing those went to some of the bin Ladens, which is really funny.
[00:55:48]  Yeah.
[00:55:48]  And of course, totally.
[00:55:52]  Yeah, Carlisle is basically funding the war in Yemen right now.
[00:55:56]  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:55:58]  I mean, and it's like...
[00:55:59]  They also just bought Supreme.
[00:56:01]  They bought Supreme.
[00:56:02]  Oh, my God.
[00:56:03]  Listeners, I'm pretty sure we're no longer giving out Supreme discount codes on our store.
[00:56:09]  I am so sorry about that.
[00:56:11]  So the Carlisle group, I mean, we just mentioned 9-11, this meeting that they were having.
[00:56:16]  Let's talk about, let's look at a little bit about the road to 9-11.
[00:56:21]  So what was Al-Qaeda, what were they up to?
[00:56:23]  By the way, listeners will assume that.
[00:56:25]  Al-Qaeda.
[00:56:25]  Al-Qaeda.
[00:56:26]  Listeners will, astute listeners will know that that means the base in Arabic.
[00:56:32]  But yeah, talk to me.
[00:56:34]  Lay some Qaeda facts on me.
[00:56:35]  What's going on with Qaeda?
[00:56:36]  And the road to 9-11.
[00:56:38]  So what was Osama up to after the, you know, the 80s have passed.
[00:56:44]  We are now, we have moved from cocaine.
[00:56:47]  Now we are doing meth.
[00:56:49]  Bell bottoms after the return are once again out in favor of long baggy shorts.
[00:56:56]  And so what's going on with Osama during this time?
[00:56:59]  Yeah, well, actually, yeah, Osama's Osama's very brief dip during that time period definitely mimics the transition from cocaine, Go-Go 80s.
[00:57:09]  You know, the money stopped flowing.
[00:57:11]  Soviet Union was gone.
[00:57:12]  Definitely, definitely.
[00:57:13]  There was a ton of still involvement from the GID, the ISI, the CIA.
[00:57:18]  It definitely was, but it was much less than it had been.
[00:57:22]  He got kicked out of Saudi Arabia.
[00:57:24]  He moved to Sudan briefly and then ends up finding himself in Afghanistan.
[00:57:30]  And all the while he's being protected by the CIA, by the FBI, as well as by the GID and the ISI.
[00:57:39]  And one of the people who, because there is a, so it's very interesting the way that it gets branded that, because obviously Al-Qaeda is not the Mujahideen.
[00:57:47]  They're not the same thing.
[00:57:48]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:57:49]  But it's definitely a continuation in a lot of respects.
[00:57:52]  In particular, you know, we just talked about Osama bin Laden was building infrastructure for the Mujahideen.
[00:57:57]  Yeah, I mean, and that's, sorry, if I got to interrupt real quick.
[00:58:00]  I mean, a lot of that sort of global jihadist infrastructure was built during the Afghan-Soviet war, financed by Saudi Arabia via, or excuse me, by the CIA via Saudi Arabia.
[00:58:12]  And so like a lot of this infrastructure that came in later into play, I mean, the Yugoslav wars saw this infrastructure used.
[00:58:17]  Like, I mean, this was, this was, this is when it became a thing, basically.
[00:58:21]  Yeah, totally.
[00:58:23]  And Osama bin Laden was very, you know, he was like, in addition to doing infrastructure, he was also a bag man.
[00:58:28]  He was sort of distributing money to people.
[00:58:30]  And that sort of financial network became, I mean, Al-Qaeda means the base, and that's sort of what it was.
[00:58:37]  It was like this financial, this whole set of financial networks, some of them in the U.S.
[00:58:43]  I mean, there was a whole cell operating in Brooklyn.
[00:58:45]  One of the more, probably one of the more important connections is this guy, Ali Mohammed.
[00:58:52]  And he had been, I mean, the documentation is pretty sketchy, but it seems like probably he started off as an Egyptian intelligence officer.
[00:59:01]  He became a trainer of the trainers.
[00:59:03]  So he would go to the U.S. Army's Special Warfare School in North Carolina.
[00:59:09]  He would learn from SOCOM how to do guerrilla warfare, how to do that kind of thing.
[00:59:15]  He would go back to Afghanistan, train people in Afghanistan, and then go back to the United States.
[00:59:20]  And he did several of these trips.
[00:59:21]  I've also made some of the, and it's a grueling trip, so I've done it myself.
[00:59:25]  It's difficult.
[00:59:26]  Yeah, that's a long flight from Charlotte to Kabul.
[00:59:29]  Yeah.
[00:59:30]  Yeah, you kind of want to have a drink on that one.
[00:59:32]  And he was, yeah, he was one of the people who trained.
[00:59:36]  I mean, he trained the 11 hijackers how to hijack planes.
[00:59:40]  And he got that information, at least some of it, from his time at SOCOM.
[00:59:45]  During the 90s, there was this whole cell in Brooklyn that Ali Mohamed was an important part of.
[00:59:50]  Omar Abdel Rahman, the so-called blind sheikh, was also an Egyptian.
[00:59:55]  And he was an important part of this.
[00:59:58]  They were involved in the 93 World Trade Center bombing, which one of the people who was blowing that building up, Ahmad Salem, was an FBI informant and was telling the FBI about this whole plan.
[01:00:12]  That becomes a reoccurring theme, as we'll see when we move into stuff as that.
[01:00:16]  The FBI, like the authorities had lots of tips about what's going on.
[01:00:22]  Yeah, and it's important.
[01:00:23]  It's not just, in some cases, it's not clear why they didn't tell anybody, but in some cases, it's very clear.
[01:00:30]  It's obviously, but when we talk about 9-11 specifically, there's obvious instances where it's very clearly an organized conspiracy of a fairly small number of people who are intentionally concealing information.
[01:00:40]  It's not just incompetence.
[01:00:42]  It's absolutely.
[01:00:43]  They knew what was coming and they chose to protect certain people for whatever reason.
[01:00:50]  And yeah, like you say, that's something that goes way, way back.
[01:00:53]  You know, the 98, Ali Mohamed was very important in the 98 embassy bombings.
[01:00:58]  He was one of the people who was observing and collecting.
[01:01:04]  He was basically casing the joint for these two embassies in Tanzania and Kenya.
[01:01:08]  And the NSA knew that that was going to happen.
[01:01:11]  You know, they had intercepts.
[01:01:14]  They were bugging a phone in Yemen, which we might talk about later.
[01:01:17]  But they were bugging this phone in this al-Qaeda operations center.
[01:01:22]  And we don't know for sure, but they must have heard these conversations between these people that we know took place.
[01:01:29]  Yeah.
[01:01:30]  And they didn't do anything.
[01:01:32]  And a ton, you know, I mean, those ones obviously get overshadowed by 9-11.
[01:01:36]  It was much more than 9-11.
[01:01:37]  It was much bigger.
[01:01:38]  But those were, at the time, those were very significant events.
[01:01:41]  And the fact that, for example, the NSA knew about it and didn't take any steps.
[01:01:46]  So again, like you say the intelligence agencies knew about 9-11, they didn't do anything about it.

=== Jesse's NSA Observations (08:17) ===

[01:01:52]  Well, actually, this has happened a bunch of different times, and there's obvious evidence of it happening several different times.
[01:01:56]  So it's not a one-off, not a one-off event for sure.
[01:01:59]  And I think that we sort of see that happen with a lot of these sort of newer, you know, lone gunmen or sometimes in the case, I think, the LA shooters, dual gunman attacks, is that I'm pretty sure, I mean, if we're just going from past evidence, and especially if we look at something like the Boston bombing, is that they do know this stuff is going to happen.
[01:02:19]  And sometimes they swoop it.
[01:02:21]  I mean, they are often the people that cause this stuff to happen.
[01:02:24]  I mean, in the case of that guy in upstate New York, I think it was upstate New York with a knife that they had to go buy him to drive and stuff like that.
[01:02:30]  They had to go drive to buy him and stuff like that.
[01:02:32]  Like, they'll sort of trick these either mentally ill or really alienated, isolated people into planning, quote unquote, planning this attack.
[01:02:40]  And then they'll stop them at the last minute.
[01:02:42]  And look, they saved an untold amount of innocence from a terrorist attack.
[01:02:47]  I think sometimes, in the case of certain people, maybe a little Mandalay Bay, they let it happen.
[01:02:55]  Yeah, I mean, you mentioned Boston bombers.
[01:02:57]  Definitely, like Sarniev, their dad had CIA connections, was to this program that Graham Fuller was running.
[01:03:07]  And again, back to those Central Asian Soviet republics.
[01:03:12]  So, yeah, absolutely.
[01:03:13]  I mean, it's a long, long running thing, a lot of history, a lot of examples of it.
[01:03:18]  So it's definitely not a one-off isolated incident.
[01:03:22]  So just to quickly recap, because we do have to wrap up in a little bit before we dive into the next part.
[01:03:29]  But I kind of want to just give, not a recap, but I just want to kind of explain why it was important to give this background before we got into like, you know, whatever, you know, kind of like what everyone came to see, which is like the actual 9-11 stuff.
[01:03:47]  But I do think that it was really important for us to kind of go through all these different connections and histories.
[01:03:53]  And we didn't even get into a lot.
[01:03:55]  But just to kind of paint a picture for people, you know, who the major players are in this region, why.
[01:04:04]  I mean, we talked about it a little bit at the beginning of the episode, but like why this region is so important, not just to U.S. interests, but like kind of throughout 20th century history, it's been contentious with a lot of different state actors.
[01:04:20]  And just kind of like, you know, so everyone can kind of see or kind of picture, you know, you've got the bin Ladens and the Bushes and the CIA and history and with the Soviets in Afghanistan.
[01:04:34]  And I don't know.
[01:04:36]  I think painting that picture is really important for people to understand what comes next.
[01:04:43]  Yeah, I think it, I mean, it gets viewed at, obviously, it was a very significant thing that affected a lot of people.
[01:04:50]  So it jumps to the top of people's psyches.
[01:04:52]  But it is not the beginning of something, right?
[01:04:55]  It is not the beginning of American involvement in that region.
[01:04:58]  It is not the beginning of American covert operations in that region.
[01:05:02]  It is part of a very long history of not just American, but just kind of the general.
[01:05:06]  I mean, oil, drugs, these are extremely important for the modern economy.
[01:05:13]  And the continued American involvement, I mean, essentially 9-11 was effectively a media event.
[01:05:19]  And we'll talk about anthrax probably later, I guess.
[01:05:23]  But the whole point of it was to create this media event to allow the continuation of this ongoing American involvement in the region.
[01:05:31]  And all these people like Hekmatiar and Bush, obviously, all these people show up both in this early period and then when 9-11 actually happens, they're the same people are involved in the whole thing.
[01:05:42]  Yeah, we should also mention Cheney and Rumsfeld as well, because those are big guys that we're going to have to talk about.
[01:05:48]  Absolutely.
[01:05:50]  Yeah, they also have long, long histories in U.S. government and intelligence.
[01:05:58]  And the Pentagon, obviously.
[01:06:00]  Cool.
[01:06:00]  This is a lot of this stuff is blowing my mind.
[01:06:05]  I can't wait to get into the next part, which is when I put on my real full truther hat, which Brace hates when I put that on.
[01:06:14]  I'm ready.
[01:06:15]  I'm ready.
[01:06:16]  I'm so ready.
[01:06:17]  Man, the masses are not ready for the pill that we are about to shove down their throats.
[01:06:21]  We watched a lot of Jesse Ventura today.
[01:06:24]  Nice.
[01:06:25]  I don't really like him.
[01:06:26]  I'm glad he sued the American Sniper's wife.
[01:06:30]  Dude, I can't believe that American.
[01:06:32]  Yeah, because American Sniper wrote in his book that he, he, he, like, you know, his book was insane and had these really fog claims.
[01:06:39]  Yeah, we should maybe talk about him.
[01:06:40]  I do want to say that I do believe that he was, he shot people in New Orleans as a Katrina.
[01:06:46]  Oh, absolutely.
[01:06:46]  Absolutely.
[01:06:47]  Very easily believed.
[01:06:48]  We got to do a Katrina episode because I don't think people understand exactly what was going on there as well.
[01:06:54]  Martial law, basically.
[01:06:55]  But no, he says in his book that he knocked out or he punched Jesse Ventura at a bar because Jesse Ventura, you know, is this character.
[01:07:04]  Jesse Ventura, of course, he was a SEAL in the Vietnam War, which he has later turned against.
[01:07:11]  Like Jesse.
[01:07:13]  But American Sniper made that up.
[01:07:16]  Like it never, that incident never occurred.
[01:07:19]  And Jesse Ventura got all pissed and sued him and won because it never happened.
[01:07:25]  However, by the time that he won the lawsuit, American Sniper had been killed by a listener of the show at a gun range.
[01:07:35]  I love taking my mentally insane, like child killer friends to the gun range.
[01:07:40]  Yeah.
[01:07:40]  By the way, I mean, it's just like, Jesus Christ.
[01:07:42]  These people are like, make fun of people for being triggered.
[01:07:45]  Literally, the American Sniper got killed because the guy was triggered.
[01:07:49]  Like, because of, you know, allegedly.
[01:07:51]  Who knows?
[01:07:52]  I mean, I was just thinking, like, can you imagine how, like, I, oh, now I'm just getting angry thinking about Katrina and Bush and how little, like, like, how everything has been washed away in memory of how fucking insane the Bush administration was.
[01:08:07]  Yeah.
[01:08:08]  Like, can you imagine if Trump literally just had martial law running through an entire like city in like a hugely black city in the south?
[01:08:20]  Yeah, I mean, it's fucking insane.
[01:08:22]  They massacred people.
[01:08:23]  Yeah.
[01:08:23]  Like, there's literally.
[01:08:25]  Yeah.
[01:08:25]  Well, anyways.
[01:08:26]  Sorry.
[01:08:27]  It just, like, makes me so angry that the like haziography of fucking George W. Bush.
[01:08:31]  I know.
[01:08:32]  I don't think maybe younger people can't understand, even though we're not like old by any.
[01:08:36]  No.
[01:08:37]  Like, it's insane that George Bush was even rehabilitated a little bit.
[01:08:42]  And everybody who's doing that, even in like kind of a meme-y way.
[01:08:45]  Well, I don't know.
[01:08:46]  But like.
[01:08:48]  The guy should be in jail.
[01:08:49]  I mean, the guy should be absolutely.
[01:08:51]  There should be a war crimes tribunal.
[01:08:52]  Like, there's no question.
[01:08:53]  It'll never happen in a million years.
[01:08:54]  But it should be.
[01:08:56]  Yeah.
[01:08:57]  I mean, well, I think it was Bush actually who put in place the plans to invade The Hague if anybody's ever.
[01:09:02]  By the way, yeah, America has plans to invade The Hague if any American soldiers are ever put there for a war crimes tribunal.
[01:09:10]  But they're not gonna.
[01:09:10]  I mean, there are a lot of black people in the army, and they only, you know, prosecute black people at the ICC.
[01:09:16]  But it's, you know, we'll see.
[01:09:18]  Well, except for one.
[01:09:19]  Yeah, I mean, Josevik is black.
[01:09:20]  I mean, a lot of the blame for that, I think, is on Obama.
[01:09:23]  And that's something I could never ever forgive that entire, whatever we want to call it, administration for.
[01:09:30]  Yeah.
[01:09:31]  Just fucking despicable people.
[01:09:34]  Well, thank you so much for joining us, Ben.
[01:09:36]  Always a pleasure.
[01:09:38]  Even though this is technically the first time.
[01:09:40]  So I'm just saying in the future, this will always be a pleasure.
[01:09:43]  Even if people listen to it in the wrong order, it'll make sense.
[01:09:46]  Yeah.
[01:09:47]  And looking forward to part two.
[01:09:49]  That'll be real fun.
[01:09:51]  I am too.
[01:09:52]  Thank you very much for having me on.
[01:09:53]  Thank you.
[01:09:54]  good night.

=== Interviewing The Laughing Citizen (02:04) ===

[01:10:09]  Sorry, let me get off the phone real quick.
[01:10:10]  Hey.
[01:10:10]  Hey, no, no, I'll call you back.
[01:10:13]  That was nobody.
[01:10:16]  Who was it?
[01:10:17]  That was the FBI.
[01:10:18]  Yeah, because we had some technical difficulties while we were recording because little, you know, you always got to have your Snowden brain on, and we didn't when we were talking about this stuff.
[01:10:28]  Remember they turned off the lights when he was doing that interview?
[01:10:31]  Yeah, and they put, okay, wait, you've seen the movie, right?
[01:10:34]  I have not.
[01:10:34]  You haven't seen Citizen 4?
[01:10:35]  No.
[01:10:36]  Oh, everyone?
[01:10:36]  I've only seen Citizen 1 through 3.
[01:10:39]  And Kane, the prequel.
[01:10:42]  Young Johnson's laughing.
[01:10:43]  Yeah, well, okay.
[01:10:44]  Now you're laughing too.
[01:10:46]  At your dumb face.
[01:10:46]  It's two out of three.
[01:10:48]  Okay, go on.
[01:10:49]  So everyone at home and everyone sitting on this couch right here, Brace Belden, should watch Citizen 4 as it's, you know, if you don't know about, you know, the tech overreach and surveillance capabilities, then you should probably find out.
[01:11:07]  But when Greenwald is there, when Greenwald, Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras are there interviewing Snowden at this hotel in Hong Kong, he's like, hold on.
[01:11:18]  And, you know, they're interviewing him.
[01:11:20]  He's under a blanket.
[01:11:21]  Everyone's phone is in the mini fridge.
[01:11:23]  Yeah.
[01:11:24]  He's unplugged everything.
[01:11:26]  Yeah.
[01:11:26]  And it really like impresses on you, oh shit, I don't know shit about OPSEC.
[01:11:31]  Well, here's the thing.
[01:11:32]  If you are, like, I know a lot of people use like Signal to talk to other people or something like that.
[01:11:36]  If you're actually having a face-to-face meeting with another person, first of all, have it near no things that can transmit or be transmitted.
[01:11:43]  And get yourself a Faraday case, which is a case that blocks.
[01:11:47]  I have a bunch at home.
[01:11:48]  And I have one with me right now.
[01:11:50]  It blocks everything coming in and out of your phone.
[01:11:53]  So put your phone in a Faraday case and put it in the other room.
[01:11:56]  I think the fridge thing works too.
[01:11:57]  I've had a lot of things the other day.
[01:11:59]  Remember, you gave it to me and put my phone in, and then you called it.
[01:12:02]  And it's a great magic trick to impress women, too.
[01:12:07]  Check out this magical case I bought.
[01:12:09]  Take a purse.
[01:12:09]  You know, I found it a little impressive.
[01:12:11]  There we go, baby.
[01:12:13]  Okay.

=== Block Transmissions (01:26) ===

[01:12:14]  So we're coming back.
[01:12:15]  We got more.
[01:12:17]  Like we said, we got a lot more to talk about with Ben.
[01:12:20]  We got to actually storm.
[01:12:22]  And think of our next episode as the Iraq War.
[01:12:25]  Yeah, Iraqi Freedom.
[01:12:26]  And then we'll have a surge.
[01:12:28]  Yeah.
[01:12:31]  Yeah.
[01:12:31]  So there's so much more to get into.
[01:12:33]  I'm, yeah, like I said, I got a lot of tinfoil hats to put on.
[01:12:38]  Yeah.
[01:12:38]  I am really about to go off.
[01:12:40]  I think this is the most reading I've done for an episode because I know all the Epstein stuff really well.
[01:12:46]  So this is like, and I know this stuff too, but there's so much of it.
[01:12:52]  Like, there's like the anthrax guys, letters, and all that stuff.
[01:12:54]  And I have to, like, I start going down one thing.
[01:12:57]  I have to get into everything.
[01:12:58]  It's very, I've been, I'll tell you what, have not had a lot of social conduct contact in the past week.
[01:13:04]  This is why that rules, though.
[01:13:06]  Yeah, I know.
[01:13:07]  Keep me off the streets.
[01:13:09]  Well, thank you so much for another.
[01:13:12]  Well, I'm not really, you know what?
[01:13:13]  I'm not thanking you guys.
[01:13:15]  We did all the work.
[01:13:17]  Thank you guys.
[01:13:19]  Okay, okay.
[01:13:19]  I think that I'd like to thank you guys for doing this with me.
[01:13:22]  Thanks, Brace.
[01:13:23]  Yeah.
[01:13:24]  Don't say my name on here.
[01:13:25]  Okay.
[01:13:26]  Well, I'm Liz.
[01:13:26]  My name is Mikhail Gorbachev.
[01:13:29]  We are joined, of course, by my faithful sat-rap, who is in charge of large swaths of Southwest Asia, Young Chomsky.
[01:13:38]  And we are Truanon.
[01:13:39]  Yeah, we'll see you next time.