True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 475: GHF
Aired: 2025-07-18
Duration: 01:24:58


=== Why We Hate Trump's Office Hours (02:40) ===

[00:00:55]  Hello, everyone.
[00:00:57]  Hello.
[00:00:58]  I'm Liz.
[00:00:59]  My name is Brace.
[00:01:00]  We're, of course, joined by producer Young Chomsky.
[00:01:03]  And this is Truanan.
[00:01:05]  Hello.
[00:01:05]  Hello.
[00:01:08]  We were discussing this before we actually chose it as the intro, but have we played that Trump Gaza thing on the fucking show before?
[00:01:14]  I have no idea.
[00:01:15]  I don't think we have.
[00:01:17]  If we have, then...
[00:01:18]  I'm like, I mean, if we have, what are you gonna do, fucking, what are you gonna do?
[00:01:21]  Will you kill me for that?
[00:01:24]  Shoot me?
[00:01:25]  That escalated quickly.
[00:01:26]  Well, I mean, well, no, it de-escalated because just shooting could be a wound, you know?
[00:01:31]  Well, no, but going from, no, when you do it, I bet you would not kill me.
[00:01:36]  I bet you'd be like, no, I can't do this and shoot me in the foot.
[00:01:38]  That's a good bet.
[00:01:39]  I think you should make it.
[00:01:40]  Go home finally.
[00:01:42]  That video was so like, I just, I hate, I have so much hate in me.
[00:01:49]  And it's just, it's, and, and, and I think this day after day, not seeing my enemies be punished is, I think, taking a psychic toll on me.
[00:01:58]  I will say that we were talking about this before we started recording, but the, there was just a Trump, there was just another one of one of his little like office hours in the Oval that I'm so fucking sick of.
[00:02:09]  But he was asked about Gaza again, and he made the same comment that he has like sporadically over the past few months, where he just kept calling it like the, you know, oh, it's the worst real estate deal ever made.
[00:02:23]  Can you believe they gave up that beachfront property?
[00:02:26]  Whatever, which I'm still like, I would love for Trump to, I want to hear him give a kind of oral history of how Gaza came to be.
[00:02:35]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:02:36]  I would love to hear that from him.
[00:02:37]  But I was saying that, you know, there's something so clarifying or refreshing, even as it's so like sickening hearing the U.S. speak so plainly about this stuff in such a way.
[00:02:53]  Like even the Trump Gaza fucking Bitcoin plan or whatever the video, the insane video that went viral, you know, however many moons ago.
[00:03:04]  But it's like, yeah, we don't have to hear this fucking dressed up humanitarian, liberal internationalist language, the, you know, all of the speeches about, you know, oh, it's so complicated and everything is just, you know, oh, you know, we're working with our partners and the history.
[00:03:22]  And oh, you know, it's just really tough.
[00:03:24]  It's like, you don't even have to hear that anymore from the fucking White House or anyone in charge.
[00:03:29]  It's just like, it was the worst deal ever.
[00:03:32]  Can you believe they gave it up?
[00:03:33]  We view it as a fucking development deal.

=== Gray Zone Revelations (11:50) ===

[00:03:36]  If I'm wrong.
[00:03:37]  And it's like, thank you for speaking plainly.
[00:03:39]  We can now hear exactly what everyone has known to be true.
[00:03:44]  There was a sentiment from the U.S.
[00:03:45]  And it's like, well, at least they're fucking saying it.
[00:03:48]  Yeah, but still, and that's the thing is like I've, I'm reaching this limit of like, everything's out in the open.
[00:03:55]  We know everything.
[00:03:56]  And just like, but it doesn't, you know, there's no, I'm like a QAnon person where I'm like, where's the arrest?
[00:04:02]  You know what I mean?
[00:04:04]  Where's take up take off the getbo?
[00:04:06]  All these people, but nobody, and nobody even talking about it, you know, like it's, it's, I mean, it's, it just drives me fucking crazy.
[00:04:14]  It just, yeah.
[00:04:16]  Well, one person trying to get to the bottom of some of this stuff is our guest today, Jack Bolson.
[00:04:23]  This is a great, I'm going to say, we had a great time speaking to him.
[00:04:27]  And I think you guys are going to have a great time listening.
[00:04:30]  He has been doing a lot of reporting and investigating into the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which is a, how do we describe this?
[00:04:42]  Opaque public-private partnership, NGO-ish, that is administering aid or is tasked with administering aid in Gaza and has been in the close vicinity of 617, is it?
[00:05:03]  Deaths, killings, according to the U.S.
[00:05:06]  And it'll probably be up by the time that we are, you know, like we say in this episode, this, this story has been ongoing and it's starting to kind of kick up a little bit.
[00:05:17]  Yeah.
[00:05:18]  I mean, there's been a lot of videos that have come out.
[00:05:22]  There's been a lot of just, I guess, exposes.
[00:05:25]  Oftentimes, both in the AP and Reuters have covered a lot.
[00:05:29]  There's been a bunch of stuff in the gray zone about the GHF, including, and this is sort of why I mentioned the gray zone here, there was a report by AP about showing US Citizens, I guess I would say U.S. troops, probably former or current troops undercover, shooting at crowds with live ammunition.
[00:05:53]  And that UG Solutions, which is one of the groups providing security for GHF, but as part of this sort of consortium, claim is misleading.
[00:06:03]  But Gray's End did this investigation.
[00:06:04]  It's like obvious that they're doing that.
[00:06:08]  It's just, the whole thing is so baffling why it's not just, I mean, I guess it is a big scandal, but why, like, there's nothing to be like, there's no, I want to say there's nothing to be done about it because that's not true, but like, there's no, um, I just, I guess I just want to rest and I want people, I want people in trouble.
[00:06:24]  It's just, GHF has been one of the most frustrating things to read about.
[00:06:30]  And it's sort of a new low in this war, which has been low after low after low.
[00:06:36]  And I think, yeah, I really enjoy this interview.
[00:06:39]  I think you guys are too.
[00:06:52]  Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the show.
[00:06:55]  And we would like to welcome to the studio Jack Poulson, investigative journalist and founder of the nonprofit Tech Inquiry, which I'm actually looking at the website right now and it's techinquiry.org.
[00:07:09]  The fucking map you have on there is sick.
[00:07:12]  It's pretty low tech, but thanks.
[00:07:13]  It's a lot of information.
[00:07:14]  Well, I'm sorry, it's not a higher tech map.
[00:07:16]  It's high tech for me.
[00:07:19]  It is a fucking, it is a very cool website.
[00:07:21]  But you can also check out jackpoulson.substack.com.
[00:07:27]  We are here to talk about something that I've been in a very bad mood the past three days.
[00:07:33]  And I got to be honest, and I've been following this stuff for long the past few days, but like really looking at a lot of this shit over the past few days.
[00:07:39]  This has put me in sort of a permanent black mood and very, I think, very angry overall.
[00:07:46]  That is affecting my personal, my public life, my public life, meeting on the street.
[00:07:50]  I've been very rude to people.
[00:07:53]  Not that anyone's noticed.
[00:07:54]  I just think nasty thoughts.
[00:07:55]  We're talking about the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
[00:07:59]  And it is not a very pretty story.
[00:08:02]  Liz, you want to kind of introduce us to what this is?
[00:08:05]  I mean, well, I think our whole, a lot of our episode is going to be breaking down what we can figure out and what Jack has figured out about what this is.
[00:08:13]  But I want to say that like just this morning, it's July 16th that we're recording this, Reuters had some new reporting that I'm just going to read here to kind of set this up.
[00:08:24]  It said at least 20 Palestinians were killed on Wednesday at an aid distribution site run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
[00:08:32]  And what the U.S.-backed group said was a crowd surge instigated by armed agitators.
[00:08:38]  The GHF, which is supported by Israel, said 19 people were trampled and one fatally stabbed during the crush at one of its centers in Khan Yunis in southern Gaza.
[00:08:50]  Quote, we have credible reason to believe that elements within the crowd, armed and affiliated with Hamas, deliberately fomented the unrest, GHF said in a statement.
[00:09:00]  So this is not the first time that this has popped up, this kind of like news item.
[00:09:08]  I don't think it's been, I would say, reported in lots of places.
[00:09:15]  I mean, it's been, I think people who have been following this story have seen that there have been incidents at aid sites, usually tied to this organization, Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, where Palestinians have been killed, shot, trampled.
[00:09:35]  You know, it's a little unclear what these organizations are saying.
[00:09:40]  Shot by tank fire?
[00:09:41]  Yeah, what's happening?
[00:09:45]  Jack, you've been looking into this organization.
[00:09:49]  This is a loaded question, but I want us just to start here, which is, what is the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation?
[00:09:56]  I mean, the short answer, the term fig leaf, has been thrown around a lot for private military contractors that are American.
[00:10:06]  In particular, a company named UG Solutions based out of North Carolina, run by a bunch of former Green Berets, one former CIA guy.
[00:10:18]  And then the sort of manager for that is a bunch of former CIA folks in a company named Safe Reach Solutions.
[00:10:26]  And it began in January as part of the ceasefire agreement as a vehicle inspection checkpoint along the Netsreem corridor, which splits Gaza in half just south of Gaza City.
[00:10:38]  And around May, that vehicle inspection checkpoint transitioned into an aid distribution center.
[00:10:46]  And there are now, well, technical, you know, nominally four aid distribution centers throughout Gaza, but for the most part, the two primary operational ones are in Rafa and in Khan Yunus, just north of Rafa in southern Gaza.
[00:11:03]  And that Khan Yunis location is where the 20 deaths were this morning.
[00:11:08]  Yeah, I mean, we were talking before the show, but I think it's worth reiterating that the war has seen, I guess, various trends in massacres coming from the IDF side.
[00:11:21]  You know, certain things will happen and get a lot of news coverage.
[00:11:25]  We're talking about like bombing hospitals or airstrikes on refugee camps or like tent camps, encampments within Gaza.
[00:11:35]  And they'll sort of gain some prominence in the news and they'll keep happening, but then something else, some like new outrage will come, and that will sort of be the thing that gets the most attention.
[00:11:44]  What we're seeing now is sort of the era of the humanitarian massacres, I guess you could call them.
[00:11:53]  And it has gained, I think it's sort of gaining a lot more attention just because it has, first of all, the numbers are kind of inching higher every week, and it's kind of getting more difficult to ignore.
[00:12:08]  But it's also, it comes with a lot of, I guess it's because they're kind of coming at this public-private partnership, this very opaque partnership that is the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
[00:12:21]  And I don't think we can really separate that.
[00:12:23]  And just for a little bit of background here, we've talked about this on the show before, but the UN and Israel, well, Israel has had a big beef with the UN for a number of years.
[00:12:33]  The U.S. with the UN.
[00:12:34]  Yeah, and the U.S. with the UN.
[00:12:36]  Although that has also ratcheted up over the past couple years.
[00:12:40]  But, you know, again, we've talked about this in the show, but there is an organization called UNRWA, United Nations Refugee, or excuse me, United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees that is a specific UN organization that administers a lot of Gaza, right?
[00:12:59]  Like a lot of the civil infrastructure there.
[00:13:00]  Ran a lot of the schools.
[00:13:02]  I think they're one of the largest employers in Gaza.
[00:13:05]  And they have long been protested by the Israeli government.
[00:13:10]  And they've also oftentimes been in charge of dispersing aid.
[00:13:14]  And do you remember there was that early on, there was the whole scandal where Israel and the US were accusing UNRWA of basically all of their employees being Hamas and Hamas operatives.
[00:13:26]  And that got the U.S. to pull a lot of aid to UNRWA.
[00:13:31]  Not just the U.S., but much of the international community bowing under pretty much immediate pressure after 10.7 cut aid to UNRWA.
[00:13:40]  Some of that has been restored.
[00:13:41]  A lot of it has not.
[00:13:42]  But, I mean, this is all part of like a larger war that Israel has with the UN that's like not worth getting into.
[00:13:48]  But, but, or like that we don't really have time to get into, it is worth getting into.
[00:13:52]  I don't think we can really separate what's happening with GHF from Israel's larger war with international organizations and specifically UNRWA and the UN.
[00:14:04]  I would expand on that a bit.
[00:14:05]  Absolutely.
[00:14:06]  The current head of USAID's, you know, what's left of its Bureau of Humanitarian Assistance, which really has led kind of the U.S. equivalent of the US aid into Gaza.
[00:14:16]  It's a guy named Tim Meisberger.
[00:14:18]  You can find all kinds of kind of think pieces he's published, YouTube videos he's done.
[00:14:24]  He's called for years for the end to all US aid to, for example, the United Nations.
[00:14:30]  This wants us to cut off all ties.
[00:14:32]  He really predicted kind of the, it called for what did happen to US aid in the beginning of the Trump administration of it kind of just being fully knee-capped.
[00:14:42]  And so there is a sort of right-wing U.S. analog that I think is very symbiotic, which is, you know, just cut out all international organizations and just purely do bilateral relationship between the U.S. and Israel when it comes to Gaza.
[00:14:58]  So the war has been going on for almost three years at this point.
[00:15:02]  And at the turn of last year, or rather at the end of last year, there seems to have been a renewed effort to essentially replace a lot of foreign aid that was going into Gaza with aid that was overseen by what appears to be a consortium of Israeli intelligence agents and tech executives,

=== Anomaly in Gaza Aid (13:10) ===

[00:15:26]  U.S. former, former, U.S. intelligence agents, and various consultants and right-wing firms that are connected to Donald Trump.
[00:15:36]  And that became Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
[00:15:39]  But I kind of want to take a step back, actually, how you got started with reporting this, because I think that is actually an important kind of entryway into what the fuck is going on with this thing.
[00:15:50]  Yeah, so for many years, one of my kind of fascinations, obsessions, whatever you want to call it, has been the intersection between surveillance technology and U.S. special operations.
[00:16:01]  And one of the most interesting firms in this space is a commercial cell phone location tracking data broker named Anomaly 6, which has been very controversial for a number of years.
[00:16:14]  You know, think like you have an app on your phone, like, I don't know, like a Muslim prayer app, a weather app, whatever, and it's secretly selling your GPS location to data brokers who then sell it to like U.S. intelligence.
[00:16:26]  Sorry, stop.
[00:16:27]  U.S. intelligence is buying.
[00:16:29]  I mean, are you talking literally with that example?
[00:16:31]  If there's a...
[00:16:32]  There's literally an application that was named Muslim Pro, which was widely reported by a journalist named Joseph Cox, who I would say is really the best reporter that's been in this space.
[00:16:44]  It was being bought specifically in that case by a company named X-Mode Social, which crazily enough, the X originally stood for drunk mode.
[00:16:52]  It began as an application for college kids who, you know, maybe had a bit to drink.
[00:16:58]  You don't want to do something dumb on your phone.
[00:17:00]  And over time, the developer realized, oh, wait a second, I'm getting people's location, and that's actually pretty profitable.
[00:17:06]  And so he pivoted into selling location data.
[00:17:10]  And then he became one of the central players with U.S. intelligence agencies.
[00:17:14]  I'm not kidding at all.
[00:17:16]  How many stories like this do you think are out there that are not reported on?
[00:17:19]  Just thinking about all of these fucking apps that are out there.
[00:17:24]  With that said, a lot of, I mean, it's a hard space to report on because at least my sources, and we could go down, I don't know how much you want to go down rabbit holes in this, but there was a Silicon Valley company that I did some deep reporting on called Orbital Insight that basically was former US Intel folks that knew how to do what was called pattern of life analysis in Afghanistan, which is how do you track where people are, what do they do?
[00:17:50]  They said, well, how do we commercialize this?
[00:17:52]  Like sell it to, I don't know, Unilever, for example, for nominally uncovering, let's say, child labor in your supply chain.
[00:18:00]  So like using the same kind of techniques, but you track people's phones to factories instead of to, I don't know, a drone factory or something.
[00:18:08]  And so it turns out when I talked to the engineers at this company who work very closely with US government, they said, actually, the cell phone data we started getting is mostly fraudulent.
[00:18:18]  And what we found is that it was time stamp data from the year before.
[00:18:22]  And so basically with all the reporting from journalists like Joseph Cox, who was at Motherboard at the time at Vice, a guy journalist named Byron Tao, who was at the Wall Street Journal, it basically exposed this whole covert network.
[00:18:35]  And then Apple introduced more privacy.
[00:18:38]  One of the main companies was Life360, which was actually for parents keeping track of their kids, turned out to be the major source of location data that was exposed by the markup to a large degree.
[00:18:52]  And so this market has kind of collapsed, but at the same time, it just has this cachet because, you know, warheads on foreheads, right?
[00:18:59]  If you know where somebody is, you can smoke.
[00:19:04]  You can kinetically.
[00:19:05]  Yeah, you can kinetically dispose of their threat vectors.
[00:19:10]  And so this company, Anomaly 6, as an aside, there's an incredible set of court documents that were first reported by Byron Tao of Anomaly 6 is a spin out of this much bigger data broker named Babel Street.
[00:19:25]  And basically Anomaly 6 was like, hey, we can do this location stuff better than Babbel did it.
[00:19:30]  And so they started their own firm, they got sued, and all kinds of incredible stuff came out in the legal documents.
[00:19:35]  Oh, wow.
[00:19:36]  So at one point, I found I got a leaked pitch from Anomaly 6.
[00:19:41]  They were pitching a social media surveillance firm on how to combine social media surveillance with cell phone surveillance to monitor Russian troop movements and the like.
[00:19:50]  And one of the pitches that they did to their commercial client was how you de-anonymize CIA agents and how easy that is.
[00:19:57]  Basically, you would draw a box around the CIA headquarters and the NSA headquarters, and you look at which phones went to both.
[00:20:03]  Exactly.
[00:20:04]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:20:05]  You do a double geofence.
[00:20:07]  And other tradecraft I've seen pitched is like GeoFence, I don't know, the Russian embassy in Venezuela, and then a drone factory or something.
[00:20:16]  And look at which phones went to both and then look at where that phone sleeps at night.
[00:20:21]  And then look at public records of what, who owns that address after you've done something.
[00:20:26]  It seems like fairly simple.
[00:20:28]  Yeah, this is not as sophisticated as you'd think it would be in terms of the tradecraft, but it's still very significant in its implications.
[00:20:39]  Sure, of course.
[00:20:40]  And sorry, this is again an aside, but just if you, everyone listening to this show should just always assume that whatever they say on or even kind of near a cell phone, or if they have their cell phone with them at any time, that like someone can find that out, right?
[00:20:57]  Okay, so the absolute craziest story is an aside on this.
[00:21:01]  Go ahead.
[00:21:01]  We're getting back to Gaza Humanitarian FBI.
[00:21:04]  I promise this will tie in, but there was actually a subsidiary of Cox, the telecommunications company, which had a website up, which literally was all about how it's legal because of things that you agreed to in your, you know, when you sign up for apps, that they are constantly, effectively wiretapping everybody's phone.
[00:21:24]  And that if you say a keyword, like, I want to buy a new air conditioner, that they'll know about it, even if you're not doing anything near your phone.
[00:21:32]  And that's exactly what people swore never happened.
[00:21:34]  Exactly.
[00:21:35]  And that's something I've been saying to this fucking show for years.
[00:21:37]  All you stupid fucking, man, I'm a little journalist.
[00:21:41]  I'm a one man snopes who are like, oh, Brace, if you say dog food near your fucking phone, even though you don't have a dog and you don't eat dog food despite what people say, and you get ads for dog food, that's just a coincidence.
[00:21:54]  You know what I mean?
[00:21:55]  It's scary.
[00:21:55]  For those who say, ladies, grab your man's phone and speak into it.
[00:22:00]  Prada.
[00:22:00]  La booboo.
[00:22:01]  Prada.
[00:22:02]  La boo boo.
[00:22:02]  Otega.
[00:22:03]  Laboobo.
[00:22:04]  Yeah.
[00:22:04]  And so as a journalist, what I should clarify is no one, I mean, it's not clear if this was, you know, a marketer gone wild.
[00:22:11]  And it wasn't, as far as I'm aware, you know, and all the best reporters tried to dig into this, but it was taken down as far as I recall the moment it was dug into.
[00:22:19]  But I mean, the fact is, like a major, like multi-billion dollar company had an entire website up of, yes, this is legal.
[00:22:26]  Trust us.
[00:22:26]  And I mean, you know, to read between the lines there, that the keywords are not just for commercial uses, right?
[00:22:32]  There's obviously they're selling all of that shit to advertisers and partnering with all the social media company.
[00:22:37]  We know all of that.
[00:22:38]  And think of the espionage equivalent.
[00:22:39]  That's what I'm saying.
[00:22:40]  Any kind of keyword that's been flagged behind the scenes for whatever reason, and there's a lot of, you know, jumps that can get made legally from that also, you know, is enough to get something tapped.
[00:22:56]  Also, and this is one last aside, and we're getting back to Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
[00:23:00]  This is a promise.
[00:23:01]  One last aside.
[00:23:03]  I know you think you're being smart because you're putting your phone in a Faraday cage when you get somewhere where you're going to be sketchy, but actually they can tell your phone's going there.
[00:23:12]  So if you want to give someone no data about where you're going, give it to your roommate and have him walk around with it in the house or whatever.
[00:23:18]  It's just that seems like basic to me, but a lot of people do do other things.
[00:23:22]  Yeah.
[00:23:22]  So here's how it ties into Gaza Humanitarian.
[00:23:24]  Look at it.
[00:23:25]  So in January of last year, you know, people underestimate the degree to which doing smart Google searches, especially with site selectors for PDFs, finds some incredible scoops.
[00:23:39]  I found huge, like leaked documents from like 20 different companies to the Pentagon accidentally published by nonprofit training contractors of like how scale AI, you know, and how the Pentagon's using large language models and like.
[00:23:53]  Anyway, you find a lot.
[00:23:54]  So one of the things I found was that this company named Orbis Operations, which basically does kind of intelligence and private security contracting, sells a bunch of technology for that.
[00:24:07]  And at the time was chaired, and in the past has been chaired by former acting CI director Mike Murrell, that they'd accidentally published their end-user license agreement, or not their end-user, but their license agreement with Anomaly 6 and a bunch of other surveillance companies.
[00:24:25]  So the thing that I generally criticize people on for surveillance reporting and technology is they talk about one thing at a time.
[00:24:32]  Like, oh, it's facial recognition or satellite surveillance or it's cell phone location tracking.
[00:24:41]  But the reality is, in practice, it's all of them at once combined in a smart way.
[00:24:45]  And that should be obvious to anybody who's ever done an investigation that you jump between everything you've got.
[00:24:51]  And so what Orbis accidentally leaked is all of the surveillance tech behind this product they have called Orbis Discovery, which you can literally find on their website, though none of the details about it.
[00:25:02]  And it had cell phone location tracking from Anomaly 6.
[00:25:06]  It had SOC puppet accounts from this infamous CIA spinout called Intrepid, which was formed by a bunch of folks who used to do the kind of cover status for the CIA before they privatized it.
[00:25:17]  There's a company called Premise Data, which actually sued me for $25 million and hired a PI firm to unmask my sources.
[00:25:25]  Basically what they do is gig work human intelligence collection.
[00:25:30]  And they've had one of their slide decks was published by the Wall Street Journal several years ago on how they were pitching U.S. Special Operations Command in Afghanistan.
[00:25:42]  The list goes on and on.
[00:25:43]  There was a company called SpyCloud that kind of looks at breach data.
[00:25:46]  So it's basically all the different data sources that you can buy if you want to do surveillance.
[00:25:52]  And Orbis Operations was putting these all together and then selling it.
[00:25:57]  And so I kind of published this and to some degree forgot about it.
[00:26:01]  And then it turns out that they are the company that the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation was birthed out of in November 2024.
[00:26:12]  And a key figure in this that I should have named, I named it in my January story of last year, is a guy named Philip Francis Riley, who was the head of what's called the CIA's Special Activities Division.
[00:26:25]  Special activities is another way to say covert activities.
[00:26:30]  It's been encoded since this famous executive order Reagan had in the 80s that was specifically defining when you can do plausibly deniable activities.
[00:26:43]  Actually, for people that know the history of kind of covert CIA funding of student organizations, that was actually through the predecessor organization to the Special Activities Division, which under like Thomas Braden, the former reporter, was known as the International Organizations Division.
[00:26:58]  So, okay, yeah, yeah.
[00:26:59]  I mean, you're talking about this stuff in, I want to call it Howitzer, but that book.
[00:27:06]  Oh, The Mighty Whirlitz.
[00:27:07]  The Miley World.
[00:27:08]  Yeah, by Hugh Wilford.
[00:27:08]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:27:09]  That's a new one.
[00:27:10]  Oh, a new one?
[00:27:11]  Relatively new one.
[00:27:12]  It's about like the, I think it's like, it's about the CIA.
[00:27:14]  Oh, the new book by Tim Weiner, The Mission?
[00:27:17]  No, not Tim Weiner.
[00:27:18]  No, no, no.
[00:27:18]  It's the guy who wrote fucking The Mighty Wurlitzer.
[00:27:20]  Oh, he has a...
[00:27:22]  It might have come out two years ago, but I have it on my shelf and still haven't read it yet.
[00:27:26]  So it's new to me.
[00:27:27]  Yeah.
[00:27:28]  So I would say that just as like the person who did all of the most sensitive, you know, presidential level directive covert activities was contracting at the time for Orbis.
[00:27:41]  And then it turns out that he was also the person who organized the creation, you know, according to reporting in the New York Times, because I'd named all these organizations in January, but I didn't like, I didn't have proof that there was a tie between them.
[00:27:58]  So it's kind of an interesting situation.
[00:28:00]  But basically from Orbis, which was purchased by a Chicago-based private equity firm in 2021 named McNally Capital, and the McNally people should recognize because that's Rand McNally of the mapping company.
[00:28:15]  So the family sold at stake in, I want to say right before the dot-com crash, and then they created this private equity firm in 2008.
[00:28:25]  And from there, they've gotten really deep into covert op investments.
[00:28:31]  So Orbis Operations is actually one of the companies in this space that McNally Capital owns.

=== Quiet Professionals Acquisition (07:33) ===

[00:28:36]  There's actually a much more recent acquisition they have, a company named Quiet Professionals, that have also independently tracked.
[00:28:44]  And so it's another one of these weird things where I've reported on them for years.
[00:28:48]  And then you realize they're both owned by the same thing.
[00:28:49]  Yeah, and they were both owned by the same thing.
[00:28:51]  So, I mean, as a short aside on Quiet Professionals, it's run by a former Delta Force sergeant major named Andy Wilson.
[00:28:58]  I thought quiet professionals were supposed to be the Navy SEALs.
[00:29:00]  No, well, it's generally the phrase for green berets, as far as I know.
[00:29:05]  It's interesting.
[00:29:06]  None of them are very quiet, are they?
[00:29:08]  Or professional.
[00:29:09]  Yeah.
[00:29:09]  I would say the Navy SEALs are way more, you know, there's a joke that when they go through their so-called Buds training, they also take a book writing course.
[00:29:17]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:29:17]  They get their MFA.
[00:29:20]  But quiet professionals, you know, the crazy story I had on them about a year ago is that they it leaked through U.S. procurement documents that they were providing technology at Fort Huachuca in Arizona to train U.S. military spies on like how to wipe data and hide data on their phones when they deploy overseas.
[00:29:42]  So that, you know, there's this thing called a hidden volume, which basically means if you have two passwords, one of the passwords unlocks the real data, the other password unlocks your fake account.
[00:29:52]  And so they were providing hidden volumes and like the ability if your phone's captured by a foreign intelligence service that you can just wipe all the data on it.
[00:30:00]  So anyway, as an aside, I just have a sense.
[00:30:04]  They also do rescue operations in Israel right now.
[00:30:07]  You can look up an organization they're running called Gray Bull Rescue.
[00:30:11]  Who needs to be rescued in Israel?
[00:30:13]  Well, I mean, there's a lot of...
[00:30:17]  After October 7th, people got scared that we're Americans.
[00:30:20]  And basically, if you feel trapped in the Middle East, they will go in and they will extract you.
[00:30:26]  50K, I'll do the same thing.
[00:30:27]  I'll break PDS.
[00:30:28]  50K, if you want me, if you're an American listening to this, you're like, I want out of Israel.
[00:30:32]  I'm afraid.
[00:30:33]  I will fly there.
[00:30:35]  50,000, I'll sit next to you on the plane.
[00:30:37]  I'll take middle seat.
[00:30:38]  I'll bring another, I'll bring dump truck.
[00:30:39]  He'll sit.
[00:30:40]  Maybe you'll sit in middle seat, me and dump truck will be outside you.
[00:30:42]  You'll be fine.
[00:30:45]  Unfortunately, they won't let you in the country.
[00:30:46]  No, no, true.
[00:30:48]  But whatever.
[00:30:48]  We'll get out through Jordan.
[00:30:49]  There was a predecessor organization to Gray Bull Rescue.
[00:30:52]  I forget the name, but it was actually, if you go to their website, it's narrated by Liam Neeson.
[00:30:57]  So they've gotten some high-profile names.
[00:31:01]  Yeah, I mean, I don't know if you're not.
[00:31:02]  I want to reproduce you pissing your pants from the internet if you just do this voiceover from us.
[00:31:07]  It's like doing Project Dynamis, you know what I'm saying?
[00:31:10]  You've all called shit like that.
[00:31:11]  I mean, like, it's Orbis, Dynamis.
[00:31:14]  Like, you know, there was this trend in tech companies where everything was called like L Y, you know what I mean?
[00:31:20]  As evidenced by the newest favorite company, Cluley.
[00:31:23]  And now there's like, in, I feel like in the defense world, it's IS as the last two letters of your company name.
[00:31:30]  So like, of course, yeah, defenses.
[00:31:32]  It's sort of like dumb guy, like Fort Bragg Latin or something.
[00:31:36]  You know, like it's, it's, it's kind of giving us a future version of saying Sentinel.
[00:31:41]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:31:42]  So the other super important background for Riley, who again is the guy at Orbis, former special activities division chief at the CIA, who like created the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation and Safe Reach Solutions legal entity, he was also former Blackwater head of special activities.
[00:31:59]  Oh, wonderful.
[00:32:00]  And so he ran that for a couple years and then moved on to Orbis later.
[00:32:07]  There's also a kind of internet surveillance company named Sir Kenneth that he's been affiliated with, that was owned by Elliot Broidy, who was a big kind of Trump donor and famously got arrested for foreign agent activity.
[00:32:25]  I want to talk about Safe Reach Solutions real quick because a lot of this sort of stems.
[00:32:30]  So Safe Reach Solutions is owned by McNally?
[00:32:35]  I don't think one can conclude that.
[00:32:38]  What is confirmed by McNally is that they have an economic interest, and I believe that's an exact quote in Safe Reach Solutions.
[00:32:47]  And it's also reported that Safe Reach was formed while Riley was working at one of McNally's companies.
[00:32:55]  So that's basically, so from what I can understand, because there's this web of fucking companies, right?
[00:33:01]  We have McNally Capital, owned by the rather poor scene heir to the Rand McNally fortune.
[00:33:09]  Yeah.
[00:33:10]  That has a bunch, it's a private equity firm that owns a bunch of defense and like private spying companies.
[00:33:16]  Yes.
[00:33:16]  A bunch of, let's say, privatized special operations stuff.
[00:33:21]  Yeah, human intelligence training, surveillance, yeah.
[00:33:24]  One of those guys who is at Orbis is this guy Riley.
[00:33:29]  It was at Orbis.
[00:33:29]  He was at Orbis.
[00:33:30]  Until January.
[00:33:31]  He goes on to start Safe Reach Solutions.
[00:33:34]  Yeah.
[00:33:35]  And Safe Reach Solutions that gave birth to the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
[00:33:42]  Well, the way it became public was through the vehicle inspection checkpoint along the Nestorian corridor.
[00:33:49]  Because I remember seeing all these pictures, right?
[00:33:51]  I mean, there's been rumors of American mercenaries in Gaza for basically the entirety of the war.
[00:33:56]  Yeah, I was going to say since like basically the week after.
[00:33:58]  But there were like unmistakable pictures of like a U.S. vet style guy named and masked.
[00:34:06]  Yeah.
[00:34:07]  Standing at these vehicle checkpoints.
[00:34:08]  And so that was a stipulation from the ceasefire agreement.
[00:34:12]  It was a ceasefire agreement.
[00:34:14]  So is that from Witkoff?
[00:34:16]  It had to have been.
[00:34:18]  But if it was in January, it was quick.
[00:34:20]  Yeah.
[00:34:20]  So what was the stipulation?
[00:34:22]  That it would not be the Israeli military and it would be American companies that would replace.
[00:34:27]  I mean, because the Israeli military obviously would rather be there.
[00:34:31]  So to some degree, this was the concession is it'll be American firms that are former CIA basically and Green Berets who work closely with the Israeli government.
[00:34:43]  Well, and we should say this is also in lieu of international peacekeepers.
[00:34:48]  Yes.
[00:34:48]  Right.
[00:34:48]  So this is like bilateral.
[00:34:51]  Yes.
[00:34:51]  No, actually, the ceasefire agreement came, or that came before, I think.
[00:34:56]  Well, they were formed before, but the deployment at the vehicle checkpoints was through the ceasefire agreement amendment.
[00:35:05]  Yeah, okay, okay.
[00:35:06]  And in fact, when I reported on some of the crazy background, the very, let's say, bro-y background of the PMCs or the private military contractors running this, somebody from that firm called me up and insisted that I know this detail, that it was from the ceasefire agreement.
[00:35:24]  And I looked it up, and indeed there's specification in the amendment.
[00:35:27]  I mean, it's interesting.
[00:35:28]  I think that's worth noting, too, right?
[00:35:30]  How this came from this sort of rather small-scale deployment, right, of just doing this one vehicle checkpoint to rapidly ramping up to becoming what is in theory supposed to be like the preferred vendor for Palestinian aid, right?
[00:35:47]  Yeah.
[00:35:48]  Is this foundation?
[00:35:49]  I think that's worth noting because, and we'll get to this later on in the episode, there are a lot of rumors that are becoming a little difficult to ignore that GHF and assorted entities have plans, at least they're pitching around for what happens after the war is finished, whatever timeline that may entail.

=== Admitting to Circumventing UN Safeguards (07:36) ===

[00:36:10]  And so from what I understand, I was reading a Wall Street Journal article about sort of the fallout from one of the players in this, which is Boston Consulting Group.
[00:36:19]  Right.
[00:36:20]  And by the Wall Street Journal's telling, I'm just going to say, I'm just going to read from a paragraph from this article.
[00:36:26]  The consulting firm's efforts, this is talking about BCG, the consulting firm's efforts in Gaza began in October.
[00:36:32]  BCG signed on to help develop a feasibility study to establish a new aid organization in Gaza.
[00:36:39]  The firm was contracted by Orbis Operations, a Washington security firm owned by the private equity firm McNally Capital.
[00:36:46]  Orbis is made up of former CIA agents and other counterterrorism officials.
[00:36:51]  I should clarify, if you ever say CIA agent, people immediately get mad at it.
[00:36:55]  It's CIA officer.
[00:36:56]  Oh, yeah, that is true.
[00:36:57]  That is true.
[00:36:58]  But you know what?
[00:36:59]  Wall Street Journal, how style.
[00:37:01]  How style.
[00:37:02]  How style.
[00:37:03]  You know what I mean?
[00:37:05]  And by the way, if I don't have to salute you, you're not my freaking officer, right?
[00:37:10]  You know, I get it's it's it's well because they would say they're the agents are their assets that they control the agents.
[00:37:17]  I know, but it's like, give me a fucking that is what an agent would say.
[00:37:20]  Yeah, that's what an agent would say.
[00:37:22]  Then tell me your full name and address.
[00:37:23]  Put some names on the stars on the wall then.
[00:37:26]  Then I'll know.
[00:37:27]  So it seems like it was, I mean, this is at least what the reporting is saying.
[00:37:31]  We don't know like how much they're trying to affect how this is reported.
[00:37:34]  So if they're what they're leaking, giving them is legit or what or not.
[00:37:37]  But it seems like Boston Consulting Group was on board from the very beginning here.
[00:37:43]  And it's, it's, it's, or at least on board at actually planning out some of the logistics how this would work.
[00:37:50]  But like they were planning to be more than just like a checkpoint agency or whatever from from the start from the get-go.
[00:37:57]  I mean, you, if you look at the timeline, it just had to have been that way, right?
[00:38:00]  Because if GHF itself was formed legally in November 2024, that was before the checkpoint opened.
[00:38:08]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:38:09]  And one of the reasons I don't dig in, to be clear, on the BCG side as much as some others is that they disavowed the project.
[00:38:18]  They disavowed.
[00:38:19]  To some degree, I feel like they're unique in that they're actually admitting how fucked up all of this is.
[00:38:26]  And so to some degree, kind of, I don't know, they're not the center of the controversy to me anymore.
[00:38:34]  I mean, it's a useful timeline, but I think McNally Capital is who I tend to see as the more central player and that BCG was just kind of the advisory.
[00:38:45]  Yeah, I like the fire guns.
[00:38:47]  Although they say BCG, just to be clear, is now engaged in a furious cover-your-ass operation where they're claiming that the two guys that like took lead on this went rogue.
[00:38:58]  They were rogue consultants working on this on their own free time of their own accord of this pro bono project.
[00:39:06]  But obviously in the days since, there have also been a couple of demotions of people above them.
[00:39:12]  Those two guys were let go and there's been some shake-ups at BCG.
[00:39:16]  On the Israeli side, this is reported, this is from the New York Times, as coming out of a group called the Mikveh Yisrael Forum.
[00:39:26]  And so that seems to be made up of like Israeli tech sector and former Unit 8200 people, who knows who else, including, as I discovered, a red-headed dwarf, otherwise known as a leprechaun named Tankman.
[00:39:43]  Very rare.
[00:39:45]  But it seems like there was this group in Israel, and then there was these groups in the U.S. kind of being brought of both Israeli intelligence agents and just like tech people, and then in the U.S., U.S. intelligence agents and tech people coming together, I guess, and then this is, again, we can tell from open source reporting only or whatever, or I can tell, and then hiring BCG, who are doing it off the books operation already in 2024.
[00:40:14]  So this had been planned.
[00:40:16]  This isn't something like they thought of this and they were like, we need to circumvent the UN.
[00:40:20]  And this is what the New York Times reports.
[00:40:21]  They're like, we want to circumvent the UN in particular.
[00:40:24]  And so let's get this together.
[00:40:25]  And so what happens from there?
[00:40:27]  So in January, we have this checkpoint, whatever, this checkpoint pilot project.
[00:40:36]  How does GHF come?
[00:40:37]  Because I also remember there was like a while.
[00:40:40]  I mean, this has been happening since the beginning of the war, but there was a period at the beginning of this year where Israel straight up started blocking like most aid going into Gaza.
[00:40:48]  And this, I think, started in March and ended in May, I think, with the GHF boots on the ground.
[00:40:55]  And so this is a pretty tight timeline.
[00:40:58]  Yeah.
[00:40:58]  I mean, There's actually a leaked document from Safe Reach Solutions published by Haaretz, the liberal Israeli newspaper, explicitly describing the checkpoint site transitioning and being, quote, retrofrited into an aid distribution site.
[00:41:19]  And if you look at the list of four sites, even though one of them doesn't function anymore, the fourth, kind of as the numbers increase, it goes further north, is right is called the Wadi Gaza location right by the Netsarim corridor.
[00:41:35]  And so my understanding is that was the site that was converted from the vehicle inspection, or at least it was pitched that way.
[00:41:44]  And so, yeah, from there, they opened up three sites, you know, in the very south of Gaza near Rafa.
[00:41:53]  And one of those had a lot of violence and is no longer open.
[00:41:58]  Because it had so much violence?
[00:41:59]  I mean, I want to be careful and maybe, I mean, that's my understanding.
[00:42:04]  I'm not going to say for sure that's why they closed it, but I want to say that's the Tal Sultan location, which is just right outside of Rafah.
[00:42:13]  There's two right outside of Rafah.
[00:42:15]  The other is in the Saudi neighborhood outside of Rafa.
[00:42:18]  And then actually pretty close by in Con Yunus is the other location.
[00:42:21]  So so-called safe distribution site one was the Tal Sultan.
[00:42:26]  Safe Distribution Site Two is the Saudi neighborhood of Rafa.
[00:42:31]  Safe Distribution Site 3 is the Con Yunus, and that's where the 20 deaths were this morning.
[00:42:36]  And then Safe Distribution Site 4 is the one just south of the Netzerim corridor, which is where the vehicle inspection checkpoint was.
[00:42:44]  So we're saying violence.
[00:42:46]  We're being a little bit broad here.
[00:42:47]  Can we talk specifically about what's happening or what's been reported?
[00:42:51]  Even though it's, you know, we should say, this is also a big part of the story, that is, you know, vigorously being denied by Gaza Human Rights.
[00:42:58]  Till today.
[00:42:59]  Yeah, well, today they're admitting 20 today, but they're not admitting those.
[00:43:02]  The UN Human Rights Office in Geneva reported at least 615 deaths specifically outside of GHF facilities.
[00:43:11]  And I reported a story for France 24 about a week ago.
[00:43:15]  And when I went out to comment for GHF, they swore there had not been a single death at any of their sites.
[00:43:21]  Yeah, it's interesting because the discrepancy, you know, Israel sometimes says, oh, maybe there's been some deaths.
[00:43:29]  We'll do an investigation or whatever.
[00:43:31]  I mean, oftentimes they just flat out deny as well.
[00:43:35]  But to just to give, because zero is a specific number, to give a specific number and have that number be zero, there's some audacity there.
[00:43:43]  You know, like that is, that is clearly like.

=== Zero Dark Contracts (06:08) ===

[00:43:46]  I mean, it's almost a dare, isn't it?
[00:43:48]  Yeah, it really is.
[00:43:49]  Well, also, you could claim, well, what counts as close to your site?
[00:43:53]  Oh, yeah.
[00:43:53]  Well, I know, that's exactly.
[00:43:54]  It's such objective.
[00:43:55]  They would claim some wins.
[00:43:56]  It is true that there was a case where there was an assumption that there were deaths at a GHF site that were actually outside of a UN site.
[00:44:05]  And so they're very good at the classic admit nothing, deny everything, make counter accusations.
[00:44:12]  That's for sure their playbook.
[00:44:14]  And if you do that long enough, you get some wins and you just keep underlining those wins.
[00:44:18]  And so I think today is one of the, you know, it's a pretty significant concession.
[00:44:25]  As dark as it is, it's at least now they're no longer saying it's zero.
[00:44:30]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:44:32]  I mean, I want to talk about basically what has happened in between May and now, or I guess when GHF was sort of announced.
[00:44:41]  So like, you know, I was mentioning these guys in Israel before.
[00:44:44]  Most, many of them are connected to COGAT.
[00:44:46]  I actually don't know how you pronounce that.
[00:44:48]  I had to look it up and I still couldn't figure it out without hearing it.
[00:44:51]  But it's the coordinator of government activities in the territories, which is like the Israeli, I guess, administration of occupied territories.
[00:44:59]  And so a bunch of COGAT guys who are also in the private sector, but it's the Israeli sort of spy tech sector get together with these CIA guys in the US.
[00:45:12]  They start Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
[00:45:15]  And one of the first things that like it makes the new, I mean, besides just starting, one of the first news stories associated with it is its CEO steps down.
[00:45:22]  Right.
[00:45:23]  So he's his name?
[00:45:25]  Jake Wood.
[00:45:25]  Jake Wood.
[00:45:26]  He's in office for like, and he's not exactly like a bleeding heart liberal.
[00:45:29]  That's before they even distributed.
[00:45:30]  It was like the day before.
[00:45:32]  That was, I mean, this isn't proof, but my understanding is that it was a direct result of the New York Times reporting that hit pretty hard Sunday.
[00:45:42]  If I remember right, the New York Times story came out on like a Sunday and distribution was going to start on a Monday.
[00:45:46]  And what was that story?
[00:45:48]  It was actually how Riley, while he was at Orbis, how he set up GHF and Safe Reach.
[00:45:56]  And in fact, the same Israeli coordination you're talking about.
[00:46:01]  And so Jake Wood, who is, I think, even still running Team Rubicon, which is a long-running kind of disaster relief organization, resigned from this because he said it didn't comply with humanitarian principles, including independence.
[00:46:19]  And this is an operator-style veteran.
[00:46:21]  This is not.
[00:46:22]  He's a former Marine, if I remember right.
[00:46:24]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:46:24]  And like, I think I was looking at Team Rubicon's site last night.
[00:46:27]  I think they did like disaster relief in Haiti.
[00:46:29]  They had a partnership with Palantir, too.
[00:46:31]  That's where I first noticed them about a decade ago.
[00:46:34]  And, you know, what's important to note is that it was denied that there was any relationship with the Israeli government for a while.
[00:46:42]  Yeah.
[00:46:42]  That was vigorously denied at the highest levels of the U.S. government.
[00:46:46]  In fact, I had a scoop on this in my story last week from a source inside of USAID that there had been a White House directive that was high priority that came through specifically to fund GHF through USAID.
[00:47:01]  So, oh, interesting.
[00:47:02]  And what's left of USAID?
[00:47:04]  Yeah.
[00:47:04]  I mean, yeah, it's a shell under the State Department.
[00:47:07]  Yeah, for sure.
[00:47:08]  And it was, I think that's very critical context is that the just as Israel is trying to completely subvert the United Nations, the U.S. has kneecapped what was our humanitarian infrastructure and is privatizing very heavily with former military contract and current and former Green Beres and CIA folks leading the way.
[00:47:37]  And so, yeah, it's dark.
[00:47:41]  So how is Gaza Humanitarian Foundation being funded?
[00:47:45]  So super interesting.
[00:47:47]  My kind of specialty for about five, six years has been kind of forensic government contract analysis.
[00:47:57]  So I mirror government procurement records.
[00:48:00]  I started with U.S. federal government.
[00:48:02]  You can find really interesting stuff in there and then expanded out to like, I don't know, 30 countries or something.
[00:48:08]  Israel doesn't publish its military contracts, but they do have their kind of civilian contracts.
[00:48:14]  And not a single member of the GHF network of three organizations has a single public contractor grant that includes GHF itself as a legal entity, that includes UG Solutions, which has existed since 2022, which is the most telling.
[00:48:30]  I want to say at least 2022, but I think specifically that year.
[00:48:35]  And then also Safe Reach Solutions, which was registered in October.
[00:48:39]  So there's these like three organizations with literally zero track record of any government contracts running something under a White House directive that's central for bilateral relationships with arguably the U.S.'s most important ally.
[00:48:54]  That doesn't make any sense.
[00:48:56]  I mean, that's what's so kind of galling about all of this is that there are essentially privatized, and I'm putting heavy finger quotes around that, American boots on the ground with guns in Gaza that seem to be the most possibly generous interpretation,
[00:49:17]  very close to scores and scores and scores of civilian deaths with total opacity because of what seems, again, and this is from the outside, I'm not trying to put words in your mouth, but seems to be a partnership between the U.S. and Israeli, both private and public sectors.
[00:49:40]  And we have zero, there's just complete opacity, or as much as they, they've tried to be as opaque about this as possible.
[00:49:48]  You can't scratch the surface without hitting CIA on this.
[00:49:51]  I mean, just I smelled that from the beginning.

=== Partnership In Shadows (15:14) ===

[00:49:54]  And then, and there's a story I want to report later today that's yet another kind of close relationship with the CIA and with McNally Capital in particular.
[00:50:05]  And it's just, and this isn't the only organization.
[00:50:09]  We haven't talked about FOGBO, but it was also being contracted actually at the same time, but with a different team by BCG.
[00:50:20]  And Qatar was supposed to be the major funder for that.
[00:50:23]  And people may remember this Gaza humanitarian kind of peer that.
[00:50:30]  The Biden one.
[00:50:31]  Yes.
[00:50:32]  Oh, my God.
[00:50:33]  The aid peer.
[00:50:34]  What a miserable peer that was.
[00:50:36]  My God.
[00:50:37]  And so this isn't new.
[00:50:40]  And in fact, I was invited to go on an aid drop in South Sudan by Fogbo when I started reaching out to them.
[00:50:47]  And I rushed to like, you know, I was going to get vaccinated and jump on a plane to, you know, Nairobi to Juba.
[00:50:53]  And then from Juba, we'd fly and do the aid drop.
[00:50:55]  Don't go to Juba Airport.
[00:50:56]  Juba Airport's not going to be a lot of fun.
[00:50:57]  You don't want to fly a lot of accidents.
[00:50:59]  Well, that's where that was mandatory, right?
[00:51:01]  Go overland, man.
[00:51:02]  The Juba airport.
[00:51:03]  I'm just saying there's a high rate of air.
[00:51:04]  But I didn't get to go, so I don't know if they were bluffing.
[00:51:06]  Did they say no?
[00:51:07]  No, they just said it was too late for me to get the visa.
[00:51:09]  Fuck you.
[00:51:10]  Aren't you still doing aid out there?
[00:51:12]  You did one drop?
[00:51:13]  Well, that was a very highly publicized drop, actually.
[00:51:16]  That was all over the place.
[00:51:18]  And I was really upset I didn't get to go, actually.
[00:51:20]  Wait, were Fogbo?
[00:51:21]  I thought it was the U.S. military that was doing those.
[00:51:24]  Because remember those insane, like, there was also a lot of kind of fake footage of this, but remember those insane U.S. airdrop of aid things, like aid parachutes into Gaza during that early period of the war?
[00:51:35]  Was that FOGBO?
[00:51:36]  at the US.
[00:51:36]  I don't think Fogbo did any I mean, I don't want to speak authoritatively, but I don't think their main project was that pure.
[00:51:43]  It's maritime, yeah.
[00:51:44]  Yeah, but actually, so I did a deep dive on USAID.
[00:51:49]  And like I said, I do a lot of forensic contract analysis.
[00:51:52]  And one of the things that was fascinating is most USAID employees were what was called personal services contractors.
[00:51:58]  So they had a literal contract with the U.S. federal government.
[00:52:02]  And so when they all started getting firing, like on USASpending.gov, they'd fire off the name of the person, their phone number, their address, everything.
[00:52:10]  So I'm like, okay, this is my job.
[00:52:11]  So I made a list of over 100 people and I just called them all up.
[00:52:15]  Like one in six of the people talks to you, right?
[00:52:18]  And some of them would talk to me for like three hours.
[00:52:20]  That's crazy.
[00:52:21]  And so I like spent a huge amount of time talking.
[00:52:24]  And I'm talking like a super fascinating part of USAID that's critical here that ties in is what was called the Office of Transition Initiatives, which was, if people remember the whole Zen Zunio scandal in Cuba in 2013.
[00:52:37]  Fake social media and the rap and exactly.
[00:52:39]  That was OTI.
[00:52:40]  So OTI, when I called up some of the senior folks from it, they literally described themselves as, quote, regime change.
[00:52:46]  And they said, unlike the rest of you, I'm not kidding.
[00:52:48]  That was literally their word.
[00:52:49]  So you called up U.S.-fired USAID employees from dog Doge, doggy.
[00:52:55]  Well, no, no, no, they weren't from Doge.
[00:52:57]  They weren't from Doge.
[00:52:58]  None of them.
[00:52:59]  They were being fired by Doge.
[00:53:00]  No, that's what I mean.
[00:53:00]  They were fired by that.
[00:53:03]  Obviously, the doggy.
[00:53:04]  Those guys are like 19.
[00:53:05]  I don't think you can legally call them.
[00:53:07]  But, and they were like, I am a regime change guy.
[00:53:11]  Only the OTI.
[00:53:12]  So to be clear, like, that's a small group.
[00:53:14]  Yeah.
[00:53:15]  And they're kind of, they're controversial.
[00:53:16]  It's like the door kickers of USAID.
[00:53:19]  I mean, what was so interesting is I really liked the people.
[00:53:23]  They were super smart and knew the politics really well.
[00:53:26]  And, you know, one of the people that talked to me at length is basically like, yeah, we're better at collecting intelligence than the CIA is.
[00:53:33]  And it's the same information, but for different purposes.
[00:53:35]  Yeah.
[00:53:35]  Because we can go talk.
[00:53:36]  We know the tribes.
[00:53:37]  We know how to talk to people.
[00:53:38]  We know how to, like, they did a huge counterinsurgency campaign in Pakistan.
[00:53:43]  Yeah.
[00:53:43]  I mean, USAID, I mean, this is long-standing war.
[00:53:46]  I mean, this is sort of this has been the, I mean, this has been sort of the, it's been the bitter truth about USAID from the start is that like oftentimes its mission, basically it started to give cover to the CIA.
[00:53:58]  And then oftentimes its mission has either correlated or just been directly run alongside.
[00:54:03]  Or in some cases, yeah, with like the Cuba stuff, it's basically functioned as something doing something the CIA would do.
[00:54:11]  Yeah, so when I asked specifically about Zun Zunio, I was told, like, look, we didn't choose to do that.
[00:54:17]  You have to understand if that happens, somebody high up told us to do that, and it blew up in our face.
[00:54:22]  Yeah.
[00:54:23]  Also, I talked to people who had direct knowledge in Pakistan with USAID during the whole fake vaccination program.
[00:54:30]  Similar thing.
[00:54:31]  They're like, and that was the Save the Children intermediary, actually, that made the introduction.
[00:54:35]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:54:36]  Yeah, it was apparently the, according to the interrogation from the doctor who ran the program, he said it was the Save the Children representative and named them in Pakistan that made the intro to the CIA.
[00:54:50]  Can you, for our listeners who aren't aware, even though this is an aside, can you just explain what happened there?
[00:54:55]  Yeah, so to find Osama bin Laden before his May 2nd, 2011 execution with the SEAL Team 6 raid by every guy shot him so they could claim that they write a book about it on the back of it.
[00:55:06]  Allegedly, including a redhead there, too.
[00:55:09]  Yeah.
[00:55:09]  One of the things that we did is we ran a fake vaccination program in Pakistan to try and collect DNA as part of the kind of hunt.
[00:55:19]  And if I'm not mistaken, I'm forgetting the name of the doctor at the moment, but I believe he's still in jail.
[00:55:25]  I mean, it's a huge scandal in Pakistan.
[00:55:27]  You know, huge, huge fucking scandal.
[00:55:29]  So wait, back to USAAID.
[00:55:32]  The reason I brought it up.
[00:55:33]  Yeah.
[00:55:34]  The main thing I kept hearing over and over and over again is airdrops don't work.
[00:55:38]  Airdrops are worse than nothing.
[00:55:40]  That you like, there's going to be riots.
[00:55:42]  It's going to cause damage.
[00:55:44]  And that's what's going to happen when we're gone.
[00:55:46]  And yeah.
[00:55:47]  And so, you know, that's obviously one of the criticisms.
[00:55:51]  And, you know, for example, of even if Fogbo, for example, isn't militarized in the same way, even though it's like former special ops, former CIA, still doing airdrops.
[00:56:01]  You know, and one of the things I heard from USAID folks is they're spending just boatloads of money for effectively one truck of food.
[00:56:08]  I mean, that's so, I mean, this is, and again, this is also an aside, but you know what?
[00:56:12]  We're just talking.
[00:56:13]  It's our podcast.
[00:56:14]  What are we going to do?
[00:56:17]  Aid delivery is such a tricky subject to begin with because it can be oftentimes so ineffective in terms of like, I mean, Somalia, that's like, I guess my main source of knowledge on this stuff.
[00:56:32]  But I read a lot that didn't go into, we did a bunch of episodes about something that happened in the 90s in Somalia.
[00:56:37]  Not Black Hawk Down.
[00:56:39]  There wasn't a little thing about the Hammerland issue.
[00:56:43]  It was part of this.
[00:56:45]  It was part of the story.
[00:56:46]  But the story was sort of the same thing.
[00:56:47]  The story is a completely other thing.
[00:56:50]  It's a great story.
[00:56:51]  And we're not done telling it.
[00:56:52]  But as part of that, I just read so much about aid distribution in Somalia because obviously it's such a huge part of that story.
[00:57:01]  And I kind of came to the conclusion that like you really just, the only people that can ever actually deliver aid is probably armed UN convoys that are overseen by a different international.
[00:57:15]  This doesn't exist.
[00:57:16]  This was just my solution.
[00:57:17]  I'm like, because all these little fucking, like save the children, all these little groups, especially in a country like Somalia, it's like you have your guys that you send out there, you pay them shit, but they live like kings among the local population.
[00:57:30]  They spend years and years trying to get these irrigation or whatever projects off the ground, but nobody actually cares if that project gets done and they'll be given no support to do it.
[00:57:38]  It's just graft.
[00:57:40]  There's so much graft all the way down.
[00:57:42]  And then, yeah, I mean, with airdrops, it's like, yeah, you fucking just drop a bunch of food in this giant pallet down somewhere.
[00:57:50]  Well, probably whoever gets, if you're dropping it, they're probably pretty hungry down there.
[00:57:53]  And so whoever gets the food, if they have a couple of guns, well, you're in charge.
[00:57:57]  And so it's like, the thing is with in Gaza that's so interesting is like some of the most famous killings of aid workers since this began.
[00:58:09]  In fact, all of the most sort of well-known killings of aid workers since this began have come from the IDF and the IAF.
[00:58:17]  And we're talking, I mean, specifically World Central Kitchen.
[00:58:21]  You know, the, the, and that, which to me, I'm like, it's so crazy how that didn't become, it's actually not crazy at all, how it didn't become a scandal.
[00:58:28]  It's crazy to me that it didn't become a scandal.
[00:58:30]  I understand why it didn't because I think the Biden administration was probably like, don't make a big deal out of this.
[00:58:36]  And whoever that fucking celebrity chef Cocksucker is probably like, oh, yeah, whatever.
[00:58:40]  But like, the Israeli IDF or IAF, probably in this case, the Air Force drone striked well, clearly marked cars of World Central Kitchen employees and killed them in like a highly precise, targeted strike.
[00:58:58]  Actually, incredibly precise as far as airstrike, or excuse me, as far as drone strikes go.
[00:59:04]  I mean, they didn't even blow up the cars.
[00:59:06]  They didn't even kill everyone in the cars.
[00:59:08]  They killed specific people in some of them.
[00:59:10]  And, you know, from the Israeli propaganda that we see, their whole thing is that Hamas steals the aid and then resells it.
[00:59:21]  You see this constantly.
[00:59:21]  I mean, I look at a lot of Hasburgh for this show.
[00:59:27]  And just also, you just encounter it so often.
[00:59:29]  Yeah, I mean, it's fucking everywhere.
[00:59:30]  It's fucking everywhere.
[00:59:31]  And these sides on that.
[00:59:32]  Just go on Normi and that's if you Google almost anything that's related to what we've been talking about this episode, I think I Googled how many civilian deaths GHF, and I got a fucking sponsored Israeli government link to a document exposing UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese.
[00:59:56]  And NGO watches for sure all over this.
[01:00:00]  It's not even NGO watch.
[01:00:02]  It's literally the Israeli government.
[01:00:05]  It's an Israeli government.
[01:00:06]  Not even a cutout.
[01:00:08]  It's not even Illel Newer or whatever.
[01:00:10]  One of those fucking, anyways, these like it's there have been like this chaos caused by also the IDF frequently relocating civilians, bombing camps in the middle of the night.
[01:00:31]  And like from everything I understand, and I take in a lot of this stuff, widespread hunger and food shortages in large parts of Gaza.
[01:00:41]  They've created this problem.
[01:00:42]  And it's so clear to me.
[01:00:44]  And again, you're a reporter.
[01:00:45]  So I'm just saying my opinion here.
[01:00:47]  But like, what's your part?
[01:00:49]  It's clear to me that the Israeli government essentially made eating in Gaza as untenable as possible, blamed that on the UN, which they say colludes with Hamas, but also says all of the figures around food and the food distribution in Gaza are fake.
[01:01:08]  Just like they say all of the casualty figures are fake, even though they also go by the Gaza Health Ministry's numbers themselves.
[01:01:16]  And then stepped in with this private public solution of their intelligence and our intelligence together, making a fake humanitarian organization.
[01:01:25]  It drives me crazy.
[01:01:26]  So one thing, there has been huge backlash against the GHF from the so-called humanitarian world.
[01:01:32]  And like, I have a lot of criticism, a lot of criticisms of like save the children or ox fam of any of these things.
[01:01:39]  I think they're in large part, there's huge amounts of graft that go on there and also connections of their own with intelligence agencies.
[01:01:47]  But like GHF is, as far as I can tell, almost a pariah.
[01:01:53]  Yeah, the UN is not a fan, to put it mildly.
[01:01:56]  What's interesting, you know, you're talking about the Israeli military killing aid workers.
[01:02:01]  That's almost the raison d'être of GHF by its own telling.
[01:02:07]  So when I, you know, I got a copy actually from a source in USAID of their pitch for the $30 million grant, which hasn't gone through, by the way, for the month of June.
[01:02:21]  And their so-called deconfliction with the Israeli military is their central pitch.
[01:02:27]  Sorry.
[01:02:28]  GHF's deconfliction?
[01:02:31]  Yeah.
[01:02:31]  So they're saying you're less likely to be killed by the Israeli military because you go through them than if you go through the UN is the central component of their pitch.
[01:02:43]  So for deconfliction in this context, for those who might not know, it's, do you remember when Israel massacred all those ambulances like, what was it, a couple months ago?
[01:02:55]  Horrible story.
[01:02:56]  You know, tons of footage, very clear that they opened fire on these ambulance attendants who were they themselves responding to a massacre that the IDF did and then went around and shot them, including a guy as he was praying who, you know, was recorded on his cell phone.
[01:03:16]  The IDF claimed that they weren't doing deconfliction with them, that they hadn't cleared that corridor with them.
[01:03:22]  It came to light that they actually had done deconfliction.
[01:03:25]  And so what the IDF does is they have these deconfliction processes, but then they might just massacre you anyways.
[01:03:32]  And so this is essentially like a protection racket.
[01:03:34]  Yeah, they say you have to tell us where you're going to be and your location and basically give that to our intelligence services or else your death is on you.
[01:03:41]  Yeah.
[01:03:42]  They use that against them.
[01:03:43]  Exactly.
[01:03:44]  Then there's a high chance that they'll go and then kill them with those coordinates, right?
[01:03:48]  Or now that you've given them your route.
[01:03:50]  But so basically what you're saying, the GHF pitch to USAID is that like, we have a special relationship and they say they're not going to kill us.
[01:03:58]  Yeah, it's that we, I mean, it's literally former CIA special ops folks with close relationships with the Israeli military and intelligence saying, yeah, we will work.
[01:04:12]  We can handle things better than the UN can.
[01:04:14]  And yet, this is from a UN spokesperson.
[01:04:17]  Up until the 7th of July, we've recorded now 798 killings, including 615 in the vicinity of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation and 183 presumably on the route to aid convoys.
[01:04:29]  Right.
[01:04:31]  Well, so keep in mind, he's saying that this is deconfliction for people with GHF.
[01:04:36]  It's not deconfliction with the people trying to get this aid.
[01:04:39]  So, I mean, what it appears, just from the layman's perspective, is that there are now these areas where they're like, come get aid here.
[01:04:46]  And there was all these sort of arresting pictures that came out of this of these sort of barbed wire with these sort of blase-looking guards with machine guns.
[01:04:54]  And then I think there was some sort of viral clip where a reporter was talking about how peaceful it was as you heard a rat a-tat of a machine gun in the background.
[01:05:02]  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:05:03]  Yeah.
[01:05:04]  I think that was even a British Army.

=== GHF's Hostile Environment (02:57) ===

[01:05:08]  Oh, it was.
[01:05:10]  I'm trying to remember his name.
[01:05:12]  Actually, I think he's on the board of in GeoWatch, even speaking of.
[01:05:15]  Amazing.
[01:05:16]  God, man.
[01:05:17]  But the UK situation, by the way, is that's a whole news.
[01:05:19]  The Australia situation.
[01:05:20]  But what really needs to be emphasized here is that the vast majority of the aid is in the very south of Gaza.
[01:05:29]  And the concern is that people that are starving are being forced to travel south, specifically through militarized zones or evacuated zones, and that that's what's leading to a lot of the deaths.
[01:05:42]  And so to some degree, even to say the death wasn't within, I don't know, a kilometer of the aid distribution site is kind of missing the point that the aid is not being distributed throughout Gaza.
[01:05:54]  I see what you're saying.
[01:05:55]  Even though there is technically one site up by the Netsarim corridor south of Gaza City, central region, it doesn't operate nearly as often as the Con Yunus and Rafa distribution sites do.
[01:06:09]  In fact, if you go to GHF's own website, the last distribution was July 7th.
[01:06:14]  Really?
[01:06:14]  Yeah.
[01:06:14]  And so since July 7th, all of the distribution has been Rafa and Con Yunus.
[01:06:19]  Oh, yeah.
[01:06:19]  And they give these sort of operational updates on their website.
[01:06:23]  And it's interesting.
[01:06:25]  I want to talk about a couple of the people.
[01:06:27]  I know we've been going kind of long, but if you'll indulge us.
[01:06:31]  Every operational update, which they give these every day, kind of comes with the same copy-pasted, I think it's copy-pasted, I guess, section on inaccurate news reporting.
[01:06:42]  And GHF has been really active on Twitter, sort of fighting back at the fake news, sort of doggy in the mode of doggy or whatever, and Elon Musk.
[01:06:52]  But they say on Saturday, the UN Human Rights, I know it's those.
[01:06:56]  It's hostile.
[01:06:58]  This is hostile.
[01:06:59]  There's a picture of a dog, and I know that it's like, oh, look, he's the Doge of Venice or whatever.
[01:07:05]  It's a fucking dog.
[01:07:06]  I'm calling it fucking doggy.
[01:07:08]  It's true and on-house style.
[01:07:09]  It's true and on-house style.
[01:07:10]  On Saturday, the UN Human Rights Office issued a statement on casualties in Palestinians seeking aid, tying them to GHF sites.
[01:07:17]  These false and misleading stats come directly from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry.
[01:07:23]  The UN's reliance in coordination with the terrorist organization to falsely smear our effort is not only disturbing, but should be investigated by the international community.
[01:07:31]  The fact is, the most deadly attacks on aid sites have been linked to UN convoys, including last week, it was reported that 40 people were killed trying to reach UN aid trucks.
[01:07:39]  Instead of hurling, killed by who?
[01:07:42]  Instead of hurling insults and promoting Hamas's false propaganda from the sidelines, the UN and humanitarian group should be working collaboratively with GHF to maximize the amount of aid security delivered into Gaza.
[01:07:53]  Bottom line, and then it's like GHF is so wonderful, blah, blah, blah, blah.
[01:07:57]  But GHF, I'm going to talk about some of the people who are in charge there now because they've got this like fucking crazy.
[01:08:04]  Do you remember how big this was?

=== GHF's Controversial Leadership (04:14) ===

[01:08:06]  I guess it was during the first Trump term, but I feel like it was almost more during the Obama term.
[01:08:12]  That like symbol for Middle Eastern Christians, I think it's like a Coptic symbol, maybe.
[01:08:17]  Oh, it's the Arabic letter N, also known as none, which stands for Nazarene or Nazrani, the Arabic word for Christian.
[01:08:24]  Okay, that makes sense.
[01:08:25]  I've just always been like Middle Eastern Christian.
[01:08:27]  But the Reverend Johnny Moore.
[01:08:30]  Yeah.
[01:08:32]  Who is, I guess he's sort of like, is he doing comms?
[01:08:37]  What is he doing for GHF?
[01:08:38]  Yeah, I mean, he does most of the interviews.
[01:08:40]  He did a recent interview where he's just kind of looked very overly disheveled.
[01:08:45]  It was kind of off-putting.
[01:08:47]  You said the man looked like shit.
[01:08:49]  Politely.
[01:08:49]  Okay, I might say the man looked like shit.
[01:08:51]  I mean, for someone running such a geopolitically important organization.
[01:08:57]  But, you know, to some degree, I haven't focused on him.
[01:09:01]  I think it's to some degree a red herring because he was brought in after the initial launch.
[01:09:08]  I think there's a tendency to assume that this is much more of a MAGA project than it really is.
[01:09:14]  This is much more bipartisan.
[01:09:16]  For example, I had a scoop a few days ago that, in fact, the PR firm for the mercenaries on the ground, UG Solutions, is seven-letter, and it's a bunch of former Obama and Biden spokespersons running this.
[01:09:32]  Is that the one where they hired the sort of the little boy who looked like he likes candy from Pentagon?
[01:09:39]  Remember that guy that would fill in at the Pentagon press sometimes?
[01:09:42]  You know what I'm saying?
[01:09:44]  Man, I'm really not.
[01:09:46]  Sabrina Singh is who I is.
[01:09:47]  Oh, Sabrina's amazing.
[01:09:48]  But the official spokesperson is Drew O'Brien, who is a special rep for John Kerry.
[01:09:54]  No, there was a guy.
[01:09:55]  There was a little man who looked like he liked candy who worked at the Pentagon.
[01:10:00]  Are you talking about Matthew?
[01:10:01]  No.
[01:10:02]  No, dude.
[01:10:02]  No, he doesn't look like he likes candy.
[01:10:06]  No, there was like a little guy that looked like he liked candy who worked there.
[01:10:10]  Anyways, but so no, but I do think the point about it being bipartisan is so important because this stuff and the planning for this stretches like long past and way above.
[01:10:19]  And in fact, Orbis Ops, where this all began, was chaired by Mike Morrell, Mr. Anti-Trump, right?
[01:10:27]  So I think there's, you know, that's always the trap to fall into on Israel is to assume that it's just the current administration's kind of unique pathology.
[01:10:38]  And this is not uniquely Republican.
[01:10:40]  This was clearly in the works before.
[01:10:43]  It's a lot of the kind of, you know, even some of the anti-Trump kind of intelligence folks involved.
[01:10:51]  I think it's a mistake to kind of assume that this would perhaps not have happened if it was a Democratic administration.
[01:10:57]  Yeah, I actually, I agree with that.
[01:10:59]  I think sometimes people see, you know, there are some differences in the administration, right?
[01:11:06]  But I agree.
[01:11:08]  Like, there's so many people that seem to be like connected.
[01:11:10]  I mean, Sabrina's saying, right?
[01:11:11]  Fucking, she was like a deputy spokeswoman at the Biden Pentagon.
[01:11:15]  Yeah, exactly.
[01:11:16]  Very recently.
[01:11:17]  Yeah.
[01:11:17]  Exactly.
[01:11:18]  Like doing basically, you know, not, I think.
[01:11:22]  To be clear, I don't have proof she specifically was tasked, but she's the biggest, the most recent hire at this firm.
[01:11:28]  High profile.
[01:11:29]  Yeah.
[01:11:29]  And the person that is assigned was former Obama.
[01:11:32]  Exactly.
[01:11:32]  And so like, this is like a bipartisan effort here.
[01:11:38]  And it's just, it's so crazy to me to see like this is, I mean, this seems like it's getting a lot more attention and becoming sort of more of like a, let's say, a political hot potato.
[01:11:49]  And I think it is, because this, this is just one of those things.
[01:11:51]  And there's so much shit like this that it just becomes like unbearable, almost unbearable to think about because there's a million things like this.
[01:11:59]  But this is what's happening is completely unconscionable and completely insane and absurd that like this is treated as if it's just like business as usual.
[01:12:09]  I mean, if this was happening in any other context, there would be such, such outrage and uproar from the U.S. government or for whoever about something like this happened.

=== Aid as a Weapon (04:57) ===

[01:12:20]  But like what we're seeing basically are these like traps using aid as a weapon, which the IDF has done many times, but specifically in this war in terms of like keeping aid out and using starvation as a weapon of war.
[01:12:35]  So to pull things full circle, the person who I would put a spotlight on is John Accree, who's the interim executive director.
[01:12:43]  And in fact, I had a leak from USAID of an email, which a few weeks later, DevX published, and of course didn't credit my scoop, that John Accree, who's former USAID, was explicitly recruiting through the Bureau of Humanitarian Assistance for staff.
[01:13:02]  And to bring it back even to some of your expertise with the Kurds, he was actually former OTI country director in Erbil.
[01:13:09]  Oh, interesting.
[01:13:11]  And so, like I mentioned earlier, OTI is also like, to the degree to which there is a regime change component of USAID, he's actually from that component of it.
[01:13:22]  And he also led the USAID relationship with the U.S. military as the director several years ago.
[01:13:29]  That would definitely make sense for that.
[01:13:30]  He's the point person, I would say.
[01:13:32]  And also, it kind of shows, you know, the USAID folks are not MA, largely speaking.
[01:13:38]  And so I think it's kind of a, yeah, again, I think Moore is kind of doing the, maybe he's speaking more to the net and Yahoo crowd.
[01:13:46]  He's playing that role.
[01:13:48]  But there is, you know, a little more foundation to this, I think, than that evangelical world.
[01:13:56]  I think an important like backdrop to this conversation is also then, you know, okay, you have all of these kind of like regime change by their own admission guys in here, right?
[01:14:08]  The kind of plans for the so-called humanitarian city in Gaza, that's what they're calling it.
[01:14:14]  Other people, including a German, in fact, have called it a concentration camp.
[01:14:20]  And I think that's like an important, you know, something important to note.
[01:14:24]  And the plan is to move hundreds of thousands of people into a camp that will cost about $3 billion that you cannot leave in Rafah unless it's to, I believe, approved third countries.
[01:14:43]  And that is currently being debated in the, you know, in within Israeli domestic politics and is at least somewhat to me, a little somewhat surprisingly controversial and has been perhaps shelved, so-called shelved for the time being.
[01:15:03]  But when we think about, you know, to wildly speculate, right?
[01:15:09]  If this is just kind of the first phase of something that is being rolled out, right, with these guys coming in that are managing these checkpoints, then managing this aid distribution, and then what this might look like down the road.
[01:15:22]  It's hard to not, I mean, I think we just need to talk about it.
[01:15:24]  So the way I would phrase it, and, you know, as a journalist, you both have to keep an open mind, but you also have to have a good filter.
[01:15:32]  And I think it's that combination of two things that makes it work.
[01:15:36]  One way to ask the question is logistically, how would this be different if it was, say, an excuse for US special ops to just get more and more of a presence and to integrate with Israeli intelligence in Gaza and to slowly, I mean, one could almost call this like a civil affairs operation.
[01:15:58]  I mean, I think actually if you talk to USAID folks, and maybe your audience doesn't know what civil affairs is, but it's a very close partner of Green Berets in the U.S. military, and they basically do well construction, kind of aid projects for the explicit purpose of gaining the sympathy and also for intelligence collection reasons.
[01:16:22]  People are more likely to tell you about the Taliban if you built them a school or gave them water.
[01:16:28]  And so there's a degree to which this looks a lot like a civil affairs mission more than it looks like an aid mission.
[01:16:37]  And you can ask the question of like, well, clearly the Israeli government and the U.S. administration want to completely delegitimize the government and just run Gaza.
[01:16:49]  You can ask, well, how is this so different than just a military coming in, U.S. private military contractors on the ground starting to just administer the country in small steps?
[01:17:06]  But I mean, I don't want to speculate too much, but I mean, what Special Ops does is covertly get into countries.
[01:17:15]  And you can ask the question, if that was happening, what would the cover look like?

=== Special Ops in Gaza (04:19) ===

[01:17:18]  Yeah, yeah, exactly.
[01:17:20]  I mean, in this case, right, you have these guys who are these private security guys, these mercenary firms protecting aid.
[01:17:27]  I mean, it's really, I mean, it's almost a lazy cover.
[01:17:30]  You know, you can already walk around openly with a gun.
[01:17:33]  You know, I want to mention this is, I said earlier in the episode that watching GHF sort of form out out of this checkpoint pilot project and what the next step would be.
[01:17:44]  You know, we talked a little bit about the BCG Boston Consulting Group kind of fallout and scandal.
[01:17:50]  There's a lengthy article from the FT that talks about the Tony Blair Institute's involvement in this stuff.
[01:17:57]  And of course, you know, we love Tony Blair here, but I just want to read from it real quick.
[01:18:03]  This is apparently coming from the same group of Israeli businessmen and intelligence agents, American businessmen and intelligence agents, BCG and the Tony Blair Institute.
[01:18:16]  It's from the FT.
[01:18:17]  It says, one lengthy document on post-war Gaza written by a TBI staff member, Tony Blair Institute, was shared within the group for consideration.
[01:18:26]  This included the idea of a, quote, Gaza Riviera with artificial islands off the coast akin to those in Dubai, blockchain-based trade initiatives, a deep water, I know they're still trying to shoehorn Web3 into everything, a deep water port to tie Gaza into the India-Middle East, Middle East, East Europe economic corridor, and low-tax special economic zones.
[01:18:49]  It continues.
[01:18:50]  The final slide deck titled The Great Trust from a Demolished Iranian Proxy to a Prosperous Abrahamic Ally has been shared with members of the current and former U.S. administrations, according to people familiar with the project, along with other governments and stakeholders in the Middle East.
[01:19:10]  Great is short for Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration, and Transformation.
[01:19:16]  It envisions all Gaza's public land being put into a trust for development whose assets could be sold to investors via digital tokens traded on a blockchain.
[01:19:27]  Gazans would be offered the chance to contribute their privately owned land to the trust in return for a token that gave them the right to a permanent housing unit.
[01:19:36]  Elsewhere in the article, it describes a plan for population transfers or ethnic cleansing of Gazans out of Gaza.
[01:19:48]  And I guess out of anywhere within Palestine or the occupied territories.
[01:19:56]  I mean, this to me, it seems like what we see here, and again, you're a journalist, so I have a little more leeway than you.
[01:20:02]  Being legally a professional comedian for all legal purposes.
[01:20:09]  Your opinion allegedly.
[01:20:12]  Most of my opinions, guess what?
[01:20:14]  All of my opinions are allegedly taken from other people's allegedly.
[01:20:17]  I'm just reporting rumors here.
[01:20:18]  But to me, it seems like there's a very clear line here, right?
[01:20:21]  Is that they found their solution, which is this public-private, totally opaque U.S.-Israeli partnership with either Gulf funding or more Gulf involvement of reconstruction under these completely, plus either, let's say, out of the spotlight or very blatant population transfer, again, ethnic cleansing, as part of the reconstruction effort for Gaza.
[01:20:51]  I should emphasize that GHF has denied on record that it has any plans beyond a distribution.
[01:21:00]  I'm sure that GHF as an entity might say that.
[01:21:04]  But like, I mean, you've mentioned yourself.
[01:21:06]  Yeah, roll it back.
[01:21:06]  It was originally a vehicle inspection checkpoint, then that morphed a new legal entity sat on top.
[01:21:11]  Hypothetically, suppose a new legal entity is introduced and GHF is under that.
[01:21:15]  The question.
[01:21:17]  And in fact, they're very careful and legalistic in their denials that if you don't name SafeReach, GHF will be like, oh, we don't do anything to do with security.
[01:21:26]  Yeah.
[01:21:27]  You really, the complexity is part of the PR in some way of how you can deny things.
[01:21:32]  And that's how the right to return becomes the opportunity to buy the Gaza shitcoin.

=== GHF Denials and Entities (03:20) ===

[01:21:37]  And fuck it, pump and dump data.
[01:21:39]  I mean, this is what it's so, it seems so much like when they made this slide, they were watching that AI video that Trump posted or reposted.
[01:21:49]  And we're like, okay, what do we see in here?
[01:21:50]  They're talking in another part.
[01:21:51]  I don't know if I put this in here.
[01:21:52]  I guess I didn't in my notes.
[01:21:54]  But they're talking about an Elon Musk development zone in there.
[01:21:58]  And it's like, if I'm not, I think Gray Zone actually found that document several months before FT reported on it.
[01:22:05]  Really?
[01:22:06]  And they found it on Netanyahu's website.
[01:22:08]  And they didn't know it had anything to do with GHF, but they had reported on that exact document.
[01:22:14]  So they were kind of like, what the hell?
[01:22:16]  Like, you know, so this has been passed around for a while, apparently.
[01:22:19]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:22:20]  Wow.
[01:22:21]  Vulture's getting ready.
[01:22:24]  Well, Jesus Christ, Jack.
[01:22:27]  There's so much more reporting on your, you know, in your sub stack.
[01:22:30]  We'll link to it in the episode description.
[01:22:33]  People should really check it out.
[01:22:35]  And this is like an ongoing story.
[01:22:38]  I mean, this is happening right now.
[01:22:40]  There's so much more to this, too.
[01:22:42]  Like, there's what you cover in your stuff, but like this weird Swiss shit that BCG is as good as it got shut down kind of yeah, that the Swiss government was like, it's the Swiss Swiss government.
[01:22:54]  And what the hell is the role of you know two ocean trusts?
[01:22:58]  Which is, I mean, that was the first really weird thing to me is there's this like wealth management, generational wealth management, kind of registered agent firm that it was all.
[01:23:07]  Yeah yeah, you have all.
[01:23:08]  You have a bunch of documentation from that.
[01:23:10]  I regret the first headline a bit.
[01:23:12]  I mean I published it within literally hours of those companies being named, so it's kind of, you know, hot on the heels, so to speak.
[01:23:20]  But I mean that, I think, is ultimately what led to UG Solutions calling me up and perhaps you know Riley even later naming himself.
[01:23:31]  But the degree to which you know you go to even the, the SAFE Reach Solutions website, it still doesn't say who's involved in it.
[01:23:41]  There's no team page.
[01:23:42]  You can find a lot of stuff through LinkedIn.
[01:23:46]  But yeah, there's a lot more reporting.
[01:23:48]  I mean it.
[01:23:49]  It's obviously you can't just get on a plane and go there.
[01:23:52]  Journalists aren't allowed, so you do what you can.
[01:23:58]  Well Jack, thank you so much for joining us.
[01:24:00]  Yeah, my pleasure to have you back.
[01:24:02]  I love your reporting.
[01:24:03]  Oh, that's extremely kind of you.
[01:24:05]  Yeah, great to be here, and it's definitely a nice excuse to not speak quite the way I tried to in my reporting.
[01:24:16]  We like to give people the opportunity.
[01:24:19]  We thoroughly encourage you to check out Jack Poulson.
[01:24:22]  That's P-O-U-L-S-O-N dot substack.com or just Google search Jack Poulsen.
[01:24:30]  If you have any tips, please send me docs.
[01:24:45]  Well, like we said, we're going to link to a sub stack in the description.
[01:24:48]  You can check out a lot more of his reporting, and I highly recommend it.
[01:24:52]  Yeah.
[01:24:53]  I'm Liz.
[01:24:54]  My name is Bryce.
[01:24:55]  I'm producer Young Chomsky.
[01:24:56]  And this has been Truanon.
[01:24:58]  We'll see you next time.