Behind the Headlines: Weekly Broadcast - 14 December 2014

Sott Editors
Sott.net
Sun, 14 Dec 2014 19:00 UTC

This week the US Congress finally published its long-awaited 'Torture Report', the culmination of years of investigation into the Bush gang's 'methods' after 9/11.

The US media reported shock and outrage at the committee's findings, but what did we actually learn from their report? And is the truth about what went on - and is still going on - far worse than we're being told?

The Behind the Headlines team investigate...

Running Time: 02:09:00

Download: MP3

Here's the transcript:

Larken Rose: You cannot begin to imagine in how many ways the world is the opposite of what you have been taught to believe. You see the guy who sells drugs to willing customers so he can feed his family as the scum of the earth while you see the hypocrite who gives away stolen money in the name of government as a saint. You see the guy who tries to avoid being robbed by the federal thugs as a crook and a tax cheat but see as virtuous the politician who gives away the same stolen loot to people to whom it does not belong. You see the cop as a good guy when he drags a man away from his friends and family and throws him in prison for ten years for smoking a leaf, and you see anyone who defends himself from such barbaric fascism as the lowest form of life, a cop killer.

In reality most drug dealers are more virtuous than any government social worker and prostitutes have far less to be ashamed of than political whores because they trade only with what is rightfully theirs and only with those who want to trade with them. The upstanding, church-going, law abiding, tax paying citizen who votes democrat or republican is far more despicable and a bigger threat to humanity than the most promiscuous, lazy, drug-snorting hippy. Why? Because the hippy is willing to let others be free and the voter is not. The damage done to society by bad habits and loose morality is nothing compared to the damage done to society by the self-righteous violence committed in the name of the state.

You imagine yourselves to be charitable and tolerant when you are nothing of the sort. Even the Nazis had table manners and proper etiquette when they weren't killing people. You think you're good people because you say please and thank you? You think sitting in that big building on Sunday makes you noble and righteous? The difference between you and a common thief is that the thief has the honesty to commit the crime himself while you whine for government to do your stealing for you. The difference between you and the street thug is that the thug is open about the violence he commits while you let others forcibly control your neighbours on your behalf.

You advocate theft, harassment, assault and even murder but accept no responsibility for doing so. You old folks want the government to steal from your kids so you can get your monthly cheque. You parents want all your neighbours to be robbed to pay for your kids' schooling. You all vote for whichever crook promises to steal money from other people to pay for what you want. You demand that those people who engage in behaviours you don't approve of be dragged off and locked up but feel no guilt for the countless lives your whims have destroyed. You even call the government thugs your representatives and yet you never take responsibility for the evil they commit.

You proudly support the troops as they kill whomever the liars in DC tell them to kill and you feel good about it. You call yourselves Christians or Jews or claim to follow some other religion but the truth is what you call your religion is empty window dressing. What you truly worship, the god you really bow to, what you really believe in is the state. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not murder, unless you can do it by way of government. Then it's just fine, isn't it? If you call it taxation and war it stops being a sin, right? After all, it was only your "god" that said you shouldn't steal and murder but the state said it was okay. It's pretty obvious which one outranks the other in your minds.
Despite all the churches, synagogues and mosques we see around us, this nation has one god and only one god, and that god is called government. Jesus taught non-violence and told you to love your neighbour but the state encourages you to vote for people who will use the violence of government to butt into every aspect of everyone else's life. Which do you believe?

To those about to stone a woman who had committed adultery, Jesus said "Let him who is without sin cast the first stone". But the state says it's perfectly fine to lock someone up if they do something you find distasteful such as prostitution. Which do you believe? The Christian god says "Thou shalt not covet" but coveting is the lifeblood of the beast that is the state. You were taught to resent, despise and hate anyone who has anything you don't have. You clamour for the state to tear other people down, steal their property and give it to you and you call that fairness. The bible calls it coveting and stealing.

You are not Christians. You are not Jews. You are not Muslims and you certainly aren't atheists. You all have the same god and its name is government. You're all members of the most evil, insane, destructive cult in history. If there ever was a devil, the state is it and you worship it with all your heart and soul. You pray to it to solve every problem, to satisfy all your needs, to smite your enemies and to shower its blessings upon you. You worship what Nietzsche called the coldest of all cold monsters and you hate those of us who don't. To you the greatest sin is disobeying your god, breaking the law you call it, as if anyone could possibly have any moral obligation to obey the arbitrary commands and demands of the corrupt, lying, delusional megalomaniacs who infest this despicable town. Even your ministers, priests and rabbis more often than not are traitors to their own religions, teaching that the commands of human authority should supersede adherence to the laws of the gods they say they believe in.

Several years ago I heard one pompous evangelical jackass in particular pontificating on the radio that anyone who disobeys the civil authority, be it a king or any other government, is engaging in rebellion against god. Those were the exact words he used. What if the government is doing something wrong? Well, this salesman for Satan opined that is the business of those in government and you are still obligated to obey.

Everywhere you turn, be it the state or the church, the media or the schools, you are taught one thing above all else; the virtue of subjugating yourselves to mortals who claim to have the right to rule you. It is sickening the reverence with which you speak of the liars and thieves whose feet are so firmly planted on your necks. You call the congressmen and the judges honourable and you swoon at the magnificence of the grandiose halls they inhabit, the temples they built to celebrate the domination of mankind. You feel pride at being able to say you once shook a senator's hand or saw the President in person. Ah yes, the grand deity himself, his royal highness the President of the United States of America. You speak the title as if you're referring to god almighty. The vocabulary has changed a bit but your mindset is no different from that of the grovelling peasants of old who bowed low, faces in the dirt, with a feeling of unworthiness and humility when in the presence of whatever narcissist had declared himself to be their rightful lord and master.

The truth of the matter back then and today is that these parasites who call themselves leaders are not superior beings, they are not great men and women, they are not honourable, they are not even average. The people who earn an honest living from sophisticated millionaire entrepreneurs to illiterate day labourers doing the most menial tasks you can imagine, those people deserve your respect. Those people you should treat with courtesy and civility. But the frauds who claim the right to rule you and demand your subservience and obedience, they deserve only your scorn and contempt. Those who seek so-called high office are the lowest of the low. They may dress better, have larger vocabularies and do a better job of planning out and executing their schemes, but they are no better than pick pockets, muggers and car jackers. In fact they are worse because they don't want to rob you of just your possessions. They want to rob you of your very humanity, deprive you of your free will by slowly leaching away your ability to think, to judge, to act, reducing you to slaves in both body and mind.

And still you persist in calling them leaders. Leaders? Where is it that you think you're going exactly that would require you to have a leader? If you just live your own life and mind your own damn business exercising your own talents, pursuing your own dreams, striving to be what you believe you should be, what possible use would you have for a leader? Do you ever actually think about the words that you hear, the words that you repeat? You parrot oxymoronic terms such as "the leader of the free world", even pretending for a moment that there is some huge journey or some giant battle that everyone in the entire nation is undertaking together that would require a leader. Why would you ever think, even for a moment, that the crooks that infest this town are the sort of people you should listen to or emulate or follow anywhere? Somewhere inside your mostly dormant brains you know full well that politicians are all corrupt liars and thieves, opportunistic con men, exploiters and fear-mongers.

You know all this and yet you still speak as if you were the ones who are the stupid, vicious animals while the politicians are the great, wise role models, teachers and leaders without whom civilization could not exist. You think these crooks are the ones who make civilization possible? What belief could be more absurd! Yet when they do their pseudo-religious rituals deciding how to control you this week, you still call it law and continue to treat their arbitrary demands as if they were moral decrees from the gods that no decent person would ever consider disobeying. You have become so thoroughly indoctrinated into the cult of state worship that you are truly shocked when the occasional sane person states the bleeding obvious. The mere fact that the political crooks wrote something down and declared their threats to be law does not mean that any human being anywhere has the slightest moral obligation to obey.

Every moment of every day, in every location and every situation, you have a moral obligation to do what you deem to be right, not what some delusional, bloated windbag says is legal. And that requires you to first determine right and wrong for yourself, a responsibility you spend much time and effort trying to dodge. You proclaim how proud you are to be law abiding citizens and express your utter contempt for anyone who considers himself above your so-called laws, laws that are nothing more than the selfish whims of tyrants and thieves. The word crime once meant an act harmful to another person. Now it means disobedience to any one of the myriad of arbitrary commands coming from a parasitical criminal class. To you the term crime is nearly synonymous with the word sin. Complying with the ones whose commands are being disobeyed must be something akin to gods, when in truth they are more akin to leeches.

The very phrase "taking the law into your own hands" perfectly expresses what a sacrilege it is in your eyes for a mere human being to take upon himself the responsibility to judge right from wrong and to act accordingly instead of doing what you do; unthinkingly obeying whatever capricious commands this cesspool of maggots spews forth. You glorify this criminal class as law makers and believe that no one is lower than a law breaker, someone who would dare disobey the politicians. Likewise you speak with pious reverence of law enforcers, those who forcibly impose the politicians' every whim upon the rest of us.

When the state uses violence you imagine it to be inherently righteous and just and if anyone resists, they are, in your eyes, contemptible low-lifes, lawless, terrorist criminals, like the lawless terrorist criminals who helped slaves escape the plantations; like the lawless terrorist criminals who helped Jews escape the killing machine of the Third Reich; like the lawless terrorist criminals who were crushed to death under the tanks of the Red Chinese government in Tiananmen Square; like all the lawless terrorist criminals in history who had the courage to disobey the never-ending stream of pirates and oppressors who have called their violence authority and law and that includes the lawless terrorist criminals who founded this country.

Everything you think you know is upside down, backwards and inside out, but what has to take the cake, the height of your insanity is the fact that you view as violent terrorists the only people on the planet who oppose the initiation of violence against their fellow men; anarchists, voluntaryists and libertarians. We use violence only to defend ourselves against someone who initiates violence against us. We use it for nothing else. Meanwhile your belief system is completely schizophrenic and self-contradictory. On the one hand you teach the young slaves that violence is never the answer, yet out of the other side of your mouths you advocate that everyone and everything everywhere and at all times be controlled, monitored, taxed and regulated through the force of government. In short, you are teaching your children that the masters may use violence whenever they please but the slave should never resist. You indoctrinate your children into a life of unthinking, helpless subservience. You are putting the chains around their little necks and fastening the locks tight. And worst of all, you feel good about it.

Out of one side of your mouths you condemn the evils of fascism and socialism and lament the injustices of the regimes of Hitler, Stalin and Mao, while out of the other side of your mouths you preach exactly what they did; the worship of the collective, the subjugation of every individual to that evil insanity that wears the deceptive label 'the common good'. You babble on and on about diversity and open-mindedness and then beg your masters to regulate and control every aspect of everyone's lives, creating a giant herd of unthinking conformist drones. You wear different clothes and have different hair styles and you think that makes you different. Yet all your minds are enslaved to the same club of masters and controllers. You think what they tell you to think and do what they tell you to do while imagining yourselves to be progressive, thinking and enlightened.

From your position of relative comfort and safety you now condemn the evils of other lands and other times while turning a blind eye to the injustices happening right in front of you. You tell yourself that had you lived in those other places, in those other times, you would have been among those who stood up against oppression and defended the downtrodden. But that is a lie. You would have been right there with the rest of the flock of well trained sheep loudly demanding that the slaves be beaten, that the witches be burned, that the non-conformists and rebels be destroyed. How do I know this? Because that is exactly what you are doing today. Today's injustices and oppressions are fashionable and popular and those who resist them, you tell yourselves, are just malcontents and freaks, people whose rights don't matter, people who deserve to be crushed under the boot of authority. Isn't that right?

You bunch of spineless, unthinking hypocrites! Look in the mirror. Take a good look at what you imagine to be righteous and kind. You are the devil's play thing. The crowds of thousands wildly applauding the speeches of Adolf Hitler? That was you! The mob demanding that Jesus Christ be nailed to the cross? That was you! The white invaders who celebrated the wholesale slaughter of those godless redskins? That was you! The throngs filling the coliseum, applauding as the Christians were fed to the lions? That was you! Throughout history the perpetual suffering and injustice occurring on an incomprehensible scale - it was all because of people just like you; the well-trained, thoroughly indoctrinated conformists, the people who do as they're told, who proudly bow to their masters, who follow the crowd believing what everyone else believes and thinking whatever authority tells them to think. That is you!

And your ignorance is not because the truth is not available to you. There have been radicals preaching it for thousands of years. No, you are ignorant because you shun the truth with all your heart and soul. You close your eyes and run away when a hint of reality lands in front of you. You condemn as extremist and fringe kooks those who try to show you the chains you wear because you don't want to be free. You don't even want to be human. Responsibility and reality scare the hell out of you so you cling tightly to your own enslavement and lash out at any who seek to free you from it. When someone opens the door to your cage, you cower back in the corner and yell "Close it, close it!"

Well, some of us are finished with trying to save you. We've wasted enough effort trying to convince you that you should be free. All you ever do is spout back what your masters have taught you: that being free only leads to chaos and destruction while being obedient and subservient leads to peace and prosperity. There are none so blind as those who will not see. And you, you nation of sheep, would rather die than see the truth.

Joe: Hi and welcome to Behind the Headlines on the SOTT Radio Network. I'm Joe Quinn and my co-hosts this week are Niall Bradley.

Niall: Hi everyone.

Joe: And Juliana Barembuem.

Juliana: Hello.

Joe: That was an alternative introduction to this week's show. It was by a guy called Larken Rose, from a couple of years ago actually, and it's from a book he wrote; that's him speaking the words of the text from his book. Not to say that we agree with everything that he said, but we thought it was a fairly powerful speech with a lot of truth in it and a lot of stuff that a lot of people need to hear, whether or not it makes any difference to them. It's something that a lot of people should hear at least once in their lives in some form or other.

So. how are all our devil's playthings feeling this evening? I hope you're all feeling very devilish. That speech was kind of okay. A few people on the chat have already been saying that it's anarchy basically, anarchical, that it's proposing no government whatsoever and that that's not maybe the best thing. But you can understand why someone would say that, someone who truly understood the nature of government today, at this point in our civilization or evolution, how some people would look at what we have today and say government is fundamentally evil and corrupt, that this is what government is and let's just get rid of it completely. So it doesn't propose alternative ideas really, it just says tear the system down and doesn't propose a replacement.

I suppose one of the points of disagreement we would have would be that some kind of a system is necessary because people need it. People do need a hierarchy in their lives. It's a fundamental need for a lot of people; I think pretty much for everybody. So on that point, yeah, but in general it was a very good speech.

Niall: Yeah, and I like that it's like what V says in V for Vendetta: okay so we're going to lay the blame where it belongs, on the door of this government. But truth be told, you need only look into a mirror if you're looking for, not the blame, but the source, where all this begins and ends, with you.

Joe: Yeah. The possibility for change has to come from ordinary people because ordinary people are the ones who are facilitating a system under which they live. If there's some control in their lives over them, then they acquiesce in that control and allow it to exist in whatever form that it takes. So by definition it's the responsibility of the collective of humanity essentially.

Juliana: I really liked the parallels he made with the church and god worshiping and all that. I would only have one point about that: it's not precisely bad that people need to believe in something higher than themselves. It's that, once again, it's corrupt whether it's the church or the government. But if say they were to worship truth, and honour it with the same passion that they do law enforcement, the police, the state god, then things would be better. The same with a better social system, a better government. Though his parallels were really good, he's comparing a corrupt church with a corrupt government, but it's not to say that you have to throw everything away.

Niall: No, where black and white needs to be treated with a bit of caution is that there is nevertheless a dynamic in history. It's not as simple as the 'oppressors and oppressed' all the time because there's a dynamic running through history where there are people who reach for power, because they understand the world and they see it more or less as it is and they understand that their role is to keep the predators at bay. They may not use those terms - that they are predators or as we use the term today, clinically they're psychopaths - but there is this dynamic - it could be in the medieval era, it could be far more recently - where a leader reaches for power and he does so because he understands that the nobles or the oligarchs would otherwise have it and abuse it. So the state per se being bad? It's like the church; the catholic church deserves to be bashed of course. But then along comes an individual, a person who seems to be - so far he seems to be alright, the current pope. He's certainly said some things that I find to be pretty impressive.

Joe: I think that's your catholic background getting the better of you there Niall.

Juliana: Yeah, don't get me started on the pope.

Joe: Don't even get started on him. Seriously. The pope is clearly just there to impression manage and keep the faithful in line. He says a lot and does nothing basically.

Juliana: And the guy's talking about world peace as he's meeting Netanyahu? Come on!

Niall: Well, Putin has to meet Netanyahu too.

Juliana: No, but there's meetings and meetings. This guy was shaking hands and saying "Oh yeah, you should just have a discussion with the Palestinians. Everything will be alright."

Joe: The problem with the pope is that he presents himself as someone who has any power and influence and he has no power and influence. If he does have power and influence he's not using it, clearly, because nothing's changing. We can see him being feted and lauded by the leaders of the evil empire essentially and no one had a bad word to say about him and that's been the case for every pope. The pope is just a figurehead and he's there as the head of the catholic church to keep the faithful in line and keep religion on the bill type of thing, on the menu, and not let all those catholics kind of wander away and become disenchanted with the catholic church. And I think that was needed. The Vatican hierarchy decided that was needed after Ratzinger didn't go down well with a lot of people particularly because over the past 10 years or more - the child abuse scandals, etc. - a lot of people had walked away from the catholic church because of that. People who still had some ounce of conscience walked away from it. So I think at least from the way the world works kind of thing, from that standpoint, what's his name? The pope?

Juliana: Francis.

Joe: Francisco was brought in to give people hope. He's kind of like an Obama, basically after Bush. He was Obama after Bush, the hope and the new beginnings and this is a new pope. But he does nothing except just throw out lots of nice sounding platitudes and "we should all live happily and peaceful". So there's two options. He has power but he doesn't actually use it. He doesn't say anything. He doesn't expose the truth. He doesn't stand up for the poor. He doesn't do anything to change the lot of the poor as he supposedly should be doing.

Juliana: If anything he plays it down a lot of the times, like with pedophilia. He's like "Oh no, nothing"...

Joe: So if he does have power, he doesn't use it.

Niall: The world as it is, a billion people do listen to him. So when he says austerity measures are evil, pretty much in those words, what's that going to do to those people?

Joe: Not a lot.

Niall: They're going to believe it.

Joe: Maybe. I don't know.

Juliana: But he's so vague. With that power you could do a lot. You could say a lot.

Joe: Yeah, compare what Putin says to what pope Francis says; there's just no real comparison. Like I said, it's kind of platitudes and it's all in line with 'feed the poor' and the kind of catholic dogma essentially of alms and charity.

Juliana: As an example, when he talked about Palestine and Israel he said "The war must stop. You two should stop going to war together." Excuse me! When was ever a war between Israel and Palestine.

Joe: Yeah, exactly.

Juliana: You see what I mean? He's talking to millions of people and he can't call it what it is, a genocide?

Joe: He reinforces the narrative that is espoused by the west. He has power in the sense he has reach and stuff, so he obviously doesn't really speak truth in the way that he could if he had any kind of conscience or any awareness.

Juliana: But I see what you're saying. He's not doing as much harm as others in what he's saying - but actually I don't know. I wonder sometimes because somebody who has so much influence to say something like that? Isn't that what's going to stick in peoples' minds?

Joe: You mean about Israel and Palestine.

Juliana: Yeah, for example, or paedophilia. "Yeah, we're taking care of it. Don't worry. It's only two percent of the priests in the world."

Joe: Yeah.

Juliana: Yeah right!

Niall: Okay.

Joe: Don't get me started on the catholic church.

Niall: We'll see. I suspect something's going to come up in the next year or so where he gets himself into real hot water. Well maybe not. Maybe it'll just be for show. The point I was trying to make was that when you have a dysfunctional, decrepit institution - yes that's what it is, see it for what it is. I think occasionally within that you get somebody who comes into it who understands that. The biggest and clearest example is Putin. He rises through the ranks, "takes over" Russia. He does it very peaceably and very fairly and I'm sure he does it with - I won't say immoral acts, but I'm sure there's a use of force where needed. He would have been acting using his conscience, but somebody 'with a conscience' out on the streets seeing it and not understanding all the background dynamics would call it out as, "well that's terrible, that's immoral, that's authoritarian".

Anyway, so this week, behind the headlines: the big news this week is this go-around on torture. It's torturous listening to people talking about 'the torture report' because it's like, hello?! That was ten years ago. But of course part of the reason why it's out now is because this report was only commissioned in 2009, by Dianne Feinstein and other US senators. Apparently part of the reason why we're only hearing about it in 2014 is because John Kerry saw to it that it would be delayed, of course. John Kerry's just a bag man which means that other people behind him wanted it put off for as long as possible. Nevertheless, we have some new details, maybe, of some of the things that went on. Obviously the report, while it's got very graphic descriptions of what was done to people, it's going to be a pretty clean report in the sense of the scale of it. They're talking about 119 people held in Guantanamo Bay. I highly doubt it's just 119; when you think of the global scale of the operation.

Joe: Well that's not even the official figure. Everybody knows that there was at least 600 people in Guantanamo Bay so why did they come out with 119? It doesn't make any sense. They're already bullshitting the public there because there were 600 people in Guantanamo Bay and the vast majority of them, by the US's own admission, were not guilty of anything.

Niall: Yeah.

Joe: They had no evidence that any of them were guilty, almost.

Juliana: And then if you count all the other prisons, Abu Ghraib, etc., you're talking thousands.

Joe: The whole thing is kind of ridiculous. It stinks of a set up, a manipulation. Of course the US government's going through its process, but someone at some point made this decision, "Let's have an investigation and a report on torture". They've had reports and investigations, senate congressional investigations on various different things over the past 50 or 60 years and they've all been limited hangouts. A lot of it's been censored. Obviously even the people investigating it aren't given the full information for national security reasons. Or if they are given information they willingly agree not to reveal all of what happened. So you can assume automatically that this is only really a small part of what actually happened.

But the impression is that it comes out at this particular time - of course it was in process. They didn't predict it let's say five years ago, knowing what would happen today, but it's quite useful that it's released now in the sense that it distracts away from all of the protests going on about police brutality in the US. And it also provides a veneer or the impression of there being checks and balances, of there still being some kind of rule of law governing the CIA, and the CIA is still held accountable, etc., which is not true at all. The way they get away without being held accountable is to have politicians produce these kind of reports that essentially whitewash what really happened and expose a little bit of what went on. And for me, that's what it's all about.

Juliana: Yeah. Well I also kind of have a theory. It may sound like too much of a conspiracy theory but I was looking at the famous 'who benefits' kind of question. Who's really benefiting from this? The people, obviously not. The CIA, nothing's going to happen. And then I started looking into this senator, Dianne Feinstein.

First of all, if you look at her CV just on Wikipedia, you see that some of her jobs - for example chair woman of the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the person who preceded her was Jay Rockefeller. And now she's chairman of the International Narcotics Control Committee, blah, blah, blah, preceded by Joe Biden. So already there you have iffy names, evil people. You know it's not an honest job.

Second, she should be retired;she's like 80-something! Then you start looking at her career or things she's said. She voted for the extension of the Patriot Act. Apparently she was involved as well as her husband in some financial scam giving her husband information. He was a corporate guy, one of her three husbands. She was the one who pushed for the weapons ban. When was that? 2013 I think?

Joe: Which weapons ban?

Juliana: The last campaign prohibiting citizens from having...

Joe: Oh yeah, okay.

Juliana: And then she defended the NSA a lot and when the NSA scandal came about and she was like "Well Snowden is a CIA agent", which is not too impossible in my opinion. There was also some revelation as to how the NSA was sending all their files to Israel. So here you have a pro-Zionist who has overtly said "CIA evil. I hate you", actually she said they were violating the Fourth Amendment because the CIA was spying on the NSA. This is a woman who's defending spying on everyone. Then she spoke against freedom of speech and this kind of pissed me off because we're an alternative news website and she was the one saying that, basically, to summarize the law that she wanted to pass, the definition of a journalist is that they have to be working for one of the main mainstream agencies and here's the list and if they're not in this approved list, then they can be called bloggers.

Niall: That's how it works in France.

Juliana: Yeah.

Niall: Yeah.

Juliana: But journalists or alternative journalists complained because, obviously, where's freedom of speech in America then, you know? So there was that. Then she spilled the beans about how the Mossad leader was visiting US officials and apparently that's kind of a secret. The Mossad chief is not advertising his trips everywhere. There's a lot more if you look her up. When you see those little things you're like, is this even legitimate? Some people are even doubting the source of the reports. Obviously what the report says is probably true but really watered down. Another journalist backing this idea was saying that it's kind of strange that in the report there's no mention of the White House or the FBI being involved. It's almost as if they were trying to target the CIA only. And then there's mention of how several countries collaborated or helped the US, 25 of which were European but no names given and stuff.

Joe: It's well known.

Niall: They were named.

Joe: It's well known which countries.

Niall: All western European countries except Norway and France were involved. They were named.

Joe: As being...

Niall: As either having a black site, which was really just Poland and Romania, or...

Joe: Participating.

Niall: Allowing flights in for people being "rendered".

Joe: Or apprehended.

Niall: Tortured mid-air.

Joe: Apprehending people and then passing them over to the CIA which is what happened with quite a few people. The local police would go and get them and then hand them over. But Dianne Feinstein has been there quite a long time and she's pretty well known. She's not a serious person like most of the senators and congress people. They're not serious people. They're bullshitters really. Back a few years ago when the short-lived CIA chief John Brennan was having his approval hearing, she engaged in this very sycophantic kind of questioning of him, specifically about drone strikes and the President's ability to authorize the execution of American citizens. And she asked him "questions" which basically contained the answers to the questions, so it was real soft-walling questions to John Brennan about the drone strike that killed Anwar al-Awlaki. So she was essentially making it easy or facilitating the incoming CIA director to sanction and agree with her own opinion, which was that drone strikes were cool and you're allowed to kill American citizens if they're terrorists. And she named off all the supposed links between Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed by a drone strike, and an American citizen in Yemen, the links between him and various other terrorists like the underwear bomber and various other supposed terrorist attacks that were all staged by the FBI.
So it was a complete farce really. And she engaged in this farce that was, like I said, rubber stamping, or giving the green light to the murder of American citizens by the President, by drones. So to have her come out and pretend that she is kind of overseeing or playing a part in this "holding to account" of the CIA over torture of terrorists and also people who are innocent, let's say, which she admits, it's just farcical.

Juliana: Yeah, it's not a pang of conscience that's suddenly making her...

Niall: No, no, there's no conscience involved in this at all. Joe said they're not serious people. They are in the respect that they're career politicians, so everything is calculated. They go over the insertion of phrases or the removal of this sentence of that paragraph based on a background trade for "my constituency" or "I'll rub your back on this, you help me out later on in this other issue". Conscience doesn't play a part. Nevertheless, for whatever reasons, this is as good a full disclosure as you'll get in the United States. We can talk afterwards about why they're doing it, but we should point out clearly here that this is probably the most dynamite thing the US has admitted to in 40-odd years. As Feinstein said in her conclusion, this presents it in black and white to Americans, that the use of brutal interrogation techniques is in violation of US law. This hasn't actually been stated yet in the last 15 years. "It's in violation of US laws, our treaty obligations, international law and our values", i.e. we, your leaders, officially, on paper, are telling you we consider it to be wrong. And this is the official line.

So something's going on for sure because they've spent the last 15 years to make sure they've got 300 million Americans to the point where they're morally ambiguous about how they feel about it, through 24 and all this background programming. "Oh well, what if it's your kid that's kidnapped and you need to get the ticking time bomb data that would just change everything?" They've already proven that they don't actually get any useful information. This was also stated in this report. "We don't get anything from it." Nevertheless they did go on the record as saying not only was it useless to us, it's not that we feel this through our own conscience, but we recognize that this is morally wrong.

Juliana: Yeah, but I'm going from the premise that they'll reveal the truth only when it suits one purpose to them.

Niall: Right, okay.

Juliana: And the conspiracy part, I don't know. Joe you wrote a book about it so you may think it's stupid, but was the Israeli lobby in the US sending a little message there, saying "We have stuff on you", or am I just inventing a theory? Because of the people who are involved, that's the first thing I thought about. Like a little bit of blackmail.

Niall: They are all in the pay for the Israel lobby at her level. You don't get to be the chair person of a senate committee without having been approved in some respect. It's just like you don't get to be a democratic party candidate unless you've first been to Israel and been approved. Basically you've got to go over and visit. So that's a given for all of them.

Joe: Yeah, the Israeli lobby is everywhere and has their nose in everything, so I don't know. There's blackmail going on all the time. So that's a given. I don't know if this has anything to do with it. When I say that they're not serious people, what I mean is when someone stands up to speak and is assuming to themselves the idea that they have some authority, or that what they're saying has some weight, that's a serious person; if they can be taken that way, seriously. Someone who stands up and is totally discredited, has no real authority and has no validity because of who they are. That's not a serious person. Someone who stands up and says "I'm going to tell you what's happening or what's going on" is. If Ronald McDonald got up and said that, you would say that's not a serious person, he's not a serious person. Well for me, Dianne Feinstein and almost every other senator and congress person is not a serious person because when they stand up they lie all the time; they're fundamentally discredited and corrupt individuals. So when they stand up to speak with authority they have no credibility and it's not serious. I don't take anything they say seriously.

And just on the point that it's kind of like stating officially that this is morally wrong, that's kind of like a torturer or someone who's into mutilating other humans beings saying "We've kind of come to a decision. We've done a lot of soul searching and we've come to a decision that amongst all the things that we do to human bodies when we're torturing them, we think that gouging the eyes out is morally wrong. Cutting off fingers and noses and genitals and stuff like that, that's okay, but gouging the eyes out, we shouldn't do that." That's what this equates to effectively. To send that message to the American people, for that to be needed to be sent to the American people supposedly, "Hey torturing people is bad", well it's game over. It's beyond a farce at this point that someone has to stand up and say "You know torture's wrong". And she stands up and says "We have suddenly found out...

Niall: After much consideration - five years.

Joe: ..."that torture doesn't extract any useful information." No shit lady! That's been known for hundreds if not thousands of years. You are full of it, completely and utterly full of it. Every word she said was just complete and utter bullshit. There's truth in there. Sure she's saying that "we torture people". Well you know what? Everybody knew that. In the weeks after September 11th George Bush said - when they were discussing their plan for their imperial adventures around the world and how they were going to get information and justify the invasion of other countries and stuff - the White House lawyers came in and said "Well we have some problems here about the whole torture aspect, about extracting information", Bush on the orders of Dick Cheney, probably, said "I don't care what the international lawyers say. We're going to kick some ass", right after 9/11. What he meant by we're going to kick some ass was, "we're going to torture some folks. Some folks got tortured."

So this was 2001. This has been ongoing and has been a conscious policy and they've flouted and manipulated and twisted laws and reinvented law to justify torture from 2001 onwards. And Dianne Feinstein comes along in 2014 and says "You know we've figured some things out." Give me a break! Get the hell out of here. That's ridiculous!

Niall: She claims that the Bush White House didn't know about it.

Juliana: Oh!

Niall: Or at least the extent of it, until 2006.

Joe: Well that's maybe true. They turned a blind eye to it because the White House and the US government really has nothing to do with the running of the country, especially in terms of foreign policy but also in domestic policy, and particularly in foreign policy. The White House has nothing to do with foreign policy. It does not formulate it; it does not run it; it does not know what's going on. That is all in the domain of the CIA and the intelligence agencies. It has been for decades. There is a secret government and the first protocol for the secret government is the intelligence agencies who are a law unto themselves and have been for a long time. So this whole thing is a complete and utter charade.

And how you can talk to people, how you expect to talk to the American people about torture and the context in which it happened, when those people have absolutely no objective reference point from which to understand that context. They're in moo-loo land. They're in pink fluffy bunny rabbits and unicorn land as far as what has actually happened, in the context in which this happened. You talk to anybody, even Feinstein muddied the waters a little bit, and the rest, and everybody who's commented on it, in particular in the media, which is where Americans get the real information, every segment on this torture debate has been about: "Well it was in the context of 9/11. We were attacked on 9/11. We were scared and we wanted to defend the country against further attacks. We wanted to protect the American people and we went a bit far with this whole torture thing." And that's all a fantasy, a complete and utter fantasy. But that is the context in which people are trying to understand this. It should be a cartoon. They're all in cartoon character land, where it's all just completely made up and you just give up and walk away. There's no point in trying to talk to those people.

Niall: Yeah.

Joe: It's fantasy.

Niall: I knew something was up when every media outlet - CNN, NBC, ABC - their lead-in to it was, "The world is braced for the torture report that's coming out today. It's not especially pretty", as if: shock! this is going to be big news. The whole world's going "Ah give us a break. We know about it." I'm sure most Americans also at least have some information about it, not to contradict what you just said. They're not as completely divorced from reality as most of their leaders.

Joe: The point here is that torture was used and sanctioned as a way to extract bogus evidence from innocent people that would bolster or justify the war on terror narrative, that there are terrorists out there, planning attacks against America when there are no terrorists out there planning any viable attacks against America. How do you justify it to the American people? In days gone by, in the old days of empire, this is before the information age, the British empire could rampage around the world and torture and kill and maim and enslave millions of people and people back home didn't know about it because all they got was the daily broadsheet written by a government journalist. That's what they knew about it, which was nothing.

Because of the information age, when there's the possibility for a free flow of information, or the free exchange of information, not that it's the truth, but with the internet, etc. and the mass media and telecommunications, it was not possible for the new American empire to carry on that tradition of plundering and pillaging around the world. They couldn't do it in secret like they could in the past, because of the information age. So what they needed was a narrative to justify that kind of a global conquest and they needed that narrative to justify that to the American people. So they came up with the global terrorism threat. But they realized very quickly that they needed some evidence for that fake narrative of a global terror threat. So they figured "Well let's go out and find some folks, torture them because we know very well that when you torture people, you'll get from the person that you torture, what you want them to say."

So you go, you pick some guy off the street in some country, "render" him, kidnap him and put him into a torture facility and start torturing him and start off and say "Okay, are you planning some kind of a terrorist attack?" "No." Okay, so you torture him some more and then you ask him again. "Are you planning some kind of terrorist attack against America?" "Yeah, whatever, if you'll stop torturing me, yes I am." "We've got some evidence here folks! Let's bring this back, put it on Fox News and we feed it around to the American people and the American military and American generals, etc. and the politicians all then support further war on terror which is just an excuse for military corporate conquest of the world.

That's what's going on and they know very well that that's how you get bogus information; you go and torture it out of someone. When you want to create a fake reality to justify your imperial aggression, you torture people and get them to confirm that that's what's actually happening. And they knew they were doing that and that was a deliberate policy.

Niall: I think there was another purpose, maybe not planned initially, but they found great use for it. There are at least two occasions I can think of where Guantanamo detainees ended up leading, in one case to an Al Qaeda in Yemen terrorist unit and in the other case a rebel group in Libya. He's now in Syria. So there's an element of "We're going to torture you to death if we have to or you're going to work for us."

Juliana: Yeah.

Niall: Kind of a recruiting ground of sorts because that's just two that come to mind, but there were others as well that turned up.

Joe: If you want some hard evidence that the war on terror, what I just said, is true, look at all of the FBI terrorist thing. So this is at home. The CIA operates abroad and is involved with foreign Islamic terrorism against the US. The FBI takes control of domestic terrorism, Islamic terrorism, Muslim terrorism against the US. So they play their part and home in bolstering this bogus bullshit narrative of the war on terror. Pretty much anybody who has read a little bit about it, and it's also all over the mainstream media at this point, that the FBI has over the past 10 years engaged in hundreds of terror sting plots; where they come up with a terror plot, they find the low IQ, poor, marginalized individuals who are extremely impressionable, they go find them and convince them that they want to be involved in this plot by offering them lots of money and masking what they're really doing. The FBI, through one of their informants, would go and pose as an Al Qaeda operative, offer these guys a bunch of money and guns and say whatever they need to say to get them to agree to be part of an Al Qaeda terrorist organization, and then they duly arrest the people, take them to court and announce it all around the US as Muslim terror plot exposed by the FBI. "We're keeping the country safe."

Now anybody who reads that can't but conclude that that is done deliberately. The FBI knows that they are deliberately entrapping people who pose no threat whatsoever, have no intention of being Muslim terrorists and they manufacture them and then trumpet it in the media to justify and bolster the bogus war on terror. So if the FBI is doing that at home you can bet your ass that the CIA are doing exactly the same thing abroad. And what the CIA does abroad, is that it tortures people instead of at home where they get these susceptible people and manipulate them into signing an Al Qaeda oath. What the CIA does abroad is it just picks people off the street, tortures them into admitting to being part of a terror plot against the US. It's exactly the same thing.

So the fact that we have this evidence from the FBI is for me a slam-dunk that that's exactly what this is all about. The CIA just uses different tactics because the CIA has a long history of torturing people.

Juliana: But here's the thing. I have a question here because apparently one of the things that the report says, it talks about Mohammed - how do you pronounce it in English? Atta.

Joe: Atta.

Juliana: Atta. And basically kind of proving Niall's point earlier on is the official admission that the excuse to invade Iraq was false. He hadn't gone to Prague in April, I think it was 2001; there was no real proof linking him to the attacks and stuff. So there's that thing where they're kind of admitting, that it was an iffy excuse to go to Iraq. And wasn't it pretty much at the same time that Israel started bombing Syria? The same time as this report was released?

Niall: No, Israel's bombed Syria about four or five times in the last three years.

Juliana: Yeah but most recently.

Joe: About a week ago.

Juliana: About a week ago. And this report came about a week ago. I don't know. Maybe it's like Bush would say, "Does not entertain" - what is it? "ridiculous conspiracy theories."

Niall: Ridiculous conspiracy theories.

Juliana: But kind of like you talked about in 9/11 The Ultimate Truth, those little games that they keep playing amongst themselves. "I'll reveal this about you so you better shut up about what we're doing".

Niall: I'll tell you what Chu, I'll meet you halfway. I won't go the whole way and say this is Zionist versus whatever or intra-power play. It probably is a power play going on here, but who and for what and for what greater purpose. We can speculate and tease it out but what comes to mind is that the NSA has had it in the neck for the last two years. Now the CIA's getting it. Maybe there's a bit of something going on there between two factions. In a similar context, the only thing that changed after 9/11 was that they went public with it. They were at pains to let people know via cultural programming, like this 24 TV show, and via plenty of hints in the media and the release of those Abu Ghraib photos that yes, we're doing this kind of thing. What do you think about it?

But the thing is, in the 1980s the US instructors were teaching hundreds of soldiers from Latin American countries how to torture their own people. Torture is engrained, is part of the US national security state and has been since at least WWII. There's nothing new to them. What's new is, if you like, the overtness of it. "Oh 9/11's happened, now the gloves come off", as Cheney said. I think we'll just have to wait and see. Fox News is harping on about this is a democrat conspiracy. I think they could be onto something, that this is factional in that sense because this wouldn't, at least to the American audience, directly implicate the current Obama government. It's all about the past. It could be that this is being done now with a view to 2016 elections, the message being "Don't vote republican. They torture people but we don't." Perhaps.

At the same time, if they really were going for the jugular, they would not have been announcing the findings in this report with pictures of the World Trade Centre towers collapsing in a loop going on in the background; the message being "Yes, we took your freedoms away, but it's because we have to safeguard them in case the terrorists come back again to take your freedoms. See?" So it's manipulative and it's really ugly and it doesn't happen in a vacuum. While the focus is on the CIA, as someone pointed out in a SOTT article, they're talking about inmates either in Afghanistan or Guantanamo dying of hypothermia under the care of CIA doctors. Meanwhile ten inmates die in a Texas prison from heat stroke: a corrections officer told the New York Times that they have been worried about the inmates boiling to death in their cells for years and nothing is done about it. That's not consciously done but torture is in the nature of people who run the US system. So yeah, that's about all I have to say about that.

Joe: I think we have to come back to the fact that it's meaningless. It's completely meaningless. The CIA doesn't suffer from this. There's no negative from this, nobody should look at this as if this is a serious blow to anybody. What this is, is a coup for the ruling elite in the US which is effectively that they're creating the appearance and the impression of checks and balance and we hold people to account and we're still all about freedom and democracy and basic human rights and all this kind of stuff. That's the propaganda. It's a propaganda tool and nothing else. For me it's completely meaningless, other than that, it's meaningless. It has no significance for any kind of a change or an actual holding to account in the US.

Juliana: No, it's kind of like when in the past few years they've been condemning the dictators in South America that Niall was just mentioning. That reminded me of that. Those guys are 90 years old! They're about to die. You made them live in exile in a luxurious mansion, even though they were CIA puppets for entire dictatorships!? And now you're going to condemn them? Give me a break!

Joe: Yeah. It's all utter nonsense.

Niall: Justice delayed is justice denied. And justice has been denied. Don't mistake this for justice. In the meantime, the largest protests in the US since the civil rights movement are currently underway. The media won't tell you this, but over 100,000 people got on the streets of New York yesterday, which is nice, good to see.

Joe: Why?

Niall: It's a sign of awakening conscience.

Joe: What are they doing?

Niall: They're protesting the police brutality, the police state, in effect, the system. They have their reasons for being there but of course, as one of the organizers said "In the end this is about far more than some recent deaths at the hands of police in the US." This is the trigger for it, but this would be the beginning of a mass movement, I think, against injustice in the US and as practiced abroad by the US government. It's not just New York but LA and Washington as well.

Juliana: Chicago, Boston.

Niall: Right. I think Eric Garner's family - Garner who died from a police choke hold.

Joe: That's what most people are protesting. They're using Garner as a major kind of rallying call, particularly in New York and on the east coast but also in Oakland. He seems to have kind of supplanted the whole Ferguson thing because maybe Garner's death was more clear-cut, in the sense that a policeman was using an illegal choke hold on him and he died as a result.

Jason: And specifically because he was non-threatening.

Joe: Yeah, exactly. And it's pretty clear-cut, the evidence...

Jason: From the video.

Joe: Yeah, there's a video, etc., whereas the death of Mike Brown in Ferguson was contested and there as no video evidence of that.

Niall: Another guy's been killed since. An unarmed black man in Phoenix, Arizona, was shot dead by a policeman who said that he was resisting arrest and that he was worried he about to reach for a gun and it was a bottle of pills for his condition; I'm not sure what exactly the pills were for. It's a very similar situation to Mike Brown, where the cop is called into the area for a totally unrelated call. Apparently someone called the police and said "There's an SUV in the neighbourhood. I think people inside it might be doing crime." That's the quote that's going around the media. I've looked into some of the details of it and what's his name - just for a reference - the guy who was killed is Rumain Brisbon, married father of three.

The police very quickly got their version of events out to the media and the family, and eyewitnesses as well, said the complete opposite. I think what they've done is rushed to get their story out again, but the Phoenix police said they issued their version of what happened in the interests of transparency, which it wasn't. It was to convict in the court of public law, essentially. He was definitely unarmed and he was shot after they had had a struggle. It's unclear how they got into a physical struggle, but the police officers justified it by saying they weren't sure if he was going to reach for a gun. The Phoenix police have defended him and there has already been a protest in Phoenix with people turning up at the police station demanding to know the name of this officer.

So as they just seem to pile one on top of the other, this is going to have a serious momentum behind it.

Jason: Well the government has kind of committed themselves to a very particular and pointless line, which is to protect individual low-level police officers who have clearly made mistakes while on their job for no real apparent reason at all. There's actually no reason they shouldn't throw these guys under the bus and say "Yeah, there's a couple of bad apples. We're doing something about it" and everybody would have been quiet. Everyone would have said "Okay, yeah we can understand that this Darren Wilson character, he was just a bad apple. He had anger issues. He decided to execute some black kid for jaywalking. Alright, we understand." But instead they make this gigantic show of how they're going to protect this guy who is not worth protecting in any real sense. Same thing with all of these cops that they've been defending, it's like they're trying to piss people off. They're trying to act like...

Joe: Why not just throw the average cop to the wolves type of thing.

Jason: It's not even the average cop because these cops are obviously making tactical errors in killing these people. There's no need for it.

Joe: Yeah. So why not just get rid of them? What's the whole deal about protecting them to the last man? It's not like there aren't enough of them. But I think it's because they have some ridiculous notion that it would undermine confidence in the police for in general, which is wrong.

Jason: The more they do it, the less confident...

Joe: Exactly.

Jason: ...people get.

Joe: Exactly. So they're stupid because it would do the opposite. It would generate or encourage confidence in the police force if they were to hold people accountable, that there is some checks and balances, etc. So yeah, it's just going nowhere. But maybe the problem here is that it's kind of pathology run amuck and there's no...

Juliana: Yeah, it's just the psychopathic "we won't admit to having one bad apple, to having made one mistake" and that's making people more and more pissed off. I think it's getting out of control actually. If you looked at the signs that people were using during the demonstrations, what caught my attention was that instead of so many "stop killing black people" - references to black people - which is what the media have been making a lot about; it was police brutality messed up - killing messed up - cops leave us alone, cops don't shoot. There was a lot more of that, apart from the fact that the majority of the demonstrators were white. Maybe it's wishful thinking on my part, but it's almost like people are trying to make a statement. "No, we understand. This is not just a question of racism."

Joe: That there's a bigger problem.

Niall: Last week we suggested that the rioting and looting in the second wave of Ferguson protests late November were probably started by the police themselves in order to justify a crack down and be able to present all protests as rioters and violent. Well, the Berkeley protests which last week descended into chaos as the media is saying, was reported by the Guardian of London so it's pretty much exposed.

Jason: The Guardian article is a little slanted though.

Niall: Well they're picking up off the AP. It's out in the media in the US: "An undercover California Highway Patrol officer who had infiltrated protests against police violence in Oakland pulled a gun on demonstrators after his and his partner's cover was blown. Earlier in the week they were observed smashing bank windows and looting the T-Mobile phone store. In a stunning admission the California Highway Patrol's Golden Gate division told the San Francisco Chronicle that officers had been dressing like and walking with protestors since the very first demonstration on 24th November, 'attempting to gather intelligence to stop highway shut downs.'" I think it's more likely that they were the ones getting protestors to block the highways which you probably notice is happening out there in California. They're trying to push people to civil disobedience and anything more extreme in order to justify the police "Well, people have got to get to work so we've got to clear the roads so start cracking heads."

Joe: They're trying to piss of people who aren't involved in the protests as well and turn them against the protestors.

Niall: Exactly. Just to give it context, in the UK we know that in 2011 emerged the cops there were using the identities of dead children and had for the last two decades, since the 1980s, infiltrated themselves to become anti-capitalist hippies and they would routinely lead and instigate the most extreme actions at green or environmental protests; we've got several reports about this on SOTT. This secret police unit had a list of nine thousand "domestic terrorists" and it was the cops' job to basically track them, to sic onto them, literally in some cases. Some of these undercover cops would go to the lengths of forming relationships with some of the organizers of the protest movement, get them pregnant and then rat them out and some of them would end up going to jail, others weren't killed but they found themselves in situations where they were accidentally killed or in some way discredited publicly.

So I have no doubt the same kind of full-on structure is at work here where the moment something erupts anywhere, they're in there first. Get the violence going. Come on, get those cocktails burned and chuck them in windows, whatever.

Joe: The problem here first of all is, what they're trying to do across the board, and this applies to torture which we just discussed as well, is that the system itself, the authorities are desperately trying to prevent the wide disclosure of just how fundamentally and utterly corrupt and rotten the system is. That's what the torture report was about, it's a limited hangout. That's what these agents provocateurs protests are about. They're trying to stop general, widespread understanding, catching on around the country of an awareness that the system is fundamentally corrupt. And it's sad. The fact that they do these things points to that reality. It's the hardest evidence we have for that being a reality, apart from the other little bits and pieces of evidence that point to it. But in a general sense, the fact that they desperately try to take these actions to censor and to disrupt what are fundamentally valid or genuine grievances that the people have.

Seriously? You're living in a country where people are out in the streets protesting about police brutality, that many people are seeing and that is all over YouTube and there's no question that it's happening and people are out in the streets peacefully protesting and want to peacefully protest about it and say "this is wrong", and the system will have none of it. It will...

Niall: It will send in guys...

Joe: ...go to great lengths to prevent that message, especially when it's transmitted by that kind of people power to prevent it from reaching a wider audience and prevent the media from being forced to report on it somehow, partly objectively. It's bizarre. I mean, what's the problem? The system has to be fundamentally messed up when it won't allow ordinary people to simply stand up for one of the ten commandments, for example. They're kind of marching for one of the ten commandments; a fundamental right and wrong situation that's very blatant. People will let so much other stuff go but when it gets down to it they'll say "Listen, we don't want to be whiners here..."

Niall: But would you stop killing us?

Joe: "...we'd prefer if the cops wouldn't shoot us out of hand when we're not doing anything. Can we have a little march maybe, just to express our feeling on that?" "No!! We're going to turn you into terrorists." As soon as torture appears in the news, Dick Cheney's right in there. He's like, "Mmmm, I like me a bit of torture". (laughter) "I've got something to say on that." The headline is: "Dick Cheney insists that rectal feeding was for medical reasons, not torture, in defence of the CIA." So he robustly defended the CIA interrogation methods as republicans, and the intelligence community attacked the senate report.

Of course what Dick Cheney didn't say there...

Jason: He has a rectal feeding fetish?

Joe: Exactly. He enjoys a bit of rectal feeding himself and he can't understand how this can be described as torture when he...

Jason: Likes to wear a diaper and...

Joe: When he has a nurse come in and do it for him every day and there's nothing wrong. He can eat through his mouth no problem. He just likes to get a bit of rectal feeding now and again. (liquid glugging sounds then laughter).

Jason: Ah jeez! Did you clean your plate Dick? There's children starving in Africa man! What a waste.

Joe: Throw that Dick Cheney in for god sakes. I think they got the rectal feeding wrong there. He had to have a bit of an emergency.

Niall: Did you hear John McCain saying his bit about torture?

Juliana: Yeah.

Jason: What was he saying?

Niall: I tried to get it for the show but I couldn't get my program to work.

Joe: He should be disqualified from comment on it because of a conflict of interest. I have insides sources that tell me that when he was in that hole in Vietnam he was loving it. So he's fundamentally biased in the whole torture thing. He was tortured and he had rats and stuff thrown into his pit in Vietnam and he befriended many of them.

Jason: Is he representing as if tortures cool and okay?

Joe: Yeah.

Jason: Like "I got tortured. It wasn't so bad. I'm amazed."

Niall: He said that the CIA's torture program was "An act of conscience."

Juliana: Huh?!?!

Jason: Wow! The thing is, I'm suspicious of this whole prisoner of war thing; that he was either a CIA plant from the beginning type of thing. I call into question that he really was there, really did get captured.

Joe: It's actually worse, because that's the only thing that excuses his mental retardation and schizophrenic...

Niall: I think we have to give it to him.

Joe: Well people give him an out and even Putin said "Yeah, he saw some pretty bad things there in Vietnam when he was held in a cage in a hole in the ground for three years. That would drive anybody mad." They kind of excuse him. It's worse if it's false because there's no excuse for his...

Jason: Exactly. I'm going to support my view that...

Joe: It's probably true, yeah.

Jason: He's trying to be pimped as an American hero and I'm not really sure about that. But the rectal feeding thing, it seems like such a rather disgusting and inefficient way to get it done because we hear about all these Guantanamo Bay people who are being forced with feeding tubes. Why couldn't they do it that way? Why did they choose the other end when they had a choice between the two? You have to wonder about the person who chooses the opposite end.

Juliana: Sadistic pleasure.

Joe: You have to wonder about the person who puts his hand up to be the hands-on guy in the torture room. "Yeah, I'll go for that Jack!"

Niall: I think there's a strong sadistic element to it because...

Joe: Well Jesus Christ!

Niall: Even in some of details Feinstein did share, it was very clear. They were trying to make the association that some of the severe rectal injuries that these guys got was as a result of this procedure gone wrong, or whatever.

Jason: Right.

Niall: No. What's more likely here is that they were sodomizing the hell out of people with anything they could find and of course they liked it, and then this rectal feeding thing was sort of anchored over it as a rationale for it. But what these sickos don't understand is that most people when they hear that are repulsed and their rationale for it is not going to...

Jason: Yeah, but I'm going to that it's probably more along the lines of what you basically just said, that it is a narrative to cover up the fact that they were probably a bunch of very, very disturbed people there basically using sodomy as a form of torture and then they wrote that narrative just to cover it up, exactly what you said is what I think is true.

Juliana: It's just sickening that they would go and analyze it as "That was a case of it going wrong." Explain a case where that would be going right.

Jason: Right.

Juliana: I mean, what the hell?!?

Jason: How does rectal feeding ever go right? But the thing that I thought was kind of interesting about the torture report on that particular topic, was the fact that - and I think Joe said something about this earlier - it's absolutely ridiculous to countenance things like waterboarding and all these different things that they're doing, but then not do the other stuff. I think that this whole thing about them having this list of things that they were allowed to do is all complete and total bullshit. And then no, they were tearing off fingernails and doing all kinds of stuff and cutting off fingers, killing people left and right. I don't believe that there was on a hundred and seventeen or a hundred and whatever people in there. I'm sure it was a larger number and they just died and they don't want to admit to it.

Niall: Yeah. You just reminded me, another layer to the farce is that in 2004 the Abu Ghraib photos came out. Do you remember those photos?

Juliana: Yeah.

Niall: The prisoners were smeared in their own faeces. And then the interrogators/soldiers/guards/ whatever, were laughing and joking around. And some of them had cuts and cigarette burns on them. That was 2004, so all this other stuff sounds relatively cleaner.

Jason: It's been washed, but I'm sure that every horrible thing that you can possibly think of ever taking place; flaying, racking, anything like that, emasculation, probably did it all; probably so absolutely horrific that they would never be able to admit it. Because the way that was presented, if the things that she was saying actually happened, considering the fact that most of them were only slightly off-track - okay, so they kept them standing for 72 hours instead of so-and-so amount of hours; an extra 23 hours. Oh, how horrific, you know. Because all of this was kind of like "Oh, it was so horrific. It was okay to water board them but they did it twice a day instead of once a day so 'quelle horror!'" BS type of stuff. It's all slightly out of bounds. Why did they not keep any records of this stuff and what was going on and why didn't they have any videotapes? Because it's such a small deviation from what they're saying was considered to be okay and legitimate in extreme circumstances. It's complete and total BS. They would destroy all of the tapes, keep no records or any of that if all they were doing was "I water boarded him a couple more times, but it was an emergency and we really needed this information" which is already BS, but okay just take that as a given. It's not logical for them to be so unbelievably secretive about it, destroy all the tapes, destroy all the evidence. For just a couple of infractions?

Juliana: It's kind of like the serial killer who will confess to one crime. It reminds me of a book I read recently about Ted Bundy. He would confess to one crime and give a reason so that the psychologist or the cop interviewing him would kind of feel sorry for him or say "Well that may explain something", and he was like "Yeah, because it's society's fault for this and that. And I was jealous and this girl this this or whatever. And yes, I killed her. I confess." But there were dozens of other crimes that he didn't admit to.

Jason: Right. It's interesting that you say that because if you look at other serial killers like Harve the Hammer, Kerrigan and John Shawcross, or whatever his name was, what they would do, is they would admit to their crimes in such a way that they would not admit all the details of them. They would make it sound like something else happened that didn't, right? Say for instance, I think it was the Hammer took some girl out and he represented it as that he was changing a tire and she tried to claim that he had stolen money from her purse, that she had been there willingly for sex or whatever. And so in a fit of rage he had hit her with the hammer and knocked her out, right? And then he drove off. But the real truth of the matter is that he had repeatedly raped her, and then he had beaten her all about the head with this tire iron very viciously, almost collapsing her skull, and that he had dumped her into this ditch somewhere but that she hadn't quite died and she came to at a certain point, crawled out of the ditch and ended up crawling a mile to a farm where a farmer found her.

So he had misrepresented the type and nature and the viciousness of his attack, he had made it sound like "I just hit her once", it had been multiple times, etc. and so forth. And throughout all of the serial killers, you have that they misrepresent the severity because they think that they'll just give you enough so that "Okay, you know that I killed her. You know she was hit over the head so I'm only going to tell you just enough to indicate that." And it's the same thing with this torture report, they're just giving you what you already know. But at the same point, we think that we know, we have the real reason to suspect that it was far worse, leaps and bounds worse.

Niall: Yeah, we do. Jeremy Scahill's Dirty Wars book and movie by the same name is based on mainstream reports that have come out between 2002 and this report. There's a horrible description of the death squads that were run by US intelligence in Iraq. Joe do you remember the name of the guy who was in charge of that?

Joe: His surname was Steel. Robert Steel.

Niall: Robert Steel. I remember the descriptions of the building he ran. I think it was from people in there either working under him or a journalist had been to see him, to interview him in his office. And he said the hallway walking down...

Joe: No, James Steel.

Niall: James Steel. So this is the US torture chief essentially in Iraq. The journalist describes the hallway as being spattered in blood, some fresh, some cake dried, as he goes into the office to meet this American government employee, essentially, who's the local torture-in-chief. This is Iraq in the mid-2000s.

Joe: He wasn't just the torturer-in-chief, he was running the death squads that were blamed at the time on Al Qaeda and all that kind of stuff in Iraq and that was supposedly the cause of the civil war in Iraq.

Niall: Right. These people were decapitating people en masse, dumping them by the roadside. They were blowing up people.

Joe: Planting bombs all over the place, basically all of the chaos that has reigned in Iraq and reigned in Iraq after the US invasion, or during the US invasion and occupation. They had a guy there who basically was running the same kind of death squad operation that he had run, and others had run in South American countries in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s. They called it the El Salvador option, which is basically when you have a resistance movement against US interests in the country or US military presence in the country, you set up death squads essentially, that are paramilitary forces and you go out and start killing people indiscriminately and create the appearance of a civil war or actually engender a type of civil war. You force it on the country. That's standard operating procedure for how you maintain an occupation until you can wear the country and the population out through that kind of a bloody war, and then impose your policies and structure the country in the way that you want it to be structured.

Niall: Speaking of wars without end, there's good news: in two weeks time NATO's withdrawing from Afghanistan, maybe, because they're upping the attacks there. "A string of deadly attacks in Afghanistan as NATO deadline looms." The Afghan Taliban which was supposedly defeated in 2001 killed a Supreme Court official in Afghanistan. So we're going to basically see some kind of manoeuver where maybe there's a drawdown of US troops but they'll be in the process of redeployment, but they'll end up staying there.

Joe: Getting back to the US, we don't like harping on about how evil the US is because obviously other places are just as bad. Maybe not just as bad, but kind of following in hot pursuit. But there was a report today about an execution of a US criminal in Oklahoma about eight months ago, in April this year that was one of those botched executions. The medic tasked with executing the guy, attempted to insert an intravenous line in the groin of the prisoner, Clayton Lockett, when he pierced an artery by accident and was sprayed with blood. So the prisoner was then writhing around, clenching his teeth, groaning in agony and he even tried to lift his head off the pillow just minutes before he was pronounced unconscious by doctors, before he died of a heart attack 43 minutes later.

So this was meant to be a lethal injection and it ended up as a bloody mess. That image - and I'm assuming the guy was guilty. He was a rapist and a murderer, but even that just makes it worse. You have this kind of element within society, that psychopathic element in society, and you have then the state basically trying to execute this guy and ending up spraying the executioner with the guy's blood and the prisoner writhing around in agony to the point where he dies of a heart attack rather than the injection. For me that's just a perfect picture of the state of the system in the US and in other places around the world. The state of the world effectively.

Jason: Yeah I can agree. One thing I would probably only take issue with is the statement of 'he was a rapist and a murderer therefore botched execution is somehow justified'.

Joe: No, I'm not saying it's justified. I'm not trying to excuse him.

Jason: Yeah, okay, in that situation, if you want to agree with capital punishment, you've got to execute him, okay, whatever. But I find it is very kind of telling of the kind of incompetent psychopathic nature of the system that goes around doing these botched executions and calling it justice in some way. I think that's positively horrific and there is something sort of ironic about the guy who is basically ostensibly killing someone, no matter how he ends up justifying it, for whatever reasons he ends up justifying it, in an attempt to have a bloodless execution gets blood all over him. There's a kind of irony there that is kind of interesting.

Joe: You can't sanitize that kind of stuff.

Jason: Yeah.

Joe: And you can't sanitize the effectively rotten state of the system.

Jason: But you can't say it's the psychopathic...

Joe: What they're trying to do.

Jason: Yeah, the psychopathic nature of committing a crime to punish a crime. Murder is murder. How are you going to say that killing is wrong and then do it yourself? You're a moral hypocrite.

Joe: Yeah.

Juliana: Speaking of other governments who are following the steps of the US, on the Spanish front; the Spanish government has approved a law where filming the police is illegal now and the fine goes up to €600,000 and they claim that the reason is because filming police is an offence against public safety. Yeah!

Jason: At this point I'm going to wonder when one of these guys come out and says "Yeah, listen, you can't do this thing that's obviously good because unicorns run fast." Yeah because it's all non-sequiturs anyway. That's the trick of the psychopath. And it goes back to the psychological rule that they say "bullshit baffles brains". People just can't handle bullshit. If someone keeps spewing totally non-sequitorial kind of bullshit at you, eventually you get this mental transmarginal inhibition and you just say, "Alright I give up. I'm not going to argue anymore. Arguing with you is pointless." And that's kind of like what they do. They come up with 'any reason will do'. Any reason will do for them. They don't want you to film them, so any reason will do. Public safety my ass!

Joe: Ukraine is...

Jason: Going bankrupt?

Joe: Yeah. Still going bankrupt. They've now passed $60 billion...

Jason: Of debt?

Joe: Of debt yeah. Effectively what the European Union wants Russia to do is to be allowed, the Ukraine and the EU, because their bailing out the Ukraine would be effectively bailing out the EU because the EU is liable for Ukraine's economic health. Because they organized a coup earlier this year primarily with the help of the US state department to bring Ukraine into the European orbit, the European "family", and keep it away from Russia. And now that it's all gone pear-shaped they actually have the cajones to turn around and demand that Russia essentially bail it out by not engaging in economic policies that would exacerbate Ukraine's debt essentially.

So it's kind of funny. They're actually threatening Russia. They have the cajones to turn around and threaten Russia. "Don't you even think about walking away from Ukraine after we kicked you out."

Jason: But, there's another angle that could be true on that and that is that I don't imagine that Russia really wants to, in any way, crash the Ukrainian economy.

Joe: No it doesn't.

Jason: It wants to get money from them.

Joe: Yeah.

Jason: It wants them to pay their bills.

Joe: Yeah.

Jason: What Russia wants is for the EU and America to make good on their promises to the Ukraine and give them whole lots of money so that they can buy Russian gas and so Russia gets it. Russia doesn't want to crash that economy.

Joe: No.

Jason: So the EU by saying "Don't crash the economy" when Russia says "We didn't intend to", they're going to say "See, they're listening to us. We've still got power."

Joe: Yeah.

Jason: It's all just total bullshit.

Joe: Meanwhile with this debt over $60 billion, the Ukrainian defence minister had said that they must double their defence spending to $3 billion to deal with the eastern Ukrainian rebels, the supposed war that's going on there. The whole thing is a comedy of farcical errors.

Niall: Well this gave Russia tremendous leverage in this position. I think they're going to force through an end to the conflict in eastern Ukraine. They're more or less there. They have another cease fire agreement. The Kiev junta is still shelling and carrying out actions but I think the situation will force at least the EU to come to terms with the situation in Ukraine and to end the conflict. But at the same time you have footage emerging this week of train loads of US APCs, Humvees, tanks, rolling through Latvia. Is it just for show or are they actually building up an armed force along Russia's border? I think they are. I think they think they are.

Joe: It's not looking good. Right now it's an amazing figure. There's supposedly 233,000 Ukrainian soldier serving in eastern Ukraine. And they say they have to increase that, they have to conscript more men into the army to increase that number to 250,000. Eastern Ukraine has maybe four million people there?

Niall: Six million.

Juliana: And the last thing I heard they're recruiting Ukrainian jails. "Okay, you want to come out of jail and help us shoot some people?"

Joe: It looks like they're certainly not backing off on the plans for a war essentially against eastern Ukrainian people. It could easily flare up. It seems we're in this period right now of them rearming and being trained. There's US 'advisors' effectively coming to train the Ukrainian army and I'm sure there's all sorts of weapons flowing into Ukraine. Okay, they can justify it as "We need to build up the Ukrainian army" in a general sense, just so it has a proper army, but in the context of what's been going on in eastern Ukraine it doesn't look very good.

Juliana: It's actually funny that Obama talked this week. I don't have it in English here. Did you hear his speech?

Joe: About what?

Juliana: He talked about the sanctions and how they had a miscalculation. They thought by sanctioning Russia, Putin was going to make up his mind about not helping eastern Ukraine and said yeah, increasing sanctions is probably not going to change Putin's mind so instead we're going to send $3 million Euros in military equipment to Ukraine, to people who are starving. But anyway, it was like a cowardly way of saying "our sanctions completely backfired."

Jason: Look, this is what's going to happen, right? You have a bunch of thugs, organized crime type individuals, just opportunistic psychopaths running the show over there. They're going to send all of that equipment and all of that money for the purposes of fighting some war, and these guys are going to take them to a giant sort of chop shop, sell off the tires, sell off all this other stuff to fund themselves, just for food. It's just bullshit posturing from their perspective, from what they're doing. It's completely retarded. The government doesn't have money to pay anyone anything and it doesn't have a sincere source of revenue anymore. Nobody's really dealing with them. Russia's certainly not buying any of their products anymore. They're not exporting. They can't buy their gas. They're going to freeze over the winter. And all of this sort of "We're going to have a war and this is going to be real and we're going to crate our Humvees and our APCs around", is nothing more than bullshit posturing because they don't have the money for it. And money drives war.

Joe: Yeah. And speaking of money and war: oil continues to freefall as a result of OPEC, which is the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, which is largely Middle Eastern countries who are oil producers, and it's down below $60 a barrel at this point, and these Middle Eastern countries are saying that they're happy to let it go to $40 a barrel. There's a lot of different theories out there as to what's actually happening. We've already in last week's show floated the idea that this was an attempt to effectively attack Iran, Venezuela and Russia; countries that are heavily dependent on their oil exports and the money they get from oil exports. But at the same time there's another idea that it's really Saudi and the gulf states sticking the knife in, or attacking economically, or from an oil perspective, attacking the US and its plans to become an oil exporter, because the US now imports oil, it uses more than it produces. So it has plans for this whole shale oil exploration to get into that market and become an oil exporter. So there's a theory that the gulf states are waging this kind of a war by allowing it to fall below the level that it would be profitable or possible for the US to engage in any significant shale oil exploration and production because it costs a lot more to produce shale oil than it does the way the Saudis get it out of the sand basically, out of wells or drills.

Jason: You know that kind of archetype of the person who through mistakes of their own, have lost their job or lost their pay and their money and they kind of delude themselves into thinking that they're going to start a home business and it's going to succeed and they're going to become really rich? But of course it doesn't succeed because it turns out that it's a little bit more difficult than you think. It's kind of what they're doing in a certain sense. They've basically completely shot themselves in both feet simultaneously. They're completely screwed; no one takes them seriously anymore. Putin has run roughshod over every single one of their threats. He's basically said "Uh, what you say doesn't matter. We don't care. We're going to continue to do what we want. We're going to make all the deals we want." And now they're here with pretentions that they're going to become a major gas and energy supplier to compete with Russia on that scale, which they're never going to compete with Russia on that scale because they simply don't have access to resources; they're basically going to frack the entire country into a gigantic earthquake-prone hole pretending that this is going to work. It's not going to work. Nobody's going to buy it. Nobody's going to care. And whatever dent they might make in the energy market for the short-term is never going to last because they simply don't have the natural resources because that's never been America's strong point. And they shouldn't even be going there and it's completely ridiculous and laughable that they're even trying this BS. And this whole forcing the oil down to $40 a barrel is very recent and everyone has a really, really big talk, but give this another couple of months and we'll see what really happens and see exactly how happy these OPEC people are with oil at $40 a barrel, when it used to be - how much did it used to be?

Joe: It was $120.

Jason: A hundred and twenty dollars a barrel. Yeah! I'm sure they're real happy about that and I'm sure their wallets are too. It's such BS posturing.

Joe: It is attractive to think of it in terms of a US gulf state plot, together with some assurances, to try and attack Russia and Iran and Venezuela, which are kind of the three arch-enemies these days, of the US, because it fits with their attempts so far; everything they can possibly do to attack Russia. And this would seem to be one way that they could make it more painful for the Russians and the Russian economy by dropping that price at which Russia can sell its oil.

But it's not so simple either because Russia still sells a lot of its oil in foreign markets in dollars, gets dollars for its oil, and there's a currency business where the ruble has been falling against the dollar which kind of offsets the economic impact because they're getting dollars and they're bringing those dollars back home and converting them to rubles, and they're getting far more rubles than they used to. So it's kind of complicated in that sense. Probably people don't think about it much but it's amazing if you look at the amount of oil consumption. The US produces a lot of oil and it has done. They've got all those rigs down in the Gulf and they're in Alaska and all this kind of stuff. The US produces something like ten million barrels a day but it consumes over 18, almost 19 million barrels of oil a day. And it's the number one consumer of oil. So it only produces 10 and needs almost 19. But that's a country of what? 300 million people or so?

Jason: Three hundred fifty, almost 400 million.

Joe: No, is it?

Jason: Yeah, last time I heard it was 350 million.

Joe: So China comes in second for consumption. China has four times the population and uses less than half the oil. So the US is this glutton for this energy basically. It's consuming massive amounts of this energy and it could scale back. It could effectively live off its own steam essentially. With the oil on its own land it could provide for all its resources.

Jason: Right.

Joe: If it wasn't such an energy hog. But the government doesn't ever consider scaling back in that way. They simply have to make sure that they own and control the major oil producing countries in the world to ensure that they're continually kept fed. I can imagine that there may have been some kind of assurances, some kind of a back door deal done where the US talked to these OPEC states in the Middle East and said "Listen, don't limit your output to try and push the price back up. Let the price continue to fall because that's going to hurt Russia and Iran and Venezuela." But the Saudis, etc. will say "Well listen, we're getting a lot less money here for our oil. A hundred twenty dollars a barrel is pretty good when it costs us probably $10 to extract it. But taking a major cut - what are you giving to us?" So maybe they'll say "Well, there's Boeing and Ratheon stuff. You like jet planes and stuff like that. We can give you some kind of a trade-off" where they basically make an economic deal to make it easy for them.

Jason: That's such a good idea.

Joe: Yeah, but they're desperate. Following that narrative, if they're desperate to try and screw Russia over, they will do anything and they'll set themselves up for a major fall in the future, just for a short-term 'sock it to Russia' or try and "get that Russian bear off our backs". They have nightmares about...

Jason: This is such a stupid idea. They are so stupid it is absolutely unbelievable. Okay, first of all America has doubled its consumption of what it produces. Yeah! It's really going to cut that by half - I really don't think so. And I don't think that they're going to end up like China which has, as far as I understand, a lot of bike wielding, rural peasant type individuals. I really don't see everyone in, let's say Los Angeles, deciding that they're going to start riding a bike to work; I don't really see that happening any time soon. Even if they managed to cut it by three-quarters, they'd still be screwed and they still wouldn't be able to do what they want to. They'd have to cut it by more than half in order to make it viable.

Joe: Yeah.

Jason: They'd have to cut it down to one-quarter of what it is to make it viable for them to do it, and that's just absolutely insane. They'd have to basically kill half the population or more of America just to get that down because there's too many people and they're so used to a lifestyle where they're all driving cars.

Joe: Big SUVs.

Jason: There's this car culture. These big SUVs in America. The military using gas-guzzling Humvees. Their Humvees are the biggest gas guzzlers on the face of the planet. So that's not going to happen, right? No matter how they slice it, no matter how they trim the fat, they are never going to get to the point where they are an oil producing state.

Joe: No.

Jason: Even if they're producing 10 million barrels because they're using almost 20 million barrels.

Joe: Well that's what they're trying to do. They're trying to find new ways of fracking for gas and their shale oil and all this kind of stuff, but it's extremely expensive to do it that way. It's almost like no matter what they do there's a negative.

Jason: Exactly.

Joe: They try and look for the positive, but their positive as far as they're concerned is "Screw our enemies over". And they're willing to take a hit because there's always a balancing factor where they'll have to take a hit for that advantage of that goal that they're trying to achieve by screwing over another country and the manipulations that they engage in by trying to screw over Russia. But they're willing to do it and ultimately they're going to push themselves too far, or overextend themselves in some way and it's going to...

Jason: They believe their own propaganda, that they are the most wealthy country on the face of the planet. No, they are not. They are the most living-in-debt, everybody-has-the-strings-to-their-purse country, on the face of the planet. They are not wealthy and they cannot take this hit. I don't think that OPEC can either, personally, but they might be willing to because they're like saying "Hey, let's get some jets." Do you think how idiotic the idea of "Hey, we have for the last 100 years been going into this area of the world, slapping everybody about, bombing them, telling them how to do stuff, and we have essentially made them and their religion and their cultural identity, some sort of disgusting, pariah religion on the entire world. We have set it up as the clash of civilizations. We have made them the evil moustache-twisting Muslim Islamo-fascists of the world. And now in order to screw over Russia, what we want to do is give them fighter jets?!?! In exchange for pushing down the price of oil?!?!" It is so retarded! It's just like "What are these guys going to do with the fighter jets?!" What? Seriously? Are they going to play golf with them!?! No! They're going to bomb the living shit out of you. "Let's give them a modern air force and military so that they can invade us now." It is so idiotic!

Joe: Yeah, but you just see it over and over again, that they're extremely desperate and they don't care. At this point they really don't care. We have a call on the line. It's Kent from West Virginia. Hi Kent. How you doing?

Kent: Pretty good. I've got a comment about leveraging the Saudis to reduce the price of oil. What's clear here in the states in the last six months or so, is these mysterious 28 pages that supposedly implicate the Saudis, that they have fingerprints on 9/11. And there's all these former congressmen, Congressman Graham out of Florida, saying "Let's have an investigation of what these 28 pages say" and there's hints that they've got the Saudis' fingerprints on 9/11. So I'm thinking that that may be used as the blackmail measure on the Saudis because...

Jason: That's common knowledge.

Joe: Yeah. It's possible.

Jason: Osama bin Laden was a Saudi prince. This is like "Oh, surprise! We have evidence the Saudis are involved." Actually it's already kind of out.

Joe: Yeah, that's how they've kept Saudi onside all these years since 9/11. It's partly to do with it but they're doing all sorts of dirty deals.

Kent: So that's one thing that just started connecting (coughing). In my opinion Israel did it but let the Saudis get their fingerprints on it, the junior partners and now they're blackmailing them. So that may be what's going on there.

Joe: Could be, yeah.

Kent: Alright. Well thanks. Great show.

Joe: Alright thanks Kent.

Juliana: Thank you. Actually, before he called I was thinking maybe they didn't even promise any planes, jets or whatever, they just have something or they're promising, "We'll keep you in power." But the truth is because the oil is bought with what do you call it? Not-under-the-table money, like official money, they have to keep it as low as possible because they're bankrupt. "Yeah, we'll give you dirty money from somewhere else or we'll keep you in power."

Joe: Yeah, well there's an implicit threat from the US with this ISIS business and their proxy mercenaries, etc., that it's understood by gulf states - they're all quite small - that these rulers could at any point lose their positions if the US wanted to. The US is the bully on the block type of thing. I assume there's an implicit or implied threat there that has been there for a long time, that nobody's permanent. "Your position here, you're just a trumped up kind of king in a flowing robe" type thing. "We can get another guy looks just like you."

Jason: Yeah. This is kind of like the regional governor/caliphate kind of idea of the Ottoman Empire, that all of these people who are in charge of these countries, they're really just vassal states and we can remove them as we like. That is definitely a legitimate theory. I completely subscribe to it. I agree with it. But I think the idea that they're blackmailing the Saudis "Hey, your fingerprints are on this", that's kind of like two bank robbers saying "Well if you don't do what I like, I'm going to tell them that you were in the bank vault." And the guy says "Yeah, well you're going to have to tell them how you knew." That there's a little bit of "You burn me, I burn you."

Joe: Yeah.

Jason: Because they might play that card slightly, but whether or not they're willing to go all the way - because right now a lot of things have twisted against America. If they have that card, if they play that card, it's kind of a Pyrrhic victory.

Joe: There's a lot of "'splaining" to do, to suddenly now out the Saudis as being responsible for 9/11.

Jason: Yeah. "And we knew about it all along", and then everyone's like "How did you know?" It's like "Because they were working with us." And you're just like "Oops! Shit!"

Joe: Can I take that back?

Jason: Can I take that back now? Maybe that is the case, though I highly doubt it. I do think that the Saudis are under control, but not necessarily as much as people may think. They are very...

Joe: They're not stupid and they know the nature of the beast having associated with it for so long and it's the same with Russia here. An empire can only engage in these scurrilous, underhanded, manipulative tactics for so long before everybody says "Oh we see how you work. Okay." And then they start developing their counter plan to it or at least predicting where you're going to go next and have something in place. So it's a very dangerous game. And that's why you get back to the idea of why empires always fall because you can only abuse the world for so much before the world kind of says "Okay, we've had enough of this."

Jason: But here's the thing on that: I saw a reported talk between all of the Arab leaders who got together, Muammar Gaddafi, the guys from Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia; they were all there in this giant big room and they were all giving their speeches and Gaddafi got up and he was like "You're all being retarded. We're all a bunch of women" basically. "We're all fighting amongst each other. We all hate each other and the real enemy is America. And we all know and we all fear, and what we fear from America is that they're going to kill us." And he said "They're probably going to kill me. They're probably going to kill the guy from Iran. They're probably going to kill the guy from Syria. And that's when you're going to know that it's time for us to get together and fight back against them." And look at what ended up happening. The killed Gaddafi. They're trying to get rid of the guy in Syria.

Joe: Assad.

Jason: And now obviously they're pretending to make deals with Iran, but who knows where that's going to go and who knows how realistic all that is. So if they played that card, that would give the Saudis a reason not to work with them anymore because I don't think that they have such an absolute control over the Arab world. It think that it has a lot more to do with internal politics and fighting and that it's a little bit more complicated than just "They have the button to the shock collar and it's going to work no matter how much they press it."

Joe: Just maybe a final note on Turkey. We kind of predicted this a couple of weeks ago when we were talking about the Turkish/Russian oil deal, where Russia decided to drop South Stream, which was going to go to Bulgaria, and put it through Turkey and do an oil deal with Erdogan in Turkey. We said a couple of weeks ago keep an eye out for an upswing or an uptake in unrest in Turkey, kind of, of the orange or colour revolution variety. And there's a report today that the Turkish police have raided a Gulen-linked critic of Erdogan. This guy Fethullah Gulen, is this US-based Islamic cleric who has this massive foundation. Back 20 years ago someone in the US state department lobbied for his getting a visa and being allowed to set himself up in the US. But he's from Turkey. And since then he's been an opponent, effectively, of any government that has been in power in Turkey. So it's kind of like this guy is a US-based phony opposition or puppet who's kept on the back burner, who can be used to stir things up in Turkey. They have this kind of set up for many countries.

So the story is the Turkish police made 23 arrests during raids on newspaper and TV stations with close ties to this US-based Islamic cleric. So that's kind of a score or hit for us in the sense that this is the way things work. When Turkey falls out of favour, Turkey's not playing ball, sidling and cozying up to Russia, the US doesn't like it and hey, suddenly you've got unrest and this Gulen guy puts his activists into operation. There's protests in the streets.

Juliana: That is so not creative.

Joe: It's tried and tested, that's the whole problem. It's worked for so long but like I said, when you keep doing the same thing over and over again, it depends how long it takes, but it's been going on for decades at this point and finally a lot of people have probably known before now but people eventually figure out your operating procedures here; how you do things. And they're then able to predict them and in this case what the Turkish government has done, is just go in and say "Yeah, we're not going to allow you to have protests. You in particular."

Jason: This is what Russia did. With Russia, several different legislations, kicking out NGOs, calling them to account, doing all this different stuff and Putin went and made his deal with Erdogan and then probably the first thing he said is "When this comes out, this is what they're going to do. This is what you need to do." It's been outed how they operate and they really are kind of a one-trick pony and they have been for a while.

Joe: Yeah. They don't have many more ideas because their policy has always been manipulation and domination and control thereby. When you've secured all of your goodies through that process, what are you going to change? If you change anything, if you don't keep doing the same thing in some variation of the same policy, you're going to lose. And that's the whole problem. The last thing these stewards of US empire want to do is give up anything. They've amassed this control and power and wealth and if they don't keep going it's going to slip away. And they're all out of ideas.

Jason: That's kind of the problem with psychopathy because all of this and being the first to do something and being willing to go to extraordinary lengths can get you a lot, can build you up a lot. But the only thing that can maintain it is humility.

Joe: Yeah.

Jason: Because once you have the power, you really can't flaunt it otherwise people are not going to want to live under you. America could have acquired all of that and said "Okay, let's change our tactics here and be a little more humble."

Joe: Yeah.

Jason: But instead they flaunt what they do.

Joe: Yeah.

Jason: They really flaunt it at this point! This Victoria Nuland character, and that tape being released, and allowing it, even her talking that way about it, was them flaunting.

Joe: Arrogance.

Jason: Their arrogant belief that they can do anything, go in there, "Yeah, we're going to shift around the UK and we're going to do this", let the cat right out of the bag and now they're not going to get away with it anymore because...

Joe: Everybody knows.

Jason: Everybody knows now. Good job!

Juliana: Even in places where they know they're really hated, as Niall predicted last week, the Chechnya bombing was probably western funded or whatever, like it usually is. And it came out this week that yeah, it was. And the head of Chechnya, he was funny. He was like, "I will not allow anyone under any mask to support the bandits. I don't care what ID he's got in his pocket or from what embassy he receives compensation. I took on the responsibility of protecting the security of the people and I will do it even if the whole west and all its minions turn upside down."

Joe: Yeah, the war in Chechnya was known to have been funded by the CIA.

Juliana: Yeah.

Joe: It said that one of the generals of the Chechen/Russian troops who were fighting against these Islamic terrorists said that "We were fighting against British intelligence in the mountains here. We caught one of them and he had a British military ID on him." So that whole thing has been known for a long time.

Niall: It's actually a century old. It goes back a century.

Joe: What?

Niall: The Brits have been in the Caspian in Azerbaijan, which Greg Palast correctly calls the 'Republic of BP'.

Joe: Yeah.

Niall: It's the base of operations for the Caspian region.

Joe: Yeah, you go back 100 years and even the British empire doing exactly what the Americans took over. Okay, we're going to leave it there for this week folks. We've kind of run over our time. But thanks to our listeners and to our chatters and to our caller Kent. We'll be back next week with another show. Until then, have a good one.

Juliana: Bye-bye.

Niall: Bye-bye.