True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 129: Blood Men Pt. 1
Aired: 2021-01-14
Duration: 01:17:59


=== Podcast vs. Television (03:13) ===

[00:00:00]  Here's what they don't understand is that podcast and television are mortal enemies because television replaced radio, which is our ancestral Aryan forefathers.
[00:00:12]  Yeah, video killed the radio star.
[00:00:14]  Everyone knows this.
[00:00:15]  Exactly.
[00:00:16]  And now, now radio is back.
[00:00:21]  Is back, you fucking scumbag, because nobody wants to watch Brooklyn 99 on their telephone.
[00:00:26]  You got to have it on the fucking Roku.
[00:00:28]  And you know what, Liz?
[00:00:30]  What?
[00:00:31]  These iHeartRadio bastards, by the way, True and On is an iHeartRadio production.
[00:00:36]  These iHeartRadio bastards have like dozens of TV shows.
[00:00:40]  Or excuse me, of podcasts about TV shows.
[00:00:43]  Yeah, yeah, that's a huge thing.
[00:00:44]  Podcasts about TV shows.
[00:00:46]  Have you ever heard one?
[00:00:49]  I don't.
[00:00:50]  Isn't there that one that people enjoy about the West Swing?
[00:00:54]  No.
[00:00:55]  I mean, if I don't know.
[00:00:56]  I don't know.
[00:00:57]  Every time people talk about the West Wing, I'm like, I don't know what you're talking about.
[00:00:59]  No one in my life ever watched that.
[00:01:02]  It's on Netflix if you want.
[00:01:04]  I don't.
[00:01:04]  I think.
[00:01:05]  Why would I want?
[00:01:07]  I don't know.
[00:01:08]  What urge would drive me to watch it?
[00:01:10]  If you decided that you wanted to, you know, understand the mind of Matt Iglesias.
[00:01:15]  Okay.
[00:01:16]  Well, if I want to understand the mind, I've said it a million times.
[00:01:19]  The combination for that, which is chemically proven to work, is to take 200 milligrams of tracedone and drink an entire thing of coffee.
[00:01:28]  That's how you do it.
[00:01:29]  The real man's ampium.
[00:01:32]  But yeah, no, we got 90210.
[00:01:35]  No, we got.
[00:01:36]  That's the name of the show.
[00:01:37]  That's the name of the podcast.
[00:01:39]  No, but I did hear a podcast the other day on the iHeartRadio Network where the ad was for a 90210 podcast.
[00:01:46]  It's a television show that came out 20 years ago.
[00:01:49]  Well, yeah, I guess.
[00:01:50]  You know, this is the thing.
[00:01:51]  This is recap culture.
[00:01:55]  But how can you recap something that has been capped for so long?
[00:02:00]  What?
[00:02:01]  I guess the whole thing about recapping is that you take the cap off and then you sort of swirl it around and then cap it again.
[00:02:07]  I have no idea what you're talking about.
[00:02:32]  Liz cut me off there, but if you're a comedian in Los Angeles and you are working and it's your fucking job, and I know maybe it's hard to find jobs as a comedian because comedy is, it's like one of the lowest things that you can do with your life.
[00:02:45]  If you're a comedian in Los Angeles and you are working on an iHeartRadio television show recap podcast, you should put a 9mm SIG sour in your mouth and just think for a while.
[00:02:58]  Just think!
[00:03:00]  Welcome to the show.
[00:03:00]  I'm Brace Bell.
[00:03:03]  Okay, I'm Liz.
[00:03:04]  Hello.
[00:03:05]  We are, of course, joined by producer Young Chomsky.
[00:03:09]  You're doing the we, of course, now.
[00:03:10]  I love it.
[00:03:11]  Yeah, we like to trade off.
[00:03:12]  And guess what?

=== Pardon Evan Liberty (15:48) ===

[00:03:14]  This is true, Non.
[00:03:15]  Hello.
[00:03:16]  Hello.
[00:03:18]  We are, you know what?
[00:03:20]  I think we could do a little like graceful entry, graceful landing into the show, but I think we should just get to it because we got a lot to get into.
[00:03:30]  And we are not actually talking about television show recaps as much as I think Brace would like that to go on.
[00:03:37]  No, we're talking about when Bill Clinton killed a mentally retarded man named Ricky Ray Rector so he could be elected for the president of the United States.
[00:03:45]  Just kidding.
[00:03:45]  We're not talking about that either.
[00:03:47]  That did happen, though.
[00:03:48]  That did happen, yes.
[00:03:49]  Of course.
[00:03:50]  No, we're talking about something that is bad.
[00:03:56]  Great entry.
[00:03:57]  No, Hold on, hold on.
[00:03:58]  Let me clarify.
[00:03:59]  also bad we're just talking about okay maybe a little uh we did not nail the smooth landing there I didn't, that's the murder.
[00:04:08]  Yeah, he shouldn't have done that either.
[00:04:10]  We're talking about Blackwater.
[00:04:12]  Yeah, okay.
[00:04:13]  So the reason Bryce mentioned pardons is because very recently, former president, as he's been recently deposed, former President Trump pardoned four Blackwater guards for their roles in what has, I mean, if you guys aren't aware, but it's like pretty famous.
[00:04:32]  It's called the Nasser Square Massacre.
[00:04:36]  They were four guys, Nicholas Slattin, Paul Slough.
[00:04:41]  Slough?
[00:04:43]  Slug.
[00:04:43]  Moral.
[00:04:44]  I know what you're supposed to.
[00:04:46]  Paul, Dustin Heard, and Evan Liberty.
[00:04:50]  Now, look, these are real people.
[00:04:52]  Evan Liberty?
[00:04:53]  Yeah, these are real people.
[00:04:54]  And I got to say, the most crisis actor names I've ever heard in my entire life.
[00:04:58]  These are so fucking fake.
[00:04:59]  I know.
[00:05:00]  Absolutely.
[00:05:00]  Slatt.
[00:05:01]  This is like Slattin?
[00:05:02]  You can't even say the second guy's name.
[00:05:05]  Paul Slough, I think.
[00:05:07]  We're going with Slough here.
[00:05:08]  No.
[00:05:09]  Anyway, so Trump pardoned these guys, which is really fucking insane.
[00:05:17]  Yeah, I mean, Trump has, I mean, it's not, it's like, Trump has long basically maintained that it's okay to kill civilians or whatever.
[00:05:25]  I mean, to be clear, every American government has been 100% okay with killing civilians.
[00:05:31]  Trump had just kind of come out and said it.
[00:05:34]  Like, you know, you kill someone with a party.
[00:05:36]  You know, there was a case of Eddie Gallagher, who I think was a SEAL.
[00:05:39]  I'm getting SEAL sense from him due to my hatred of him, who, you know, slit the throat of a, I believe, Iraqi child who was in ISIS, who was wounded.
[00:05:51]  They were tending to him, and he comes over and slits the guy's throat.
[00:05:54]  Eddie Gallagher was like, he's like a total fucking freak.
[00:05:57]  Of course, now has like a clothing line and like a popular Instagram and stuff like that.
[00:06:01]  Smashing watermelons on every stage across America.
[00:06:03]  Exactly, exactly.
[00:06:05]  Huge entertainment career.
[00:06:07]  But the Blackwater Guards were really, I mean, this has been a case that has been, I mean, the Nassau Square massacre happened in 2007.
[00:06:14]  And this has always been kind of one of those things where it was like, these are, you know, not U.S. troops.
[00:06:20]  There's no like, you know, they had a lot of people pushing basically for their release, but there wasn't that same sort of impetus, I didn't think.
[00:06:28]  Yeah, I mean, you know, this was like a massive, it was like a pretty, this has marked kind of the big turn in popular opinion.
[00:06:37]  Although it should be said, the Iraq war was never quite that popular, but, you know, comparable to other wars in the past.
[00:06:45]  But, you know, it really marked a turn in public opinion on the Iraq war and specifically with DOD and their relationship with private military contractors, which we're going to get into.
[00:06:58]  So we should say, in case anyone who's, we're going to get into more details about actually the event that happened, but we should say, you know, these four guys, there's actually, you know, maybe five, one of them actually ratted on the other four and they also prosecuted him, which is pretty funny.
[00:07:11]  My man.
[00:07:12]  Yeah.
[00:07:13]  Start snitching.
[00:07:14]  Yeah, snitching doesn't pay, folks.
[00:07:16]  Just remember that.
[00:07:17]  Actually, literally does.
[00:07:19]  Well, that guy went to jail.
[00:07:21]  I know, but in my experience, people will pay you to snitch.
[00:07:25]  Just saying that.
[00:07:27]  So these guys, you know, they killed 17 unarmed civilians as kind of Blackwater, hired Blackwater personal security detail in Iraq in 2007.
[00:07:39]  20 more were wounded.
[00:07:42]  So like a total of about 37 people shot, a shit ton of kids, which we're going to talk about.
[00:07:49]  But so recently, like Bryce said, like ever since the incident in 2007, there's been a kind of like, you know, a section of the right-wing kind of DOD Bush guy cheerleaders who were always pushing for these guys to get off.
[00:08:07]  And to pardon them, it ended up being a pretty long and storied trial, which again, we will get into.
[00:08:15]  But prior to Trump's pardon, there was a big push, like a really big push, to get these guys' sentences vacated.
[00:08:26]  And that's kind of what set all of this in motion.
[00:08:28]  So there's this guy, John N. Marr, as in Bill Maher, very similar, of Marr Legal Services, the Bon Jovi of Legal Services, who he drafted like a 60-page habeas corpus motion to call on the courts to vacate, set aside, or free the four Blackwater guards so they could go home to their family.
[00:08:55]  He cited a bunch of Brady violations, which basically refers to when prosecutors fail to turn over exculpatory evidence.
[00:09:03]  This guy Marr, by the way, I just want to note, he was a former JAG officer in Afghanistan.
[00:09:10]  Yeah, considering the high quality of human being that have come out of the JAG Corps, including Kurt Schlichter, really the whole thing should be abolished and they should be in prison.
[00:09:20]  And including the television show, Jag.
[00:09:23]  Never heard of it.
[00:09:24]  However, I will be appearing on Jag On, which is an iHeartRadio Network show, and it is a weekly recap of the television show Jag.
[00:09:33]  Isn't it called Jag Off?
[00:09:35]  No, well, the joke is that like people think it's going to be called Jag Off, but we're jagging on because we're on TV.
[00:09:42]  Anyway, so this guy, he also was a federal prosecutor.
[00:09:45]  He was actually, funny enough, appointed by George W. Bush.
[00:09:51]  So, you know, class.
[00:09:52]  All up in the family.
[00:09:53]  He later went on to work for the DIA.
[00:09:55]  And I just want to mention him because he also runs a website.
[00:09:59]  And this is literally what it's called.
[00:10:00]  It's called lawyersdefendingwarriors.com.
[00:10:03]  There's no difference between a lawyer and a warrior.
[00:10:06]  That's what I've always said, baby.
[00:10:07]  Both meets in fields of combat.
[00:10:09]  Both generally, I would say, people don't like.
[00:10:14]  And you know what?
[00:10:15]  Here's the thing.
[00:10:16]  You're in jail.
[00:10:17]  You're going to call one or the other, a warrior or a lawyer to defend you.
[00:10:22]  So anyway, that's kind of how this all got in motion.
[00:10:25]  Let's get into the pardon really quick.
[00:10:27]  So do you want to read from this?
[00:10:29]  I don't know how we have to do this.
[00:10:30]  Absolutely.
[00:10:31]  Okay.
[00:10:32]  So I cut out a paragraph here that just says a bunch of bullshit.
[00:10:34]  I mean, the whole thing's a bunch of bullshit.
[00:10:36]  But I do want to mention some of the elected officials that were shouted out here.
[00:10:39]  So today, President Trump granted full pardons to Nicholas Slatten, Paul Slough, Evan Liberty, and Dustin Hurd.
[00:10:46]  The pardon of these four veterans is broadly supported by the public.
[00:10:50]  Not a citation on that.
[00:10:53]  Including Pete.
[00:10:54]  Oh, so they're just including Pete Hegseth and elected officials such as Representative Louis Gohmert, Representative Paul Gosar, Representative Ralph Norman, Bill, and these are all representatives.
[00:11:06]  So I'm just going to say their names.
[00:11:07]  Bill Flores, Brian Babbin, Michael Burgess, Daniel Webster, Steve King, and Ted Yoho.
[00:11:14]  It's funny, it reads kind of like, you know, especially with the Pete Hegzeth thing.
[00:11:18]  It like reads like, you know, a college when it gets donations for an auditorium or whatever.
[00:11:23]  And it's like, thank you.
[00:11:24]  Special thank you to Pete Hegzeth.
[00:11:27]  I mean, this has been, you know, a lot of these guys appear on Fox News like over and over and over really pushing for these guys' release.
[00:11:33]  So they must be pretty, you know, gratified to see their names here.
[00:11:35]  So these veterans were working in Iraq in 2007 as security contractors responsible for securing the safety of United States personnel.
[00:11:43]  When the convoy attempted to establish a blockade outside the quote green zone, the situation turned violent, which is a classic use of the passive voice there.
[00:11:52]  I hate when my situations turn violent.
[00:11:55]  I really don't like that.
[00:11:56]  Who did it?
[00:11:56]  Who knows?
[00:11:57]  Which resulted in the unfortunate deaths and injuries of Iraqi civilians.
[00:12:01]  Initial charges against the men were dismissed, but they were eventually tried and convicted on charges ranging from first-degree murder to voluntary manslaughter.
[00:12:10]  It's not that large of a range, by the way.
[00:12:12]  Yeah, there's really just two charges basically that they were hit with: the murder and then the manslaughter.
[00:12:16]  On appeal, the DC Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that additional evidence should have been presented at Mr. Slattin's trial.
[00:12:24]  Further, prosecutors recently disclosed, this part really gets me, more than 10 years after the incident, that the lead Iraqi investigator who prosecutors relied heavily on to verify that there were no insurgent victims and to collect evidence may have had ties to insurgent groups himself.
[00:12:43]  By the way, I want to make it clear in case that that's not true.
[00:12:47]  Like they just made that up.
[00:12:50]  Yeah, I'd really like to know the definition of insurgent.
[00:12:52]  That's kind of but like also like the much of like these guys, I mean, we'll get to the trial later, but these guys are basically convicted on like testimony from like the dozens of people that saw them open fire on just random people in a street.
[00:13:05]  And then the FBI team, which found that they received absolutely zero fire from any source besides themselves.
[00:13:12]  Yeah.
[00:13:13]  So in order to properly tell this story, we need to back up a bit.
[00:13:19]  We should go through the details of what actually happened in Nassur Square before we kind of get into a bit of a history here with Blackwater and the Iraq war, because you got to get some context here to fully understand the gravity of this situation and the pardon itself.
[00:13:37]  So this incident happened September 16th, 2007 in Baghdad.
[00:13:43]  This is in a kind of fancy area, right?
[00:13:45]  Brace, you're our Middle East correspondent here at Druina.
[00:13:48]  I've never been to Baghdad, but yeah, it's Mansoor Square.
[00:13:52]  From what I, or for excuse me, Mansoor district, from what I understand, it's like a little bit fancy, although I have a feeling probably not that fancy, but it's a real hot day and it gets hot out there, you know.
[00:14:02]  Apparently, a car bomb had exploded by a mosque about a mile away from Nasur Square while like a State Department delegation was at some compound somewhere nearby.
[00:14:11]  And so after the bomb explodes, you know, I think when things like that tend to happen there, it was kind of like if you're not in the green zone, you got to get back to the green zone.
[00:14:22]  Can you explain what the green zone is?
[00:14:24]  I would love to.
[00:14:25]  At one time, when I was on methamphetamine, I read a book called Imperial Life in the Emerald City, I believe it's called.
[00:14:31]  I can't remember who wrote it, but I read it in one hour about life in the green zone.
[00:14:36]  And believe me, the green zone was like a giant area kind of in the middle of Baghdad that was like the American sector, right?
[00:14:44]  Like everything in there was American.
[00:14:46]  Really, really, really strict security.
[00:14:49]  I mean, it was like, and all holds bars, like anything kind of going.
[00:14:53]  You want your blue jeans and your Coca-Cola?
[00:14:55]  Absolutely.
[00:14:56]  Come hang out at the green zone.
[00:14:57]  Absolutely.
[00:14:58]  And that's the thing is with Americans, as we'll get into with the contracting stuff.
[00:15:02]  Blue jeans and Coca-Cola are like, if you go to another country as an American, you are, you are, believe me, you are living in a little American.
[00:15:11]  Never feel bad for soldiers being like, oh, it's so hard for me.
[00:15:14]  Motherfucker, you are eating Burger King in Kuwait and fucking Iraq.
[00:15:19]  Suck my fucking dick.
[00:15:21]  When you have to eat fucking plain rice or nothing at all for like three weeks like I did, then we can talk.
[00:15:28]  You know how hungry I was?
[00:15:30]  Anyways, so they, you know, they have to evacuate these State Department fucking lackeys, you know, pieces of shit back to the back to the green zone.
[00:15:43]  While this is happening, there's a group called Raven 23 at a nearby Blackwater base.
[00:15:50]  And they, or excuse me, in the green zone.
[00:15:51]  And they request permission to leave the green zone and clear a route for the caravan.
[00:15:56]  The request is denied, but the convoy leaves anyways, which is very indicative of what our friends in Blackwater like to do.
[00:16:04]  I will say there is an important detail at this point.
[00:16:06]  The cameras, you know, sort of at the entrance to the green zone, show these vehicles leaving, these four vehicles leaving, they are painted silver.
[00:16:15]  Not so the case later in this story.
[00:16:17]  Yeah, we'll get to that.
[00:16:18]  Well, anyways, the convoy caravan heads to Nassore Square to basically clear a route for the State Department types.
[00:16:24]  And Nassau Square is like a giant traffic circle.
[00:16:26]  There are a lot of these all over the Middle East.
[00:16:29]  In fact, there's traffic circles like everywhere about San Francisco.
[00:16:33]  But it's a large traffic circle.
[00:16:35]  And that's kind of where things go south.
[00:16:37]  So the way that like convoys work in Iraq is, I mean, it's similar and different between like Blackwater convoys and American troop convoys.
[00:17:07]  The thing is, though, Blackwater convoys are literally just allowed to shoot at whoever they want.
[00:17:11]  Like if your car gets too close to their car, they'll kill you.
[00:17:15]  And in fact, there were like tons of incidents of them doing this, sometimes in front of State Department functionaries.
[00:17:21]  They would just like, someone would veer too close to them and they would just blast them and be like, that's it.
[00:17:26]  And no one gets in trouble.
[00:17:27]  Yeah.
[00:17:27]  And the thing too, like to mention, well, I guess we'll get into this a bit more later, but with Blackwater, they were tasked with, you know, basically providing security, which is a very broad term.
[00:17:39]  But so they would say that they were acting, you know, someone was attacking, not them, but the client, the people they were protecting.
[00:17:45]  And so they would use that as a justification to basically shoot up anyone they wanted.
[00:17:52]  Not just on foreign soil as well.
[00:17:55]  Yeah.
[00:17:56]  Yes.
[00:17:57]  Yeah.
[00:17:57]  And in fact, Blackwater had killed just a ton of people, not even in caravans.
[00:18:03]  Like, you know, at one point, a sniper shot just three Iraqi security guards at a TV station for what seems like fun.
[00:18:11]  And none of those families ever got any sort of compensation or anything from the American government.
[00:18:15]  Although, as we'll see in the Nassur Square case, many of those families would refuse that kind of stuff anyways.
[00:18:21]  Anyways, they get to Nasseur Square.
[00:18:23]  And these guys are not just like in SUVs.
[00:18:26]  They are in, from what I can understand, although I've read a couple of different, sometimes it says they're in Bearcats.
[00:18:31]  Sometimes it says they're in Mamba APCs, but they are basically in APCs, you know, big armored ass vehicles, mine protected.
[00:18:41]  They have 7.62 millimeter guns on top.
[00:18:44]  And I believe they also have grenade launchers on them.
[00:18:47]  And grenade launchers are, I've never shot a grenade launcher.
[00:18:50]  I've never, you know, been around a grenade launcher.
[00:18:52]  Grenade launcher, I actually have seen a grenade launcher for sale in a weapon store in Syria, but it was not like a mounted one.
[00:18:59]  But yeah, they can cause a lot of havoc.

=== Blackwater's Impunity (11:29) ===

[00:19:03]  These vehicles are puffed.
[00:19:04]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:19:06]  They are big ass fucking vehicles.
[00:19:08]  Yeah, sick boys.
[00:19:09]  And the thing is, like when Blackwater convoys are really American convoys, anybody, any, any sort of, you know, foreign convoys are going around Iraq, they don't like call the traffic cops ahead of time.
[00:19:19]  And in the Middle East, there's quite a lot of like white-gloved traffic policemen, you know, because they don't have lights everywhere.
[00:19:26]  And things can be a little chaotic.
[00:19:27]  They need him to direct people.
[00:19:29]  And so like, if you're a traffic cop and you see these convoys coming, you want to like, it's your job.
[00:19:34]  You got to fucking scramble to get everybody out of the way because these people can shoot them with no impunity.
[00:19:41]  Precisely what happens here.
[00:19:44]  Once they're in the Nassur Square area, a sniper attached to the team, who we will talk about later, actually, I'll mention his name now.
[00:19:52]  A man named Nicholas Slattin puts his fucking gun out of one of these sort of slats.
[00:19:57]  Like they have these little, you know, the openings in the sides of the vehicles and just immediately shoots the driver of a white Kia.
[00:20:03]  Like just kills him.
[00:20:05]  The driver collapses sort of on the steering wheel and the car starts slowly rolling forward.
[00:20:11]  The woman in the passenger seat is flipping out because the person next to her was just shot randomly out of the side of a truck.
[00:20:21]  Two Iraqi traffic cops like try to stop the car from moving because it's like moving towards the APCs.
[00:20:29]  At this point, the Blackwater mercenaries claim that they think the Kia, in fact, they don't even claim they think they're like, yeah, that Kia was a car bomb.
[00:20:37]  That was a vehicle-borne IED V-BID.
[00:20:40]  I just call them car bombs because it's how whenever you try to use like military terminology, people do that.
[00:20:47]  I do too.
[00:20:48]  Like people were like, especially people who say it like, you know, ROE rules of engagement.
[00:20:53]  Like you sound like a fucking mercenary when you talk like exactly.
[00:20:57]  Just, I mean, rules of engagement make sense, but like, yeah, like this stuff, like V-BID, like, okay, car bombs are different, but like, you know what I mean in this case.
[00:21:03]  It's a car bomb.
[00:21:04]  It's a bomb.
[00:21:05]  It's a car.
[00:21:05]  It's made into a bomb.
[00:21:06]  It's a lot of people normally.
[00:21:07]  Exactly.
[00:21:09]  So they're like, oh, shit, this thing's a car bomb because the guy we just killed no longer can put his foot on the brake because he's dead because we shot him and it's rolling towards us.
[00:21:17]  And then they fucking open fire on it again and kill the woman in the passenger seat.
[00:21:21]  According to the FBI agent in charge of the investigation, they also hit it with a grenade.
[00:21:27]  They also discovered that they shot it dozens of times with illegal black-tipped armor-piercing ammunition, which Blackwater was not allowed to have.
[00:21:36]  There, basically, a lot of the guns they had, I don't think they were allowed to have the grenade launchers or like anything.
[00:21:41]  But again, it's cowboy shit.
[00:21:42]  It doesn't matter.
[00:21:43]  Yeah, they were doing another thing to know about Blackwater is that, you know, and we probably don't have enough time to even get into all this, but they were also doing a lot of weapons movement throughout the Middle East because mercenaries are, yeah, yeah, yeah, they're, you know, they're for hire, right?
[00:21:57]  And so depending on who wants to hire them, that's what they're there for.
[00:22:02]  Exactly.
[00:22:02]  That's the thing is, is they provide, let's say, full spectrum services to whatever client they'd like.
[00:22:09]  I mean, it's, it's the massacre.
[00:22:11]  Again, I can't get into it point by point because A, it's, you know, it's really a little too brutal.
[00:22:17]  And also that B, there are so many bodies at the end of this.
[00:22:21]  But one I think is really indicative and heartbreaking.
[00:22:23]  It's a family in a taxi cab try to lie down.
[00:22:27]  They take fire.
[00:22:29]  And one child, a nine-year-old named Ali, slumps into his father's arms.
[00:22:34]  His dad sort of tries to hang his put his kid's head up.
[00:22:37]  The door is open and the kid's brains just fucking fall out of the sidewalk because he got shot by an American mercenary.
[00:22:44]  A car carrying ice was hit.
[00:22:45]  One of the workers was shot.
[00:22:48]  You know, tries to get out, tries to escape.
[00:22:50]  And when he opens the car door to get out, the car door and I think the guy are blown away by a grenade launched from one of the Blackwater vehicles.
[00:23:00]  Again, the traffic cops claim these guys were just shooting randomly.
[00:23:04]  I mean, and that really seems to be the case is that just like anyone and everything, they're just shot at them.
[00:23:10]  And people tried to flee because, you know, generally when there's firing, no matter even if you're on the insurgent side or whatever.
[00:23:17]  And by the way, there were no insurgents.
[00:23:19]  And also, by the way, the insurgents were right.
[00:23:22]  You try to fucking take off from there.
[00:23:23]  You don't want to get shot by anybody.
[00:23:26]  And they shot people in the back.
[00:23:27]  They shot people driving away.
[00:23:28]  I mean, they just shot everybody.
[00:23:30]  Zero incoming fire.
[00:23:32]  I want to make that very clear.
[00:23:34]  There were zero shots fired at the block.
[00:23:37]  I mean, not that that would have excused what they did anyways, but like to be clear, there was not like the fucking president's press release says there wasn't violence occurring.
[00:23:47]  Like there was violence inflicted by one party, the Blackwater team.
[00:23:52]  They massacred 20 people, shot 17 more people, and then just roll back to base.
[00:24:00]  Yeah.
[00:24:01]  So after this, like I said, this became a huge, just a huge sensation, like obviously not just in Iraq, but also like in America.
[00:24:12]  Immediately, the Iraqi government like puts out a release that is like, Blackwater did this.
[00:24:17]  This was a total massacre.
[00:24:18]  What the fuck?
[00:24:19]  Because they've been having, you know, you have to understand that like what's kind of a provisional government at this time, right?
[00:24:26]  Yeah.
[00:24:26]  The U.S. is still very much in control, but, you know, it's, it's more complicated.
[00:24:31]  You know, they had been having a shit ton of problems with Blackwater because these guys, you know, as we'll get into, they, you know, like you said, they, they're operating with like total, without total, with total impunity.
[00:24:43]  So they can just, they're just like running around like they own the place and Iraq really wants to get them out.
[00:24:48]  And so this is like a huge, a huge fucking deal.
[00:24:52]  And rightfully they seize on it and are like, try to get ahead of the story.
[00:24:56]  Blackwater puts out a press release where their guys come out and they're like, no, It was insurgents.
[00:25:03]  It was car bombs.
[00:25:04]  All these things that Brace was outlining.
[00:25:08]  What's fucking crazy is that then, so the media is like reporting both of this stuff that's happening.
[00:25:14]  Then the State Department, they issue a statement.
[00:25:17]  And this is like official, unofficial State Department, like, I don't know, digital stationery because they sent it to all the media outlets, right?
[00:25:25]  The State Department issues a statement saying that Blackwater troops were ambushed defending American lives in a war zone.
[00:25:31]  This is on like the full official letterhead.
[00:25:33]  This is like totally, you know, this is allegedly the official statement by the U.S. government, right?
[00:25:40]  Turns out this total, this statement was written by a Blackwater operative named Darren Hanner.
[00:25:47]  And it was put forward as the official State Department statement on the incident.
[00:25:56]  Insane.
[00:25:57]  Like that, that is what is so wild to me.
[00:25:59]  Like it's, it's the State Department's relationship with Blackwater is really funny because basically like the State Department was guarded almost at all times when in Iraq by Blackwater guards.
[00:26:12]  And so they have this really weird relationship with them where they, I mean, again, corrupt and fucked up, but like they can't get rid of Blackwater and they can't really afford to piss him off too much because these are the guys that are protecting like the, you know, tons of State Department employees that are in Iraq at that moment that they're putting out any sort of press release.
[00:26:31]  It's a fucking mafia relationship.
[00:26:33]  Totally.
[00:26:33]  I mean, absolutely.
[00:26:35]  You know, and and and and the the crazy thing is, like Liz mentioned, the Iraq government really wanted them out because I didn't mention this earlier, but a Blackwater guard had drunkenly just murdered a member of the vice president's security squad who like asked him to leave like the vice president zone.
[00:26:52]  He just shot him and then they gave him, I think they gave his family $5,000 because they didn't want to make it too high.
[00:26:58]  As the U.S. government said, if they did make it too high, they originally supposed to give him $250K.
[00:27:04]  If they made it $250,000, then people would kill themselves so their family could get that money.
[00:27:09]  So they lowballed everyone.
[00:27:12]  But yeah, I mean, it's incredible.
[00:27:15]  At one point, this actually happened before the Nasser Square shootings.
[00:27:19]  State Department was making some sort of preliminary investigations on Blackwater.
[00:27:24]  And one of the heads, or I believe actually the head of Blackwater in Iraq, went up to the State Department investigator.
[00:27:30]  And this is in like, you know, there are congressional documents that show this, that this happened.
[00:27:36]  He said, I can kill, I could, he said he would and could kill him and get away with it because it's Iraq.
[00:27:44]  So he like literally was like, I'll shoot you and nothing will happen to me because it's Iraq, which will, I mean, that is really sort of a theme of a lot of this.
[00:27:54]  Well, he's not wrong.
[00:27:55]  He's not wrong.
[00:27:56]  Like, if he had shot him, then he probably would have gotten away with it.
[00:27:59]  That's the thing is if you're a U.S., I mean, U.S. troops killed countless civilians in Iraq.
[00:28:05]  But like in a situation like this, you might get in some trouble.
[00:28:08]  There is at least a chance that you'll get in some trouble.
[00:28:10]  Granted, you'll probably be given clemency in not too distant future, but at least you might get kicked out of the army.
[00:28:18]  In the case of Blackwater guards, they're like, yeah, we will never let people be prosecuted in Iraq or really even in America.
[00:28:25]  And like they'll smuggle anybody out of country immediately if they're involved in anything like this.
[00:28:30]  Well, that's what these guys, these, you know, in the Nassau Square Massacre, that's what these like 17 Blackwater guards were under the impression because when basically the State Department shows up, they roll through and they question these guys like immediately afterwards.
[00:28:45]  And the State Department goes, don't worry, we're giving you limited use immunity.
[00:28:49]  So nothing you say can be used against you in court of law.
[00:28:53]  And like these, so these guys like say all this shit.
[00:28:56]  This becomes a real problem for the DOJ when they're trying to prosecute this case, which we can get into.
[00:29:02]  But I do want to mention that this is also how Oliver North got off.
[00:29:06]  Yes, yes, absolutely.
[00:29:08]  Limited use immunity.
[00:29:09]  Well, the FBI rolls out there too, two weeks after it happens.
[00:29:14]  And you know why?
[00:29:16]  It's because they were originally supposed to be guarded by Blackwater guards.
[00:29:19]  And so they received a lot of pushback from that and eventually had to bring their own security guards, which I believe, no, you know, no disrespect to Blackwater.
[00:29:28]  I feel like the FBI can probably handle itself.
[00:29:31]  I think they have a lot of machine guns and stuff like that.
[00:29:34]  Well, these guard, these investigators get there and bam, they notice that, okay, all of the trucks have been repainted.
[00:29:42]  All of the so-called like damage they took has been fixed.
[00:29:46]  Eventually, they tracked down like one part of an engine that they said had been fucked up and went through it.
[00:29:51]  And wouldn't you know it, it had been damaged by a grenade fired from a grenade launcher on a Blackwater vehicle.
[00:29:59]  In fact, all of the damage they found, 100% of the damage that they found had been caused by Blackwater-friendly fire.

=== Blackwater's Private War (14:47) ===

[00:30:32]  So I think like, you know, we've talked a little bit about or, you know, tried to impress some people like the total insanity of the Blackwater era.
[00:30:44]  I think some of our listeners who maybe are a bit older, like, will remember this because Blackwater really became like kind of a like catch-all for all of the heinous crimes of the Bush administration in Iraq.
[00:30:58]  It kind of became like kind of a, yeah, like a symbol of that.
[00:31:01]  But like, the, you know, the, you know, PMC relationship with DOD and Blackwater really is just one of many, but it really, you know, it is a huge one.
[00:31:12]  Um, and it certainly was a huge one in Iraq.
[00:31:14]  Like this relationship goes back further.
[00:31:18]  You know, this wasn't the first time.
[00:31:19]  And in order to kind of understand that relationship, we really do have to kind of roll back a little bit to my favorite, my favorite time in American history, September 11th.
[00:31:33]  Incredible.
[00:31:34]  Well, in fact, you know, a lot of people talk about September 11th, this tragedy, but no one really talks about September 12th when we all came together or September 10th.
[00:31:42]  Well, September 10th, yeah.
[00:31:44]  September 10th and September 12th were big days for, if you worked in private military contracting, big days for you.
[00:31:53]  Or an Israeli moving company, yeah.
[00:31:56]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:31:57]  So September 10th, 2001.
[00:31:59]  A lot of people have forgotten this, but this is, you know, this happened and it's a bit much, it's a bit on the nose, we'll say, particularly if you've listened to our series on September 11th.
[00:32:10]  Liz, we actually won't be saying that because I just said the Israeli moving company.
[00:32:14]  So literally the day before September 11th, okay, Rumsfeld, that guy, Donnie R., Donnie Rums, he's out, he's in front of the Pentagon.
[00:32:24]  Remember, he is the Secretary of Defense under George W. Bush.
[00:32:30]  And basically, he gives this huge speech.
[00:32:34]  You know, all these Pentagon officials are in front of him, a bunch of bureaucrats, a bunch of guys that handle all the contracts with like Northrop Grubman, Halliburton, all those, you know, whatever, all the big contracting companies.
[00:32:46]  And he says, the security of the United States of America is facing a new adversary.
[00:32:50]  It's the last passion of five-year planning.
[00:32:55]  This adversary sounds like the Soviet Union, but our foes are more subtle and implacable today.
[00:33:01]  The adversary is the Pentagon bureaucracy.
[00:33:05]  I think he thought that was like him being funny.
[00:33:07]  I don't know.
[00:33:09]  I mean, that is kind of funny.
[00:33:11]  Yeah.
[00:33:12]  Oops, got him.
[00:33:13]  Yeah.
[00:33:14]  Oh, whoa, he called us communists.
[00:33:16]  So, yeah, basically, Rumsfeld.
[00:33:18]  Way more people.
[00:33:20]  Yeah.
[00:33:20]  So basically, Rumsfeld announces the day before 9-11 that he is going to war with DOD, and there's going to be like a massive, massive shift toward the private sector and contracting.
[00:33:30]  Interesting.
[00:33:31]  He won that war, though.
[00:33:33]  You got to give the guy credit.
[00:33:35]  He won the war.
[00:33:36]  Yeah.
[00:33:37]  And, you know, to understand this, again, this is stuff that we kind of really tried to focus on with Ben in our 9-11 series.
[00:33:44]  Like, all of this is a realization of the core of the Bush administration.
[00:33:51]  Big guy in that core, obviously, is Dick Cheney.
[00:33:55]  Tricky Dick.
[00:33:56]  Yeah.
[00:33:57]  Sorry.
[00:33:57]  I don't know why I had to say that.
[00:33:59]  Well, no, I mean, you know, Cheney was Secretary of Defense.
[00:34:03]  Yeah.
[00:34:04]  Don't forget, he was Secretary of Defense under Daddy Bush, Papa Bush.
[00:34:09]  And when he was there, he was like really obsessed with privatizing the military.
[00:34:14]  I mean, this was like a really big push.
[00:34:15]  Don't forget that then Cheney, you know, he goes on to become the CEO of Halliburton.
[00:34:19]  He also, there's a time where he works at AEI.
[00:34:23]  I don't know why I just American Enterprise Institute.
[00:34:26]  Yeah.
[00:34:27]  So that's like, you know, the big neocon outfit.
[00:34:30]  They're all pushing crazy privatization, crazy wars everywhere.
[00:34:34]  Of course, we cannot forget Peanac.
[00:34:38]  So right before Cheney leaves, you know, leaves his post as Secretary of Defense, like 1992, 1991, he, you know, he commissions a study by Halliburton on, you know, what is the quickest way for us to privatize the DOD, right?
[00:34:58]  And what they find is that, you know, the quickest way is for the U.S. to expand its skirmishes, we'll say, overseas to the point where, yeah, they need more and more, you know, personnel that they can't fulfill.
[00:35:22]  And so they need to contract it out, right?
[00:35:25]  So effectively what Cheney commissioned and then, you know, when he joins Halliburton, what he realizes is that you create an industry for yourself.
[00:35:34]  Because as the U.S. expands its military reach, the more, you know, the more Halliburton gets, the more other private firms can expand all of their business.
[00:35:44]  And this, like, okay, the reason why we're, you know, we have to kind of set the stage because Eric Prince emerges directly out of this, as we'll get to.
[00:35:52]  Because Blackwater really was nothing until the Iraq war happened.
[00:35:57]  Yeah.
[00:35:58]  Absolutely.
[00:35:59]  I mean, and like these, these companies have been around for a while, right?
[00:36:02]  Like, I mean, or PMC companies have been around for a while.
[00:36:05]  Obviously, there are mercenaries dating back to, you know, time immemorial.
[00:36:09]  But really, the modern incarnation of this stuff happened, you know, sort of with World War II veterans during the Cold War.
[00:36:16]  They started Executive Outcomes, Sandline International, you know, a lot of, let's say, less than above board work in Africa and Asia and all the same places that it's happening today.
[00:36:29]  But this is like really when it becomes a huge industry because we're not just talking about private military contractors, although these things sort of become inseparable as time goes on, but just contracting in general.
[00:36:43]  I mean, at one point, there were 200 private contracting companies, armed and unarmed, in Iraq.
[00:36:49]  200 companies.
[00:36:51]  You know, that's incredible.
[00:36:52]  They had this program called, which we could do a whole just podcast about this, called Cost Plus.
[00:36:58]  Basically.
[00:36:59]  Not where you buy shitty first apartment furniture, by the way.
[00:37:05]  No, this is like that word that's like not a real wood.
[00:37:10]  Yes, yeah, I know what you're talking about.
[00:37:11]  But it's like wood.
[00:37:13]  I'll tell you, they make like apartment floors out of that these days.
[00:37:15]  I don't know.
[00:37:16]  It's like bolster wood.
[00:37:17]  Anyway, awful.
[00:37:19]  But they got these fucking way that this program works is I'll explain it with like a little bit of an anecdote.
[00:37:27]  If you, for instance, have a truck, a $100,000, $80,000 truck that you are being contracted to, you know, move something in Iraq or from Kuwait to Iraq, whatever.
[00:37:40]  And that truck gets a flat tire.
[00:37:42]  Your company doesn't have like spare tires.
[00:37:45]  Your company blows up the truck and makes more money by buying a new truck because the more you spend, the more you make, which is exactly my theory of financial planning.
[00:37:58]  So this works.
[00:37:59]  I was a big fan of this program and pushed for it really hard when I was in.
[00:38:02]  It's very Keynesian.
[00:38:03]  Oh, it's incredible.
[00:38:06]  But like basically none of these companies, including the big guys like Halliburton, really had any interest in looking out for anything, anything, anything but their bottom line.
[00:38:16]  And, you know, obviously Iraqi lives come at the bottom of that list.
[00:38:20]  But even U.S. troops really got the shaft from these guys.
[00:38:24]  A lot of the time, they would just send out convoys because they were tracked, you know, contracted to like, you know, okay, you have to do this many convoys a day, blah, blah, blah.
[00:38:33]  And so they would just send out convoys with nothing in them to just drive down Iraqi highways from base to base because that's what they were contracted to do and they made more money that way.
[00:38:44]  I mean, every executive had like a, you know, at the end, I'm talking about like 2004 fucking money, like $50,000 SUV in Kuwait and stuff like that.
[00:38:54]  I mean, they had C-do's, all this stuff, and they made a ton of money on all of it.
[00:38:59]  They also had a ton of translators that they were just hired without any qualifications.
[00:39:04]  Like if you spoke anything like broken Arabic or broken English, whatever, and you just called, I think the company was called like Thor, you called them and you had a one-minute phone interview and then they'd send you to Iraq.
[00:39:16]  I feel like I remember that.
[00:39:18]  It's so, yeah, it's amazing.
[00:39:19]  It's a huge boom.
[00:39:21]  Yeah, I mean, to like really like set, you know, set in the scope of what Cheney and Rumsfeld achieved, you know, during the Gulf War, right?
[00:39:31]  And that's when Cheney was Secretary of Defense, right?
[00:39:33]  So during the Gulf War, the ratio of private military contractors to DOD, you know, officials, personnel, whatever you want to call it, in the Gulf War was one to 10.
[00:39:48]  At the end of Rumsfeld's tenure during the Iraq war, it was one to one.
[00:39:54]  That's like a Belden party.
[00:39:56]  No, I mean, it's just like really, really unprecedented.
[00:39:58]  I mean, it's like truly unprecedented what they achieved.
[00:40:01]  They completely, completely transformed modern warfare.
[00:40:07]  And, you know, I do want to get into this.
[00:40:10]  There's ramifications that I think they didn't, you know, foresee, but that come out of that.
[00:40:17]  Yeah, I mean, it's, it's really, there were so many advantages for them at the time.
[00:40:22]  And for instance, instead of having to have a soldier or somebody, you know, clean a dish, they would actually just hire a guy from Pakistan and pay him $1.25 an hour, make him work 12 hours a day, seven days a week, take his passport and keep him locked up in a barracks that he can never leave.
[00:40:39]  And these companies would make hundreds of millions of dollars in a contract while the actual person in Iraq is making $1.25 a day.
[00:40:46]  At one point, this American private military contractor company hired like, I think something like 1,300 Ugandan or Ugandan, excuse me, like soldiers or security guards to service base security for some places.
[00:41:03]  These guys were paid $3 an hour and the company that hired them was paid tens and tens of millions of dollars by the Pentagon.
[00:41:11]  And so the whole thing is just a giant scam.
[00:41:13]  And the thing is, the other positive and the thing that the Pentagon liked too, is if any of these third world nationals died, because that's what they called them.
[00:41:21]  Oh no, they called them third country nationals, but I guess people called them third world nationals there.
[00:41:27]  They weren't added to the American body count.
[00:41:30]  PMCs weren't either, but like they weren't even reported, right?
[00:41:34]  And so like tons of these people died because they were sent, you know, with basically zero instructions to do, you know, maybe drive a truck somewhere or whatever, you know, can't speak the language and they get killed because they're in a war zone.
[00:41:47]  Whether they're killed by Americans or they're killed by, you know, insurgents, whatever, they get killed and nothing happens.
[00:41:53]  Yeah.
[00:41:54]  Jeremy Scahill in his reporting at the time, but he, you know, he's also, he's written a book or maybe two books on Blackwater.
[00:42:01]  And, you know, he's obviously followed Eric Prince and his career very closely through his like journalistic career.
[00:42:09]  But he had a great line where he pulled this from the Times of London in like 2007 or something.
[00:42:15]  They said, like, the war business boom isn't oil, it's security.
[00:42:20]  And I think people like don't totally realize that when they look back and think about the war in Iraq.
[00:42:26]  But this was like, I mean, this, yeah, like we said, this completely transformed everything, including Blackwater, right?
[00:42:34]  Yeah.
[00:42:34]  Because Blackwater, before the Iraq war, what they were making, what, like 300K?
[00:42:38]  They were nothing.
[00:42:39]  Yeah.
[00:42:39]  Peanut money.
[00:42:41]  I mean, give me a break.
[00:42:42]  I mean, that's the thing.
[00:42:43]  It's like what you said is absolutely true, or that quote rather is absolutely true.
[00:42:48]  Like, you know, in San Francisco, there's sort of that old adage or a doge, whatever, adage, whatever.
[00:42:55]  Adage, the magazine I write for.
[00:42:58]  You know, they have, they have that whole saying rather that the people who actually made a ton of money during the gold rush weren't the fucking morons who went to go get gold.
[00:43:08]  It was the people who like sold them shovels.
[00:43:10]  And that's precisely the same thing that's going on here.
[00:43:13]  Yeah, by 2007, Blackwater is making about 800 million.
[00:43:17]  Yeah.
[00:43:18]  I think in total, they made a billion and a half.
[00:43:20]  Just incredible.
[00:43:21]  I mean, fucking incredible.
[00:43:22]  There's Eric Prince had a his like autobiography, Civilian Warriors.
[00:43:29]  Yeah.
[00:43:29]  He said, Blackwater became something resembling its own branch of the military and other government agencies.
[00:43:36]  We became the ultimate tool in the war on terror.
[00:43:40]  The ultimate tool?
[00:43:42]  Wouldn't that be the Predator drone?
[00:43:44]  Well, they were the ones running the Predator drones, I guess.
[00:43:48]  I mean, they were fixing them up, but yeah, it's the crazy thing is that like Blackwater really underreported the amount of shootings that they had.
[00:43:56]  Like a guy, they claimed that they had 1.4 shootings a week.
[00:44:00]  A guy who worked for Blackwater, like a whistleblower, said that they had four or five like a week, like basically one a day, or not one a day, but you know, half of one a day.
[00:44:09]  And, you know, of course, I'm sure a lot of their shootings were for civilians.
[00:44:13]  So yeah, I mean, before really before Iraq, Blackwater's business was like, you know, occasionally training Navy SEALs because Prince himself had been a Navy SEAL.
[00:44:25]  And then the USS coal bombing happened.
[00:44:29]  And they suddenly got a huge contract to train U.S. naval personnel on like, I think, how to repel borders and stuff like that or security.
[00:44:39]  Also, the USS Liberty attack happened.
[00:44:42]  And then they got training to send emails and write Facebook posts.
[00:44:48]  Exactly.
[00:44:50]  No, like I mentioned, though, to bring it back, you know, Blackwater, so Blackwater becomes this like catch-all phrase for all the like private military contractors.
[00:44:59]  But it is true that I mean, they expanded like nuts.
[00:45:03]  Like at, you know, it wasn't just that overnight, then suddenly they were doing all this like legit stuff.
[00:45:09]  They were doing, like, they had a blimp division, which like what?
[00:45:17]  It's BBW, Blackwater Blimpworks.

=== Order 17 And Beyond (15:39) ===

[00:45:20]  No.
[00:45:22]  So this.
[00:45:22]  That would have been better if Blimps were Blackwater.
[00:45:24]  Whatever.
[00:45:25]  You can't win them all.
[00:45:26]  Well, they're just pulling the federal money and just like spend, spend, spend, creating like crazy.
[00:45:30]  Because the thing is, is that like, I don't know if people remember, but the Iraqi occupation, not going so well.
[00:45:36]  No.
[00:45:37]  No, no, it was not, Liz.
[00:45:39]  In fact, I would say it was going poorly.
[00:45:41]  Yeah.
[00:45:42]  And so Blackwater really had an opportunity here to offer its security services because, you know, so much is falling through the cracks over in Iraq.
[00:45:53]  And the thing is with contractors, and that's the thing, like that sort of is the theme for this, is that contractors can do whatever the fuck they want.
[00:46:00]  They are not under the, you know, military code of justice.
[00:46:03]  They are not under really, I mean, they're under these sort of occasionally very vague orders.
[00:46:08]  And they are in their sort of minds.
[00:46:11]  And I mean, I guess in reality too, more flexible than U.S. troops.
[00:46:14]  You know, they don't have to call in all these different things.
[00:46:16]  They have different resources.
[00:46:18]  Obviously, they don't have like, you know, the same resources as like army troops or marines or anything like that.
[00:46:24]  But there's certainly a lot less bureaucracy.
[00:46:51]  So in order to understand completely like how these guys were running around, you have to order you have to understand like a little thing called Order 17.
[00:47:02]  I'm sure that a lot of our listeners have listened, and if they haven't, they should.
[00:47:06]  The excellent series Blowback by Friend of the Pod, Noah Colwyn, and Brendan.
[00:47:15]  I can't remember Brendan's last name.
[00:47:17]  It's James.
[00:47:18]  Thank you.
[00:47:20]  We're just going to leave that in because I think it's funny.
[00:47:22]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:47:23]  Sorry, Brendan, I forgot your last name.
[00:47:26]  Anyway, you should listen to that show.
[00:47:28]  They do a great job of breaking down a lot of storylines in the Iraq war, and there are a lot.
[00:47:33]  But Order 17 is really key for understanding just how lawless this entire fucking fiasco was.
[00:47:42]  Yeah, I mean, it's really the work of a guy named Paul Bremer, who is one of the greatest heroes in American history, a real diplomat's diplomat, and honestly somebody who I wish was my father.
[00:47:56]  Oh, my God.
[00:47:57]  A little background on him.
[00:47:58]  He was basically like God in Iraq.
[00:48:01]  He was the head of the provisional authority there.
[00:48:05]  He was also a former employee of Kissinger and Associates and had an office in the Twin Towers.
[00:48:10]  He did not go to work the day that the planes hit.
[00:48:16]  Also worked on terrorism legislation under Dennis Hastert, which is a famous pedophile.
[00:48:23]  Anyways, his ass gets into Iraq in 2003.
[00:48:26]  Yes, absolutely.
[00:48:28]  He gets in there.
[00:48:28]  He's basically in Iraq for about a year and a couple months, May 2003, or I guess a month, May 2003 to June 2004.
[00:48:36]  Immediately, like one of his first things he does, and this is a very famous thing that the Americans did, which was seen as a mistake, although maybe not.
[00:48:45]  They fire like every single government official and soldier, the entire officer corps, because there's a process known as de-bathification.
[00:48:56]  Obviously, a throwback to denazification.
[00:48:59]  But the thing is, like they do kind of the same thing because in denazification, they basically like, okay, you know, you're a postal official.
[00:49:08]  Now you can't have a job for a year or whatever until you've completed some courses.
[00:49:12]  And then if you're a higher ranking one, now we're going to hire you to start the spy service and you don't have to denazify.
[00:49:18]  Or in fact, you can actually become the leader of Bolivia and sell cocaine in a couple decades.
[00:49:25]  So don't worry about it in the case of Khalas Barbie.
[00:49:29]  But they banned basically all these guys from having jobs.
[00:49:33]  I mean, I think they put like 400,000, 500,000 people out of work.
[00:49:37]  He's obsessed.
[00:49:38]  And this is, Americans get really into sex when they're talking about Iraq.
[00:49:43]  They're like, I mean, obviously everyone knows about that big plan to turn it into like a, you know, a Sunnistan, a Shia stan in a Kurdistan.
[00:49:50]  You know, but like this is all kind of governing their thinking.
[00:49:55]  He's like, fuck Sunnis.
[00:49:57]  And this is a very funny kind of reversal of how things often sometimes work with them too.
[00:50:01]  He's like, fuck Sunnis.
[00:50:03]  You know, it's more reliable.
[00:50:05]  Shias are more reliable, even though not that this matters, that I think there was more Shia in the Bath Party than there were Sunni.
[00:50:12]  Again, I'm not an expert on this stuff, but he like constantly compared like Bathus to Hitler.
[00:50:18]  He claimed Hussein killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis in the 90s, which is not true, even though that claim is reported constantly over and over and over again.
[00:50:28]  And of course, like I said before, created the green zone, the emerald city.
[00:50:34]  So right before he leaves.
[00:50:35]  He really is like the Wizard of Oz of the Green Zone.
[00:50:38]  Absolutely.
[00:50:39]  Just a real, I can't remember what happens in the Wizard of Oz, but he is really, I mean, he kicks Johnson.
[00:50:46]  Have you seen the Wizard of Oz?
[00:50:47]  No, it's like a John Wick thing.
[00:50:49]  Oh, my God.
[00:50:51]  So he anyway.
[00:50:53]  I just assume that most movies are in the John Wick universe.
[00:50:56]  I think that's a fair assumption.
[00:50:58]  I haven't seen those either, but they seem very popular.
[00:51:01]  I can understand the connection between other movies now.
[00:51:03]  Anyways, so basically, he signs this thing called Order 17, which it is a long thing to read.
[00:51:13]  And we're not going to read, in fact, any of it because it's just legal Mumbo Jumbo.
[00:51:17]  But the essence of it, in fact, the entirety of it is saying foreign contractors connected to the occupation of the country are 100% totally immune from Iraqi law.
[00:51:32]  Yeah.
[00:51:33]  So like, I can go up to you.
[00:51:35]  I am, say, a member of Blackwater.
[00:51:38]  I can go up to you on the street, put a gun to your head and pull the trigger and have kill you in front of as many people as I want.
[00:51:46]  And the Iraqis legally can do nothing about it.
[00:51:51]  It's insane.
[00:51:53]  Yeah.
[00:51:54]  Yes.
[00:51:54]  So foreigners were to be completely immune from any form of arrest or detention other than people, than persons acting on behalf of the sending states.
[00:52:04]  So aka America.
[00:52:06]  Yeah.
[00:52:08]  By the way, that doesn't apply to if you're a member of a neighboring country that is in Iraq.
[00:52:13]  Right.
[00:52:14]  Just Americans.
[00:52:15]  Right.
[00:52:15]  And also we should mention that Americans had complete and total utter freedom to arrest and detain indefinitely whoever they wanted.
[00:52:24]  I seem to remember there was a famous prison somewhere in Iraq.
[00:52:29]  Yeah, they also got some interesting immunity deals.
[00:52:32]  Yes.
[00:52:33]  Also contractors involved in that too.
[00:52:35]  None of whom ever got punished, even though they were directly involved in the torture of prisoners at Abu Gharib.
[00:52:40]  Yeah.
[00:52:40]  So this was also, I mean, I don't know if people, you know, I mentioned this in the last episode.
[00:52:45]  We were talking about the telecoms, but this was like during a period where like everyone was getting immunity.
[00:52:51]  It was like, you know, it was.
[00:52:53]  This is literally the period where Epstein got immunity.
[00:52:56]  Yeah, that's what I'm saying.
[00:52:57]  It was everyone was immunity crazed.
[00:53:00]  It was the, you know, the beanie baby of the 2000, the late 2010s or you're like a Beverly Hills merchant.
[00:53:09]  I own that joke because I couldn't fucking remember the date.
[00:53:13]  Being babies are they're still around.
[00:53:17]  Anyway, so no, everyone's getting immunity.
[00:53:19]  So, you know, the Bush administration is like, they knew they were fucking legally, I mean, they could be liable for a lot of shit, including, by the way, going to The Hague.
[00:53:31]  And so they're just handed out immunity.
[00:53:33]  They give the telecoms immunity.
[00:53:35]  They give the CIA immunity.
[00:53:37]  They give contractors immunity.
[00:53:39]  They're just giving everyone immunity.
[00:53:40]  And this is a big fucking deal to the incoming, or, you know, there's supposed to be this handoff, basically, to the incoming Iraqi government, right?
[00:53:51]  And Mysore Square, like I mentioned at the top of the episode, becomes this catalyst, you know, in Iraq as much as it does in America.
[00:53:59]  So, you know, this is a huge scandal.
[00:54:03]  There's a, the trial that they hold in America for this is fucking nuts.
[00:54:08]  It basically lasts 11 years.
[00:54:11]  Yeah.
[00:54:11]  Yeah.
[00:54:12]  Which, by the way, if you're on trial, you kind of want that to happen.
[00:54:16]  I mean, it literally, it starts the first trial.
[00:54:19]  So, okay.
[00:54:20]  We're going to have to, I, you know, there's a lot of details in here, especially details the right wing really likes to cling to.
[00:54:27]  I don't know.
[00:54:28]  It's a little much for me, but basically there's three different trials.
[00:54:32]  There's the first case that DOJ brings against these guys is dismissed in December of 2009.
[00:54:39]  And I got to say, you know, Eric Holder, not a great, not a great attorney general.
[00:54:46]  No.
[00:54:47]  No, he fucked up a lot of people.
[00:54:49]  This was a big case that he fucked up.
[00:54:52]  And there was a lot of pressure on the Obama admin and also we should say Hillary Clinton, you know, State Department to really like do something about this, not just from the U.S. media, because, you know, at this time, right?
[00:55:07]  Okay, little history lesson.
[00:55:08]  Obama, Hillary, they run against each other in the primary, right?
[00:55:12]  Wait, for president?
[00:55:15]  Technically, for the Democratic nomination for president.
[00:55:18]  That's incredible.
[00:55:19]  Yeah.
[00:55:21]  Former adversaries, then stronger together.
[00:55:25]  But yeah, so they run against Blackwater is actually a big touchstone of their respective campaigns.
[00:55:31]  And Hillary goes like ham against it and is like, we're getting rid of all the contracts.
[00:55:37]  These guys are going to go to jail.
[00:55:38]  It's like a big rallying thing.
[00:55:40]  You know, Obama famously says that he's going to shut down Guantanamo.
[00:55:45]  That doesn't happen.
[00:55:46]  He's going to, you know, we're going to get out of the Iraq war.
[00:55:48]  That doesn't happen.
[00:55:49]  You know, all these things he says he's going to do.
[00:55:52]  We have Hillary Clinton with her Huma Abedin, who's literally a member of the Muslim Brotherhood.
[00:55:56]  Like, we're making progress here.
[00:55:59]  So when, you know, Obama presidency starts and Hillary Clinton's in there.
[00:56:05]  By the way, we should say that Hillary did actually follow through.
[00:56:08]  The Hillary Clinton State Department totally fucking nuked all Blackwater contracts.
[00:56:13]  Yes.
[00:56:13]  Which plays an important role in our story later.
[00:56:17]  Yeah, in the kind of, you know, in the metamorphosis of one Eric Prince, the Jokerine.
[00:56:23]  But yeah, so the holder, DOJ, like, really fucked this up.
[00:56:29]  So, yeah, the first case is dismissed.
[00:56:32]  There's a 90-page opinion.
[00:56:34]  90 pages in a pre-Wait, is this guy a woman?
[00:56:37]  No, Judge Ricard M. Urbina.
[00:56:41]  Okay.
[00:56:41]  Quite a name.
[00:56:42]  Could be a girl.
[00:56:43]  Very, yeah.
[00:56:44]  That's a podcast.
[00:56:46]  That's like a character in a podcast series name.
[00:56:51]  I don't.
[00:56:52]  I've only listened to our podcast.
[00:56:53]  Anyway, so he issues a 90-page opinion, which is pretty rare for a judge because this is in a pre-trial state and it makes it very difficult to challenge on appeal.
[00:57:05]  He says that, you know, the feds completely mishandled the case.
[00:57:09]  It's in reckless violation of the defendants' constitutional rights.
[00:57:13]  They say that the feds rely too much on the statements that they gave to the State Department when they were under the impression they had immunity.
[00:57:23]  Remember that?
[00:57:25]  Well, that's just a coincidence.
[00:57:27]  Yeah.
[00:57:27]  So it's a total fucking mess.
[00:57:31]  At the same time, like I mentioned, remember when I mentioned that Blackwater was being accused of running guns throughout the Middle East?
[00:57:38]  Yes.
[00:57:38]  Okay.
[00:57:39]  So at the same time, Blackwater is dealing with a grand jury in North Carolina, investigating them for weapons smuggling and bribery of Iraqi officials.
[00:57:49]  Oh, yeah.
[00:57:49]  And also, I should mention, I made all these notes about this.
[00:57:52]  There's not enough time to get into it, and there's no really a place for it.
[00:57:56]  They also ran guns in Afghanistan and signed them out of Afghani armories under the name Eric Cartman.
[00:58:04]  Oh, come on, man.
[00:58:06]  From South Park, yes.
[00:58:08]  Which, who knows?
[00:58:08]  Maybe he's in Blackwater.
[00:58:10]  I don't know.
[00:58:10]  He seems, you know, a little fat for that.
[00:58:12]  You know, little details like that are so funny.
[00:58:16]  You know, fuck, I wish I could think of another one off the top of my head.
[00:58:19]  I mean, wait till we get to the Libya weapons smuggling thing because it gets even funnier.
[00:58:23]  But it's like little details like that really give you a window into like how human and like obscene the like state apparatus is.
[00:58:33]  You know what I mean?
[00:58:34]  Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
[00:58:35]  You're like, you guys are fucking quoting South Park on your fucking killing spree.
[00:58:39]  While you're taking like 200 AK-47s that the Afghan National Police have and then giving them to Taliban or whatever, or to probably die.
[00:58:47]  Sick.
[00:58:47]  Or just selling them.
[00:58:48]  Who knows?
[00:58:49]  Mercenaries.
[00:58:49]  They're just like you.
[00:58:51]  Anyway.
[00:58:52]  Yeah.
[00:58:52]  So the judge throws out the first trial.
[00:58:58]  This is a total disaster.
[00:59:00]  The you know, it's not just a disaster for DOJ, but it's like actually a diplomatic disaster.
[00:59:07]  Because remember how I mentioned that, you know, the Iraqi government really was like seizing on this to as a way to kind of like drum up domestic support too.
[00:59:18]  Because surprise, surprise, it was quite popular at the time to run on anti-American sentiment in Iraq.
[00:59:24]  Yeah.
[00:59:25]  And even as a lot of these guys sort of in private sort of kowtowed to the Americans in public, they were very, you know, loud in their opposition to basically any lack of any accountability to these Blackwater guards.
[00:59:39]  Yeah.
[00:59:40]  So, yeah, no, I mean, that's the thing is that you can, you know, they'll be very anti-American to the public, but the whole time they're communicating with the Obama administration.
[00:59:51]  And that's the thing.
[00:59:51]  Exactly.
[00:59:52]  So, you know, State Department cables show that the State Department communicated to DOJ directly that this case was having a significant impact on diplomatic and political issues, like with Iraq.
[01:00:04]  And Eric Holder, I mean, it's alleged that Eric Holder had direct discussions with then Prime Minister Malaki in Iraq, which is pretty crazy.
[01:00:13]  Funny enough, the right wing in their appeals process has started.
[01:00:19]  This is just a funny detail.
[01:00:20]  I'm sorry, you guys.
[01:00:22]  They've started calling, instead of, you know, we mentioned Raven 23, which was like the unit, the Blackwater unit.
[01:00:29]  They've started calling them the Biden 4.
[01:00:31]  Incredible.
[01:00:32]  Which has got to be some hare-brained Bannonite scheme to like attach this to the incoming Biden administration.
[01:00:43]  It's just so funny.
[01:00:45]  They're doing that because Biden, you know, three weeks after this case gets dropped, Biden, you know, shows up in Iraq and promises that the Obama administration is going to deliver a win to the Iraqi people in their case against Blackwater.

=== Cowboys Operate in Darkness (05:09) ===

[01:00:59]  Smart move.
[01:01:00]  Yeah.
[01:01:01]  So anyway, so second case comes April 2011.
[01:01:05]  An appellate court says, actually, no, the 2009 decision is wrong.
[01:01:12]  And you can actually go back and continue your prosecution of these guys, right?
[01:01:19]  Love an appellate court.
[01:01:20]  Yeah.
[01:01:22]  Yeah.
[01:01:23]  So they prosecute four of the guys.
[01:01:25]  They drop charges on one of them.
[01:01:27]  The trial begins June 2014.
[01:01:29]  There's 10 weeks of testimony, 28 days of jury deliberations, convictions, all four men.
[01:01:36]  Slatten, the main guy that we mentioned, he gets sentenced in April 2015, life in prison.
[01:01:43]  The other three get 30 years in prison each.
[01:01:46]  But the story doesn't end there.
[01:01:48]  August 2017, a U.S. appeals court overturns Slattin's murder conviction and says, no, no, no, no, it's not fair.
[01:01:57]  This guy was so psycho, you shouldn't have tried him with the other three.
[01:02:02]  So then they say this guy's got to get another retrial.
[01:02:05]  It's like a fucking disaster.
[01:02:06]  You can do that.
[01:02:07]  If you're just too crazy, they'll be like, oh, no, man, he makes it.
[01:02:10]  I mean, I don't think they actually said he was psycho.
[01:02:12]  I'm adding a little color commentary.
[01:02:14]  But anyway, so then they have to run another trial.
[01:02:17]  They have to run this guy again.
[01:02:20]  Murder on his own.
[01:02:23]  They declare a mistrial.
[01:02:24]  They got to do a third trial.
[01:02:26]  This guy gets tried.
[01:02:28]  I swear to God, this guy gets tried three times.
[01:02:31]  Jesus Christ.
[01:02:33]  Yeah, it's like so fucking nuts.
[01:02:35]  So then November 2018, two years into Trump's presidency.
[01:02:40]  That's how fucking recent this shit is, right?
[01:02:43]  November 2018, they get their third attempt.
[01:02:47]  They finally convict him for murder December 19th, 2018.
[01:02:52]  And now they're all out.
[01:02:54]  Yeah.
[01:02:56]  It's, yeah, now they've just all been pardoned across the board.
[01:03:01]  In interviews I've read with them, they seem totally unremorseful for what they've done.
[01:03:06]  Yeah, I mean.
[01:03:08]  Totally par for the chorus.
[01:03:11]  It's hard to convey the total darkness in which these guys operate.
[01:03:18]  Like, it's hard.
[01:03:20]  I mean, we're just doing a podcast.
[01:03:23]  It's hard without video, without all this archival stuff for people to fully appreciate like how fucking insane these guys are and how insane what was happening in Iraq was.
[01:03:35]  I mean, it was like, especially the thing with Blackwater.
[01:03:39]  I mean, we all know that how brutal U.S. troops were in Iraq and, you know, kicking in doors and tying up families and shooting people and all that stuff.
[01:03:46]  But with Blackwater, it's almost to another level because when you're in the army or you're in the Marines, you're in whatever, there are like certain rules of engagement.
[01:03:56]  You know, there's a bureaucracy, there's a chain of command, and there's this kind of like apparatus around you.
[01:04:01]  But with Blackwater, a lot of these guys had formerly served in the military and now they're sort of free to be the cowboys that they want to be.
[01:04:08]  Because, you know, I've known people I went to high school with, people I, you know, I knew later in life had served in the army.
[01:04:15]  And like, you know, one gripe that a lot of people have, not necessarily these guys, but I, I, you know, a lot of people have is that they're not allowed to do a lot of stuff.
[01:04:23]  And in Blackwater, you sort of get the chance to become a cowboy.
[01:04:27]  And, you know, where do cowboys operate?
[01:04:29]  Cowboys operate the frontier.
[01:04:30]  And at the frontier, you can do whatever the fuck you want, you know?
[01:04:34]  And it's like they did and they could.
[01:04:36]  And that's a totally foreseeable sort of, you know, byproduct of this is that, is that you breed already the U.S. military and it's, you know, the this professional military breeds sort of this, these, I don't even know what to call them, but just like class of like fucked up, brain damaged Praetorian warriors.
[01:04:58]  And then you have this like, you know, special operations, which is a whole other thing.
[01:05:02]  I didn't even talk about fucking Navy SEALs.
[01:05:03]  We'll get into that next time, next episode on this because I got a lot to say about Navy SEALs.
[01:05:10]  But then you get, you know, these Blackwater guys, and it's like you're free of all those rules.
[01:05:15]  Like, now, when you get a civilian that's giving you shit, instead of joking about killing him, you can put a gun to his head and fucking kill him, and nothing happens.
[01:05:23]  And so it's like, yeah, this is an industry that is like built to make killing machines.
[01:05:28]  And that's what they do.
[01:05:29]  I mean, that's what the army does.
[01:05:30]  But these guys really perfected because they are on all those constraints that you have on the army.
[01:05:35]  You know, I mean, this is this is this is dark fucking stuff.
[01:05:40]  It's crazy too, because you know, it's why we want, we had to like tell the story of how Cheney and Bush and Rumsfeld and all these guys and all the guys behind him too, right?
[01:05:51]  I mean, those are just the big names, like birth this entire and like push through this entire industry.
[01:05:58]  It's like, you know, we had to create these super soldiers in order to fucking expand and continue accumulating more and more and more wealth.

=== Twin Peaks' Cosmic Evil (05:15) ===

[01:06:09]  Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
[01:06:10]  And they created these things, you know, if you guys listen to the, you know, there's like a, I think it's in the third episode of this, or maybe the second episode in the Spider Network series we did with Michael Judge, where he's talking about the kind of strange relationship between the way that warfare, like insurgent warfare responds to like the changes of the invading army or whatever.
[01:06:34]  And we were talking about it in the case of Vietnam.
[01:06:37]  And like, that's the same fucking case with what we've seen with the proliferation of PMCs in the Middle East and the way that and what happened with the occupation in Iraq.
[01:06:49]  Like this is going to be like two episodes in a row that I mentioned this.
[01:06:54]  So sorry about that.
[01:06:56]  But there's a scene in Twin Peaks the Return.
[01:07:02]  I know I keep going back to this, but it really, I mean, everyone should watch it.
[01:07:07]  But it's, there's this like really infamous sequence in the, I think it's in the eighth episode, where it's like this full camera swan dive into the mushroom cloud of the Trinity nuclear test in like over the White Sands missile range.
[01:07:25]  And like for people who don't know, this is 1945, I think.
[01:07:30]  And it's the first atomic bomb test in history.
[01:07:33]  So this is before Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
[01:07:39]  And it's like the sequence in the show is like completely horrifying and beautiful at the same time.
[01:07:44]  And it's supposed to be, right?
[01:07:45]  And there's, you know, Lynch has Threnody for the victims of Hiroshima playing, which is a very kind of chaotic, insane, like cacophonous whirl of sound.
[01:07:57]  And you're like swirling around this like ash cloud.
[01:08:00]  It's an incredible sequence.
[01:08:02]  And then the episode like cuts to 1958 New Mexico.
[01:08:07]  And there's this like disgusting Lynchian creature that like hatches out of this egg in the desert.
[01:08:14]  And it like crawls out of the explosion site.
[01:08:18]  And it ends up like crawling through a window into the mouth of this like sleeping child, this little girl.
[01:08:26]  And it's strongly implied in the series that.
[01:08:29]  It's funny.
[01:08:30]  We started this episode railing on podcasts about TV shows.
[01:08:32]  I was going to make a show, but now you have to do it.
[01:08:34]  Well, okay, anyway.
[01:08:35]  But so it's strongly implied in the series that this little girl is like one of the central evils that's birthed like in this Twin Peaks American, like kind of, you know, very 1950s Americana American world that Lynch creates.
[01:08:55]  That this is like the central like cosmic evil in the Twin Peaks universe.
[01:09:00]  So it's like a bit of an origin tale.
[01:09:03]  And it seems like what Lynch is really getting at, and I think this is kind of like a thread through most of his work, but that with the explosion of the atom bomb, like a Rubicon was crossed, right?
[01:09:17]  And this inexplicable evil was like unleashed on the world with the creation of this.
[01:09:23]  And like even before Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which it should be said are like the most horrific acts, some of the most horrific acts, if not the most horrific acts in human history.
[01:09:35]  But that something changed when this happened and that like kind of dialectically, this new evil was born out of it, right?
[01:09:44]  And you see in Iraq, like basically what I'm trying to get at is like, you know, to bring it all around is like, it's not a coincidence that ISIS, which yeah, we all make jokes about and whatever, but like, you know, is one of the most like evil nihilistic death cults ever to exist in history.
[01:10:02]  It's hard for me to find the words to, I don't think, I think almost by design, it's difficult to describe like how all-consuming and dark and avoid like ISIS is.
[01:10:16]  I quite like them, but yeah, I see what you're saying.
[01:10:18]  I mean, they want to make like, I don't think people understand, like, they want to make nothing exist, like, including themselves.
[01:10:23]  Yeah.
[01:10:23]  I mean, it's, it's like the pure ideology of a school shooter.
[01:10:27]  It's like something I can't wrap my head around.
[01:10:29]  I was always just astounded.
[01:10:31]  Like, you know, we, we, we, you know, we go through bodies and like, you know, they'd all have these fucking explosives strapped to them.
[01:10:37]  And it's like, I would always think every time I looked at one of these, I'm like, there is basically nothing you could tell me that would make me put explosives around my body.
[01:10:47]  Even if I was going to fight, you know, and like, you know, it was supposed to blow up and I got wounded.
[01:10:51]  And it's like, yeah, I mean, it's, it's, it's all that, like, that, that's what, that's what sort of made it so like effective because, you know, they, they, any way is oblivion for them.
[01:11:02]  Yes, exactly.
[01:11:03]  They can annihilate you if they die.
[01:11:05]  Yeah, it's like a pure death drive, like a pure annihilation of all existence.
[01:11:11]  You know, it's not about like ruling over everyone.
[01:11:15]  It's about just like fucking consuming everything into a void.
[01:11:20]  And it's like a darkness that like won't stop coming.

=== Dialectical Mercenaries (04:47) ===

[01:11:24]  Yeah.
[01:11:24]  And I don't, what I'm trying to say is like, I don't think it's a fucking coincidence that that gets born out of.
[01:11:30]  the horrors of what the United States and specifically what we hired these these fucking mercenary killers to do.
[01:11:38]  Well, yeah, I mean, you had this engorged belly full of people out there and like, you know, that's the shit it shit out, you know, and gave weapons to.
[01:11:47]  But yeah, no, absolutely.
[01:11:50]  It's all of this stuff.
[01:11:52]  I mean, Prince himself is in the sort of the reinvention of Eric Prince and what happened to him after sort of his fall, after Blackwater cut ties with him and changed its name.
[01:12:05]  I think that actually perfectly mirrors that it all comes from the same miasma.
[01:12:09]  Like it all kind of crawls out of the same depths, out of the same well.
[01:12:14]  And it's all just like, it's, you know, it's evil.
[01:12:16]  And it's, and it's a continuation, like you said, or like, you know, we were talking about the Spider Network episode.
[01:12:20]  Like this stuff was like birthed in sort of the post-World War II environment.
[01:12:26]  And then it kind of, you know, it gains steam and it, you know, it gets further along.
[01:12:31]  And then now we're here today where it's, it's like, it's, it's somewhat the same, but not completely recognizable.
[01:12:37]  It's like a new thing.
[01:12:39]  It's a dialectical.
[01:12:40]  Excuse me.
[01:12:41]  Let me take that again.
[01:12:42]  You know, it's a dialectical relationship.
[01:12:44]  Like you said, like now we're at, I don't know, a new version of this for the new century.
[01:13:25]  So we had planned initially for this to be one episode, but here's the thing.
[01:13:30]  There's too much to talk about.
[01:13:32]  We got like halfway through the notes.
[01:13:33]  We're not even, I mean, it's just like, you know, I'm sure a lot of, I hope that, I mean, I hope this wasn't repeating too much for people, but it's hard to kind of like lay the scene for talking about who Eric Prince is and like what, just what he's up to right now, which is what the next episode will be about, without kind of talking about this history with Blackwater.
[01:13:56]  And I mean, specifically with the Iraq War, because it really does mark a shift in the way that America, you know, was running the empire.
[01:14:05]  Yeah, exactly.
[01:14:06]  I think with what Prince is doing now, I mean, we live in a pretty different world than we lived in in 2007.
[01:14:14]  And with what he's doing now, it's just so psycho, but so actually like wrapped in with the world system that we have to lay that groundwork to show where this came from.
[01:14:25]  And, you know, I remember when I was a kid, you know, hearing about Halliburton and Cheney and all these fucking people.
[01:14:30]  But like, I also got to remember, I'm 44 years old now.
[01:14:33]  You know, a lot of people might not remember that.
[01:14:35]  I fought in Iraq the first time.
[01:14:38]  You know, the movie was.
[01:14:39]  You have Gulf War syndrome.
[01:14:41]  I knew Jar Head from Jar Head, the movie.
[01:14:46]  What was that one about?
[01:14:48]  The Jar Head.
[01:14:49]  Is that supposed to be the good Iraq War movie?
[01:14:51]  Are there any good Iraq War movies?
[01:14:53]  They've also, I saw Jar Head.
[01:14:54]  The only scene I remember from it is when they put in a videotape and the guy has his wife getting fucked on it.
[01:14:59]  You know, people, I gotta say, people don't like American Sniper.
[01:15:03]  I think, look, this, again, this is the second episode I'm going to bat for fucking Clint Eastwood.
[01:15:08]  But here's the thing.
[01:15:09]  It really is an all-American portrait of that time period.
[01:15:13]  I've seen a scene for it where he's like on the phone with his wife and gets into a firefight with like the badass sniper in Iraq.
[01:15:22]  I do.
[01:15:23]  They should just put out like an art movie about him on the top of the stadium in New Orleans, just shooting down 17-year-olds.
[01:15:32]  Yeah, we got to talk about Blackwater.
[01:15:33]  Remind me to mention Blackwater and Katrina next episode so we can talk about that.
[01:15:38]  Absolutely.
[01:15:38]  But I think too, it's like people want Iraq war movies that are like critical of the Iraq war.
[01:15:44]  They're like, ooh, we want to watch like the epic bacon takedown or whatever.
[01:15:49]  But it's like actually way more artistically fascinating and interesting to watch something like of the time, of the culture, like something actually explicitly American, which is why Clint Eastwood is so fucking good.
[01:16:02]  Yeah.
[01:16:03]  or Secret Soldiers of Benghazi.
[01:16:06]  I feel like- It's so funny that American snapper got killed by a veteran in a gun rage.

=== Secret Soldiers of Benghazi (01:46) ===

[01:16:12]  I'm sorry.
[01:16:13]  Like, okay.
[01:16:14]  That's that.
[01:16:15]  I mean, it's perfect.
[01:16:17]  It's perfect.
[01:16:18]  I mean, if he was, what other way is there for that guy to die?
[01:16:21]  The guy who shot him should be given a medal.
[01:16:23]  At a Creed.
[01:16:24]  Yeah.
[01:16:24]  Okay, true.
[01:16:25]  Crowdsurfing at a Creed show.
[01:16:27]  In a pit, yeah.
[01:16:29]  What happened to him?
[01:16:30]  Wait, did that guy die?
[01:16:33]  I'm not familiar with that.
[01:16:34]  Or did he get this guy?
[01:16:35]  Or was he always sober?
[01:16:36]  I think you're thinking of the Nickelback guy.
[01:16:39]  I can't remember.
[01:16:40]  I don't know.
[01:16:41]  That was a crazy time for American culture.
[01:16:42]  I assume he was always sober because, what was Creed's big song?
[01:16:45]  Where Long's World War I With Arms Might.
[01:16:50]  That guy did get sober.
[01:16:51]  That guy did get sober.
[01:16:54]  Isn't that about getting sober?
[01:16:56]  No, that's probably about God.
[01:16:58]  Or is it about getting high?
[01:16:59]  Getting higher?
[01:17:01]  I would probably about God.
[01:17:04]  It's you know, why?
[01:17:05]  But maybe not.
[01:17:06]  Everyone was wearing cargo pants.
[01:17:08]  Not me.
[01:17:09]  I was wearing skinny jeans, and all the kids at school made fun of me.
[01:17:11]  And now, look at them.
[01:17:13]  Look at them.
[01:17:14]  Fuck you.
[01:17:15]  Now I'm wearing big ass pants with a bunch of pockets and fucking polo shirts.
[01:17:20]  And now you're wearing fucking tight jeans.
[01:17:23]  Fuck you.
[01:17:23]  Suck my fucking dick.
[01:17:25]  Fuck you.
[01:17:26]  I won.
[01:17:29]  I'm Liz.
[01:17:30]  My name is Brace.
[01:17:32]  We are joined, of course, by producer Young Chomsky.
[01:17:37]  We'll see you next time.
[01:17:39]  Bye.
[01:17:58]  Come out.