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This week, The Truth Perspective spoke to Brandon Martinez, co-founder of Non-Aligned Media and author of a new book, The ISIS Conspiracy: How Israel and the West Manipulate Our Minds Through Fear. Brandon is a Canadian independent writer and journalist, who focuses on 20th and 21st century history, international affairs, Zionism, Israel-Palestine, media, and American and Canadian foreign policy. He is the author of two other books: Hidden History and Grand Deceptions.

We discussed Brandon's new book, the rise of ISIS, the nature of false-flag terrorism and what's really going on with the so-called war on terror, as well as some current events and developments in Canada under the Harper regime.

During the final segment of the show, we discussed more of the events surrounding the bombings in Yemen, the Ukrainian governments' collusion with neo-Nazi battalions, and the culture of psychopathy which has created a murderous police force in the U.S. We also discussed the banking system and its recent moves to take control of the private funds of individuals and small businesses by denying them access and in some cases seizing their funds using insubstantial excuses.

Running Time: 01:59:00

Download: MP3


Here's the transcript:

Harrison: Welcome back everyone to The Truth Perspective. It's April 4th. I am your host, Harrison Koehli. My co-host Elan Martin

Elan: Hey there!

Harrison: And joining us today in the studio we've got SOTT editors William Barbe.

William: Hello. How's it going?

Harrison: And Brent Kope.

Brent: Hi there.

Harrison: So today we have a special guest. We've got Brandon Martinez joining us today. He is a Canadian independent writer and journalist who specializes in foreign policy issues, international affairs and 20th and 21st century history. The last several years he has written on Zionism, Israel and Palestine, American and Canadian foreign policy, war, terrorism and deception in media and politics. His articles and analyses have appeared on Press TV, Veterans New Now, Media with Conscience News, Intifada Palestine, Information Clearing House, What Really Happened, Global Research and we have carried some of his articles as well on Signs of the Times. He's the co-founder of nonalignedmedia.com and the author of three books now, Hidden History, Grand Deceptions and his latest The ISIS Conspiracy: How Israel and the West Manipulate Our Minds Through Fear. So welcome to the show Brandon.

Brandon: Well thanks for having me on guys. I appreciate it.

Harrison: Thank you. I just read your book recently. It's a collection of pretty much all of your latest articles since the so-called war on ISIS began last year. It's really good. It's really accessible, really well written and it's pretty short so you can read it in a few days.

Brandon: Thank you.

Harrison: I really enjoyed it.

Brandon: I've been following the whole ISIS development since it started. About a year ago is when it started to pick up steam. It seems like a few years ago nobody had heard of ISIS and nobody could really come up to somebody on the street and say "What's ISIS?" Nobody could tell you. And it seems like there's been a sort of a policy change because originally we saw that there wasn't really this hoopla and hysteria and this craziness surrounding ISIS which we see today in the media. It's just 24/7 constant, non-stop coverage of every little ISIS atrocity.

But originally back during the Libya war - and this was about 2011 - there was no mention of ISIS. In fact the narrative at the time which I delineate in most of the articles in the book, is that the narrative was the rebels in Libya were the good guys. They were just idealistic people who were trying to overthrow the dictator, right? That was the popular narrative and that's what we were hearing from western politicians. And the story was Gaddafi's the evil dictator. He's killing his own people. There's this indigenous uprising in his country against his evil dictatorship and we need to help these people oppose this evil tyrant. So that was the story at the time that everybody was being fed and most people believed it. They felt like we had to go in and do this humanitarian intervention and stop this evil dictator.

It turned out that all this was lies. This was all propaganda. This was all deceit. Libya in Africa was sort of a boon of progress in an otherwise bleak part of the world. It was the best economy in Africa. So this idea that this was an indigenous uprising, that this was just discontent among the people is false. They tried to brand it as part of an extension of the Arab Spring. You had some indigenous uprisings like in Egypt and in Tunisia and these other dictatorships that were propped up by the west, and the west was playing this very duplicitous game where they were pretending to be on the side of the protestors but were in fact still working with those regimes.

So there was definitely a genuineness to some of the Arab Spring but trying to brand the Libya uprising as part of that was definitely untrue. From the get-go Gaddafi even announced in his public speeches, he said "This isn't some indigenous uprising. This is an al-Qaeda uprising." He constantly said this. He said "This is al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda is leading this revolt. This is an insurgency and it's not legitimate."

In order to understand this whole ISIS thing, we have to go back into history and look at what is al-Qaeda? ISIS seems to have sprung out of the womb of al-Qaeda and this broader Wahhabi ideology; what is that and where did that stuff come from? So I try to delineate some of that stuff in the book.

Harrison: We'll get into that a bit later. First of all, maybe we can get into some current events because the whole region in the Middle East has been just chaotic for years. We had the Arab Spring several years ago. We had Libya, then it has erupted into Syria. Iraq is still struggling. And now just in the last week or so we've got an invasion of Yemen. Can you tell us a little bit about what's going on there?

Brandon: Yeah. The Yemen fiasco started probably about two months ago, maybe a month ago, probably in February is when it really got going. So this is where Yemen has historically been a split country between north and south, and various imperial powers have tried to control it because it has some resources and some key ports that they want to control for oil purposes. But what happened was the dictatorship in Yemen was always backed by the Saudis and the Americans and these Houthi rebels; the Houthi movement is a group of Shia Muslims who formed a fighting force basically because they were being oppressed by the dictatorship in Sanaa, which was sort of a Sunni/Saudi-oriented regime.

So they basically took power and they overthrew the regime in Sanaa in February and they chased the leader Hadi into hiding and he turned up in Saudi Arabia of all places, being harboured by his benefactors and his backers. So the Houthis were aligned with Iran and they were aligned with this sort of Shia arc of resistance you could call it, with Hezbollah, Iran and the Shiite militias who were fighting ISIS in Iraq. So there's this burgeoning alliance that's formed since ISIS has been injected like a cancer into the region. So the Houthis gaining power in Yemen just provided another key point of resistance in the region to this American/Israeli/ Saudi domination.

So the Saudis started bombing Yemen in response to this, completely out of the blue they just sent in fighter jets. They tried to give their campaign of aggression legitimacy by saying that "Oh we have ten countries on our side now" and of course all ten countries are dictatorships sponsored by the west and propped up by the west. So that's rapidly unfolding. I don't know what the latest situation is but there seems to be some pitched battles between Houthis and the pro-Saudi forces in Aden. I don't know what the latest development is though.

William: The only latest thing that I know of is that Russia is calling for an emergency UN Security Council meeting and they're actually holding it today, trying to put a pause on some of these Yemen atrocities that are going on.

Harrison: I've read something about the US pulling some of its people out or it sounded like they were kind of trying to distance themselves from the aggression at this point. I don't know what's going to happen with that; if they're going to kind of commit themselves to a bit...

Brandon: Right. I think Washington is passively supporting it. They don't want to directly intervene but I've seen reports saying that Obama is giving logistical support and other forms of support to the Saudis. But it's very confusing. On the one hand Washington claims it's some grand opponent and adversary of "radical Islam" but on the other hand they fervently support the Saudi dictatorship which is the most fanatical Wahhabi-style system where you have them still cutting people's heads off for drug trafficking and menial offenses.

They can't maintain a coherent narrative. It's so contradictory and so confusing. I think it was Rand Paul, the son of Ron Paul, who went on CNN and he said "We have this contradictory policy. On the one hand we're 'fighting ISIS in Iraq' but in Syria we're actually aligned with ISIS and we're supporting these rebels in Syria to fight Assad. So what is this? What's going on? It's confusing the people to make sense of all this because it seems so contradictory." But when you take a step back and kind of look at the overarching, overall agenda behind it, it does actually make sense.
What I try to argue in the book is that from the get-go, from day one, this whole Wahhabi radical Islam was just a tool, a creation of the west and their allies in the region. The British were involved with fostering the ideology in its infancy. And of course it was the British that installed the Saudi dictatorship monarchy back in I think it was the 1920s and they've supported it ever since.

So it's always been a tool to divide and conquer the Muslim world and use it as a proxy to accomplish its geopolitical ends in the region.

Harrison: And if we look at who else is supporting the Saudis here, I think I read that Israel is lending support to Saudi Arabia in this conflict as well.

Brandon: Yeah, that's another interesting thing. Israel is actually aligned here with the most radical Wahhabi element. So what we have here is Israel's ambassador Michael Oren gave an interview back in 2013 to the Jerusalem Post and he laid out very clearly what his government's agenda was and he said "Our main adversary right now is this Shia arc of resistance between Damascus, Tehran and Hezbollah. We prefer al-Qaeda to them. We prefer these radical Wahhabi to these more moderate Muslim forces who have more military clout than al-Qaeda does."

But to me, you have to take a step back and say "Well why do they like al-Qaeda and ISIS better than Iran, than Syria? President Assad is very secular. These people are supposedly completely crazy and they're just chopping peoples' heads off; they're totally nuts and they're willing to do suicide bombing. So how is it that Israel's actually comfortable with that and trusts them more than these more moderate forces? So to me, we have to look at this and say "Well maybe it's because these crazy Wahhabi types are actually controlled and that Israel doesn't fear them because Israel perhaps controls them; the west perhaps controls them and can dictate what their actions are. So this idea that al-Qaeda and ISIS and these other offshoots and franchises are organic, independent groups is simply unfeasible. It cannot be demonstrated to be true.

Everything that they do seems to fall in line with this Zio-American empire's agenda in the region. When you look at what ISIS does, they only attack countries that are on the other side of the Zio-American Empire. They have only attacked countries like Iraq, Syria, Libya, Lebanon.

Harrison: So basically it just happens to be several of those countries that Ambassador Oren mentioned and several of the countries that historically have been on the radar of US and Israeli foreign policy.Coincidence?

Brandon: Right. To believe that this is just a coincidence, it just beggars belief to me. From the get-go, going back to the Libya thing, we know that these groups are controlled. We know that they are being supported, that they're being funded and created by western and Israeli intelligence. It was quite an open secret back in the Libya war that the west was supporting the rebels there. It was pretty open that those rebels were al-Qaeda that were led by al-Qaeda franchises, like the Libyan Islamic fighting group and other offshoots. So the west was supporting these rebels, funded them, trained them, armed them. They used those Gulf Sheikdoms, the Saudis, Qataris, and whatnot as sort of a proxy to send funds and arms to those rebels.

Harrison: And even fighters because some of the fighters themselves were foreign. They weren't all Libyan.

Brandon: Right. And it's the same situation in Syria. I think the Syrian regime said there were fighters from 83 different countries fighting in Syria. These aren't indigenous people. They aren't Syrians. They weren't Libyans. There's probably some people in those countries that joined, but the brunt of the fighters are foreigners. They're hired, paid mercenaries and professional killers that are just shipped and transported wherever they're needed. If you need them in Libya, that's where they are. If you need them in Syria, that's where they are. If you need them in Kosovo, if you need them in Afghanistan. They just transport them wherever they need them and NATO supported those rebels in Libya with a bombing campaign, air strikes against Gaddafi and now the situation is absolute chaos in the country and all of those fighting groups that were waging the insurgency in Libya have now been subsumed into ISIS. There's headlines in CNN saying that ISIS has taken over huge cities in Libya and that all those groups basically formed ISIS. It's like this umbrella network.

You have all these different fighting groups, even in Syria I heard there was about 1,000 different fighting factions involved in the insurgency. But they just kind of give it this broad name of ISIS. What are they? Originally America was saying "We're only funding moderate vetted rebel groupings". This was just a propaganda technique to distance themselves from the radical elements. But they were always radical from the beginning.

The FSA, what they call the Free Syrian Army, was just a propaganda cloak, a front group to funnel weapons to anybody who is willing to fight Assad. It was just sort of like this conduit between Washington and ISIS and al Nusra and the al-Qaeda groups because they couldn't just come out and openly say "Yes, we're going to fund these people. We're going to fund ISIS." So they had to establish this fake front group which doesn't even really exist. All of the so-called Free Syrian Army fighters just defected to ISIS and al-Nusra anyway. So it's like they can't keep a coherent narrative here. It's all unravelling.

Elan: Yeah. I don't think I've ever, in the three or four years since we've been hearing about the so-called uprising and the FSA in Syria, I don't think I remember hearing one even semi-legitimate representative of that organization speak cogently about any kind of social reform or agenda that would make the living standards or anything better in Syria. I think the only thing that we've seen is John McCain going to visit and sitting in with a bunch of them and I don't even remember anything substantive coming out of that conversation.

Brandon: Right. From the beginning it's not like they had any kind of policy plan going forward. They didn't outline anything. There already is an opposition in Syria that try to work within the system and get reforms that way. But these people from the get-go are just militants who wanted to fight and wanted to overthrow the government. They weren't even advocating anything serious. And the leader of the FSA I think was stationed in Turkey for a while and that's the hub. But it was never a real organization. John McCain went over there just to create the pretext that they're funding some moderates.

I don't understand what the distinction between a moderate and a radical is. How are they defining those terms? If you're an armed militant trying to overthrow a regime and you're killing people to do it how are you moderate? I guess their suggestion was that they weren't religious extremists or something. But it turns out that they were because thousands upon thousands of so-called FSA fighters joined ISIS without blinking an eye. So it's just a fraudulent campaign from the beginning.

Harrison: And really, if the FSA and al Nusra and all these other nebulous groups are considered moderate, what would you consider President Assad?

Brandon: Right.

Harrison: Because in the region he represents a more moderate form of government. It boggles my mind too. And it's just a code word. They say moderate because if they were to just say what these guys really were, you wouldn't get popular support. You wouldn't be able to have your propaganda have any real effect in your own population.

William: Yeah, they're just straight up distorting the language so that they can get what they want. The fact that they say "moderate" doesn't really mean they're moderate. It just means that it sounds better to the masses when they're projecting it over the mainstream media.

Brandon: Right. It's just a marketing technique to sell it to the public. Like you said, Assad is moderate. He's not a religious extremist. He's very educated and cordial and if you've seen interviews of him, he's not an extremist. The idea that he's some brutal dictator tyrant - the mainstream media to me is such a joke because I saw a report recently. I went to journalism school for about a year. I'm an opinion writer so I kind of use rhetoric and stuff myself, but they always tell you if you're a news reporter you've got to keep out this fiery language from your reports. Opinionist terms and rhetorical terms, you've got to keep it out of a news report. But I just saw this report on TV. They talked about Assad and they referred to him as the "lethal dictator Assad". I was like "This is journalism?! Are you serious?!"

The mainstream media gets away with this and it just boggles my mind how crazy things have gotten.

Elan: I really enjoyed deconstruction of ISIS in a couple of your articles at your site and you had just a number of interesting quotes coming out of the mouths of Israeli politicians in particular. I just wanted to read a couple of them. This is by a gentleman named Oded Yinon, who is a Likudnik or part of the rightwing party that Benjamin Netanyahu is a part of. It was made 33 years ago in 1982. And these are your words:
Brandon: "In 1982 a stunning Israeli strategy paper was published which outlined with remarkable candour a vast conspiracy to weaken, subjugate and ultimately destroy all of Israel's military rivals. The document was called A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s authored by Oded Yinon."

And this is what he says. I'd read this before and you put it into this ISIS context which I felt was really appropriate as well. He says "Lebanon's total dissolution into five provinces serves as a precedent for the entire Arab world including Egypt, Syria, Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula and is already following that track. The dissolution of Syria and Iraq later on into ethnically or religiously unique areas such as in Lebanon is Israel's primary target on the eastern front in the long run while the dissolution of the military power of those states serves as the primary short-term target. Syria will fall apart in accordance with its ethnic and religious structure into several states such as in present day Lebanon so that there will be a Shiite Alawi state along its coast, a Sunni state in the Alepo area, another Sunni state in Damascus hostile to its northern neighbour. And the Druses who will set up a state maybe even in our Golan and certainly in the Horan and in northern Jordan. This state of affairs will be the guarantee for peace and security in the area in the long run and that aim is already within our reach today."

And here's just one more to complete the picture. "Iraq, rich in oil on the one hand and internally torn on the other is guaranteed as a candidate for Israel's targets. Its dissolution is even more important for us than of Syria. Iraq is stronger than Syria. In the short run it is Iraqi power which constitutes the greatest threat to Israel. An Iraqi/Iranian war will tear Iraq apart and cause its downfall at home even before it is able to organize a struggle on a wide front against us. Every kind of inter-Arab confrontation will assist us in the short run and will shorten the way to the more important aim of breaking up Iraq into denominations as in Syria and in Lebanon. In Iraq, a division into provinces along ethnic/religious lines as in Syria during Ottoman times is possible. So three or more states will exist around the three major cities, Basra, Bagdad and Mosul and Shiite states in the south will separate from the Sunni and Kurdish north. It is possible that the present Iranian/Iraqi confrontation will deepen this polarization."
Now this was back in '82 so the war between Iraq and Iran came to pass.

Brent: It's stunning.That lays it all out right there.

I was just going to say we can't really understand any of this without going back to those documents from the '80s and other documents that I quote that they kind of just repackaged, like the Clean Break document from 1996 which was written by Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David Wurmser. All three of them became leading members of the Bush administration pushing for the war in Iraq in creating all of the propaganda with the WMDs and anthrax and all this stuff just came from Douglas Feith's office of special plans in the Pentagon. So this was a neocon propaganda effort from the get-go. They're very candid about their plans. They write down what they hope to see and then they go about implementing it by infiltrating the American government or the British government or whatever the case is and then they push for it and they use the media and their access to mainstream media to propagandize the public, as we saw with William Crystal and Robert Keg and the other neocons and these think tanks like PNAC and all these groups that they form. It's so amazing, the coordination that they have.

But I think the Oded Yinon is the foundation of this policy, this Likudnik vision for the Middle East is just fracturing, breaking down and subjugating all of its military rivals. So when they talk about threats, they're saying "Iran's a threat. Saddam's a threat." Well a threat to whom? A threat to your hegemony, to your domination of the region, to your continued oppression of those peoples there. So when they mention threats, are we supposed to put on Israel's spectacles? I'm here in Canada, you guys are in America. We're supposed to view the world through Israel's spectacles? Well according to most people in the region, Israel is the threat. Israel has nuclear weapons. Israel has aggressively invaded and occupied nearly all of its neighbours since it was formed. Israel has been ethnically cleansing the indigenous population of Palestine since 1948. Who's the aggressor here? Who's the danger? Who's the threat? Who's the menace? It's very clear that Israel is the danger.

And then going further than that, look at Israel's involvement in false flag terrorism, attacking even their own allies to induce a response that's against their adversaries in the region, which they've consistently done since the King David Hotel bombing. That was the founding principle of the Zionist regime, by way of deception, creating enemies and getting others to fight your battles for you. And that's what this whole neocon movement was set up to do, hoodwink the Americans into fighting Israel's wars for her.

So Oded Yinon, as you quoted there, advocated breaking up all of these countries into ethnic and religious factions and then ludicrously asserting that that would bring peace and stability. That would bring far more conflict and craziness to the region. But from Israel's perspective, it would bring a guarantee that they can't be challenged. So this is coded language. He's not being completely honest with you when he's saying that, but he's writing it from a Zionist perspective so you have to break it down from that angle.

But this is what we see unfolding and I try to connect the dots in that essay that you quoted from. It was called The Destabilization Doctrine; ISIS Proxies and Patsies. That's one of the most popular ones that I wrote. We see this unfolding. We see that Iraq is being ripped apart. We see that Syria's being ripped apart into smaller segments and factions. ISIS has declared its Islamic state, its caliphate. This is that Sunni state that Oded Yinon talked about. Then you'll have the Alawi state which Assad supposedly represents.

And in Iraq today we have a similar thing. ISIS pushes into Iraq, sets up its base there, declares itself a state, and then you have the Shia government in Bagdad. And the Kurds of course are still battling for independence for themselves. And I'm not necessarily against any of those groups having independence or autonomy or whatnot, but the problem is that it's being exploited. These divisions are being exploited for Israel's hegemony. Israel has supported the Kurds for a long time and has armed and trained them. So those people might have legitimate aspirations for independence and I can't say that they don't have a right to that, but they have to realize that when Israel's giving you arms, Israel's supporting you, this is kind of dubious. Maybe you're being used for some broader conspiracy here and you don't even know it. So I think those people have to figure that out.

It seems like everything's being distorted though because ISIS is being pegged as the grand and great threat. ISIS is just a sideshow. ISIS is just this lousy offshoot of a terror group that the west created. But the biggest threat to the world is not ISIS. ISIS wouldn't even exist without all of this support that they're getting. They're a nothing group. The only reason that they're still in the fight in those countries is because they're getting a constant flow and stream of weapons and money from the west and their proxies in the Gulf. And Israel's been helping them in the Golan there, giving them hospital treatment and giving them weapons and sending them back into the fight, and has been bombing Syrian military sites to aid the insurgency.

I was on this pure Zionist propaganda channel called NewsMax. They just invited me on. It was like a Sean Hannity type of character I was talking to. I told him this and he was just basically yelling at me any time I tried to talk. But when we bring the pieces of the puzzle together like this, they can't deny this. It's so obviously clear what the agenda is, from the get-go it was to break down these countries. And I always bring it back to that declaration by General Wesley Clark. Back in 2004 I think, he revealed that the policy plan of the US regime was to take out seven countries in five years. And what were those countries? Well he says it was Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Syria, Lebanon, I think it was Sudan and one other country. Sudan was ripped apart in an artificially induced civil war which the Israelis were heavily, heavily involved in. In fact I think it was one of the top ministers in the north Sudanese government, who came out and said that Israel was behind the civil war in Sudan. They armed the southern separatists, gave them military support, trained them and induced and ignited the civil war there to break Sudan apart because the Sudanese government was supporting Palestinians.

So it seems like the underlying philosophy of all of this is to break down the regimes, not so much because they're a military threat. Syria and Iraq, Saddam's Iraq, were not much of a threat to Israel in terms of military capacity. Israel is armed to the teeth. They have the latest technologies and weapons sent to them from the United States, bankrolled by the United States, supported by the biggest superpower in the world. This idea that those countries are a military threat to Israel is a weak claim. I think Israel embellishes threats, embellishes the strength of these governments just to whip up hysteria and garner more support from the US and the west.

But the idea here is to break down any regime that could potentially support Israel's more direct adversaries, that would support Hamas and Hezbollah and the Palestinians who are fighting for statehood and who want the right of return, which Israel is intent on preventing. So those are the countries that are being assailed here in this ISIS campaign; Syria, Iran, Hezbollah is involved now. Hezbollah got drawn into the fight. That's what Israel wanted. Now ISIS has said that their next target is Lebanon. How convenient. How convenient that all of Israel's enemies are on the receiving end of ISIS violence but none of the puppet regimes are. Egypt, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar. None of them have even seen an inkling of ISIS violence or incursions. And we're supposed to believe this is just a mere happenstance that ISIS is onside with the tyrannical regimes that have been oppressing. They claim they represent Muslims. These regimes have been oppressing Muslims and they don't lift a finger against these governments.

Harrison: And Israel. You'd think that Israel would be one of the biggest targets, right?

Brandon: You'd think it would but according to ISIS themselves, Israel is of no interest or concern to them. They even declare on Twitter, they said "We'd rather go after 'Muslim infidels', other versions of Muslim than Israel."

Brent: Yeah, because that makes sense.

Brandon: It makes absolutely no sense, even from their crazy Wahhabi perspective. But it makes sense when you understand that ISIS is a controlled group at the top. In one of the articles in the book I quote from this New York Times article from 2007, they were talking about al-Qaeda in Iraq, so this was sort of the precursor to ISIS right? And the head of the US military, their spokesman said that the leader of that group, whose name was Abdul Rashid al-Baghdadi, very similar name to ISIS's current boogieman leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. So this was the precursor and they said that he was completely fake, that he didn't exist, he was an actor and all of his public declarations were voiced by an actor. They tried to spin it though. They tried to pull the wool over our eyes in saying that al-Qaeda itself was responsible for the deception because they were trying to put an Iraqi face on this al-Qaeda splinter group in Iraq.

This was during the brunt of the fighting in the Iraq War, so that the anti-American insurgency that the fighters were resisting, the American occupation, large segments of them were Iraqi people who were part of these Shia militias that are currently fighting ISIS today. These are the same kind of groups that were fighting the Americans. I've seen some recent Vice documentaries who follow around these Shia militias and they say clearly "The Americans are still our enemy and they created ISIS to harm us."

So that was the brunt of the resistance. It was an indigenous resistance against the American occupation. A very common tactic of imperial governments is to try to discredit that resistance, to discredit those fighters, to discredit the insurgency by associating it with religious extremists or people who are pretty detestable. So they created this al-Qaeda in Iraq as sort of this counter-gang. It's that old British Empire tactic of creating a counter-gang, giving it the same kind of name or flavour as an indigenous uprising insurgency, associating it with that and having it commit atrocities, like beheadings or whatever.

So the Americans are behind that as a Pentagon psyop to discredit the resistance and basically to justify continued American involvement in the campaign. Donald Rumsfeld and all these American politicians were saying "We have to be in Iraq because we have to destroy this group called al-Qaeda in Iraq. They're terrorists. They're going to take over Iraq if we don't stay here and kill them." So it was just a propaganda ploy. And then you had the al-Zarqawi guy who was the cat with nine lives. He died and then he was resurrected. He died. It's the same with Osama bin Laden and all these shadowy, murky, elusive al-Qaeda figures. They seem to just pop up everywhere. When you go back to even the assassination supposedly of Osama bin Laden, completely fake.

He wasn't assassinated there. They throw his corpse into the ocean so nobody can see it. It's clearly propaganda. Bin Laden died probably in 2001, was killed and the media kind of just kept the phantom of bin Laden alive to serve as a justification for continued American involvement in the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan and just an American presence there. With all of these things we have to unpack it all. It's confusing to people because there's so many red herrings that they throw out there.

But there seems to be a congruency to the whole thing. Al-Qaeda, if we go back to the 1980s, fully created and sponsored by the CIA to fight the Russians and to cause problems for what they called the Soviet puppet regime in Kabul. They're just replaying the same tactics over and over again. They create this mercenary force, arm it to the teeth, sponsor it, send it in to cause problems for a regime and then they use their own creation, their own Frankenstein as a justification for further engagement. They created al-Qaeda and then they declared war on al-Qaeda. And then we saw a similar thing with ISIS. They create ISIS and now they said that we're in a war that is completely fake as well.

Harrison: You mentioned al-Zarqawi and just like with the first al-Baghdadi, there was a report, I think in 2007 or somewhere around there in the Washington Post, where again a top military - I can't remember what his position was. I think he had something to do with information warfare. There was this presentation given and in that presentation the details of which this Washington Post reporter had access to, he called al-Zarqawi something like the greatest psyop success in the Iraq war because for similar reasons as with al-Baghdadi they wanted to de-legitimize the insurgency which was just cropping up naturally in response to the American occupation.

So they've done it with Zarqawi, with Baghdadi and the most recent Baghdadi, we never see him, right? There's maybe one picture of some guy that they say is Baghdadi and that's it. Who is this guy? Where is he? And then they did the same thing with Osama bin Laden. That can maybe get us into another area here which is the kind of PR campaign of ISIS. You mentioned that they declared on their Twitter page that they have no interest in attacking Israel. Well, who is ISIS and why do they have a Twitter page?They've got these slick propaganda videos. Tell us your thoughts on ISIS's propaganda, all these videos that get released.

Brandon: Yeah, you mentioned Zarqawi as a psyop, al-Baghdadi and bin Laden. It's almost like the master manipulators are contriving these people, creating them just for public relations purposes, these are basically actors, they're not even real people. They exist perhaps, but they're not genuine in their public statements. Bin Laden for example, would say some interesting things. In my book Grand Deceptions where I talk about 9/11, I quote him in an interview right after 9/11 where he basically said that he didn't do 9/11 and that it was done by the Israeli intelligence and American CIA. And he gave some pretty interesting arguments for why that's the case.

So it's like there's two different bin Ladens. There's the guy who makes statements like that, but then there's the bin Laden who's meeting the CIA agents in hospitals and so forth. There's reports of him still in connection with the CIA going up all the way through the 90's and into the early 2000s. So it seems like they create false opposition. They create these boogieman enemies that they use to justify foreign adventures. Same thing with ISIS. This Baghdadi is a very elusive character. Nobody's ever really seen him. Some people say that he's in that photo with John McCain. I don't know if that's confirmed or anything but nobody knows who this guy is. His background is super murky and he could be just a total fake. He could be just pure PR, he's just an actor like the previous leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq admittedly was an actor, was faked, didn't even exist.

So this whole thing about ISIS just springing up out of a hole in the ground one day and accruing this massive fighting force with all these weapons, they have Twitter pages and they've got HBO quality execution videos with the perfect soundtrack, it's utterly insane. Where are they getting the expertise for this? Supposedly they're running around the desert fighting Assad but they have the wherewithal and the expertise to make some slick video. It's all PR. To me all this stuff could be cooked up in some CIA movie studio. How do we know? We can't confirm who's making the video, where it's being made, who these masked people are who are carrying out these executions. Who are these people?

Most of the videos get picked up by this group called SITE that's run by Rita Katz who's an Israeli citizen and her father was killed in Iraq as a spy back in the 60s. And she gets hold of all these videos even before ISIS puts them out, she gets them somehow and she puts them out. Maybe she was involved in the production of them. How do we know? ISIS has Twitter pages and they're arresting people in the west who are re-tweeting ISIS stuff and you have this whole phenomenon about western recruits to ISIS. This is the new scaremongering campaign. There's all these foreign fighters for ISIS and they're coming from the west. I just asked the question in some of those articles "Well how are they doing that? How are they leaving the country and joining ISIS without the intelligence agencies knowing about it or stopping them or preventing them?"

Harrison: Well to get into that a bit, first of all you mentioned SITE and in Canada at least, soon after the Ottawa shootings we had a video that was released, again by SITE of the Canadian John McGuire calling for retaliation against Canada for its involvement in the air strikes in Syria. So just to make a connection, but then you ask about all these foreign fighters and the people getting into Syria and Iraq. Maybe we could go over again to Canada for a second; we had recently a kind of scandal in Turkey when it was revealed that there was a CSIS officer, agent or whomever - and CSIS is Canada's intelligence agency - who was implicated in human trafficking, getting people into Syria and specifically those three British girls. Maybe you could give us some of the details about that.

Brandon: Sure. That was perfect timing when that story broke because this came just as the Harper regime, which is a fanatical, reprehensible neocon pro-Zionist regime, was pushing this bill C51, the new anti-terrorism legislation "We have to save you from ISIS so give us all your freedoms".

Brent: The Canadian Patriot Act.

Brandon: Right. Even worse than that. It has things in there like "terrorism propaganda is now a punishable offence". What does that mean? If you say that the Palestinians have a right to defend themselves against Israeli state terrorism you're a propagandist for terrorism now? It's so broad you can just arrest anybody for anything really. And just as that was being pushed and railroaded through parliament this scandal broke which is bad timing for the Harper regime, that CSIS was working in employing a Syrian national who is operating out of Turkey and Jordan, who was acting as a human trafficker for ISIS. So this guy was helping people from Europe go to Turkey and then into Syria to join ISIS. And apparently he helped these three British schoolgirls who I presume would not be soldiers but would be some sort of sex slaves for ISIS fighters.

So we have CSIS actually employing an ISIS recruit. This is the story; he was working out of this Canadian embassy in Jordan and the head of the embassy was a guy named Bruno Saccomani who was handpicked by Stephen Harper to be the Ambassador to Jordan. He used to be RCMP. He used to be part of Stephen Harper's personal security detail. So we have a guy that was handpicked by Harper to be the ambassador to Jordan and they're running this ISIS recruiter out of that embassy. So this almost links Harper directly to ISIS. He's constantly pontificating in the parliament about the threat of ISIS. It's such a joke. He's committing air forces to this fake bombing campaign of ISIS.

What happened with that, just to give you the end story, nothing really came out of it. Basically the CSIS just denied it, said "We don't comment on stuff like that" and it's died down. I was surprised that the mainstream even ran the story, like CBC and the Globe and Mail, and all these mainstream media in Canada covered it, but they tried to twist it and just uncritically reported the CSIS denial, as if that's credible. "Oh CSIS denies that they're running an ISIS recruiter so that's it. End of story." The mainstream media is just totally complicit with this.

But to me this is indicative of a broader pattern of western intelligence agencies working with ISIS directly, that they're helping ISIS get recruits from the west, that they're literally trying to fill the ranks of ISIS and send these lunatics over there, these disenfranchised youth with no future, they just go trolling for these people. They send informants into mosques and they just troll for impressionable youth to recruit and send over there as cannon fodder.

So to me this is a broader campaign by the west to continually flood ISIS with weapons, with bodies, with cash, with everything it needs to accomplish what the west wants it to do, which is to overthrow Assad. It hasn't successfully done that yet so they have to continually support it. People are going to try to shoot down my theory by saying "Oh look, they arrested some person who was trying to join ISIS. Look, they arrested this person in Texas. Look, they arrested this person here and there." To me this is just PR.

They allow hundreds to go join ISIS and do nothing to stop them. They help them, and then arrest one guy and say "Look, we're trying to crack down" when they're not really. It's just a PR thing.

Harrison: I don't know if there are any more details on this story yet, but just recently there was a man in Canada on Prince Edward Island that was arrested because "they believed that he might commit an act of terror in the future".

Elan: Thought crimes.

Harrison: You can't be waging a war on a group like ISIS without having some results that you can bring back to the people. You've got to fire out some ineffective air strikes just to show that you're doing something. You've got to make a few arrests just to show that there is a problem and that you're doing something about it, all the while, like you said Brandon, they're sending hundreds and thousands of people over there to actually be ISIS, to be the guys on the ground doing these sorts of things. And at the same time, by arresting certain people on just the flimsiest of pretexts, that establishes this kind of precedent for clamping down on any kind of dissent or anything that might be perceived as an internal threat to these governments. It works in every way for these guys.

Brandon: It's super obvious to anybody that's actually paying attention, reading articles, especially like alternative news sites. You're not going to get any legitimate news from the mainstream media. You're just going to get the spin. But when you actually look at places that are reporting the facts on the ground and doing it consistently, you can see that this overall picture is clear. But then most people don't have the time, energy or interest to follow that. They're just leaving CNN on in the background. They're worrying about their own finances, their own family dramas and they're just focused on themselves.

So it just comes back to them. They have pretty solid control of the mainstream media. All that's been consolidated and they just use that as a tool to blast this BS propaganda non-stop and people don't get any alternatives unless they really go digging.

Elan: And there's probably a percentage of people out there, especially in the US, who probably still think that Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11.That was connected in a lot of people's minds and due to bad information or lack of critical thinking, it was never corrected.

Brandon: I talk about that in my book Grand Deception. People actually believe that Saddam Hussein and Iraq did 9/11. It was the neocons who created that propaganda, who injected that into the narrative. Afghanistan to them was sort of a sideshow. We can get into that a bit later, but I just wanted to say on this ISIS thing, the west claims it's trying to destroy ISIS. There are supposedly 60-plus countries part of this coalition, including the world's sole superpower, the United States, including Britain, who's one of the top five militaries in the world, Canada, Australia. So we have the greatest powers in the world except for Russia/China in the coalition to defeat a bunch of guys running around the desert with Kalishnikovs and a few jeeps and a few tanks that they stole and somehow they can't defeat ISIS.

Maybe that's believable for somebody who has absolutely no clue how military and intelligence operates and works, but for anybody who's been following geopolitics and knows the strength of different militaries and military forces, this is completely insane. They could destroy ISIS overnight, probably within a week they could destroy ISIS. They could just target their command centres, bomb them to oblivion and they're done. They won't be able to recover if you kill all their commanders and you take out all their command centres, they're completely disoriented and they can't fight anymore.

So it's completely obvious that this is fake and this isn't a serious campaign. It is disingenuous. It is PR. It is a way for the west to try to distance itself from its own creation, right? Same with the al-Qaeda thing. It seems like they're just repackaging everything and doing it over again.

Brent: It's a great way to funnel tax dollars too, into the military industrial complex in all the countries that are involved. They drop bombs and they need to send aircraft and they spend money on fuel and all kinds of stuff and it just funnels money upward. That's our tax dollars that just get sucked away. It's ridiculous.

Brandon: These regimes at the same time are using the fear-mongering campaign surrounding ISIS to pass all kinds of laws that take our rights away and bolster the police state and the intelligence services, give them more power, give them bigger budgets. All of these regimes are doing it; Canada, Australia, the United States, Britain, France. There's a simultaneous agenda, like they just get a memo from some command centre in Washington or Tel Aviv or London and say "Do this. Pass this law. We're going to use ISIS as the new scarecrow to push this agenda, to push this global police state". I think it was Assad that pointed out this very logical thing. He said "My air force is far smaller than all of these countries that are in the coalition. Yet we're conducting far more air strikes and real bombing campaigns against ISIS." So 60-plus countries whose combined military might is conducting far less of an effort to defeat ISIS; they're not serious about this. They're not actually trying to defeat ISIS, they're just claiming that they are. This is just a PR campaign.

It was incredible because I wrote an article back in August 2014 where I actually predicted everything that would happen. I said "They're going to turn on ISIS. They've created it. They're going to turn on it. They're going to say they're at war with it. They're going to try to start bombing it or claim that they are and they're going to "accidentally" start hitting Iraqi police and military forces who are actually fighting ISIS. It's not that I'm psychic, it's just that I've seen it before so many times that it's predictable. It's completely in line with previous policies that they've conducted in other countries.

This is what we see happening. I just quoted from a Russia Today report saying that 22 Iraqi soldiers were killed in a US air strike a few weeks ago. And periodically we see Shiite militia forces being hit by US air strikes. They're taking out Shiite fighters who are fighting ISIS while they're claiming that they're targeting ISIS. They just say it's an accident, just like they say that when they drop these weapons caches that they claim are going to the Kurds, they fall into the hands of ISIS miraculously. "Oh, sorry. We dropped some weapons to people who are trying to kill you. Our bad."

Brent: These are the ones that we hear about too. It's probably the tip of the iceberg.

Brandon: That's just the stuff that's been reported. How do we know what's going on, on the ground. But all these Iraqi parliamentarians and military people and militia leaders, I quoted from a New York Times article that interviewed some of them, and they say very candidly that "America created ISIS and we don't trust them". And they boycotted American involvement in this coalition to fight ISIS. They said "We don't want the US involved because we can't trust them. They've killed our fighters. They claim it's an accident. We don't believe it. They're trying to contain our fight because they don't want to destroy ISIS."

The real target is the Shia arc of resistance; the alliance between Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon or Hezbollah in particular, and now the Houthis. And the US has green-lighted this attack on Yemen with a similar outcome.

Harrison: The attack on the Houthis comesat an interesting time because, like you mentioned, they are supported by Iran. It almost seems to me like one of the purposes of this might have been to goad Iran into taking a more active role and maybe even getting involved somehow in the conflict in Yemen. And this comes just at the time where we have these negotiations going on about Iran's allegedly nuclear weapons program which is non-existent. And then just in the last couple of days we've had reports coming out saying it looks like there is a deal going to be made with Iran. Have you been following that? Do you have any thoughts about what's going on with Iran at the moment?

Brandon: Yeah. I think we have sort of a build up to deal with Iran. I always laugh and say - first of all, I don't want to give any legitimacy to any kind of US dealings with other countries. The US, we're supposed to believe, has a right to dictate to other countries what this should be or that should be. I don't accept that premise that the US is the one to be the arbiter in this kind of thing and be the one who's laying out the ground rules for what other countries can do in terms of nuclear capacity. The fact is that if Iran wants a nuclear weapon - I'm against all nuclear weapons. I think every country should disarm them. They're just tools of mass destruction and death and why would we want these on the planet? But the fact is that they do exist and the only countries that have them are countries that certainly shouldn't have them and have proven to be bad actors on the world stage. The United States is the only country that's ever used nuclear weapons during the Second World War against Japan.

So if there's any country that shouldn't have or that should be banned or prohibited from having nukes, it's the US. And certainly Israel is high up on the list of countries that should be banned from having nukes because they've shown themselves to be an aggressive war-like state that just wants to attack, invade, subjugate and subdue anybody that they don't like, if it doesn't kowtow to their agenda. So if Iran decides that they want a nuclear weapon for just deterring their enemies, then they have a right to get one and it's not for the US to day that they shouldn't.

The Ayatollah said "We're against nuclear weapons. It's wrong. It's forbidden in Islam." But the only reason they'd want to get one is to deter the big powers from invading Iran. It's the ultimate deterrent. Israel has nuclear weapons in the region. It's one of the only countries in the region other than Pakistan I believe. But that would make sense for Iran to want to get that, just as a deterrent, seeing all of these countries surrounding Iran getting invaded; Afghanistan, Iraq, two countries bordering Iran invaded by the United States, destroyed right on their doorstep. The empire is right on their doorstep and we're supposed to believe that they're crazy because they want a nuke? It's an absurd narrative.

But this deal that's going on, I don't know the exact terms of it. I guess Iran has to tone down their centrifuges or whatever in exchange for a lifting of the sanctions. I guess that's good in a sense because Iran doesn't even want a nuclear weapon. They say it's forbidden and they're going to have some sanctions lifted which will help their people and will be beneficial to their economy. So I guess they're trying to induce Iran into further conflicts in the region to try to bog them down in a way and draw them into these quagmires. Iran as far as I know has a defence pact with Syria so whenever Syria's attacked Iran promises to back them up, at least on paper. So they were drawn into this campaign against ISIS in Syria.

This is just the perfect way to have all of Israel's enemies at each others' throats and not focused on Israel. Iran and Hezbollah and Syria, their main focus actually was Israel. They said "Israel is the main adversary here. It's a foreign injection into our region. It's here to dominate us. It's here as a malignant force to harm the region." Israel is always trying to stir up problems with its enemies to take the attention off of Israel, to put it somewhere else. And it's always trying to create false flags and pretexts to do that and also to have its allies do its bidding for it. Netanyahu goes to the United Nations and holds up this ridiculous cartoon of a bomb, from a Road Runner cartoon and it says "Proof! Iran's going for a nuke. I've drawn a picture of a bomb so that's proof."

So what he's doing, he's just trying to deflect. I guarantee you Netanyahu doesn't believe Iran is even trying to get nuclear weapons. This is all propaganda to just deflect attention from the fact that Israel has nuclear weapons. It's to deflect attention from Israel's onslaught in Gaza, Israel's continued policy of ethnically cleansing the West Bank and Gaza. A lot of it is intended as misdirection and PR for the western populace to take the attention off of Israel because Israel has been getting a lot of heat. The BDS movement has picked up steam. You have conferences everywhere now talking about Israel's atrocities and even questioning Israel's "right" to exist, which is a ludicrous assumption. And it's being targeted. A lot of people are waking up to this and even a lot of American groups are now campaigning to end US aid to Israel.

So a lot of this propaganda is Zionist propaganda designed to shift public attention and focus off of what Israel is doing and onto its enemies. And Netanyahu even said this. He went on Meet the Press and firstly he said "I don't want Obama to attack ISIS. I want ISIS and the Shia and Sunni to fight each other so they can weaken each other." It's part of this divide and conquer strategy. Regarding the fact that ISIS is killing people and committing atrocities and beheadings, he also said "Look, this is proof that Israel's the only rational actor in the region. Israel's the only civilized country in the region. All these other ones are killing each other and beheading each other and they're not civilized so you have to support the only boon of civilization in the Middle East." And of course he is not telling you it's the Israelis behind the scenes who have instigated all of these fights and battles who have fuelled all of these insurgencies in the west as well.

So it's all propaganda. It's all PR and deception. I try to connect all the dots with this. Maybe you disagree with me, but for the most part, all roads lead to Tel Aviv at the end of the day. Some would argue that there's some sort of corporate interest in these battles. To me it doesn't really add up. In terms of business interests, businesses don't flourish in conflict zones. The only business that flourishes in conflict zones is the weapons industry, just because there's a benefactor to a conflict doesn't mean that they instigated the conflict, right? They just came in and benefited from the situation.

To me, we have to look at what is the overarching policy plan and agenda behind it. The most convincing thing that I've found is those Israeli geopolitical strategies and documents where they lay it out quite clearly. "This is what we're going to do. We're going to fragment all of our rivals". Then when we tie that in with the neocon proclamations, the Clean Break Report and the Project for the New American Century report from 2002 which says "We need a new Pearl Harbour", and we look into 9/11, who and what was behind 9/11, we find very much the same players. The Israelis were heavily involved in 9/11 which I cover in my book Grand Deception, the first six chapters.

So it seems like there's very familiar themes and forces behind all of this madness. There's a coordinated effort. It's not just some random thing that these politicians are just crazy and coming up with these contradictory policies. There seems to be a congruency and an agenda behind all of it.

Elan: You pretty much just answered what I wanted to ask you next, in part. But I wonder Brandon, can you even underline it a little further and state if Israel is looking for complete hegemonic power over the Middle East? Is that the ultimate objective? Is it just to remove these existential threats or threats of Shia-dominated countries that can be potentially threatening to them? Or is it really more an ultimate goal for them to want to have some kind of total dominance over most of these countries?

Brandon: I think that that's the basic structure of all these war policies. It seems to me to be dominance over the region. Also they're extremely paranoid about the demographics of Israel itself; that they're always campaigning against...

Brent: Brown people.

Brandon: Yeah, right, right. They're always saying "We have this demographic threat to the Jewish state". They want to maintain the Jewish majority in Israel which is kind of weird because they have an opposite agenda in the west. There's a lot of Zionist groups that support multi-culturalism in the west but that are completely against it for Israel, which seems like another divide and conquer strategy. So they're very concerned about just keeping Israel intact as this Jewish stronghold, as a Jewish majority state and keeping the Palestinians at bay, keeping other immigrants at bay, like recently they rounded up a bunch of black immigrants from Africa and they put them in prison camps and they're calling for them to be expelled and so forth.

So I think they're just completely obsessed with maintaining this Jewish state in the region and keeping their supposed adversaries at bay. Breaking down those regimes surrounding it serves a few purposes. One is to prevent any rival in the region from challenging Israeli hegemony but also preventing those governments from supporting what Israel considers its internal adversaries which would be the Palestinians as a whole. The Israeli politicians have come out and made genocidal declarations saying all the Palestinian people are our enemies. Just their presence here is a threat to us. We need to kick them out. We need to expel them.

That's what they sought to do back in the 80s during that Lebanon invasion in 1982. Israeli went in there firstly to break up Lebanon and create a civil conflict in the country as per the Oded Yinon plan, which they did. They armed those Christian militias in Lebanon who carried out the Sabra/Shatilla massacre. Those were armed, trained and propagandized by Israel to hate the Palestinians and there were these Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon that were targeted by the Israeli proxies. So they went after the Palestinian refugees there to destroy them and break up Lebanon who they saw as a military threat.

So I think the mindset of the neocons and their Zionist string-pullers in Tel Aviv is this overarching thing about subjugating their foes. This goes back to the Oded Yinon plan and they've kind of just re-branded and reworked it into a modern context and that's what I think is the overall goal. It was David Ben Gurion, the first Prime Minister of Israel who gave this incredible interview with a magazine in 1962 where he predicted the outcome of the future. He thinks he's some sort of prophet. He said "The entire planet will become united in a world alliance save for the Soviet Union." And he said "There will be an international police force. There will be no more wars." And he said they would build a shrine to serve the federated union of all continents as prophesied by Isaiah in Jerusalem. They'd build a shrine to be the centerfold of this new world order that he envisioned, his grandiose plan for world government.

It's hard to say exactly what Netanyahu thinks and what his position is vis-à-vis world government, but it seems like some of these Zionist leaders have this one-worldist vision. They want to put down any resistance to some sort of global control. That is an absolutely authenticated interview, he said that and he was basically the founder of Israel. The neocons very much speak that language. They talk about making the world safe for democracy, whatever that means. And democracy to me seems to be this code word for Israel or making the world safe for them and their interests.

There's definitely a local part of the plan in terms of the Middle East itself. But there also seems to be more of a global reach to it because we see western governments passing laws that take away our rights under the pretext of terrorism. And the terrorist threat is completely fabricated and created by these same forces, the Israeli intelligence and western intelligence together fabricate incidents. Right when they declared war in August 2014 in the big coalition all of these so-called incident started to happen. You had the Sydney siege. You had the Paris Charlie Hebdo shooting, Copenhagen shooting. All of these events just miraculously pop up out of nowhere on cue for this new campaign to defeat ISIS. And the end result of all those shootings was anti-terror laws that take away your rights, give unlimited powers to the intelligence agencies and more power to government to clamp down on your speech, on political dissent.

You had David Cameron, the Prime Minister of Britain in the United Nation speech and he said "The non-violent extremists are the new threat. They're just as bad as ISIS." He said "Conspiracy theorists, people who question the government's version of 9/11, 7/7, other terrorist attacks, anyone who questions that is akin to ISIS." They're trying to associate anybody who questions this war on terror mythology as global propaganda by these governments, to convince us that we should relinquish all of our rights and freedoms and trust in the government to save us from the terrorists.

There's sort of a two-pronged assault going on. You have the actual fighting going on in the Middle East as part of this Israeli geopolitical scheme, but then back at home they're trying to snuff out dissidents and critics of that who are exposing the gambit. This eventually would target people like me, people like you guys, anybody who's criticizing this and exposing what's really going on is going to be demonized and portrayed as being sympathetic to ISIS or something. It's completely backwards because how could they possibly portray us as being sympathetic to ISIS. We're saying that your governments are running ISIS.You created ISIS. You're funding them. You support ISIS. You've created this Frankenstein and now you're trying to associate us with that Frankenstein even though you're the one responsible. It's so Orwellian and bizarre to me.

Brent: It's pathological.

Brandon: Right. It is a mental disease that these politicians have. They're just completely drunk on power to the point where they don't even have to make any sense anymore. They can say anything and then the mainstream media reports it like it's some credible thing. And we just sit here and laugh because it's comical.

Brent: I don't know if you're familiar with Political Ponerology, but the author Łobaczewski points out that there's always that double-headed sort of approach. He calls it a pathocracy. It's a government run by pathological individuals and he points out that there's the foreign war that's used to justify all the crazy stuff that they want to do at home. But there's also the internal war against anybody who's pointing out the fact that the government is actually behaving like a bunch of murderous psychopaths.

Brandon: Right. I think that's right on the money. It's crazy to me how these psychopaths can consistently get positions of power, like Stephen Harper, Obama, David Cameron, the French Prime Minister Hollande. Maybe it's just the nature of power that if you're a psychopath, then you're willing to stab anybody in the back to get to the top. You're going to eventually rise to the top.Maybe that's the nature of power.

Brent: I think power probably attracts those pathological types because normal people just want to live their lives, get along, have a family, be happy. Pathologicals aren't happy unless they're dominating and destroying. So they have to get themselves into positions where they can do that and not be criticized or otherwise locked up for it. So it's not that power corrupts, it's kind of that power attracts the corrupted.

Brandon: True. True. And this is why I guess we see politicians constantly involved in pedophile scandals.They not only abuse adults in terms of waging warfare and whatnot, but they also want to dominate children. Anything that gives them a rush. It's like this mindset that they control you, they dominate and they can get away with anything. They pretty much do except for some isolated cases. In the major countries and the major powers, these politicians seem to be completely immune to the law. You have these laws on the books about war crimes and genocide but it's never applied to the big ringleaders, the big war criminals. They'll snatch some middleman in Africa that they put in power as a puppet and they'll say "Ah, you're a war criminal. We're going to send you to the Hague." But then where's George Bush and Dick Cheney? Oh, they're free. They're walking. They're giving speeches for $50,000 a pop.

All of the big war criminals, from Netanyahu to the American and British leaders, are immune from it. There's no such thing as international law. International law is this flowery thing that politicians throw around. It's never applied to the big powers at least, so what is it? It's nothing. It means nothing to anybody. If it's not applied consistently, then it's worthless. And why are we still talking about it?

It's predicated on a flawed premise too because the international law emerged from the Nuremburg trials during World War II, but therefore it's nothing more than a sham because how can you have a war crimes trial at the end of a World War and only one side gets punished. It's just a kangaroo court. The victors judge the vanquished. I don't accept the legitimacy of that concept. If the Axis won then the Allies would have been on trial and would have been strung up. In fact a lot of the Allied powers in World War II - and I go into some WWII history in my other book Grand Deceptions - they didn't even want a war crimes trial because they knew it would be complete hypocrisy, they would be condemning their vanquished foes for things that they themselves were supremely guilty of themselves.

Not a single high ranking member of the governments of the Allied powers were ever tried for anything, yet they're still stringing up 80-year-old Germans who were security guards at a prison or something. This is just more PR. A lot of this stuff today stems from that. The nation of Israel today is predicated on this victimhood mythology that they inculcated and convinced everybody through Hollywood and the media to create a pretext for the existence of the state of Israel. That was the real force behind the whole Nuremburg thing, these Zionist groups. The Allied leaders were saying "We don't want a trial. We're guilty of aggressive warfare. We're guilty of invasion. We carpet-bombed civilians in Dresden and Hamburg and nuked Japan and carpet-bombed Tokyo and killed hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people". And even after the war they starved to death several million Germans and the Soviets committed mass rapes of German women and so forth.

They knew it would be hypocrisy, but these Zionist organizations mainly based out of the United States wanted to see a Nuremburg trial because they wanted a narrative of victimhood. They wanted to create this narrative that said "We're the ultimate victims of this war" even though more Germans and Russian died than Jews in World War II. They also wanted a verdict to say "We get reparations money from Germany for what we claim happened during WWII and then they used that money to finance Israel, to build the infrastructure of Israel and then create this propaganda cloak to mask Israel's crimes. The former Israeli minister said "Every time we commit a massacre in Gaza and Europeans criticize us we bring up this holocaust thing. We throw it in your face to shut you up." Just like the anti-Semite canard. Anytime you criticize Israel they say you're an anti-Semite, which de facto is saying that "We're infallible. Whatever we do, no matter how evil it is, if you criticize us you're an anti-Semite. We're not going to challenge what you are saying or your claims about us, your charges against us that could be completely valid and true, but we're just going to call you an anti-Semite because you are criticizing us" meaning "We are above everybody else. We can do whatever we want. We can kill 3,000 people in Gaza. We can kill 500 children, drop white phosphorous and you're not allowed to criticize us because we're the chosen ones" or whatever.

That needs to be delineated too, and connecting not only current events, but the bedrock foundation of all these things because there's a lot of myths in history, the victors write history. We know that it's propaganda to serve the winners and shape this new world order that they had envisioned and create a foundation from which to push for more draconian measures and evil policies. So to me, we have to look at not only current events and things that are relevant to us today but also go back into history. A lot of people in the alternative media don't want to go to that end because there's even laws that prevent you from doing that. There's laws for example, in Europe called holocaust denial laws that prevent people from questioning any aspect of the story.

They'll have a 9/11 denial law that says you can't question any aspect of the official narrative of 9/11.

Harrison: Yeah, it's probably coming.

Brandon: They're dictators while they're fronting as democracy. Or David Cameron gets his way.

Brent: There's even that book that shows documents where they prove basically that the Zionists were collaborating with the Nazis during WWII and encouraging them to kill more Jews; if you look at these documents you think "Jeez, it's obvious that many of the similar patterns we're seeing today where powers in Israel are puppetting these other groups, it goes back to the beginning. It's the same stuff, same song, different tune.

Harrison: We've gone about half an hour over what we originally planned but I think if you're cool we'll stop it there. I just want to thank you again for coming on the show. It's been really great having you on. I just want to recommend your book again. The latest is The ISIS Conspiracy. You can get it on Amazon and I want to give out your website - nonalignedmedia.com. So everyone should check out the website. There's some great commentary and just keeping up to date on current events of all sorts. It's good for me because I am Canadian, so I like to get a little bit of a Canadian perspective too.

So thank you Brandon for coming on, again.

Brandon: Thanks so much for having me on. It's a pleasure and privilege.

Harrison: Thank you and we'll hope to get you on again some time.

Elan: Thanks for coming Brandon.

Brent: Yeah, it was great talking to you.

Brandon: Thank you guys. Take care.

Harrison: Okay, take care.

Elan: Well he was just terrific and I was reminded a little bit of Douglas Reed's Controversy of Zion. When did he write that? In the middle 50s?

Brent: Yeah.

Elan: It's almost as though he is taking all the events of current day and was putting it in that context. And like you said Brent, saying same dance, different song. It's just the same pattern over and over again. And once you see the pattern it's kind of hard to miss. It becomes perfectly obvious.

Brent: But again, if you don't study it, if you don't take the time to read into it, to access the information that you're not going to get in textbooks or in college classes, you're not going to see it. It's not obvious until you actually get into it and see it and then read and read and read and read. It does make sense logically.

Harrison: In other news today, I just wanted to bring up a couple of things. First of all I want to come back a bit to the invasion of Yemen and the bombing that's going on there. I found the whole narrative to be mind-boggling, because if you think about what happened, you had this leader who was deposed in a coup and then flees the country looking for support from another country that supports him. That country then says "Oh, we've got to protect the legitimacy of this government and so we're going to send some military over there and get things done. Oh sorry, I was talking about Crimea and and there for a second I got my narratives switched.

Elan: I knew that was coming.

Harrison: Because that kind of sounds like what happened in Ukraine last year where Yanukovich was taken out of power by a coup d'état and he fled to Crimea and then Russia and Russia basically said "Okay, we're going to support the so-called legitimate leader of Ukraine against the people that took power in a violent coup." Then what did the western governments and media say? "Russian aggression. We can't stand by this. This is totally horrible. We're going to lay all these sanctions on Russia and stop this from happening."

On the surface the events are quite similar but what was the response to this Saudi invasion? Oh well you won't see the word aggression used anywhere in the western media about this. "This is a legitimate defence of this legitimate leader in Yemen. And not only that, we're going to support Saudi Arabia in defending Al-Haddia and we're going to support them in bombing Yemen."

Now compare this to Russia and Ukraine and Crimea. Russia didn't invade, they didn't bomb. They didn't go to Kiev and take over and start bombing all these right sector guys. And when they annexed Crimea, what did they do? They had a democratic referendum that was organized by the authorities there in Crimea at the time. So the hypocrisy of that situation just astounds me, not only how similar the situations were but in their differences. The Yemen/Saudi Arabia thing is just so much worse and yet it gets the full support of all of the western nations and so-called western civilization. So that's just a bunch of BS in my opinion.

Brent: It's pretty typical.They're constantly "When we do it, it's fine but if anybody else does it, it's a huge, big offence and we have to go and stop them". It's typical of the way pathological people think and it goes to show these are the kind of people that we have running our governments. It's disturbing to say the least.

Harrison: Speaking of Ukraine, just a little bit of news. Of course I mentioned Right Sectors. These were some of the guys that were heavily involved in the coup and not only that, with the torture and killing of civilians in east Ukraine, what are now called Donetsk and Lugansk Peoples' Republics. The right sector was so-called volunteer battalions. So these guys weren't officially connected in any way with the official Ukrainian armed forces. But now that has changed. In the past weeks there was that conflict between two of the top oligarchs in Ukraine, Kolomoyski and Poroshenko and Kolomoyski was the leader of one of the provinces close to Donetsk. I can't pronounce the name of it.

He was forced to resign by Poroshenko and he was one of the main backers of groups like the Right Sector. He has basically his own private armies that he's used for years to take over other rival business interests and he's pretty much a big bully in Ukraine. When he wants something he just gets his armed thugs to come and take it. And he controls one of the biggest private banks in Ukraine. He had a lot of power, but now he has resigned so there's probably some things going on in the background.

He was a supporter of Right Sector and in the past week the leader of Right Sector, Dmytro Yarosh agreed to some of Poroshenko's terms. What Poroshenko did is basically make Right Sector now an official part of the Ukraine armed forces. So he's armed these independent, volunteer battalions. They'll still remain volunteers but they are now officially part of the Ukrainian armed forces. So what Poroshenko has done is take these lunatic, neo-Nazi thugs and let them into the fold.

It's a strange thing for a couple of reasons; one, because he's made these neo-Nazi groups official. I guess now he can say that the Ukrainian army is officially Nazi, but at the same time they represent one of his biggest threats. So I'm wondering if he thinks that he can control them by giving them more power and official status in Ukraine. I don't know.

Brent: It sounds like a rerun from World War II.

Elan: Exactly, yeah. The Kaiser giving Hitler more power and everyone suspecting that it wouldn't come to very much. At the end of the day, Hitler just grabbed more and more power and decided that he was going to be it.

Brent: They call that grabbing the tiger by the tail.

Harrison: One of the things in the news just yesterday caught my eye; the police in the US in the month of March have killed more people than the entire UK police force in the last hundred years. US police killed 111 people in March of this year. And that is more than in the past 100 years in the UK.

Brent: Yeah, I read stories every day now. I feel like they're coming where "Unarmed man shot by police." "Guy with hands up shot by police." They raid the wrong house. The number of stories, and the kids too that have been killed or wounded. There was that baby that was injured by a flash bang. There was that seven-year-old, I can't remember her name, Aleisha-something. She was shot when cops busted into her house and it was the wrong house and his gun "accidentally" discharged. She was sleeping on the couch and she was dead. It just happens over and over again. There was that girl in Colorado. She was driving her friends home late at night and the cops said that she had tried to assault them with her vehicle. Well, the autopsy results showed that there was no way from the angle that the bullets came in. The cop had to have been standing at the side or behind the car. There's no way she could have even tried to have hit him with the car. And she was only 17.

That's just a few. There's a couple of pages on Facebook that posts these stories. Cop Block is one of them. I think Free Thought Project and Predictive Info also have a couple of them there. Every day there's more and more stories. And they seem to target brown people because I guess for some reason in the mainstream media black and brown people are perceived as more violent and more criminal and generally they're lower income so they don't have the financial resources to defend themselves in court, or to go after them after the fact when somebody gets killed. So they're the kind of easy targets.

And then you ask the question why? Why is this all of a sudden an issue? Why are the police more violent than it seems like ever before? I think it goes back to Michael Chertoff and the Bush administration in the early 2000s. He encouraged collaboration between Israeli and American police departments. They would send people over to Israel to get them trained and come back and they'd retrain the police; now it's all based on this presumption that any time you feel that you're life is threatened you just pull that trigger and you shoot to kill. They don't teach these guys hand-to-hand combat or effective ways to disarm people non-violently or even negotiating tactics or shooting to injure. You could totally shoot somebody in the leg, completely disable them, especially if they're unarmed or mentally disabled or whatever. But they don't teach them that. They want to just shoot in the head, shoot them in centre mass and that's what they do.

Elan: You said a little earlier that positions of power attract the corrupted; I don't think I've ever heard of any psychological screening processes for being accepted as a police officer, although maybe there were and I just don't know. But you have to wonder if all those types of standards separate from one's level of education have been thrown out the window because what we're seeing here is like it's the rise of the psychopath in a way. There's something about being a police officer that becomes very attractive to types who are quite willing to inflict violence at the drop of a hat.

Harrison: Yeah, I think it's all connected in a certain way and something like this may be more nebulous. I don't necessarily think that there's a plan that's written down and scripted, but when you combine the sorts of things that Brandon was talking about, in geopolitical terms, you've got this psychopathic regime in Israel that for years has been manipulating foreign wars and these whole geopolitical processes, while destroying countries and influencing other countries at the same time, there's got to be a social effect from that kind of influence.

Brandon described ISIS in Iraq and in Syria as a cancer that's basically infecting the region. Well it's the same thing when you look at the whole neo conservative war plan. That mentality is a cancer that is infecting western nations, and not only western nations but then the people on the receiving end of it in the Middle East and in countries all over the world. So you have this psychopathic mentality that is influencing and directing foreign policy and governments which filters down to the police on the streets. And so it is this culture of psychopathy and this mentality is just all over the place.

So it ends up reaching every possible social level, down to the household, and emotionally, physically, mentally, we have people who will believe these lies just because they're told on the news. They then have a completely backwards view of the world and what's actually going on and that's exactly what psychopaths want. They want people to believe their narrative so that they can fulfill their objectives. It's just a total propaganda technique. Emotionally you see people assimilating these psychopathic values to a greater or lesser extent. We live in this culture that is so psychopathic to the point where the police can kill 111 people in a month and there's no mass uprising over a change in government. How can people just accept that sort of thing? I think that probably many don't accept that sort of thing but then you come up against that manufactured reality where even if there are other people that may see things the way you do, if you watch the news you'll see yourself as a minority view and "I guess I must be crazy for thinking these sorts of things".

Brent: That effect of what your peers think and how it affects individuals, has been documented in a couple of different studies. It shows that if your peer group or even if you perceive your peer group to have a certain set of beliefs, you'll unconsciously switch your beliefs to fit in with them, just on the basis of how our brains are hardwired because when we were tribal back in the day when humans were evolving it was very important to fit into your peer group in order to survive.

We have that intense survival instinct to fit in and to feel the need to fit in and if you're not networking with like-minded individuals or even knowing that they're out there, you're just going to go with the flow and accept what you're told. That serves to minimize your anxiety, because the idea that a cop can just walk up to your house, you're outside on your porch diddling on your phone, a cop walks up, says some words to you and he can just shoot you for whatever he perceives as an offence and then get away with it will make anyone nervous. The only way that somebody outside of that looking in can sort of minimize their anxiety is to justify it. Blame the victim. "Oh they did this" or "they did that" or "they deserved it" and that kind of makes the outside observer feel just a little bit better that "oh maybe it won't happen to me".

Elan: Right. I think fear plays a huge part in this. When you're stuck in the throes of fear you lose your cognitive faculties. You're not able to address things objectively and anything to extricate yourself from a situation, even if it's foisting the blame or deflecting on another, feels safer somehow. "I'm not that person! Sure, I'll go through your scanner" or capitulate in a number of different ways.

Brent: In the actual reality it's making you less safe because you're unaware of the very real probability that harm could come to you or your loved ones. So it's backwards in a way. It makes you feel better but in reality it makes you actually much more likely to be hurt.

Harrison: That's the same dynamic with the false flag scenario, like Brandon was talking about where you have this manufactured enemy and then the PR campaign starts to ramp up the fear among a population, like the members of the so-called coalition force against ISIS. You have these relatively minor terrorist attacks in these various countries in order to ramp up the fear and get the backing for these new legislations that just happen to take away more of the rights and freedoms that were guaranteed before then, but which actually weren't there in the first place. Just like that fear mentality in the events you are talking about, it actually makes you less safe because now you're underneath and subject to a supreme power in your own country that probably doesn't have your best interests at heart.

Brent: They don't like something you're saying online, they don't like something on your Facebook page, they can show up at your house, knock your door through, put you in a hole somewhere and that's it.

Harrison: It only happens to other people.So there's nothing to worry about.

Elan: Well on the subject of this psychopathic fear-inducing paranoia that seems to be spreading in all these different spheres of life and society, Mac Slavo of SHTF Plan had an interesting piece on the subject of how just getting your money out of banks has been a very challenging thing of late and coming on the heels of our discussion last week with Fernando Aguirre, I thought it was very interesting. In his article he states that consumeraffairs.com reported on many customers who'd been shut out of their funds due to suspicious activities reportings, including cases where small business owners were considered potentially money launderers for conducting ordinary business by sending out checks to pay bills and employee salaries. So he's got this interesting quote here from one such lady who has a business and she writes:
I am a sole proprietor with a small business and have my income direct deposited into my chequing account at 5/3. (That was the date.) Three days ago I went into the bank to get money orders and they treated me like I was robbing the bank. After about 40 minutes they gave me the money orders and unknown to me, had placed two half million dollar holds on my accounts with them. I was told it looked like money laundering and was treated like I had done something wrong. They won't give me my money and I can't pay my employees nor my bills. They basically stole my money and I have to fight to get it back.
Again, under the pretense of being a terrorist, a criminal, a money launderer, whatever name or label they conveniently decide to give you, they will withhold your money. This isn't such an isolated case. This is a systemic situation that we're now facing. And the article goes on. It says:
Policies in the United States, many of them established under terrorism laws, already require banks to automate monitoring and reporting of any suspicious transactions, including any transfers above $3,000, large cash withdrawals, all currency exchange activities and dozens of other details about individual accounts. The laws even give banks legal immunity from any harm or false imprisonment that may come from false reporting of suspicious activities. And he goes on to say:
As SHTF reported a few days ago, banks have even been ordered to seize cash from customers and alert police over large cash activities. The Justice Department has ordered bank tellers across America to contact law enforcement if they suspect that your cash withdrawal may have something to do with illicit activity. It doesn't need proof or any sort of red flag indicator. Merely suspicion by the bank teller while processing your transaction is now enough to have you investigated by authorities.
Brent: Yeah, I have a Wells Fargo account and I don't like to keep large sums of money in the bank, just because I don't trust it. When it gets over a certain amount I would make a withdrawal and I just tuck it away. The last time I did it I took out I think about $5,000 and I just noticed the teller very casually "Oh, you going on vacation or are you buying a car?" And I just made something up like I was going to buy a motorcycle or I was doing some home improvements. I can't remember what I said exactly. But you just kind of casually have to engage in that sort of strategic dance because you know that they're not just happily asking those questions just because they're curious about your situation. For them, they have to give you that money and they're like "Oh why does this guy want a whole bunch of money? What's he going to do with that?"

Elan: Well it's like "See something, say something". You had in eastern Germany in the 60s, the 70s and the 80s until the Berlin wall came down, you had one in every 50 people reporting to the Stasi on suspicious activities. This creates a culture and climate of fear and paranoia and it's just another way they're getting to us.

Harrison: Alright. I think that's it for today. We're running up on the end of our second hour. So thank you again to Brandon. Check out his website nonalignedmedia.com. It's been great. Thanks again to our co-hosts here, William, Brent, Elan. And thank you for myself.

Elan: Thank you Harrison.

Brent: Same here.

Harrison: So everyone take care and we will see you next week.