True Anon Truth Feed - [9/11 Week] Episode 98: Bush Did 9/11 (Part 4)
Aired: 2020-09-11
Duration: 01:41:08


=== Truanon's Neurotropic Joke (04:05) ===

[00:00:00]  Liz, baby, we got to start selling fucking supplements.
[00:00:04]  That's the Belden program.
[00:00:05]  The Belden program.
[00:00:06]  Well, Belden program is financed solely by supplement sales.
[00:00:09]  But yeah, we gotta, we gotta.
[00:00:11]  You heard of this shit, Ginkgo Bulboa?
[00:00:14]  What?
[00:00:15]  Ninko Boloba.
[00:00:16]  Baloba?
[00:00:17]  Well, I guess it's not working then.
[00:00:19]  It fucking, it's a, it's like a, it's a natural neuotropic, apparently.
[00:00:24]  The what?
[00:00:25]  Newotropic.
[00:00:26]  I'm sorry, what was it?
[00:00:27]  No, ootropics.
[00:00:29]  Like neotropic.
[00:00:30]  I'm not doing a bit here.
[00:00:32]  I really, if I'm mispronouncing any of these things, it is not a problem.
[00:00:35]  It really didn't look like that's what you were trying to say.
[00:00:37]  No tropic.
[00:00:38]  Well, it's just like a no tropic.
[00:00:41]  You know, like it's like a guy.
[00:00:42]  Isn't it neutropics?
[00:00:44]  New tropics.
[00:00:45]  Yeah.
[00:00:47]  It is, it's like a brain pill.
[00:00:49]  Like if you take it, you're smarter.
[00:00:51]  But it doesn't the kind that cows take?
[00:00:55]  No.
[00:00:55]  Moo-tropic.
[00:01:10]  Oh man, I've been looking forward to this for so long.
[00:01:24]  Me too.
[00:01:25]  I mean, for Christ's sake, I've been looking forward to it.
[00:01:26]  I can't remember when we did the last episodes, but I don't think it was on 9-11.
[00:01:31]  Was it?
[00:01:31]  Did we do those last September?
[00:01:33]  No.
[00:01:34]  Okay.
[00:01:34]  I have no, I can't believe it's September right now.
[00:01:37]  I have no idea.
[00:01:38]  I know.
[00:01:38]  It's so weird.
[00:01:38]  What is going on with that?
[00:01:40]  Before we get into it, hello.
[00:01:42]  I'm Liz.
[00:01:43]  I refuse to introduce myself.
[00:01:45]  Okay.
[00:01:45]  Well, that's Brace.
[00:01:47]  We are also, of course, joined by Young Chomsky.
[00:01:50]  And this is 9-11 week on True Anon.
[00:01:55]  Hello.
[00:01:56]  Hello.
[00:01:57]  We are.
[00:01:59]  So actually, I do want to say, I want to preface this with, if you have not listened to all of the other 9-11, 9-11, 9-11 episodes we've done, do not listen to this one.
[00:02:13]  Turn this off.
[00:02:14]  It's not going to make any sense.
[00:02:15]  I understand.
[00:02:16]  You might have even listened to those a while ago.
[00:02:18]  Maybe give them another listen because this is really the fourth installment, meaning you should have listened to the other three installments.
[00:02:25]  Yeah, actually, you know how people do that joke?
[00:02:26]  Like, if I haven't seen the third one, do I need to see, you know what I mean?
[00:02:30]  Or if I haven't seen the first one, can I see the third?
[00:02:32]  You know, and they make a little joke about it.
[00:02:34]  This sounds hot.
[00:02:36]  Whatever.
[00:02:37]  All I'm saying is, actually, this isn't a joke.
[00:02:40]  And no, if you haven't listened to the other ones, you got to do it before you listen to this because it's not going to make any sense.
[00:02:46]  Yeah.
[00:02:47]  Can you do that girl's voice again?
[00:02:48]  No.
[00:02:49]  Okay.
[00:02:50]  Yeah, it's not going to make a lot of sense to you.
[00:02:53]  And, you know, sometimes even my co-host might be mean to you if you do something.
[00:02:58]  Yeah, this is Truanon, where we tell you to turn off our podcast.
[00:03:04]  All right, without further ado, we are joined by the one and only Truanon 9-11 consultant.
[00:03:10]  Ooh, consultant.
[00:03:11]  That sounds, that's a very 9-11 word.
[00:03:13]  Yeah.
[00:03:14]  Ben, aka Housetrotter.
[00:03:17]  Let's roll the tape, sweet art.
[00:03:18]  Let's go.
[00:03:33]  Take off the black bags, exit the electrodes from all points of the body, and lower the prisoners because we are back.
[00:03:45]  We have today something of a syncretic episode.
[00:03:50]  And that is to say that longtime listeners will remember our 9-11 mini-series with our fellow researcher Ben and our Spider Network series, which has had a whole bunch of different guests on it.

=== Syncretic Episode Revealed (15:43) ===

[00:04:05]  But many people haven't yet put together the fact that these are actually the same series.
[00:04:11]  And so today, for the week of 9-11, 9-11 week, we're calling it, we have returning with us Ben, an independent researcher that's at Housetrotter on Twitter, here to talk about the swamp that birthed 9-11 and the swamp creatures that did it.
[00:04:30]  Ben, how are you doing?
[00:04:32]  I'm doing pretty good.
[00:04:32]  How are you guys?
[00:04:34]  Good.
[00:04:34]  We're so happy to have you back.
[00:04:36]  Oh, I am thrumming, Ben.
[00:04:40]  I am electric because we are combining many things, which I greatly enjoy talking about.
[00:04:48]  Yeah, I'm doing the many points of light, George H.W. Bush.
[00:04:51]  It's all just intersecting.
[00:04:53]  It's everything.
[00:04:54]  It's coming together.
[00:04:55]  You know, people, I will say, like, reading this kind of stuff, people don't give the far right credit enough just for how intersectional it is.
[00:05:04]  Absolutely.
[00:05:05]  I mean, you've got all kinds of different Europeans.
[00:05:09]  You know, it's a real melting pot.
[00:05:12]  I mean, where else could you get Catholics and Al-Qaeda and my people?
[00:05:19]  I mean, we're all there, baby.
[00:05:21]  It's really the first movement.
[00:05:24]  It's the first thing that really brought everyone in the world together to do 9-11.
[00:05:31]  So start us off here, baby.
[00:05:33]  What are we working with?
[00:05:35]  Well, I think one of the, you know, I hate ascribing 9-11 to like one particular group, but I think if we could slice off one little piece of the power network that this is, it would be Lecerque, or I just call it the Circle because I'm an American.
[00:05:52]  But this group is a very interesting one.
[00:05:54]  It's a whole lot of different right-wing politicians with connections to this Nazi spider network.
[00:06:01]  It's a lot of people in finance in the United States.
[00:06:04]  It's a very interesting network of people that definitely was at least one of the groups that did 9-11.
[00:06:09]  Yeah, so this is a group that we've teased on the show before, or we've referenced them in various episodes over the past year, but we've actually never done a proper deep dive into who exactly they are.
[00:06:27]  And I mean, you know, kind of like how we were talking in the Spider Network series is they're pretty much one of the major kind of post-war private global intelligence elite organizations that have shaped the post-war world, the second half of the 20th century.
[00:06:51]  Yeah, I think to me, like the really interesting thing about the Circle is there's a wonderful book by David Teacher called Rogue Agents, which took him a long time to get published.
[00:07:02]  And once you read it, you can kind of see why.
[00:07:05]  That does a pretty good job of kind of laying down the background of Le Cirque.
[00:07:08]  And that's a lot to get into today.
[00:07:12]  But it's interesting to note that it came out of the pan-European movement, which was at the beginning of the 20th century a relatively fresh movement.
[00:07:20]  A guy named Richard Nicholas Agiro wrote the Pan-Europa Manifesto.
[00:07:27]  And this guy himself is a really interesting character.
[00:07:29]  He is a half-Japanese, half-Austrian, Austrian count.
[00:07:35]  And this really took off among certain parts of the nobility this idea of a European, a pan-European superstate.
[00:07:43]  And at first, like this was this was like a just, I mean, pretty much big among the nobility.
[00:07:48]  But as you can see, like after World War II, obviously, I mean, people still are very much into this idea.
[00:07:55]  But that sort of milieu, and there was a lot of these such groups, like various pan-European groups kind of floating around Europe in the pre-war era.
[00:08:05]  And then, you know, World War I happened, World War II happened, and things started to change a little bit.
[00:08:12]  Yeah, I mean, I think like the particularly the, you mentioned like the Catholic part, like there's a lot of different ideologies that play into this.
[00:08:20]  Like one of them is sort of the Catholic nobility wanting to reunite Europe and the old Austro-Hungarian Empire and, you know, sort of make this Catholic European superstate.
[00:08:32]  On the other hand, there's also like ex-Nazis and sort of fascist collaborators within the various governments who are basically tolerated and sometimes were quite powerful who wanted to continue this project on.
[00:08:49]  And it kind of reminds me of people like Paul Schaefer are like kind of the lower end of this scale.
[00:08:55]  But these are people like, you know, one of the Le Cirque founders was Antoine Panay, who had been a collaborationist in the Vichy government in France.
[00:09:03]  You know, people like this who at a very elite level were part of the, not necessarily Nazis, but very much willing to collaborate with fascists if it advanced their career.
[00:09:14]  And that's kind of what they continued to do after the war.
[00:09:17]  Yeah, with Penne in particular, I think this is Penet who I'm talking about.
[00:09:21]  If not, it might be his right-hand man, Jean Violet.
[00:09:25]  But I believe one of them was part of a group called La Kagul, which was, I mean, like we've talked about in the Spider Network series, the 30s, the 20s and 30s, and sort of little got supplanted by World War II.
[00:09:39]  But the 20s and 30s especially, Europe was rife with these.
[00:09:43]  And America, for that matter, too, was rife with these sort of mystic nationalist fascist organizations.
[00:09:51]  And La Kagul in particular, it means the cowl.
[00:09:54]  I know I'm not pronouncing it correctly, but hey, fucking sue me.
[00:09:58]  And these guys, much like the theme murderers that we talked about in Germany, they would wear these cowls over their head.
[00:10:04]  They would meet and sort of have these ritualistic meetings.
[00:10:08]  It was all really neo-Masonic.
[00:10:09]  And you see the Masonic influence.
[00:10:11]  And I know what you're all thinking.
[00:10:13]  I'm not like a Masons guy.
[00:10:15]  But these guys are just budget Masons in terms of rituals and stuff.
[00:10:19]  And I mean, that even continues on after the war.
[00:10:22]  But La Kagul, they would commit terrorist attacks.
[00:10:25]  I mean, a lot of it really mirrors sort of like the civil war between de Gaulle and the OAS after World War II.
[00:10:34]  But yeah, they would commit terrorist attacks.
[00:10:36]  And then a lot of them, some of them were very fiercely anti-German.
[00:10:39]  And then a lot of them also ended up collaborating.
[00:10:42]  Yeah, I mean, even the first, like very, the very first European economic integration was the steel and coal between France and Germany.
[00:10:51]  And there was that whole issue of how do we deal with the very industrial areas of Germany and were they going to suppress that?
[00:10:57]  And eventually, like these kind of this right-wing network was able to integrate West Germany completely into the rest of the European economy, which was definitely a huge part of their early goal.
[00:11:08]  Yeah.
[00:11:10]  So that brings us to Le Cirque.
[00:11:13]  That's sort of where that came from.
[00:11:15]  And tell us about exactly the origins of Le Cirque, like the specific ones.
[00:11:21]  Yeah, so it was really started up by Antoine Panay, who was, as I mentioned earlier, was a collaborationist with the Vichy government in France.
[00:11:31]  And he was later the prime minister in the early 50s.
[00:11:35]  So he was really the key person that brought this together.
[00:11:37]  Otto von Habsburg was also very closely involved.
[00:11:40]  Yeah, so there's definitely this aristocratic element to it.
[00:11:44]  And then Franz Josef Strauss, who was a defense minister in Germany.
[00:11:49]  He was a member of the Christian Social Union, I think is the name of the party, but basically a Christian Democrat party in Bavaria.
[00:11:58]  He was also a long time minister president of Bavaria, which is just bad vibes from Bavaria in general at this period for sure.
[00:12:08]  So these are really the key people in putting this together.
[00:12:11]  And obviously, this is a, you know, Habsburg is obviously very big in Austria.
[00:12:16]  Habsburg, I mean, people wanted Habsburg to be the king of Spain under Franco.
[00:12:21]  Like that was something that a lot of Opus Day people were pushing for.
[00:12:24]  So they also had big ties into Spain and Portugal at this time.
[00:12:28]  But they really proceeded to bring in, I mean, it was nominally a Catholic group and definitely it has a lot of overlap with Opus Day and stuff like that.
[00:12:37]  But obviously there are a lot of non-Catholics who are a part of it as well.
[00:12:41]  And they really used existing social networks, things like Masons, other groups like that, to kind of assemble this network of different people.
[00:12:52]  So that's really where it has its origins.
[00:12:55]  And then eventually, I mean, what it ends up becoming ultimately is, as you mentioned, sort of a private intelligence network composed of these elites who have access to state intelligence agencies, and they also create their own private intelligence agency called the 6I.
[00:13:13]  And they use this to get information.
[00:13:15]  Obviously, they're all various different heads of state, senior ministers.
[00:13:19]  So they're sharing information around and conspiring with one another to do various things across Europe, such as this network of right-wing groups that are committing terrorist attacks, false flag terrorist attacks across Europe, particularly starting in the 60s.
[00:13:35]  Yeah, so I mean, it does sort of emerge as, you know, we talk about the pan-Europa movement.
[00:13:43]  Obviously, the EU comes out of this, which is something that maybe we can get into later if we have time.
[00:13:49]  But also, you know, I mean, basically they saw after the war that a way to re-strengthen Europe after the decimation of World War II was in a French-German partnership.
[00:14:01]  And de Gaulle made that really difficult.
[00:14:04]  And we've sort of talked about that a little bit and the kind of, you know, behind the scenes war in France that de Gaulle kind of faced with the intelligence groups.
[00:14:16]  But as that they're kind of strengthening that partnership, there is a point where this extends beyond Europe and the United States gets involved.
[00:14:25]  And that's when Lecerque gets much bigger, it seems.
[00:14:31]  And its goals then are not so much just about strengthening the industrial production of Europe and securing certain profits for elites and managing kind of, you know, you know, various communist parties, which we'll get into that too.
[00:14:51]  But also becomes like a real like, you know, global partnership across the Atlantic.
[00:14:58]  Yeah, I mean, particularly in France, you know, in Germany, their main person was Franz Joseph Strauss.
[00:15:05]  And his political career kind of peaked and then fell.
[00:15:08]  You know, Penne was by far the most powerful person they had in France and his career also sort of peaked in the 50s.
[00:15:14]  He was still very well connected, but not as politically powerful.
[00:15:17]  And so this sort of Anglo-American group stepped in to kind of fill that gap.
[00:15:22]  So people like Brian Crozier, who had been sort of a propagandist for the British government during World War II.
[00:15:31]  On the American side, John McCain's dad was one of the early people that was part of this.
[00:15:37]  So it was this, it was these sort of things started to percolate between the United States and Britain, and particularly when Bill Casey became a Lucerque member.
[00:15:49]  And as that kind of H.W. Bush clique of people climbed up, particularly in the Ford years, but obviously especially in the Reagan years, that's when the American, I wouldn't say dominance, but definitely the U.S. element was much stronger at that point and the British element as well.
[00:16:07]  We should also mention that one of the biggest opponents or like one of the biggest foes of Lucerque, I guess I should just say the circle, but I'm like already accustomed to saying Lucerque.
[00:16:20]  I keep mixing them up.
[00:16:21]  I know.
[00:16:22]  I sound so stupid, but it's okay.
[00:16:25]  Was the Soviet Union.
[00:16:26]  And like, so it wasn't just that they wanted like to rebuild France and Germany.
[00:16:31]  Like it was an explicit anti-communist project, but also like vehemently trying to dismantle the Soviet Union.
[00:16:43]  I think like there's one incident which is to me like emblematic of just like part of the project that they were engaged in.
[00:16:51]  And this took place during the Nixon presidency.
[00:16:55]  And so Kissinger, friend of the pod, Henry Kissinger, and his good chum David Rockefeller had been going to Lucerque meetings.
[00:17:03]  The first Lucerque meeting actually in America was at the Rockefeller Center, which is insanely funny.
[00:17:08]  I assume it took place in some kind of boardroom and probably not the main stage or anything like that.
[00:17:14]  But at one point, David Rockefeller is handed a document by a group called Sint Unum, which is a Latin word, a pair of Latin words that I know the definition of, but I'm just not telling you, called Study of Subversion Within the Catholic Church.
[00:17:31]  The document was in French.
[00:17:33]  Rockefeller gives it to Kissinger.
[00:17:36]  Kissinger has it translated by CIA translators, and then he hands it directly to Richard Nixon.
[00:17:44]  And so at this time, there was like, I'm no expert on American relations with the Holy See, but at this time there was some like controversy over whether there should be an American representative in the Vatican.
[00:17:55]  There hadn't been one, I think, since the 50s.
[00:17:58]  And this group was sort of trying to use that because there was a lot of pressure to put one back there.
[00:18:04]  There's also a lot of pressure to not put a representative there.
[00:18:09]  And so this group, Sint Unum, looked like they were trying to sort of play on that.
[00:18:15]  They were claiming that there were two big nexuses of basically like subversion within the Catholic Church.
[00:18:21]  One came from the left, which they implied was financed by the Polish and Soviet governments.
[00:18:26]  And then one came in the form of modernist modernism.
[00:18:31]  That's all it was, modernism.
[00:18:34]  And they had very specific asks.
[00:18:36]  They asked to fund a science magazine in Montreal.
[00:18:40]  They asked to fund a magazine, a bi-weekly magazine for bishops.
[00:18:44]  They asked for quite a lot of basically funds for propaganda, $13.4 million.
[00:18:51]  Unfortunately, well, excuse me, I shouldn't say unfortunately.
[00:18:55]  In reality, Sint Unum was actually Lucerque and was headed by the head of the fiat group, a guy named Carlos Pacenti.
[00:19:06]  And this is just like one tiny glimpse at what these guys were up to.
[00:19:14]  And the ease which these guys have of giving this document over, because when in reality, what this is, is a document requesting funds for right-wing church groups.
[00:19:21]  And that is rather strange that that's making it onto the president's desk.
[00:19:27]  They actually, Kissinger advised against it, possibly because they had some even further right church groups they had to fund or something.
[00:19:34]  Or they're always like, we're already giving you guys a bunch of money.
[00:19:37]  But it's just, for some reason, that to me is like a very sort of telling example.
[00:19:42]  Yeah, I mean, that was a huge part of what they did was just anti-communist propaganda basically everywhere across Europe and the United States.

=== Train Station Tension (10:12) ===

[00:19:48]  I mean, they were very close with the Heritage Foundation in the United States.
[00:19:52]  Both of the founders were Lucerque members.
[00:19:54]  So obviously they're pushing tons of just generally right-wing propaganda as well in the United States.
[00:20:02]  It was a huge element of what they did.
[00:20:04]  Yeah, also, Mika Brzezinski's father was a member, which, very cool.
[00:20:24]  So, you can't really mention secret organizations in Europe without mentioning the most secret and the most organized of these organizations, which would be, well, Gladio wasn't an organization, it was a project, but which would be, to term it in modern language.
[00:20:39]  the Gladio movement.
[00:20:42]  And from what I understand, that had quite a lot of overlap with Lacerque.
[00:20:48]  In fact, in my head, you kind of can't really separate any of this stuff.
[00:20:52]  It seems to be all totally incestual in the same thing.
[00:20:56]  Yeah, I mean, if you talk about like Italian Gladio, which is obviously kind of the prototypical Gladio, you know, Andriotti, who was the defense minister of Italy, he was actually the person who revealed the existence of Gladio to the world.
[00:21:11]  He basically, you know, published this.
[00:21:13]  He got in front of parliament actually and was basically like, yeah, we had this secret army and, you know, wasn't that so great?
[00:21:19]  And he, you know, this kind of gets into the Mason connection, but there was this Masonic Lodge in Italy that was organizing these right-wing terrorist attacks.
[00:21:28]  And the intention in Italy was to make sure that the communists and the socialists were not able to win very many votes in the elections, to generally sort of neutralize the further left, the more militant left-wing movements that were active in Italy at this time, and to just generally create an atmosphere of sort of tension, political tension, which the right-wing in particular could exploit to maintain political control over Italy.
[00:21:54]  So they, I mean, they basically, what they did was they funded right-wing Italian militias.
[00:22:00]  Some of the people had been fascists.
[00:22:02]  Some of them were just neo-fascist.
[00:22:04]  But all of them were right-wing.
[00:22:07]  They got access to these weapons caches, which they would use to, for example, bomb a bunch of police officers or bomb a train station, bomb a piazza, kill a ton of people.
[00:22:19]  I mean, by the standards of the day, it was very significant political violence to kill 80 people in a train station.
[00:22:27]  Obviously, their false flags got a lot more elaborate and larger over the years.
[00:22:32]  But this is where they got their start.
[00:22:34]  So in Italy, to speak of the Italian example in particular, this connection with Andriotti is pretty clear.
[00:22:39]  I mean, he's a very frequent Lucerque member interacting with people who are organizing precisely the same kinds of operations in Belgium, in West Germany, in Portugal, all over Europe.
[00:22:51]  They're organizing these right-wing.
[00:22:54]  I mean, you could call it, you guys called it civil war in the French context.
[00:22:57]  And that was a little bit different, but I think it kind of was.
[00:22:59]  It was sort of a low-level civil war that was managed by the European elite for their political ends.
[00:23:06]  Yeah, and this spread all over Europe.
[00:23:10]  I mean, they were still finding arms caches like within the last couple decades that had been buried in Switzerland and places like that.
[00:23:17]  And like, you know, we talk about Gladio, but I believe Gladio was really only the name of the Italian operation.
[00:23:23]  But there were these separate but intersectional operations going on in every country.
[00:23:28]  I mean, there's a lot of talk about that's where Detroit came from.
[00:23:32]  It's how Olaf Palm was killed.
[00:23:35]  And it's really astounding just how organized they were with these stay-behind armies because they did create these large stay-behind armies.
[00:23:43]  But these were, they needed to put these to a use because the Soviets weren't exactly invading.
[00:23:50]  you know, this strategy of tension that they used in Italy was replicated on different scales in different places too.
[00:23:56]  I mean, certainly in Turkey, one could make the comparison there.
[00:24:01]  And this fascist bombing, I mean, there was almost the Italian, you know, sort of neo-post-war neo-fascist tried to coup the Italian government in a really half-assed way in 1971, led by the Black Prince, which, you know, the guy sucks and all, but got to respect the nickname.
[00:24:21]  And like, it was, it was really like, no holds barred.
[00:24:26]  I mean, and that's like, that's kind of what I want to impress upon people is because I don't think that I know a single person who listens to this podcast who would be like, oh yeah, of course, the Bologna train station bombing, false flag.
[00:24:40]  But for some reason, like, this is what I want to say is that this is like the same kind of operation by the same kind of group.
[00:24:48]  In fact, the same operation by the same group.
[00:24:51]  And like that, that's what I want people to kind of put together.
[00:24:54]  Yeah, this is an, I just want to read really quick from an excerpt of just one of the memos that was found.
[00:25:02]  It's a headquarters of a press office in Portugal, but it was basically the headquarters for the Portuguese State Behind Network.
[00:25:09]  I think this is from like 74, 75.
[00:25:12]  So they would have been controlled by, again, same group, Lucerque, but also really NATO is like another big, big force here that we maybe will get into.
[00:25:24]  We don't talk enough about them, by the way.
[00:25:26]  Just making a little mental note of my energy.
[00:25:28]  Oh, we have a sponsorship issue, but.
[00:25:32]  Yeah, this podcast gets Atlantic Council money, right?
[00:25:35]  Oh, yeah, absolutely.
[00:25:36]  I understand what's wrong with the Atlantic Ocean.
[00:25:39]  I haven't looked into it further than that.
[00:25:40]  Yeah, protect the seas.
[00:25:42]  I'm all about that.
[00:25:43]  What's wrong with being Atlanticists?
[00:25:44]  I want to find Atlanta.
[00:25:46]  Atlantis.
[00:25:48]  So this is an excerpt from one of the memos.
[00:25:50]  And so you'll see how explicit this is.
[00:25:52]  They write, our belief is that the first phase of political activity ought to create the conditions favoring the installation of chaos in all the regime structures.
[00:26:01]  This should necessarily begin with the undermining of the state economy so as to arrive at confusion through the whole legal apparatus.
[00:26:08]  This leads on to a situation of strong political tension, fear in the world of industry and hostility toward the government and the political parties.
[00:26:16]  In our view, the first move we should make is to destroy the structure of the democratic state under the cover of communist and pro-Chinese activities.
[00:26:24]  Moreover, we have people who have infiltrated these groups, and obviously we will have to tailor our actions to the ethos of the milieu.
[00:26:31]  Propaganda and action of a sort which will seem to have emanated from our communist adversaries and pressure brought to bear on people in whom power is invested at every level.
[00:26:42]  That will create a feeling of hostility toward those who threaten the people of each and every nation.
[00:26:47]  And at the same time, we must raise up a defender of the citizenry against the disintegration brought about by terrorism and subversion.
[00:26:56]  So, like, I mean, they're like explicit, like, you know, again, this is something that we try to emphasize in the podcast in various episodes.
[00:27:03]  And I feel like it's going to be a continuing point that we are going to try and drive home.
[00:27:08]  But, like, these people are incredibly organized, incredibly strategic, and are carrying things out with incredible discipline across the globe for decades.
[00:27:22]  And their propaganda network is so incredible: while they are in the process of subverting the European, the Western European political process, all that they're doing is producing a propaganda that accuses the Soviet Union of doing that to the West and just straight up making things up, creating this with this propaganda, this political environment where you would be primed to see left-wing bombings, right?
[00:27:52]  In this media environment where all of these elites are telling you, yeah, the Soviets are trying to subvert our democracy.
[00:27:59]  You know, those people are in the headspace so that when, for example, a supposedly left-wing group bombs a train station, they believe that, even though it doesn't make any sense.
[00:28:07]  And obviously, it's actually a right-wing group that's controlled by the state.
[00:28:11]  Yeah, and that propaganda is so strong and so lasting that even supposed liberal left editors of supposed liberal left magazines will continue to propagate such propaganda pieces as recent as just a couple days ago.
[00:28:28]  Well, for instance, I think that one thing that this all really impresses on someone is that the people that we're talking about are basically capable of incredible evil.
[00:28:42]  I doubt many listeners of this show would bomb a train station full of innocent people.
[00:28:49]  I doubt most people in the world would.
[00:28:52]  And the fact that there is absolutely no qualm about doing any of this kind of stuff, but in fact, this is a chosen tactic.
[00:28:59]  I mean, there's the Brabant massacres in Belgium.
[00:29:04]  There's Marc Detroit.
[00:29:07]  There's all of the violence that took place in, I mean, because of course the South American network is also intersected with this.
[00:29:14]  I mean, what this amounted was to was like, in some parts of the world, like a small scale or sometimes large scale genocide.
[00:29:22]  And in other parts of the world, where they couldn't get away with stuff like that, like in Italy, you know, it's targeted assassinations and just the total smearing of the left.
[00:29:31]  And you know what?
[00:29:32]  It worked.
[00:29:33]  You know, like that's the thing I think a lot of people understand.
[00:29:35]  It's like this wasn't just like a conflict that was frozen in time.
[00:29:38]  Like people think of this as like one front in the Cold War, but like this was a victorious battle in the Cold War.
[00:29:44]  And they haven't finished fighting it because they're not actually fighting an enemy here.
[00:29:49]  They're like, they're fighting, they're fighting basically the ideas of land, bred freedom, whatever.
[00:29:57]  That is what they're fighting.
[00:29:59]  And so there's no end to it ever.

=== Rockefeller's Role in Private Intelligence (16:00) ===

[00:30:01]  Well, one person we just briefly mentioned, but I think we need to spend some time on is Rockefeller because he's like a really big figure in the U.S., basically the U.S. partnership with this group, Lucerque, and various kind of iterations that it grows into.
[00:30:21]  And, you know, I like paused for a second when you said that the first meeting was at Rockefeller Center because all I could think of was like fucking Alec Baldwin, like 30 rock, but it being like one of the most sinister, most important like meetings in American history on this fucking like sitcom backdrop was just like kind of making me feel a little sick and dizzy.
[00:30:44]  But David Rockefeller, a big figure in American politics that doesn't get mentioned enough, I think, surprisingly.
[00:30:53]  Yeah, I think people associate him with, there's a lot of people who don't take, for example, the CFR or groups like that very seriously.
[00:31:01]  Yeah.
[00:31:02]  Council on foreign relations, just yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:31:06]  Who, I mean, basically run American foreign policy more or less.
[00:31:09]  I mean, that's a broad group.
[00:31:11]  That's a large lot of people, but the elite among that group definitely run American foreign policy.
[00:31:16]  And obviously, that's very closely, you know, Rockefeller basically created this group post-war.
[00:31:23]  So it's not surprising that he would intersect with a lot of the same people who were doing this in Europe.
[00:31:31]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:31:32]  Yeah, but he's basically known as like a, I love when people just call billionaires philanthropists.
[00:31:38]  I think that's how you learn about Rockefeller.
[00:31:40]  Oh, he's just a well, if you've got a foundation, I mean, like Ford, I think of Ford as nothing less than a philanthropist who funds many important left-wing groups.
[00:31:52]  It's in keeping with Ford's lifelong tradition to socialism.
[00:31:56]  Anyways, but like Rockefeller, if I'm not mistaken, built the World Trade Center.
[00:32:02]  He sure did.
[00:32:03]  Yes.
[00:32:03]  It was going to be the crown jewel of Manhattan and it was for a long time.
[00:32:07]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:32:09]  It was funny.
[00:32:10]  Researching this, I actually found out that the Twin Towers were at one point named David and Nelson.
[00:32:17]  I did not know that.
[00:32:19]  Yes.
[00:32:20]  And that was from a few different sources too, which that is one of those, and I've talked about this before, but this can't even be a synchronicity because they did 9-11, but like it's just one of those things that I read and I get an electric feeling in me.
[00:32:36]  I really, I liked reading it.
[00:32:38]  There's a photo of David Rockefeller standing next to a small scale model of the towers.
[00:32:43]  And it's just like a real just mind-melled moment where you're like, oh, this is all just one thing.
[00:32:51]  And they've tried to like, and I think Brian Crozier wrote like some really sort of PC memoirs about his life.
[00:33:00]  And he's tried to portray, it's called something agents, I can't remember.
[00:33:05]  I know teacher's book Rogue Agents is sort of like a poke of poking fun at his title.
[00:33:10]  Yes.
[00:33:11]  Yeah.
[00:33:12]  And he basically just describes Lecerque as like just a discussion group between people who like Western countries.
[00:33:19]  Yeah.
[00:33:19]  Yeah.
[00:33:20]  He tried to say that there was not even a membership list, really, that they just sort of invited people on a whim, I guess.
[00:33:26]  But very clearly, there's a membership list of people.
[00:33:30]  Yeah, Crozier wrote that memoir.
[00:33:32]  And actually Rockefeller in his memoir, I think first off, so he got involved because Pacenti invited him.
[00:33:40]  Pacenti was this big, Carlos Pacenti was this big financier in Italy, one of the wealthiest people in Italy.
[00:33:46]  And he was a big client of Rockefeller's big client at JP Mortgage.
[00:33:51]  And so he invited Rockefeller.
[00:33:54]  And this is what Rockefeller says, that he went to a few meetings, but that people were worried because this was a very far right wing group and it would look bad if he stayed a member of this group, which I just think is so, whether it's true or not that he did actually leave at this time, it's just very funny that there's people further right-wing than Rockefeller that you can't associate with.
[00:34:17]  Whenever I read about him, I always do remember that cocaine ship that got seized with $1.3 billion cocaine that we really didn't hear much about besides that.
[00:34:28]  And for some reason, I feel like we're not going to.
[00:34:31]  Whenever I think about that, I always think about the ones we just haven't heard of.
[00:34:36]  The ones that were successful were never seized.
[00:34:39]  Any enterprising merchant mariners out there, hit our line.
[00:34:59]  So Rockefeller is actually the one who brings Nixon into the fold, right?
[00:35:04]  Like he's the one who makes that connection.
[00:35:07]  And a lot of that, again, just to mention our buddies, my understanding is that a lot of that had to do with basically Nixon.
[00:35:15]  So again, you know, Kissinger is his national security advisor and Rockefeller brings in Kissinger, brings in Nixon.
[00:35:23]  And a lot of this had to do with basically wanting to strengthen U.S. ties with NATO and with the European NATO countries and using these CERC meetings as a kind of intermediary for anything more kind of, I guess, above the board or formal in that way.
[00:35:41]  So it was kind of like a, he was like kind of a weird like conduit between Lucerque and the Nixon administration.
[00:35:48]  Yeah, definitely, especially in light of the fact that, you know, often there were conflicts about sort of with this Rockefeller American foreign policy.
[00:35:58]  There ended up being conflicts with that within the American political system.
[00:36:01]  So I think it kind of had this, the, what it ended up being is kind of a Trojan horse where a lot of the right wing in Europe ended up advancing, for example, Reagan in the United States in the 80s.
[00:36:16]  And, you know, I don't mean to portray the ruling elite as sort of fractured or anything like that.
[00:36:21]  They definitely have very common goals, but there are definitely different tactics or sort of different strategies that people think are the best ones to use.
[00:36:28]  And this sort of Kissinger faction of people gets pushed out in part because of this Lucerque group having an influence on American politics and advancing that sort of Bush and in the UK, Thatcher as well.
[00:36:44]  Yeah.
[00:36:45]  Another group you mentioned was 6I.
[00:36:48]  And I feel like we should kind of explain a little bit of that.
[00:36:51]  I don't want anyone to get confused.
[00:36:53]  That's not five eyes, which is the...
[00:36:56]  They lost an eye.
[00:36:58]  yeah no this is like Paul Schaefer style yeah uh This is like six, the number six, I, the letter I, but is separate and a much earlier kind of iteration of intelligence operations than what, you know, from the Snowden revelations on the Five Eyes agreement between the five countries.
[00:37:21]  But 6I was kind of like, I mean, I don't know the best way to put it.
[00:37:28]  Ben, you're probably better with this than I am.
[00:37:29]  But I mean, I would say that it's basically like, you know, and this is something we mentioned on the Spider Network series too, is that you have to understand that Vietnam and Watergate were a huge headache for the intell like all intelligence agencies and like that stuff coming and Congress basically trying to reassert a kind of like political role by providing oversight and you know hearings and however controlled that was, it was still like a total headache for them.
[00:37:58]  And what basically kind of emerged out of that was then, okay, well, how can we have like a more privatized CIA operation, right?
[00:38:06]  How can we have a more privatized intelligence group?
[00:38:10]  Which is a funny thing to say when you're talking about basically a group kind of acting above the CIA in even more secret.
[00:38:17]  But that's kind of what 6I was about, right?
[00:38:22]  Do you think that's a fair assessment?
[00:38:24]  Yeah, definitely.
[00:38:25]  Because you mentioned like all these commissions that were happening in the U.S.
[00:38:29]  And, you know, definitely the CIA was still up to a lot of shenanigans during this period, but they definitely felt hamstrung.
[00:38:36]  And they definitely, I think, it scared them, the idea that Congress would try to stop them.
[00:38:41]  So they created a bunch of different networks to try to get around this.
[00:38:43]  One was to use the intelligence agencies.
[00:38:46]  We talked about like the United States, the CIA's relationship with the Saudi intelligence agency, GID and ISI, the Pakistani service, obviously involved in like all the all the mujahideen stuff.
[00:38:57]  So they created that kind of network, the Safari Club network.
[00:39:00]  But the 6I was another angle to take it from.
[00:39:05]  So it was basically, it was a lot of British industrialists.
[00:39:09]  It was run by Brian Crozier, who was this, I guess he was mostly a propagandist is what you would call him.
[00:39:15]  Like he worked for the foreign office, the British Foreign Office during World War II, making propaganda.
[00:39:23]  And basically, how this privatization process started, at least in this case, was that Crozier had this propaganda network operation that was running within the British government, and it was producing anti-communist propaganda for the British government to use against the Soviet Union.
[00:39:41]  And people did not like this.
[00:39:42]  There were liberals in British society who were sort of upset at the idea that the British government was pushing a particular political line.
[00:39:50]  So Crozier basically got fired and had to start a private group that would do exactly the same thing.
[00:39:55]  And he went out and got funding from industrialists.
[00:39:59]  And that's sort of how he ended up intersecting with LCERC, was that he was going to be their propagandist.
[00:40:03]  So that was basically the role that he served.
[00:40:06]  But yeah, as you mentioned, when we get into the 70s, when these intelligence agencies start to at least feel scared, feel like they need another route to do this kind of stuff, stuff like the 6I gets formed.
[00:40:19]  And it's basically, so there are groups like Kroll that we'll talk about that are actual registered licensed companies.
[00:40:27]  So 6I is not that.
[00:40:28]  It's still a private group.
[00:40:29]  It has to operate through fronts.
[00:40:31]  Crozier has plenty of publishing houses as fronts that he used for this purpose to pay people.
[00:40:37]  And so because Crozier was running Lacerque, which was this organization of a lot of very prominent right-wing politicians in Europe and in the United States, now he's got these connections where he's getting requests from people about information that he can give them.
[00:40:53]  And he's also getting information from all of these different contacts.
[00:40:57]  And so it ends up being with Crozier and a few other people at the top, it ends up being sort of an information clearinghouse and also ultimately because of that, a way to plan different kinds of operations.
[00:41:11]  So this network gets used, for example, in Iran towards the end of the Shah, Shah's reign in the late 70s, they sort of set up this propaganda and spy operation within Iran, but even to manipulating elections in Britain.
[00:41:27]  I mean, they helped get Thatcher elected.
[00:41:28]  Right.
[00:41:29]  And they did this in Latin America.
[00:41:30]  And Reagan.
[00:41:31]  Absolutely.
[00:41:32]  Yes.
[00:41:32]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:41:33]  You know, and they did this by making propaganda, putting it out through channels like the Heritage Foundation in the United States, and also spying, just spying on politicians, spying on ordinary people in order to get information that would be useful to their movement.
[00:41:47]  They had a pretty, didn't they forge an early relationship with Murdoch?
[00:41:52]  That's like my understanding is that Murdoch and Roy Cohn kind of like got in when they're pushing Reagan specifically, but also in terms of helping Murdoch kind of grow his businesses, obviously.
[00:42:08]  So it's like kind of working in tandem at the same time.
[00:42:13]  They had some involvement too with the Sandinistas as well.
[00:42:17]  Yeah, I don't even know much about their Contra stuff, but I'm sure that there's a lot of fun.
[00:42:22]  All these guys come all back together with Contra.
[00:42:25]  It's always fun.
[00:42:26]  It's like the whole gang's there.
[00:42:31]  Yeah, I think once we see in the late 60s, 70s, I mean, really, it started kind of in the early mid-60s.
[00:42:39]  I know we've talked about the pallading group before on the show, which was Otto Scorzeni's sort of joint enterprise with, I believe, a U.S. Army colonel in Spain, where Otto Scorzeni also had quite a large fascist group, CDAD, I think.
[00:42:55]  And they trained Green Berets in warfare.
[00:42:59]  I believe we talked about that in the last sort of Spider Network episode.
[00:43:03]  But that really, the ball really gets rolling with that in the post-Vietnam War era because we have these private intelligence agencies.
[00:43:11]  And to be clear, since people have been doing intelligence work, people have been doing intelligence work, let's say, off the books or is in an entrepreneurial manner.
[00:43:21]  But it really becomes formalized in the 60s and 70s.
[00:43:24]  And we have these groups that No longer are just doing like, you know, RAND Corporation style, you know, intelligence gathering, risk assessment or spying on people, but they actually start fielding their own armed troops.
[00:43:38]  Or or, you know, bringing out trainers to the field to to to, you know, find the next big Savimbi.
[00:43:45]  And but Savimbi, by the way, represented by some Trump's people too it's it's, it's really astounding.
[00:43:54]  Like that comes, like like we're talking about with Kroll.
[00:43:57]  You know that that they really are like emblematic of like, really the more like New York Manhattan version of this.
[00:44:04]  You know this.
[00:44:05]  This all goes on to layers.
[00:44:06]  You know there are some down and dirty fucking groups that will, you know, go cut someone's head off for you, but then there's like, these sort of Wall Street groups as well, of course, Wall Street where the CIA came from as well, but like it's it's, it's it's a level.
[00:44:20]  Yeah Ben, can you break down Kroll INC for us?
[00:44:23]  Yeah, so I think, I think that's a great context to put Kroll in, because it is, it is not like a normal, so it's nominally a normal company.
[00:44:31]  It's a registered, licensed company that, you know, lots of big corporations hire for various reasons you mentioned, like security consulting, and I mean a lot of it is is basically industrial espionage, that kind of thing as well, but it is.
[00:44:44]  It is a part of sort of, as you mentioned, like a range of different types of private intelligence corporations and they get into, you know, they have connections to the circle.
[00:44:55]  So so Lucerque is is, during this period, one of the big outlets, for Lucerque is in South Africa and trying to prop up the apartheid government in South Africa and of course, they had all kinds of propaganda and things that they would try to get Western politicians you know European and American politicians to support South Africa.
[00:45:15]  But they obviously also had military you know private military corporations that they were supporting and one of these was Kroll and this is where Kroll came into contact with, for example, the SAS.
[00:45:28]  A lot of former SAS people ended up forming these, these kinds of private military corporations, and these are the same kinds of people who go into Kroll.
[00:45:38]  So you know, like Kroll's CEO on 9-11 was an SAS vet, their deputy CEO, who I think became their their Iraq guy after the after the invasion.
[00:45:49]  He was also SAS, So it was, it's this, it's basically, you know, a nice cushy retirement for these operators, these people who are working for the government.

=== AIG's Complex Network (11:33) ===

[00:46:01]  And it basically gives elites access to the same, the same caliber thing that states have access to, but without some of the pesky oversight.
[00:46:12]  So it becomes very handy.
[00:46:13]  But then the other great thing about Kroll is that because they're a legit corporation, you can also hire them for your legit operations and give them a very nice front.
[00:46:22]  So for example, they start to run security for the World Trade Center complex after the 93 World Trade Center bombing.
[00:46:30]  So they're this very secretive, well-connected elite organization who are simultaneously a very clean, neat corporation that you can put in charge of your multi-billion dollar complex that's about to be hit by a terrorist attack.
[00:46:46]  Yeah, I think there's a couple things that are really indicative of Kroll's role in this sort of network.
[00:46:54]  I found a Businesswire article from 2004 called Kroll Launches High-Risk Securities Business Headed by Aleister Morrison.
[00:47:03]  Now, high-risk securities business is like, oh, they're trading in stocks or something.
[00:47:07]  Not quite.
[00:47:09]  Morrison was a high-ranking SAS man famous for storming a hijack plane in, I think, Mogadishu in the 70s, killing a bunch of hijackers.
[00:47:17]  He also started something called Defense Systems Limited.
[00:47:21]  And now listeners of this show should by now be able to pick up the kind of name that is synonymous with private military contracting.
[00:47:29]  Defense Systems Limited, here's a little indicative case for them.
[00:47:33]  They had an outpost in Colombia supposedly protecting the offices and, I believe, rigs of British Petroleum.
[00:47:41]  What they were actually doing was collecting intelligence on people who didn't like the oil rigs and people who didn't like the government and handing them over to paramilitary death squads who would take these people out in the middle of the nights and shoot them.
[00:47:54]  This is from the article.
[00:47:56]  The intense hostility that corporations and government agencies face in diverse world regions, I love the way these guys talk, has created an unprecedented demand.
[00:48:05]  This is in 2004, mind you, has created an unprecedented demand for services to ensure the security of people, property, and operations, said Michael Cherkowski, Kroll president and chief executive officer.
[00:48:17]  Kroll's global infrastructure, reputation security, and success on Iraqi assignments position us to play a key role in this vital area.
[00:48:26]  With Aleister Morrison leading the charge, we are confident that we will provide special value to clients and serious competition to the niche players in high-risk security.
[00:48:36]  Niche players.
[00:48:38]  Another thing that Kroll got involved with was the murder of Roberto Calvey.
[00:48:46]  Roberto Calvey was a member of that famous Masonic Lodge, P2.
[00:48:51]  And he was also what is known as God's Banker.
[00:48:55]  He was headed up the Banco Ambrosian.
[00:48:58]  I was just waiting for you to say that.
[00:49:00]  I love it.
[00:49:01]  I have like eight books on Calvi.
[00:49:03]  We got to do.
[00:49:05]  Big Calvi guy here.
[00:49:06]  Big Calvi guy.
[00:49:08]  Anyways, he was found hanging from Black Friars Bridge.
[00:49:13]  That's really difficult to sound like you're not, you don't have a lisp there.
[00:49:17]  Black Friars Bridge in London in 1982.
[00:49:21]  This is important because as a member of Liccio Jelly's P2 Lodge, he was what was known as a fraterni or a black friar.
[00:49:32]  Anyways, Kroll said there was some foul play involved.
[00:49:35]  Never got the killers.
[00:49:37]  Yeah, and then Calvey, too.
[00:49:39]  I mean, like to tie it back to Pacenti, who was the leader of Laceric, or definitely the Italian Laceric representative for a long time.
[00:49:46]  Pacenti and Calvey were in a long financial battle that took place just before the collapse of Banco and Broziano.
[00:49:53]  So, you know, even within these groups, there's still lots of infighting and conflict between them, even while they have the same goals and kind of work together from time to time.
[00:50:04]  Sometimes you just got to hang one of your boys from a bridge.
[00:50:08]  You know, it happens.
[00:50:09]  It happens.
[00:50:10]  That's the terrain.
[00:50:11]  I love my guys, but like, you know, money's money.
[00:50:14]  That's what happens when dudes don't rock.
[00:50:17]  Yeah, well, that's what happens when you put swag over class, Liz.
[00:50:21]  That's why you never fucked that up.
[00:50:41]  Well, you mentioned that I mean, Kroll has like an explicit, a more explicit relationship with the events of September 11th.
[00:50:48]  I mean, you mentioned that they were hired after the 93 bombing.
[00:50:52]  But there's also some like, there's some more explicit ties to the World Trade Center and to 9-11 that maybe we should get into.
[00:51:01]  Yes.
[00:51:02]  Well, there's this whole there's this whole complex of people.
[00:51:06]  Again, I like taking these little slices of these networks that are a part of this and just trying to figure out what are the relationships between this, this small group of people.
[00:51:14]  So you can kind of get a sense of like what's going on in this little corner of these elite circles.
[00:51:20]  So Kroll, Kroll is very closely connected to this company, Marsha McLennan, which is kind of like an accounting firm.
[00:51:30]  They also do all kinds of like risk consulting.
[00:51:32]  So it's like it sort of edges into Kroll territory, but it's a little bit more financial focused and a little bit more legit than what Kroll does.
[00:51:42]  And both of them have a very close relationship with AIG.
[00:51:46]  So, this is all chiefly relevant because American 11 that crashed into World Trade Center 1, all of the floors that it impacted, so the plane hit floors 93 through 99, Marshall McLennan's offices were 93 through 100.
[00:52:03]  So, all of the floors that were hit by the plane were Marsha McLennan's office.
[00:52:08]  Not long after 9-11, in I think 2004, Marsh and McLennan bought Kroll.
[00:52:15]  And on 9-11, Marshall McLennan's CEO is Jeffrey Greenberg, whose father is this guy, Maurice Greenberg, who, if you know anything about AIG, that name will ring a bell.
[00:52:28]  He was long, long, long time chairman of AIG.
[00:52:32]  And he was also very good friends with Bill Casey, who obviously was Reagan's campaign manager and he was head of the CIA for a long time.
[00:52:42]  And actually, Casey, like there's like a memo on the CIA website of Casey recommending somebody's resume for Greenberg to hire at AIG.
[00:52:52]  So they were quite close friends.
[00:52:56]  So when you have this Lucerque-connected private intelligence group that is closely financially connected to the company that owned all of the floors in the North Tower that were hit, which is very closely financially connected to a key CIA asset in the financial world, Maurice Greenberg, it's just an interesting, I don't know, it's an interesting picture of the pain.
[00:53:24]  Yeah.
[00:53:25]  I mean, there's a lot of coincidences here, but that's the thing.
[00:53:28]  They're just coincidences.
[00:53:30]  We should say, I mean, we should probably get into a little bit about AIG.
[00:53:33]  I'm sure some people know that name.
[00:53:38]  Maybe from their like cursory, maybe you like remember from the financial crisis, they were a pretty big, pretty big player in the financial crisis.
[00:53:47]  They were pretty big back then.
[00:53:49]  Yeah.
[00:53:51]  Yes.
[00:53:53]  It stands for American International Group.
[00:53:55]  And it's basically a kind of AIG is like a multinational, I think it's like one of the largest multinational like finance and insurance companies in the world.
[00:54:04]  I think they have like 80.
[00:54:07]  And it's like every country.
[00:54:08]  They're literally in every country.
[00:54:11]  I mean, it's a massive, massive global country or company, well, or country that controls and moves around massive, massive amounts of money and has for decades.
[00:54:25]  But they're, yeah, so this is, they're like a really big power player in the finance and insurance industry.
[00:54:31]  And they have a lot of, you know, as you might imagine, they have a lot of elite connections, right?
[00:54:35]  Kissinger, who we've mentioned a couple of times before, he's on the board of AIG for a long, long time.
[00:54:41]  Basically ran AIG with Maurice Greenberg.
[00:54:45]  Hank Greenberg is probably also what people know him as.
[00:54:48]  So they, I mean, they basically ran AIG together.
[00:54:51]  And it was also, you know, some of the, for example, like David Cohen, who was the deputy director of ops for the CIA, got hired like less than a year before 9-11 to be AIG's kind of security consultant, some kind of risk management job, but it basically came down to like knowing about international affairs through his networks.
[00:55:14]  So again, it's like a major, you know, a major insurance company that has a big stake in a major piece of property in downtown Manhattan.
[00:55:26]  They get, you know, hints that something is coming.
[00:55:29]  So they start to hire somebody who's got connections, right?
[00:55:32]  Like David Cohen's deputy director of ops for the CIA.
[00:55:35]  He can get them not necessarily all of the information that they need, but can get them some of the information that they would need to sort of know what's coming up.
[00:55:44]  You know, this is all speculation, but if you think about how these corporations work and how these elite power networks work, you know, I think the idea that this company that's at the very, very top connected to a lot of the foreign policy elite via Kissinger, to a lot of the intelligence elite via Hank Greenberg, the idea that they would have an inkling that something's coming and they start to hire up some CIA talent who have connections to figure out what that might be, you know, I think that's what you start to see here.
[00:56:13]  Because another person that gets hired by Marshall McLennan is Paul Bremer, who is like a top neocon.
[00:56:20]  So like they, you know, it's not a unique thing.
[00:56:22]  They're hiring these people up.
[00:56:24]  Well, there's another guy that is actually running World Trade Center Security, I believe on 9-11.
[00:56:30]  Actually, I know on 9-11, John O'Neill, who was a FBI man who was basically in charge of their bin Laden case.
[00:56:40]  He is hired on August 23rd of 2001, and he dies in the attack.
[00:56:47]  I believe he actually was let go from the FBI after he had a briefcase full of like super secret intelligence papers.
[00:56:54]  He just like left it on the subway and someone took it.
[00:56:57]  I mean, who knows what's up with that, baby?
[00:56:59]  But like, yeah, he was like their guy for bin Laden and, you know, went to Pakistan, all this stuff.
[00:57:07]  And, you know, just coincidentally, month before it happens, gets hired.
[00:57:13]  Yeah.
[00:57:14]  You know, I'm not going to cry over the death of a G-Man necessarily, but no.
[00:57:18]  But on the other hand, I don't think it's a coincidence that he did not have enough foreknowledge to not be in the building because there were a lot of people who were not in either of the buildings.
[00:57:27]  Yeah.
[00:57:28]  New not to go.
[00:57:29]  Some people who actually went there every single day and just decided to take the day off.

=== Saudi Connections and Carlisle (10:57) ===

[00:57:35]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:57:35]  Why not?
[00:57:37]  Again, though, it's a coincidence thing.
[00:57:40]  That's the thing that 9-11 is really known for.
[00:57:43]  Just a bunch of things that don't connect to each other that all happened for no reason.
[00:57:49]  Simultaneously, for some reason.
[00:57:51]  Exactly.
[00:57:52]  That's what's called magic, baby.
[00:57:54]  Yeah, AIGs, just in their history, there's so many coincidences in their history.
[00:57:59]  Like how they were, you know. very much responsible for the financial crisis and yet made $180 billion in the bailout from it.
[00:58:09]  So what a weird coincidence.
[00:58:14]  Yeah.
[00:58:15]  Yeah.
[00:58:15]  So I feel we'd be remiss not to mention Friends of the Pod and current people who paid for my scholarship to Harvard, the Carlisle group.
[00:58:27]  Absolutely.
[00:58:27]  Got to mention the sponsor at least once.
[00:58:29]  Yeah.
[00:58:30]  Sponsor of 9-11, to be clear.
[00:58:32]  Yes.
[00:58:32]  Yes.
[00:58:33]  That's right.
[00:58:34]  We talked about Carlisle a little bit on our first episode, which hopefully by now everyone has listened to and taken notes and listened to again and taken more notes.
[00:58:47]  But I don't think we talked about them enough or gave enough kind of background there.
[00:58:52]  And when we're kind of talking about these, like you said, these looking at these little slices from these different kind of groups and trying to suss out these kind of elite circles.
[00:59:03]  And, you know, like you say, it's, you know, they all have kind of aligned interests and yet there's different kind of factions and different moving parts and different kind of corners of the room that you need to shine light on.
[00:59:16]  And Carlisle is like one of these kind of players.
[00:59:20]  Very much a kind of global elite group that has a bit of, you know, it does have a good, like honest front, but that's not the whole story with them.
[00:59:35]  Yeah, I think of Carlisle because, right, Carlisle has the front of being sort of wealth management, private equity.
[00:59:41]  You know, if you're just a regular old rich person, you know, one of the handful of, you know, multi-billionaires, right?
[00:59:47]  You're just going to give money to Carlisle to invest and do whatever with.
[00:59:50]  Right.
[00:59:50]  Yeah, it's a big pimping company.
[00:59:52]  That's right.
[00:59:52]  Absolutely.
[00:59:53]  BPCs.
[00:59:55]  But they're also this continuation of how are the intelligence agencies going to launder money?
[01:00:04]  They need financial institutions that can make that happen.
[01:00:06]  And I think of Carlisle as being sort of a continuation of like BCCI and other groups that had existed before.
[01:00:14]  And they, yeah, I mean, like, you know, on 9-11, for example, Frank Carlucci, who had been former CIA deputy director, he's the chairman.
[01:00:25]  You know, another senior person in Carlisle is obviously H.W. Bush.
[01:00:29]  So they, in addition to being, you know, a big company, they end up having these very elite connections.
[01:00:37]  And in Carlisle in particular, it's a lot of defense connections and intelligence connections.
[01:00:44]  And so that ends up being a lot of what they invest in.
[01:00:46]  So they invest in companies that make weapons, private military companies.
[01:00:52]  They also invest in these kinds of quasi-private military corporations.
[01:00:58]  So they get directly involved in these conflicts via these financial holdings.
[01:01:04]  And then I think clearly they are a way to pay out people by saying, hey, we're going to do this thing.
[01:01:10]  We're going to make this thing happen.
[01:01:12]  Give you just the minimal details they'd need to know.
[01:01:15]  And we can guarantee you're going to have this return.
[01:01:19]  So it acts in that way as well.
[01:01:22]  Well, I believe we mentioned this on the other episode, but George W. Bush Sr., or George Bush Sr., excuse me, no W, was actually in a meeting with some of our good friends, the bin Ladens, on the morning of 9-11.
[01:01:37]  Yeah, there was a, I don't know if they met on the morning of 9-11, but it was a conference that was being held.
[01:01:42]  And H.W. Bush had been there the night before.
[01:01:47]  And then I think James Baker was also there, who was like, you know, former Secretary of State.
[01:01:53]  So, and then, yeah, like Shafiq bin Laden was there.
[01:01:56]  So there was, who's a, I guess he'd be a half-brother of Osama bin Laden.
[01:02:03]  So there are all of these Saudi ties as well that come via the Carlisle group.
[01:02:10]  It ends up being, particularly post-BCCI, it ends up being like one of the main ways that the Saudis are connected to the American elite financially is via the Carlisle group.
[01:02:21]  So it's definitely a big player in this.
[01:02:25]  Yeah, on the BCCI thing for a second there, you know, I know we talked about them in another episode, but what I want to stress here is that I think that there's sort of a mental block, at least there has been with me at certain points in my life, by being like, well, okay, this group existed, but then they ended their existence.
[01:02:41]  And so like that necessarily marks the end of the operation and the beginning of a new one or whatever.
[01:02:47]  But like you really got to get past that mindset and be like, well, okay, BCCI goes under.
[01:02:52]  That doesn't matter.
[01:02:53]  That's just a tactic in the operation.
[01:02:56]  That tactic is still in play.
[01:02:58]  And so like, it doesn't matter what name it has.
[01:03:01]  And like, you know, something we talked about, I think on the third episode with with Monsieur Judge is that like these guys got really good at this kind of stuff.
[01:03:12]  You know, like some of it might start out sloppy.
[01:03:15]  Someone might find the membership list for P2.
[01:03:17]  You know, some enterprising journalist might, you know, a few weeks before he gets assassinated, find something out here or there.
[01:03:23]  But then at the end of like, you know, they got a lot better.
[01:03:26]  He didn't have to kill Gary Webb, you know?
[01:03:29]  I mean, they did kill Gary Webb, but like, it's, it's like they got a lot better at these tactics and they employ the same ones over and over, but they refine them, you know, and they professionalize them in a way.
[01:03:41]  And so you end up with something like Carlisle.
[01:03:44]  Yeah, because BCCI obviously eventually got like, you know, audited and got shut down.
[01:03:51]  And definitely a lot of people lost money.
[01:03:53]  So, but Carlisle has been, you know, just trucking along.
[01:03:57]  They make enough money.
[01:03:58]  They can, you know, they have enough connections to keep people off their backs.
[01:04:02]  So they've really perfected it at this point.
[01:04:04]  Well, you mentioned that Carlisle is kind of the go-between, or at least historically, not so much anymore, obviously, but was kind of like the go-between between the U.S. and the Saudis and helping kind of really establish that relationship.
[01:04:19]  Obviously, with the Bush oil money and the oil dynasty, that's like a big, you know, player in here.
[01:04:26]  And we got into some of that stuff in the first episode in this series, but there's a lot more to talk about with the Saudis because, well, there's just always so much to talk about with the Saudis, but we didn't really, I mean, we barely even scratched the surface with like all of the kind of, when we say the Saudis, who we mean and the different kind of players there.
[01:04:50]  Yeah, I think one of the key ones is obviously the intelligence service of any country is definitely really important.
[01:04:56]  And because of the relationship that, you know, H.W. Bush had a very close relationship with Kamal Adam, who was the head of the GID, I guess, before 1979.
[01:05:08]  So even back in those days when Bush was not technically a spy, you know, he already had a close relationship because of his oil ties.
[01:05:18]  And so that, like that Bush connection is made very, very early on.
[01:05:23]  And it remains really close.
[01:05:24]  You know, that was like in the 50s into the 60s.
[01:05:27]  And that remains really close for a long time.
[01:05:29]  And Carlisle ends up becoming in the latter days becomes one of the ways that Bush is able to get these people money and that they're able to get him money is that they have this relationship via Carlisle.
[01:05:44]  You know, one of the key people in that relationship is Prince Turkey Al-Faisal, who was the head of the GID for a long time.
[01:05:54]  He was later, I think, the ambassador to the UK and the US.
[01:05:59]  And he's, you know, he quit just before 9-11.
[01:06:06]  I think it was like literally two weeks before 9-11.
[01:06:10]  And we talked about the role that Saudi intelligence likely had.
[01:06:13]  And obviously, the Patsys were the 19 hijackers who were very closely controlled by the GID and other Gulf state intelligence agencies.
[01:06:24]  So, you know, Prince Turkey's financial relationship with the Bushes is, I don't think, coincidental to that.
[01:06:31]  They're closely aligned, you know, strategically in terms of, you know, the U.S. and Saudis having this relationship with respect to the oil supply.
[01:06:39]  They're also directly making money for one another.
[01:06:43]  And then they have these security considerations where, you know, after 9-11, they can create this security arrangement that protects Saudi Arabia and makes the Saudi elite a lot stronger.
[01:06:53]  So this Carlisle becomes like one of the ways, one of the avenues that they have this contact and this connection with each other.
[01:07:00]  And that kind of, I mean, that still exists today, even with the bushes sort of out of the, I mean, it is kind of funny.
[01:07:08]  You know, I was thinking about them earlier because actually, okay, this is embarrassing, but I'll admit it.
[01:07:13]  I was watching the Today Show and the fucking one of the Bush daughters is like a, I almost just called her a hostess, is like a host on the Today Show, which is so.
[01:07:27]  Is it possible to be a like right-wing politician from the early 2000s daughter and not have a TV file?
[01:07:33]  No, that's like the only thing they can do.
[01:07:37]  They did 9-11.
[01:07:39]  Yeah.
[01:07:41]  Yeah, man.
[01:07:42]  She's at 30 Rock, back where it all started.
[01:07:47]  But yeah, I mean, I was watching it and I was just like, man, the Bush family, where are they now?
[01:07:54]  Like, this is not, this is not the dynasty it once was.
[01:07:59]  I don't know if it's because none of them had sons, not to get all gendered or whatever, but like it got a bunch of fail daughters.
[01:08:08]  This is not, you know, running Carlisle and running guns and running drugs and running oil all over the world.
[01:08:16]  You know what I mean?
[01:08:17]  Well, there's still a Melvin Bush, right?
[01:08:19]  Like the other Bush brother.
[01:08:22]  Also, like, I shouldn't discount Treb.
[01:08:25]  Jordan W. Bush's wife killed a person when she was like 16 years old.
[01:08:31]  Yeah.

=== Journalism's Complicated Network (03:23) ===

[01:08:32]  Something I always like to mention.
[01:08:34]  You know, I get it.
[01:08:35]  You're a kid, you're drunk, you're driving.
[01:08:36]  Still fucking killed somebody.
[01:08:38]  I kind of don't get it, to be honest.
[01:08:39]  I'm not.
[01:08:40]  Yeah.
[01:08:40]  Well, you know, I don't.
[01:08:42]  I don't know how to drive, so I don't fully get it.
[01:08:44]  Yeah.
[01:08:44]  That's the lesson.
[01:08:45]  Never learn how to drive.
[01:08:46]  Protect yourself.
[01:08:49]  Speaking just particularly about Prince Turkey, at one point in 2002, I believe, a high-ranking member of al-Qaeda, I believe a Saudi citizen named Abu Zabaya, Zabaida, excuse me, was captured in Pakistan.
[01:09:07]  He is, you know, classic black bag, you know, extradition, taken to alternative places like Poland, at Guantanamo Bay.
[01:09:18]  At one point, he was put in a coffin and covered in cockroaches by a good friend in the CIA.
[01:09:24]  Anyways, he names a couple of people as his main points of contact with sort of this network.
[01:09:31]  One of them is a high-ranking Pakistani Air Force officer, and the other one is Prince Turkey Al-Faisal.
[01:09:39]  Faisal had a long relationship with Osama bin Laden.
[01:09:43]  And I often use Jamal Khashoggi, the Washington Post columnist who was killed.
[01:09:49]  He was the Washington Post columnist in quotation marks.
[01:09:53]  That's right.
[01:09:54]  Yeah.
[01:09:54]  Washington Post columnists means CIA assets.
[01:09:56]  Yeah, absolutely.
[01:09:57]  We joke about that, but like that is actually true.
[01:10:00]  No, literally.
[01:10:01]  Yes.
[01:10:01]  Yeah.
[01:10:01]  And like Daily Beast is guys who are trying to be that.
[01:10:04]  And I'm sorry, let's not forget our faves at the Lyon New York Times, Fail in New York Times.
[01:10:11]  That's Pentagon.
[01:10:13]  It's all every, you know, I got to say, I, Ben, I was thinking of you because I watched for some fucking reason.
[01:10:19]  This is so terrible because I admitted that I watched the Today show the other day.
[01:10:23]  And now I'm admitting that I watched that fucking movie with Tom Hanks about the Washington Post.
[01:10:30]  It's so awful.
[01:10:31]  But I mean, it's like an interesting, it's interesting to watch.
[01:10:34]  It's like Oscar Bait, whatever.
[01:10:36]  It's Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep, and it's about the publishing of the Pentagon Papers.
[01:10:42]  But it's like super fascinating.
[01:10:43]  Sometimes I like watching these movies because I like to see how they want to represent these events.
[01:10:49]  And, you know, they, you know, it's this like struggle about the free press and they're obviously trying to say something about, I don't know, fucking Trump or something probably.
[01:10:56]  Who cares?
[01:10:57]  But it is so fascinating watching these guys like put forth this idea that all these like little gumshoe reporters out there just trying to get to the bottom of things.
[01:11:08]  Like if only once journalism stands up to, you know, the big dogs in the White House who think they can keep running things the way they are, like, nope, journalism will come and save the day.
[01:11:21]  And it's like, my God.
[01:11:22]  I mean, I know that we go off about journalists all the time on this podcast, which, you know, not great for, you know, some reasons, but really great for other reasons, which is that like even the amount we go off on them is still not enough.
[01:11:38]  Like, I don't have, like, there's not enough time in like our entire podcast catalog for us to like go off on how much the fucking media sucks.
[01:11:51]  I'm sorry.
[01:11:51]  Like, all of these guys are lackeys for the state.

=== Normalization and Cold Cases (05:24) ===

[01:11:56]  All of them.
[01:11:57]  And it just like, I can't stress it enough.
[01:12:00]  I don't know.
[01:12:01]  It makes me so angry.
[01:12:02]  I know you, you hate journalists almost as much as I do, Ben.
[01:12:07]  The way that Khashoggi got talked about after he was as being like a free press guy.
[01:12:13]  It's like this guy literally ran the Saudi press for the royal family.
[01:12:17]  Like that's what he was.
[01:12:18]  He was their propagandist.
[01:12:20]  And he was also, of course, a CIA propagandist as well.
[01:12:23]  But he was also like the point of contact between Prince Turkey al-Faisal and Osama bin Laden because Khashoggi would go to Afghanistan to write these stories about the brave Mujahideen fighters.
[01:12:36]  And then while he was doing that on the side, he was maintaining this connection.
[01:12:40]  I'm sure that they had others, but that was definitely one of them.
[01:12:43]  And the way that nobody talked about any of that stuff, it was all this just bullshit about press freedom in the Gulf.
[01:12:51]  Oh, crazy.
[01:12:52]  I mean, it's so crazy.
[01:12:53]  And the girl who even broke the story, I mean, she was, I mean, she was obviously his handblur.
[01:12:58]  I mean, just from the middle of the night starts tweeting like, uh-oh, we can't contact Jamal.
[01:13:05]  Yeah.
[01:13:06]  I mean, that whole thing, brother, there's some, I mean, that's a, talk about a fucking cold case file there.
[01:13:16]  It's also sort of interesting to note, you know, obviously his uncle, Anon Khashoggi.
[01:13:21]  You know, you mentioned the Safari Club earlier.
[01:13:23]  The Safari Club was named as such because these representatives from these intelligence agencies actually met at a club called the Safari Club owned by Anand Khashoggi, used for, I'm sure, totally above board and really just relaxing safari-like purposes.
[01:13:39]  It's the best game park in Eastern Kenya, absolutely.
[01:13:42]  And, you know, another thing about Anon is, of course, the Queen's song, Khashoggi's Yacht, I think it's called.
[01:13:59]  I believe that Robert Maxwell purchased Khashoggi's boat and, excuse me, yachts.
[01:14:07]  There's specific definitions for these things.
[01:14:09]  And I'm not entirely sure if I'm remembering correctly, but that might have eventually become the Lady Ghulane.
[01:14:15]  And yeah, and I don't know if it was that one or it was a different one, but Trump also ended up owning one of Khashoggi's yachts as well.
[01:14:24]  Yeah, I mean, Khashoggi was a key player in this Safari Club network specifically that you mentioned.
[01:14:32]  Peter Dale Scott puts him in this article in Lobster as one of the controllers of the international heroin traffic, and he's got some information to back that stuff up.
[01:14:42]  So he's like a big, very important cutout between the American elite and the Saudi elite for sure.
[01:14:49]  And I think the fact that he's obviously very close with the Bushes and Turk Al-Faisal, that's not a coincidence.
[01:14:58]  And he was also, I haven't seen any follow-up on this, but supposedly Epstein worked for Anand Khashoggi.
[01:15:05]  Yeah, I've seen that too.
[01:15:08]  I just saw that reported in a one-off thing, and I have not seen anybody look at when exactly it was or what he supposedly did.
[01:15:14]  I mean, they mentioned something about he's trying to find money for Khashoggi.
[01:15:18]  Yeah, well, he's a financial bounty hunter.
[01:15:20]  Yeah.
[01:15:21]  He was like bragging that he was like taking, you know, going and picking up money from warlords in Africa.
[01:15:27]  It's like, I mean, obviously he was some kind of bag man before he sort of found his niche there.
[01:15:34]  That one I always pause on and then the Ghillane shooting Colombian.
[01:15:41]  Or was it, was it Colombian?
[01:15:42]  It was Colombian.
[01:15:44]  She would claim at dinner parties to have ridden very specifically in a Blackhawk helicopter and shot rockets at a Marxist.
[01:15:53]  I mean, there's a couple of Marxist guerrilla groups in Colombia.
[01:15:55]  Sure.
[01:15:56]  But she says she shot it at one of their tanks, which, no, no, no.
[01:15:59]  They don't have a tank.
[01:16:00]  So she probably shot it at like a car full of like peasant farmers or something.
[01:16:04]  Yeah.
[01:16:05]  That is.
[01:16:05]  But that's not generally, you know, there's a lot of rich people in this world.
[01:16:10]  I'm thinking specifically of Dan Bilzerian.
[01:16:12]  Actually, Dan Bilzerian would probably try to do this.
[01:16:14]  But like, even he, they're not like letting him shoot a fucking rocket in a Black Hawk helicopter.
[01:16:21]  Mean that lady Ghislaine Maxwell full of shit, but like that's a very specific lie if she told.
[01:16:26]  Well, speaking of Ghislaine, there is one thing that we haven't talked about, much to the chagrin of some little people with Twitter accounts out there, and
[01:16:53]  And that is the Mossad and the Israeli intelligence connections.
[01:16:59]  Because we've talked about the ISI, we've talked about the Saudi intelligence.
[01:17:04]  We've talked about obviously the CIA and the UK.
[01:17:07]  And now with LACERC, a kind of parapolitical private intelligence organization.
[01:17:14]  But we still haven't talked about the Israeli intelligence connections.
[01:17:17]  And there are quite a few that we should get into.

=== Israeli Intelligence Connections (08:04) ===

[01:17:21]  I mean, this is especially pertinent now because, you know, with this, you know, normalization between the UAE and Israel, which is really like, there has been a normalization.
[01:17:30]  I'm doing air quotes here for a while between the Gulf states in Israel.
[01:17:35]  And of course, like one of the most important things they collaborate on is intelligence because they have the ultimate enemy of Iran, which they which they share a very common goals with each other in wanting to wipe it off the map.
[01:17:51]  But like, I think it's especially pertinent to mention this.
[01:17:54]  Now, and of course, you know, Epstein's passport said his place of residence was Riyadh or his false passport.
[01:18:02]  But yeah, there's a couple of Israeli links to this, let's say the 9-11 debacle.
[01:18:10]  Well, not a debacle, the successful 9-11 operation.
[01:18:13]  Yeah, I think one of them is definitely, I think there's a lot of Israeli elite connections as well, and a lot of Zionists in the U.S. that have connections to the Israeli elite.
[01:18:21]  I mean, I think the, you know, the Israeli elite and American elite are pretty enmeshed, generally speaking.
[01:18:26]  But there definitely are people who are closer to the Israeli elite in the United States.
[01:18:31]  But, you know, through the intelligence side of things, like you mentioned, I think very briefly, Brace, you mentioned the dancing Israelis, and then we didn't follow up on it.
[01:18:42]  Yeah, well, I mean, it was the greatest night of my life.
[01:18:44]  There were six of us out at this Berlin nightclub.
[01:18:47]  And it was just, it was fantastic.
[01:18:51]  Oh, you're the New Jersey ones.
[01:18:52]  Never mind.
[01:18:52]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:18:53]  Go ahead.
[01:18:53]  Go ahead.
[01:18:55]  The New Jersey, sorry, not to be confused with the German dancing Israelis.
[01:18:59]  This is the New Jersey, the Weehawk and Danis.
[01:19:06]  But it was, you know, this was one of those things that was, I feel like became kind of an urban myth.
[01:19:13]  Something that people are doing.
[01:19:14]  But people don't think it really happened.
[01:19:17]  Yeah, but even the way it was spread was people sort of like, you know, obviously like anti-Semites mentioning it, but also just like kind of a general, I don't know, it was like an urban myth, along with the one that is definitely not true about like some, you know, huge number of Israelis.
[01:19:31]  Yeah.
[01:19:31]  Yeah.
[01:19:31]  Oh, well, yeah.
[01:19:32]  Well, there's, there's sort of, there's two myths of the Muslims like going wild and celebrated and then like 50 Israelis dancing on rooftops and stuff.
[01:19:40]  Yes.
[01:19:40]  Yeah.
[01:19:41]  Yeah.
[01:19:42]  And the supposed Israelis who were warned not to go to work that day, which is not, is not really true.
[01:19:47]  Well, they were warned on 4chan.
[01:19:48]  Like some of you are pretty true.
[01:19:50]  No, don't go to the Little Trans Center.
[01:19:51]  Don't go to Little Trade Center tomorrow.
[01:19:53]  But the Dancing Israelis is like a very clear intelligence connection.
[01:19:57]  So first off, like what is it that happened?
[01:19:59]  These five guys who worked for a moving company were standing like on the on sort of the bluffs looking over lower Manhattan and they were taking photos of each other standing in front of the smoldering wreckage.
[01:20:12]  Like one of them had a guy like holding a lighter up and some witnesses someone like holding his hand up to make it seem like he's looking at some remote.
[01:20:24]  Yeah.
[01:20:25]  And I think a witness saw them and narked on them and called the cops or something.
[01:20:31]  And somehow the FBI became involved.
[01:20:34]  I don't know why the FBI becomes involved.
[01:20:37]  I don't think that she identified them as Israeli.
[01:20:39]  I don't know what about them would seem Israeli.
[01:20:42]  So I assume that the FBI had some inkling that there was a Mossad front group operating in northern New Jersey and that maybe they should show up for this.
[01:20:50]  Because it did turn out there was a French intelligence report that leaked that basically said the FBI had been observing this moving company, I think they were called Urban Moving Systems, that was employing these five guys.
[01:21:04]  And they had like $5,000 in cash in the van.
[01:21:08]  They had box cutters in the van, which is not surprising for a moving company, I guess.
[01:21:12]  But what is surprising is the explosives residue that they found on the van.
[01:21:18]  The follow-up tests were supposedly inconclusive.
[01:21:21]  I don't know if I necessarily believe that.
[01:21:25]  But they were also connected to another moving company in Florida, in Miami, that according to somebody at the FBI Miami station had actually moved one of the 9-11 hijackers at one point, that one of the 9-11 hijackers had hired this moving company.
[01:21:44]  And this moving company's phone number was in the pocket of the Urban Moving Systems Dancing Israelis in New York.
[01:21:50]  So there's clearly a connection between these two groups.
[01:21:54]  So this, along with before 9-11, the DEA were getting these weird visits from people who claimed to be art students from Israel.
[01:22:08]  And a lot of different DEA agents at different field stations across the U.S. experienced this.
[01:22:14]  And so somebody at the DEA wrote up a memo about this, that this had happened.
[01:22:20]  And so then following this, there was this same intelligence report finds out that these students were very likely Mossad agents.
[01:22:31]  A lot of them were located in the South Florida area where some of the hijackers were living.
[01:22:36]  So it's very likely that these Mossad agents posing as Israeli art students were surveilling the 9-11 hijackers before the attacks.
[01:22:46]  So what this, and then also as well, the other thing that happened was in very early August, a lot of different intelligence agencies were giving information to the United States, to the CIA.
[01:22:58]  And one of the things that Mossad gave the U.S. was the names of four of the hijackers who were already in the U.S. at this point, except that they told the CIA that these hijackers were planning an attack outside the United States.
[01:23:12]  So this doesn't make any sense.
[01:23:14]  If you have the names of these people, it's very, very easy to find out where they are, that they are in the United States.
[01:23:19]  And of course, it's very likely that Mossad was observing these people, surveilling them.
[01:23:25]  Why was this information withheld or modified so that the CIA would not find out about it?
[01:23:32]  I think, you know, very likely Mossad is playing some role in not necessarily handling, but they want to surveil the other part of the operation that's happening that they know about, just to keep tabs on it.
[01:23:44]  And so that's the little piece of it that we get is this weird story about these five Israelis dancing in front of their wreckage and these art students who are surveilling the hijackers.
[01:23:55]  Yeah, like I want to be clear on this.
[01:23:57]  Like Ben was saying earlier, like there is, you know, sort of this idea that mentioning the dancing Israelis is like an anti-Semitic sort of dog whistle.
[01:24:04]  And like, indeed, for some people, it is, you know, like who basically expand all of this and ignore many of the Anglos that were involved in this as well.
[01:24:17]  But like, no, this is reported.
[01:24:18]  Like a lot of the information I got from this and not a lot, but an article I read on this is in the Jewish Daily Forward, which is, you know, tends not to be.
[01:24:27]  Well, let's just say they're very sensitive souls over there.
[01:24:31]  But like, you know, they had no, you know, the forward itself had no qualms about saying like, yeah, these guys were linked to intelligence.
[01:24:39]  You know, like I believe the guy who ran the moving company, who owned the moving company was like a Mossad officer.
[01:24:45]  You know, I'm not sure if they were ever to prove it for, be able to prove it for the actual movers, but they did not do a lot of interviews after they got back to Israel and they were kicked out of the country on visa violations.
[01:24:59]  And from what I understand, that is sort of the polite way to remove a friendly spy is to sort of snatch them up and be like, okay, well, you've overstayed your visa, even if you haven't, and it's time to go.
[01:25:12]  There does not seem to be a lot of protest registered from the Israeli embassy over that.
[01:25:16]  But yeah, these guys really faded into the background once they got back to Israel.
[01:25:20]  They refused to do any interviews.
[01:25:22]  They said they were too traumatized to talk.

=== 9-11 Episodes Controversy (12:00) ===

[01:25:25]  You know, it's funny.
[01:25:26]  They were actually thrown into the MDC where Ghelane is now.
[01:25:29]  So perhaps she's sniffing their explosive residue there on the bunk beds.
[01:25:35]  But yeah, I mean, it's just one of those, like, it's like you're saying earlier, it's like the slice of like, of these organizations here.
[01:25:42]  And you can really learn a lot from that because that's really the only way that like you can look at this stuff and not go insane is to examine it piece by piece by piece by piece and then see how those pieces connect together.
[01:25:52]  And sometimes those pieces don't always perfectly connect together.
[01:25:55]  But like, that's because also we don't really have all of the information either.
[01:26:01]  And like, that's why like, I think sort of the lack of research around 9-11, of like serious research around like this, this should be counted, you know, in official testimonies of it, right?
[01:26:14]  Like, this seems pretty important that like five Israeli intelligence agents were snatched up across the banks of the Hudson or whatever on the morning of 9-11.
[01:26:24]  But it really is like there's a lot of sort of disinformation, misinformation out there too, that really muddies the water with this stuff, even though it's incredibly serious.
[01:26:33]  I mean, 9-11 has affected basically every facet of life post-9-11.
[01:26:38]  You know, it changed the whole world.
[01:26:42]  Yeah.
[01:26:44]  There's a really cool historian.
[01:26:48]  I think he's Swiss, Daniele Ganser.
[01:26:50]  He wrote one of the really good books on Gladio as his PhD dissertation, which I think sort of put him in a really good spot to understand 9-11 when it happened.
[01:27:00]  And since then, Fortunately, he speaks English, but in the sort of German language media in Switzerland and Germany, he's one of the people that's sort of advancing alternative theories to the mainstream theory about 9-11.
[01:27:13]  And it is, I think, I think his approach to it is a very scholarly, academic, historian approach.
[01:27:20]  I don't think it's surprising that people in history, in international relations in particular, there's either direct pressure from your employers.
[01:27:32]  Obviously, a lot of departments in academia are connected to intelligence, but also just generally, if you're a historian to ask some of these questions, it means you're not going to get your papers published.
[01:27:42]  It means people are not going to take you seriously.
[01:27:45]  So there's very, very few people who are actually doing real academic level, because obviously there's great research happening.
[01:27:52]  It just doesn't have a lot of institutional support.
[01:27:54]  Most of these people are trying to do it, you know, as a side gig or not really making much money on it.
[01:28:01]  Well, I think something that happened too, I mean, I know this happened.
[01:28:05]  And, you know, whether, you know, I'm sure we all have our own opinions about how softly or explicitly this was pushed by government actors or state actors.
[01:28:19]  But, you know, there was like a real concerted effort to paint anyone who had questions about the official narrative about 9-11, which, I mean, like a really like a big effort to paint them as like cranks and nutjobs and wackos.
[01:28:36]  And it got relegated to the Alex Joneses and the, you know, ancient aliens kind of crowd.
[01:28:44]  And I mean, that was obviously a tactic, okay?
[01:28:48]  But it's a real shame because what's funny is like, I mean, I remember, you know, in the months and years after, I mean, I would say up until at least like 2006, 2007, like questioning what happened and being, and, you know, I mean, I remember reading the 9-11 Commission report when it was published.
[01:29:13]  Like I was very much like following what was going on and, you know, where these like narratives were coming from.
[01:29:22]  And like, it wasn't so, I mean, not to say it was mainstream to kind of question things, but it wasn't as crank as it is portrayed now.
[01:29:33]  Like that, that, what happened, I think, kind of in the later Bush years and then obviously in the Obama years and particularly in the run-up to the election of Obama to like paint anyone as a kind of like right-wing crank that thought that, you know, there was that something is missing from the official narrative of what happened on 9-11.
[01:29:55]  Like, I don't know, it still persists.
[01:29:58]  It absolutely still persists.
[01:30:01]  And it's so wild because I mean, almost everyone, whether or not they want to say it out loud, but almost everyone accepts that, you know, what happened with JFK is not what happened with JFK.
[01:30:16]  Whether or not they want to go, depending on how far they want to go and what they think happened, or if they even want to get to the point where they're like even formulating an opinion about what happened, almost everyone agrees that the magic bullet is ridiculous, right?
[01:30:32]  But like the same isn't for 9-11 at all.
[01:30:36]  And there was like a very concerted effort.
[01:30:38]  Even Chris Hayes recently tweeted that, and in praise of this, he said, I was part of a cohort that attacked and expelled quote-unquote truthers from the left-wing politics, and it was successful, kind of comparing it to QAnon, whatever.
[01:31:00]  And, you know, I don't think that anything that we've laid out in this series in the last three episodes or in this episode or in what will be in the next part of this, like, is like Ben isn't a crank.
[01:31:11]  We're not cranks.
[01:31:13]  We're laying out like his history.
[01:31:16]  Like, all of these people are real.
[01:31:18]  All of these organizations are real.
[01:31:20]  All of this happened.
[01:31:21]  Like, you can't, this isn't crank theory.
[01:31:26]  And I just like, I don't know if we can do anything with on this podcast and on this podcast is like pushing back on this idea that questioning what the government tells you makes you a crank.
[01:31:41]  Like it's just completely absurd.
[01:31:43]  And especially when, like we said, all of these groups formed explicitly as anti-communist political organizations.
[01:31:53]  Like it is essential, it's an essential part of any kind of left-wing education to know this stuff.
[01:32:00]  And I just like, I don't know, I have no patience for it for the Chris Hayes of the world and anyone who is sympathetic to that shit, you know?
[01:32:09]  Well, I think something like I want to impart, I mean, I'd second basically everything you just said there.
[01:32:16]  But like, it's, it's for people to understand that the United States government, the governments of, well, a lot of the countries we've mentioned today, are capable of doing extraordinary and like, you know, terrible deeds, basically.
[01:32:31]  And like, to me, I think the safer assumption is to assume that like, you know, 9-11 was a planned attack, right?
[01:32:40]  And that it's, because if you look at the after effects of this, I know I've said this on an earlier episode, the Bush administration could not have asked for a more favorable event.
[01:32:51]  I mean, it's, it's, it's almost tailored.
[01:32:54]  I mean, it was tailor-made for exactly what happened.
[01:32:58]  Every single thing that happened in the follow-up to 9-11, from the Iraq war to the Patriot Act to just increased reliance on the government.
[01:33:05]  I mean, we talk about the years of lead in Italy.
[01:33:08]  I mean, this was the years of lead in one instant, right?
[01:33:11]  All of a sudden, huge patriotic fervor.
[01:33:14]  We're going to invade a fucking country that had nothing to do with 9-11.
[01:33:17]  It had obviously nothing to do with 9-11.
[01:33:19]  And people believe that it did.
[01:33:20]  You know, people went along with it.
[01:33:23]  And so, like, I think like, you know, if your automatic assumption here on hearing that like, you know, we have these episodes or whatever is to be like, oh, this crank shit.
[01:33:32]  Like, ask yourself why you're thinking that.
[01:33:35]  And like, ask yourself, like, why do I believe that the government did Gladio or that they did, you know, the Tuskegee syphilis experiment or really like any of the, you know, fucking Gulf of Tonkin incident, you know?
[01:33:51]  Ask yourself why those are all possible to you and why this one just remains out of the realm of polite speech.
[01:33:58]  And the thing is, like, by doing these episodes, like we are going to probably turn on, I mean, we did some 9-11 episodes before, but like, some people are probably going to be like, dismiss this now.
[01:34:06]  And like, okay, brother, you know, that's your prerogative.
[01:34:09]  But like, it's like this isn't, this is an event.
[01:34:14]  This is one of the most important events of any of our lifetimes.
[01:34:16]  Hell, even if you weren't born, it's one of the most important events of your lifetime.
[01:34:20]  It has affected every facet of your life.
[01:34:23]  And I think that like you really got to flip that like revulsion to thinking about it or repulsion to thinking about it on its head and be like, actually, no, I do need to think about this because this is like, this has touched you personally.
[01:34:35]  No matter who you are, this has touched you personally.
[01:34:38]  And so if there's one thing, like Liz is saying, there's one thing we can apart from this, it's that.
[01:34:45]  Yeah, I think that's such a good point.
[01:34:46]  Like this, you know, I think the three of us obviously have our own point of view about what happened.
[01:34:52]  But no matter what, like you say, this was a huge, huge, transformative event.
[01:34:57]  And so you need to study it.
[01:34:58]  And it is important.
[01:35:00]  You know, who owns the buildings, right?
[01:35:03]  Who controlled the, you know, who had these connections to the terrorist networks that supposedly crashed the planes.
[01:35:09]  Like these are important historical questions to get right.
[01:35:13]  And they're important to have on the record.
[01:35:15]  And so I think, you know, you should, even if you haven't bought into the idea yet, I think take a look at some of the sources we've mentioned and stuff like that.
[01:35:23]  Because I think that these facts and these networks that you could study when you look at this event are really significant.
[01:35:31]  And I think, you know, I think in the end, if you look through the facts, there's no reason to give any of these people the benefit of the doubt.
[01:35:39]  You know, like Bryce mentioned, like, what we know that these people are responsible for, you know, decades of political terrorism, right-wing political terrorism in Europe, you know, a decades-long campaign in South America.
[01:35:50]  Like, there's absolutely no reason to give any of these people the benefit of the doubt.
[01:35:54]  to mention like I mean mass experiments and like obscene obscene medical experiments in Africa that really are not even well documented or people know that much about and that's like that like reminds me of like just a brief tangent but something that really annoys me is the I don't I don't I do understand how but the idea of crisis actors has entered the lexicon via certain like right-wing outlets And,
[01:36:24]  you know, all of the examples of false flag terrorism that we know that happen, there's no crisis actors.
[01:36:28]  It's actual real people that died because the people who do this stuff have no qualms about killing innocent people.
[01:36:34]  It's just not even something that factors into, I mean, if you, for example, if you read the Operation Northwoods documents where, you know, Kennedy asked the Joint Chiefs, how can we overthrow Castro's government?
[01:36:47]  The options that they gave him were like, you know, start up right-wing terrorist groups in Miami, you know, shoot down American airliners, attack American ships.
[01:36:58]  The idea that there would be civilian casualties, American civilian casualties, was not even a consideration.
[01:37:02]  It didn't matter to them at all.
[01:37:04]  So these people are capable of great, great evil.
[01:37:06]  There's, and they've been documented doing it.
[01:37:09]  No reason to give any of them the benefit.
[01:37:11]  Why would you give the guy who bombed North Vietnam to smithereens the benefit of the doubt on any of this stuff, right?
[01:37:18]  If I was going to look for who did 9-11, Kissinger would be like one of my number one people that you would identify.

=== Benghazi Series: Part Five (03:43) ===

[01:37:25]  And what do you know?
[01:37:26]  There he is.
[01:37:26]  He's right there in the middle of it all, right?
[01:37:29]  So I think looking at these networks and looking at what these people have done, it just, it really, it really impresses upon you like how vast this network is that coordinated this.
[01:37:41]  And the fact that they got basically exactly what they wanted is a very sobering fact.
[01:37:48]  Well, Ben, we're stoked.
[01:37:50]  We love having you on.
[01:37:51]  And we're excited because we're going to actually round out this series with part five in a little bit.
[01:37:57]  So that's coming up.
[01:37:58]  And stay tuned for that.
[01:38:02]  But I think this has been, hopefully a lot of people have learned some things.
[01:38:07]  I think my assumption is that a lot of people maybe haven't listened to the 9-11 series yet or started it from the beginning.
[01:38:15]  And I implore you, if you haven't, open up that third eye, listen to those three episodes and come back and we'll have another one for you pretty soon.
[01:38:27]  Well, Ben, always a fucking pleasure, Playboy.
[01:38:30]  Thank you so much for having me.
[01:38:31]  This is always a blast.
[01:38:32]  I appreciate it.
[01:38:34]  We'll see you at the airport.
[01:38:36]  meet you there well we like i said we got more so
[01:39:02]  So stick around because we got part five coming up.
[01:39:08]  Wait, hold on.
[01:39:08]  Are we going to have to do like 10 next year?
[01:39:11]  I don't know.
[01:39:13]  We'll see.
[01:39:13]  We'll figure it out.
[01:39:14]  Yeah, yeah, we can do that.
[01:39:18]  Well, here's the thing.
[01:39:19]  There's another 9-11.
[01:39:21]  Benghazi.
[01:39:23]  Can you imagine if we did like a five-part series on Benghazi?
[01:39:27]  I actually was about to suggest that to you after we stop the interview.
[01:39:32]  We really should because I don't think a lot of people really understand what was going on.
[01:39:35]  I don't think that people know about Benghazi, and we could talk about Benghazi.
[01:39:38]  They were running.
[01:39:39]  And I don't want to do five episodes on it.
[01:39:41]  Well, then me and my friend, who does happen to be the son of Gaddafi, maybe we can do our own spin-off podcast.
[01:39:51]  Okay.
[01:39:52]  Gaddaf pod.
[01:39:56]  All right, let's go.
[01:39:57]  Terrible name.
[01:39:59]  Oh, hey, he came up with it.
[01:40:00]  It should be Padafi.
[01:40:03]  John, I'm trying to make John Podesta and Gaddafi go to the next one.
[01:40:06]  No, just Paddafi.
[01:40:08]  Padafi?
[01:40:10]  I don't get it.
[01:40:11]  I don't get it.
[01:40:13]  All right.
[01:40:13]  I literally don't understand.
[01:40:14]  Well, explain to me after we finish.
[01:40:16]  Or you can explain to me now, but I feel like that's rude to make you do that.
[01:40:19]  It's funny they don't have a pod save Libya.
[01:40:22]  Well, they don't really care, do they?
[01:40:25]  They did it.
[01:40:27]  Those guys worked for them.
[01:40:30]  Pod didn't save Libya.
[01:40:31]  No, Pod destroyed Libya very badly.
[01:40:37]  All right.
[01:40:37]  Just a little preview to our Benghazi series.
[01:40:40]  I'm hungry.
[01:40:40]  I got meatballs in the other room that I got to eat.
[01:40:42]  Ooh, that sounds nice.
[01:40:45]  All right.
[01:40:45]  We've been at this for a couple hours.
[01:40:49]  How do we sign this off again?
[01:40:51]  What?
[01:40:52]  Dude, are you, what?
[01:40:55]  You forgot how we sign off?
[01:41:00]  I'm Liz.
[01:41:02]  I'm Brace.
[01:41:03]  We're joined by producer Young Chomsky.
[01:41:05]  That was chewing on.
[01:41:07]  We'll see you next time.