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This week on 'Behind the Headlines', we're interviewing former U.S. intelligence officer ‌Scott Rickard. Rickard is a linguist and veteran of the communications technology and national security industries. For three decades, he worked with national security and international service providers in Signals Intelligence (SIGINT), Communications Security (COMSEC), and Open Source Intelligence (OSINT), advising a number of governments and intelligence agencies on analyzing and prioritizing their intelligence collection efforts.

Rickard continues to monitor, corroborate, and communicate fact-based research and analysis of the international business environment, emerging technologies, and geopolitical developments. In recent years, he has been an outspoken critic of US foreign policy and blanket public surveillance, and has made a number of appearances on RT, Sputnik and PressTV.

Join us this Sunday 22 November 2015, from 2-4pm EST / 8-10pm CET for an insider's perspective on mass surveillance, the non-stop terror attacks, the stand-off between the U.S. and Russia, and more.

Running Time: 02:13:00

Download: MP3


Here's the transcript of the show:

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

Harrison: Hi guys.

Niall: Hi everyone.

Joe: We also have Jason Martin in the studio this week.

Jason: Hey! What's going on people?

Joe: He's here to...

Jason: Make a complete fool of myself.

Joe: No, hopefully not.

Jason: In front of tens of people. [Laughing]

Joe: In front of tens of thousands of people. [Applause] So, this week we are hopefully going to be talking to Scott Rickard. Scott is a former US intelligence officer, a linguist and veteran of the communication technology/national security industries. For three decades Scott worked with national security and international service providers in SIGINT or Signals Intelligence Communications Security and Open Source Intelligence, advising a number of governments' intelligence agencies and analyzing and prioritizing their intelligence collection efforts.

Scott continues to monitor, corroborate and communicate fact-based research and analysis of the international business environment and emerging technologies and geopolitical development. In recent years he has been an outspoken critic of US foreign policy and blanket public surveillance and has made a number of appearances on RT, Sputnik and Press TV.

Instead of beating around the bush, we are going to go ahead and try to call Scott right now.

Scott:: Good afternoon, this is Scott.

Joe: Hi Scott, this is Joe.

Scott:: Hey! Joe Quinn. How you doing sir?

Joe: Yeah, how are you? Nice to meet you, I suppose.

Scott:: Yes, likewise.

Joe: We just started the show and we more or less gave a little intro.

Scott:: Okay.

Joe: Your brief bio that we put up.

Scott:: Oh, thank you.

Joe: With me, are Harrison, Niall and Jason.

Jason: Hello.

Niall: Good to have you here Scott.

Scott:: Okay.

Joe: So, we're a bit of a team here.

Scott:: Thank you, for having me on the show.

Joe: It's great to have you on. I personally have seen you around with the kind of things that I've been looking up for the past 10 years or so; the geopolitical situation and terrorism and the "war on terror" all that kind of stuff. I've seen you quite a long time ago I think, appearing in different places. We just mentioned them in our blurb about you, which you've been on RT, Sputnik and Press TV...

Scott:: Yes.

Joe: ...talking about what's going on in the world. We give a little bit of your background in the intelligence community specifically. In the blurb for you, we don't have in your bio, a reference to the NSA.

Scott:: To give you a background, I started out in the air force as an Arabic and Korean linguist. I flew in the back of the RC135. It was an intelligence collection platform. I also worked with the downlink signal collection platform where they used the U2 program to do signals intelligence. This was prior to the TS special satellite technology that they use today. And then throughout that I worked in Asia, Europe and the Middle East and then I came back to the states and then I worked at the NSA for about a year-and-a-half. Then I came down to work at NASA at Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral doing a bunch of work with advanced network systems and computer systems. After that I was doing a whole bunch of consulting and did some start up companies, and now I'm actually moving into another start up company here at the end of the year. Are you familiar with Lavabit?

Joe: Uh-huh.

Scott:: One of my colleagues acquired a Lavabit from the founders and he's a major shareholder in the company now and we're going to try to put something together that will be a sustainable commercial product that people can have protective Unix systems from the government.

Jason: So Lavabit is what? Encryption or?

Scott:: Yeah, it's what Edward Snowden was using when he was communicating with his group of people and the government was going after the Lavabit servers and they basically just said, "No" and shut down the services.

Niall: So, that's where I've heard it.

Scott:: Yeah, you might have heard of it before.

Joe: It's interesting that you mention Lavabit and encryption because in the aftermath of these Paris terror attacks last weekend, one of the things the French government, and I think the US lawmakers have jumped on as well, saying that we need to do away with encryption, to stop allowing ordinary people to encrypt their information.

Scott:: Right.

Joe: And this despite the fact that the so-called terrorists didn't use any encryption. There was no encrypted information that the terrorists were using.

Niall: Yeah. They were sending text messages to each other.

Joe: On Facebook, yeah.

Scott:: Sure. I looked at a lot of the information I could find. I imagine you guys are a lot closer. Does everyone call out of Paris as well?

Joe: Yeah.

Scott:: Okay, so you guys are a lot closer to it, obviously being there and keeping a much closer eye on it. But the information I've been able to get has really shown that these individuals obviously were European, so certainly sympathetic to the fight against imperialism. The targets were not random. These were specific targets. The concert hall was specifically targeting Israel and their ownership of that venue as well as the individuals that are very outspoken against things like the boycott and divestment type of efforts.

One of the band members actually used some foul language in reference to Roger Waters, so these particular individuals, we would consider them sort of Nazi youth, not that I'm damning the German people, but certainly even within the American military I refer to a lot of my colleagues as Nazi youth because they're taking their jobs a bit too seriously.

So, that happens and certainly within all of our respective societies and governments we have extreme individuals. When you're trying to combat that and you've lost your father, your mother or your brothers or sisters, you certainly have a different agenda. I'm not sympathizing with the attacks on Paris, but I understand why they're frustrated and certainly understand that they may even have been duped into it. I don't have any particular details to back that up, but certainly the western intelligence services have been doing that for quite some time. They did it in Vietnam with Operation Phoenix. They certainly did it in Europe under Operation Gladio. They've done it in South America, Operation Condor. They did it in Iran, Operation Ajax.

And certainly all these colour revolutions don't look very good on the west as well; the rose revolution, the orange revolution and so on. So there are just way too many incidences that the west has overpowered other countries. I think the program was Police State. I would call it more of a terrorist state because of the amount of governments that have been overthrown and certainly received the wrath of western economic and military power. Like I said, I don't sympathize. My condolences go out to the people that have lost their lives, but it is a war that they will never win. When you're out killing other peoples' families, there are going to be people that want revenge and there are going to be people that are willing to do anything to make a statement and they're willing to lose their lives for it, just as much as the west is brainwashed and willing to lose their lives for the economic and military dominance that their governments really overlay.

Look what's happened to Africa over the last few centuries with the European dominance of Africa. I said this actually yesterday to one of the guys that I was interviewing yesterday from K2 Intelligence. He was talking and I said, "Well look at Greece." There's a great example. If Greece were not Caucasian people, they would be being treated far worse and they still have to beg for $2 billion, which is per capita - there are only 10 million people in Greece - it's 30 times smaller than the US, but that's only $60 billion. But yet we gave ourselves almost $400 billion dollars a couple of weeks ago and there were no questions asked.

So, we basically gave ourselves almost seven times what the Greeks are begging for per capita, and the Greeks still have to give their firstborn child to get that. So, it's a very strange situation. And god forbid, that they weren't a Caucasian society because then they would be in very dire straits.

Joe: Yeah. Scott, I just wanted to go back a little bit because I think you kind of jumped the gun there a little bit. I want to talk a little bit about your background and your history. You had a government job, right?

Scott:: Sure.

Joe: Obviously there was no future in that for you because you're no longer in it, right? But I wanted to ask you, given what you speak about today, was there anything in your experience in the past working within the US intelligence community, did something that happened or that you saw, that galvanized you to either get out or send you on the kind of path you've been on since then? Or have you always been a "conspiracy theorist" as CNN once called you?

Scott:: Yeah. Well they certainly didn't do their research. Brian Selter didn't even know my name. And to be up against Liz Wahl, that's not much of a formidable opponent.

Joe: No, exactly.

Scott:: My father was military and I grew up in the military as a child. He was very loyal. The US society is very well trained to be loyal. Our school systems were actually based on depression. Obviously our education as based on British education so we all lived and breathed the Encyclopedia Britannica. Let's be clear. That's not the Encyclopedia America. We were all very well trained and very well brainwashed, very much like other countries with their stilt or their spin on history.

There wasn't a whole lot of place to question it when I was a child and certainly when my father was a child. Even though he had incredibly good jobs in the military and post-military, he obviously didn't have the kind of access to information that we have today. I don't know if you guys remember having to search through Dewey decimal systems and track down books.

Niall: Yup.

Scott:: I don't know if you did, but we all believed what was in Encyclopedia Britannica was true when in fact it turns out a lot of that stuff was very untrue. So as I got older and started to work in the intelligence community I could see in my early 20s that, "Hey, wait a second. That's not what happened! Why are they saying that in the news? That's strange that they would lie about that." Then the deal breaker for me was when I was working in the NSA, the whole Iran Contra scandal came out. There was incontrovertible evidence in the intelligence community of the involvement of not just the executive branch of government but certainly the intelligence community, as well as military and far more than what they revealed - and certainly in contrast to what they revealed - in the hearings.

So, we gathered up classified information and sent it down to the Justice Department and the Justice Department did nothing with it, rather than going to the news or anything like that. So what it proved to me is that there is no accountability. They hide behind the veil of national security when in fact it's really national embarrassment or national corruption.

So, you have a group of individuals who do know the truth, but it's almost like being in the mob. You don't want to rat on your boss. Well first of all, you'll lose your seniority. Secondly, you'll probably lose your retirement. And thirdly, there are a lot of people who believe that the ends justify the means. There was that, "no matter how much bad is being done, whatever good happens is worth the bad". It's an interesting dynamic. And then you certainly have people who are pushing agendas, working for different policy influencers; organizations like AIPAC, those types of organizations.

Those people have very good connections within the military and intelligence communities and governments as well. There have been a lot of people in the state department that were handling the Middle East affairs, were mostly extreme pro-Israel Zionists and predominantly of the Jewish faith. So they have taken an effort to hire in within that particular division, individuals that would have a like-minded agenda for the state department, obviously carrying the torch for that type of ideology, individuals like Hilary Clinton and such.

So, I started to see that kind of thing in the '80s during that period and I was only in my mid-20s and I decided that this was not for me. This is illegal. It's not what I thought it would be and it certainly far (audio blank) ... there was no avenue at the time. I'd have to start my own radio network or newspaper, and I also would have been worried at that point about anything that I knew at that time because it was classified information. I could go to jail. Well lo and behold, the technology community - I don't know if you guys remember Gofer and Archie and things like that back in the '80s. They were predecessors to the internet.

Joe: Okay, we're back. Sorry about that folks. I'm going to try and get Scott back. Carry on Harrison.

Harrison: From the perspective of intelligence agencies, they wouldn't want any sort of whistleblower. From my childhood, looking back on the way I was taught about the wars, like World War II, how important it was to keep information secret and have these spy networks, it made sense at the time. When you think about it, in a war environment you want to have secrets and you want to be able to keep them. Of course that can even apply on other levels with any kind of administration of a country. You've got secrets that you want to keep and it might even be important to keep from other countries or maybe even from people within the country. But that's a very slippery slope I think, when you get to what kind of stuff is kept secret. The question then becomes what is something that should be revealed and that shouldn't be kept secret? And then how do you go about that when you have this entire establishment, this intelligence community that is designed to keep those things secret.

Jason: You have kind of hit on the problem there because the justification for keeping secrets is to keep secrets from your enemy. But if you're keeping secrets from your own population, then what does that make them; your enemy. It's the way the intelligence communities seem to treat the people of America, as the enemy. And in a certain sense they are because if they were to find out half the things that people like the NSA and the CIA are keeping secret, well then those people wouldn't be in power anymore, theoretically. From down the line of the theory of democracy, eventually they would be out of power, they would lose support and they are the enemy.

Niall: I think George Bush Sr. said to someone at some point, "Marty - or whatever the journalist's name was -, if the American people knew half the things we've done, they'd run us out of town tomorrow."

Joe: Alright, I think we have Scott back. Are you there Scott?

Scott:: Yeah. Sorry about that.

Joe: I think it was our fault or rather Blog Talk Radio's fault. But I think we should be good to go now. Anyway, there was a question from Niall just before you were cut off there.

Niall: You're working in Intel and a lot of guys get out, or try to, as whistleblowers and it often ends up bringing a ton of trouble on their heads. You didn't go that route, right? You just got out and then became a consultant and then you've appeared as a critic on current events. I suppose my question is; were you ever hounded by the powers that be in the US for speaking out?

Scott:: No, no. I think what happened with me is that I'd left in the late '80s and I worked in a government job until the mid-'90s, but it was more along the lines of the technology infrastructure side of what they were deploying for different emerging technologies throughout the eastern space missile command. So, when I left there I was working more in commercial industry and as I was saying before I got cut off, there was really no avenue to have these kinds of global discussions and sharing information very freely. But with the advent of the real internet networking and list serves and those types of things as they came out, I was using most of it for my work to advance the technology side.

But at the same time I developed a lot of real information gathering and analysis capabilities. Then as the information became more and more useful, obviously the open source intelligence availability just became like, a Pandora's Box. There was just so much information that was very high quality that people weren't able to get before. As one of the people that was speaking earlier as I was waiting to come back on said, now this information that they didn't want you to know, people know and certainly they're not doing a lot about it, but there are more and more people that are becoming aware of the fact that there are shadow government type activities going on that are driving foreign policy above and beyond anything that even the politicians understand.

Most of the politicians are more or less puppets. They've been given those roles because of their obedience and not their dissident values, other than individuals maybe like Jeremy Corbin who has risen to the top of the Labour Party in England. But outside of individuals like him the majority of others are very much yes-men to the system.

So, did I at one point see an opportunity to communicate with more people? Yes! I saw there was a great place to share information and I started seeing individuals that were in similar roles like me talking to each other and sharing current events and affairs. But as some of my colleagues that still work obviously have to avoid me like the plague because they all have security clearances, but at the same time, they privately talk with me and agree with what I'm saying, but they can't go public with it because they'll lose their security clearance.

And then you also have individuals who actually believe in what they're doing, sadly and they think that they're doing the right thing by committing these crimes around the world and support them. So, there are a lot of individuals who are more than happy to disagree with what the government is saying but not a lot of people are willing to do anything about it. One of my friends who was in the embassy in Tehran in the '70s who understands what the Americans were doing there, subverting the Iranian government alongside the Shah, he's one of the guys that introduced me to Press TV and gave me an opportunity to do some international news reports.

At the time I was writing articles and stuff like that and blogging and putting in wherever I could but obviously that's a needle in the haystack for the internet community. Unfortunately western media doesn't let opposition discussions like we're having now on any time of mainstream networks. You're not going to see these kinds of conversations on Fox or CNN or BBC or any of them and if you do they're very short shows and they're not given any mainstream nightly news type coverage.

On your network, SOTT, I see a lot of it out there. I was lucky enough to be on the Paranoid Network's show with Clyde Lewis last week and Clyde Lewis does Ground Zero. I don't know if you've heard of his program, but it's a nationwide show. And then there's also Jack Blood in the United States. He's got some Terrestrial Base radio networks that he goes on as well. So, there are smaller radio networks that are getting the word out, but unfortunately the majority of Americans aren't listening to those networks. They're listening to their televisions.

Niall: Indeed. Still.

Scott:: Yeah, so they're very misinformed and they have a polar effect, depending on what stations they watch because the way the political parties in the news is lined up, it's basically lined up to make us against each other in a two-party system. And most people believe that the two-party system is real and they spend their lives disliking the other party. That's by design actually. They designed the political infrastructure. That was the same thing that the lords did to the peasants. It's also an interrogation methodology that they use. You have the good cop - bad cop type methodology. Certainly some people like that bad cop methodology. And then certainly the good cop which would really be the liberal and conservative type of approaches.

Most governments are set up that way anyway because they've followed the royalty methodology in western cultures. It's like the Hegelian dialectic type sort of description that Hegel made in the 1800s.

Joe: Yeah. I suppose the powers that be in the US and elsewhere would say that they're giving the people what they want. To a certain extent I kind of agree with them in that sense that the majority of people, I'd say, in the US are not inclined to want to dig into things and find out the truth for themselves. They want the truth to be given to them by an authority. The fact you and us and a lot of other people do their own research and set up or have become a part of this alternative media, that pathway is theoretically open to just about everybody else on the planet but so many of them don't take it because there's some kind of a difference there between those two groups of people.

Scott:: I think part of it is it goes against the narrative that they thought was true. They find it unbelievable.

Joe: Right, hard to go there.

Scott:: Hard to take. It's hard for me to take.

Joe: Exactly.

Scott:: And I understand that. They believe what they've been told.

Harrison: Scott, you gave an example of when you were working in intelligence you said one of the things that got to you was seeing something on the news and saying to yourself, "That didn't happen". Was that based on information that you had personal knowledge of, from intelligence, that you then saw on the news being presented in a way that wasn't true?

Scott:: Oh absolutely! This is public knowledge now, but it was an absolute fact that they were providing the mustard gases and different types of chemical warfare to Saddam Hussein that he was using against Kurds and Iranians. Certainly that wasn't the message that they were giving in the American news and that was a war that we certainly used him as a proxy mercenary to destroy not only his country but Iran. Both countries suffered dearly for that. There were over a trillion dollars lost and over almost 500,000 or 600,000 people lost their lives on both sides. It was one of the longest wars at the time before the Afghan War. I think it lasted 8 or 10 years.

That's a pretty serious event that the Americans initiated but it was never portrayed that way and certainly I was very close to that. I understood that with a lot of detail when I worked at the agency. There's certainly the involvement of Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. That was going on at the same time. His history wasn't portrayed very clearly when he was made the bogeyman in the news as well. It's very strange the way that scenarios are portrayed.

Libya's a great example today. I was at a meeting in Washington, DC with all the heads of intelligence. It was an intelligence summit at the convention centre in Washington, DC and pretty much everybody was there, from the director of the CIA, director of national intelligence, former and current Homeland Security Intelligence agencies directors were all there. Some of them would get whisked out right away but other ones would actually stick around and talk and I had the opportunity to talk to several of them and say that I was disappointed in the fact that they were dumbly being disingenuous in the news, even during the conflicts. So, they were not being honest with the attendees.

What people don't understand is in the intelligence community, just because you work there, it's very siloed. It's very compartmentalized. So, people that are working on a specific project that aren't hungry for news and hungry for all the pieces fit together, just because they're working for the intelligence community doesn't make them very knowledgeable about the entire thing. So, these individuals go to these meetings and even within these high-profile, very well-attended meetings and conference, they're still maintaining the rhetoric that is incredibly misleading.
So, I go and I approach the individuals that are talking and I talk to them about it and I give them some details of who I am and they don't argue. They don't try to substantiate why they were up there and misleading the crowd. And I tell them I'm very disappointed. This is what we've been doing. "We've been supporting these individuals in Syria and Libya." You can look up Mahdi al-Harati in Libya. He's been working with the CIA for 20 years. He ran forces for us in there. There's a very serious amount of highly incontrovertible evidence of what a huge hand we've played in creating this mess." And there's no argument. They look at me like they've just been hit by a Mack truck and they're not trying to substantiate what they just told the entire crowd.

So it's very strange. It's very strange. It's almost as if you're talking to a zombie.

Joe: Yeah, you can say that again. It's funny you mention that Mahdi al-Harati guy. He's the guy who lost the CIA 200 grand a couple of years ago there in Libya.

Niall: In Dublin.

Joe: Yeah.

Scott:: His wife was robbed. She had €200,000 in the house and she was robbed and she went to the police. They said, "Well how did you come up with €500 notes and 200 grand?" She said, "Oh, well the American intelligence gave it to my husband to run military forces in Libya." The next day he's catching a flight home because he's been outed.

Joe: Exactly. It's just a farce at that point.

Scott:: He was on the Mavi Marmara as well.

Joe: Right, strange bedfellows.

Niall: With a Turkish connection I wonder.

Scott:: Well no, he's been working with American and Turkish intelligence for 20 years so he's obviously an asset. And he also helped push back some of the mercenaries who got out of hand in Libya and went into Mali and were causing trouble at French uranium mines. So the French and the Americans went and destroyed the remainder of their uncontrollable mercenaries that were pillaging Libya and spilling over into Mali. Then he went about his way to go to Syria and now he's actually the mayor of Tripoli. So, how about that? [Laughter]
Well done Mr. Harati!

Joe: Yeah, clear perfidy, fast track, clear path.

Jason: Considering the fact that he was outed by his own wife...

Scott:: She was probably just worried she lost 300 grand in Euros.

Niall: It didn't put a dent in his career. He got a heck of a job from it. He went right back into Libya.

Scott:: He was in Syria and then he went to Mali, then he went back to Syria and then he went back to Libya. He's been busy, and paid very handsomely.

Niall: It's a farce.

Scott:: It is a big farce.

Niall: It's part of the farce. What's farcical about so much of this is that these aren't secrets. So, for example, there's a public story about this one guy whose then held up in the same newspaper or maybe in a story by the same journalist not long after, as a leader of rebels in Libya. There's nothing secret about it in that respect. It's there for everyone to know and everyone to see and yet tens of thousand of people working in Intel in some form or another; just pretend they didn't see that? How does that work?

Scott:: Well, like I said earlier, these are individuals who have spent their entire lives on the government payroll and now the young guys don't know any better. The guys in their 20s are just turning knobs. But the guys in their 40s and 50s are guys that understood that they turned knobs and didn't know what they were doing when they were younger. It's like being the mob, "I'm made. I'm not going to rat on my boss. I'm just going to finish it out and get my retirement and then I won't have to do this anymore." There are a lot of individuals like that. And then unfortunately there are other individuals who go, "I don't care. I'll be happy the day that every Arab is dead" or "every Asian is dead", whoever the enemy is they've been trained to hate. They're very well-trained drones who believe that Jesus or god or the good that they're doing is getting rid of the evil in the world. They've had very good training in order to have that kind of conviction.

Joe: Scott, just reading through your bio here it says that you worked for national security and intelligence service providers and signals intelligence communication security and open source intelligence. This ISIS terrorist group seems to use social media and have their own websites. They have their own publications. They upload videos, etc. etc., apparently with impunity.

Scott:: Let's talk about that. So, let's look at a couple of organizations. There's Ritz Katz. She runs a thing called SITE Intelligence and what they do is magically find all of these incredible al-Qaeda videos and release them or videos of bin Laden and release them. Let's be clear that Rita Katz was a former Israeli military and intelligence. Her father was assassinated by Saddam Hussein. She left the country and migrated out of Iraq into Israel and started her career in combating what she would probably consider an Arab culture. So, she's very anti-Arab. She's very well-connected to the intelligence community somehow.

And there are a myriad of groups like that. There's Intel Centre. It's a protégé of Donald Rumsfeld and there are all these little offshoots. There are also big ones like Ricky Strat and Stratfor and those types that people are more familiar with. But there's one that actually came out in the news this week, CloudFair got a little bit of notoriety this week from Anonymous of all places, because of their involvement in managing websites for ISIS. Well it turns out, when I went to go look at the actual management and founders of CloudFair, they're a bunch of former Israeli intelligence guys and guys who were associated with Israeli military intelligence and Zionist ideology. And I'm like, "Well what are we doing with ISIS web managers that are Israeli working in California in a start-up? That seems quite suspicious."

So, let's be clear that a lot of these Twitter accounts that are being destroyed and a lot of these websites that are being identified may not be being run by who we think they are. And you need to start looking at the actual forensics of the network traffic and the individuals that are administering and adding to these websites and the communications to get those changes done, as well as the financing of these particular operations. An individual I met, also in social networking, Scott Bennett actually warned the French intelligence six months ago to do the right research on the financing of these terrorist organizations in order to prevent them. I think it was just yesterday or the day before, Putin put out a committee to actually finally track down the financing of these mercenary and terrorist organizations.

I think what you'll find is there's thousands, if not tens of thousands - Scott Bennett said there was at least 15,000 - of these particular accounts that are not coming out of the Middle East. They're not coming out of Arab countries. They're coming out of western-based countries and they're coming out of European and other obviously Middle Eastern and different financial organizations that certainly shouldn't be involved in these.
I think what you would find if this information was made readily available, is that it would tie it right back into organizations that are subverting national security in the United States and the European Union and elsewhere. And they're subverting it in such a way that they may be encouraging these individuals to do what they're doing and they may be, in a very direct or indirect way, financing these individuals and providing these individuals access to the weaponry and the equipment that they need in order to accomplish these tasks, that it further emboldens the military industrial complex and the agenda of their political ideology.

Like I said earlier, with the dissidents like Jeremy Corbin and others coming up within the French government and other European governments, you see this is one way in order for them to diffuse their success.

Joe: Yeah. What you're talking about seems to point to some level of a two-tier system or a parallel government even for security forces and intelligence agencies because if on the one hand there are people who are effectively financing, promoting and even dispersing terrorist literature onto the web and at the same time these people in the NSA and other intel agencies are supposedly trying to find out where they are, maybe some people in the NSA and different western intelligence agencies need to look at the cubicle next to them to find the source of some of the ISIS propaganda?

Scott:: Well, here's what happens. You have limited resources and you have to start with just a tsunami of information people could go through. And people are set with projects. So the directors and the management will control the resources. Obviously every once in a while you get an individual who bucks the system and looks at things and goes down rabbit holes that they didn't want them to go down. And those individuals certainly won't see very many promotions if they try to make waves with the kind of things they find.

So, I think what you have - as I mentioned earlier on the program - is that the state department is incredibly influenced by individuals who are very specific in their agenda, therefore extreme pro-Israel, extreme Zionism; organizations like AIPAC and England - I can't remember the name of theirs, but the equivalent there. And also in Australia, but certainly within the Five Eyes governments, there's a heavy influence of these types of political ideologies.

And when you look at those influences, they just don't stop at lobbying. They have individuals who work in the state department, who work at those representative offices, who work within the intelligence community, who work within the lobbying organizations that surround AIPAC. There's literally hundreds of these organizations that are just incredibly well networked, not only within the intelligence community, but also within the military, within the Pentagon and respective governments through the Five Eyes relationships because these are longstanding relationships that have gone on for generations because of the influence within at least the American and the British government, stand over 100 years. So, you're talking about a minimum of three to four generations of individuals who have developed relationships.

So, once you start untying and unravelling that, then you can start to answer the questions of, "Okay, how deep does this go? How many people are involved in this? And why is it that the average guy who grows up in the middle of Kansas and comes into the intelligence community and says, 'Whoa! I had no idea this was going on.' And then he goes, 'Nothing I can do. I'm just going to finish out my career.'" So, obviously it seems too big of a nut to crack for most people.

Joe: Right. Right, I can imagine, yeah.

Harrison: Scott, back on this ISIS topic - correct me if I'm wrong - but it seems to me from what you're saying that first of all it should be pretty easy to be able to find out where all these websites and Twitter accounts are coming from, but that at least in the western intelligence agencies, the resources aren't made available in order for the people actually doing the intel work to find it out. Is that correct?

Scott:: That is probably not true. If I said that, I said that wrong. I would say that there are resources to look into those types of internet activities and subpoena that type of information. Let's say for example somebody wanted to do their job at the NSA but did not know about CloudFair. They may have or they may not, but let's say they did not know about CloudFair. Then later on they can subpoena CloudFair's information and say, "Look, we believe that you guys are managing these networks. What the hell's going on here?" Now the fact that they were allowed to operate if they knew they were going on and there's not any kind of a honey pot-type of arrangement - it might have been a honey-pot arrangement with the Israeli intelligence when we think about, "go ahead and try and set this up and try to work with all the organizations you can", or whether or not it was set up as a flypaper type environment of, "Set this up and see if you can get any takers", basically entrapping individuals alongside of Israeli intelligence.

So, Israeli intelligence could have been cooperating with the NSA to create these types of environments. I'm not sure which it's going to be but I don't want neither because if you're going to try to create terrorists, that is not the effect of what my government is supposed to be set up to do and certainly you want to minimize the amount of work that's being made to do that. The problem is that it's such a lucrative business and it's so misunderstood by the political and even the technical and intelligence infrastructure that it's a free-for-all, we're stealing from the government. It reminds me of when I was a child and we had the $500 hammer and the $2,000 toilet seat. These are the kinds of things that happen with government. You can sell ice to Eskimos and sand to Arabs. It's not a legitimate business but yet it still gets set up and it's given massive amounts of importance because of the incredible Powerpoint presentations that these numbskulls have sat through.

Joe: Yeah, you mention that idea of entrapment of Intel agencies, falling back on that explanation when it comes out that they've been associating vicariously with terrorist, protecting them, as has been the case on many occasions, in the UK in particular and France and in the US. When someone stumbles across that, the plausible narrative is, "Oh well, we're protecting this known Muslim terrorist and in order to stop him or keep an eye on what he's doing and also to see who else he's connected with so we can infiltrate a larger network".

That's the plausible narrative that they come out with all the time and I think that works on a lot of people. It works on intelligence agencies. It works on politicians. But when you look at the track record of these people, they go further than that. They don't just keep an eye on these kinds of people, very often they're actually facilitating them in carrying out terror attacks. But even then they say, "Well we did that because we wanted to know how they carry out terror attacks" or something stupid like that. Their narrative has become increasing ridiculous as they go on.

Scott:: Yeah, I totally agree. It's the wrong way to go about it. You have to be one step ahead rather than leading the terrorists with carrots. You need to be second-guessing their objectives. So, it's the wrong tactic, it's the wrong strategy. They've shifted the mentality to think that they could use technology to conduct the jobs when the real human intelligence and the real infiltration and the real linguistics skills that are required, are far more effective and they've gone away from that. There's a real loss in skill sets that used to exist. Not everybody uses the internet and certainly they've made Snowden the scapegoat, but since Snowden went this international route, people are more careful.

Well, the smart guy was more careful to begin with anyway and the dumb guy is always easier to catch. They've also made proxies out of individuals and it's been very clear, when you look at the operations I mentioned earlier, Gladio, Phoenix and Condor and such. So, there's no doubt that there are objectives out there that are trapping them and making them do bad things in order to create the kind of chaos, not only within countries that we're at war with, but certainly within our own countries, like what the Germans did when they burned down the Reichstag. So, there's a serious type of societal result that they're looking for from the say the society's going to react and when they get that reaction then it opens up a new strategy that they were trying to accomplish.

One of the best examples I've used with that was Abdulmutallab who was called the underwear bomber or the Christmas bomber. He flew the flight between Amsterdam and Detroit and had a very small device in his underwear that was never designed to actually blow up a plane. It was designed to actually fail and the reason it was designed to fail was because they were trying to sell these body scanners to the airports and to try to set up these types of security infrastructures as a business. In fact the Department of Homeland Security was headed by Michael Chertoff who was trying to sell these pro-vision scanners.

Well they were very unsuccessful until after the underwear bomber. And it turns out that underwear bomber's father was one of the largest arms dealers and richest guys in Nigeria. By the way there were only a couple of oil fields in Nigeria in the early '90s until Dick Cheney came in with Halliburton and now there's about six or seven hundred oil fields in Nigeria and the United States gets 2 million barrels a day, 10% of their requirements on their imports for their usage a day, from Nigeria alone.

So, this is a country that had absolute ties to American industry, intelligence and military and the highest level of individuals there that we were dealing arms with, his son who was very clear with him on the phone out of England and out of Dubai, that he was very disappointed in what his country had become under the western developments there. And when he went to Yemen, it's my belief he was not welcomed by al-Qaeda and yet he was welcomed by individuals that we'd had there for quite some time, had infiltrated al-Qaeda, and they set this poor kid up and made him think that he was actually a real terrorist that was really going to blow the plane when in fact it was designed to fail in order to create a different objective.
That's my take and there's absolutely no way they did not know this guy was in Yemen. There's no way that he could have gotten out of Dubai and into Yemen and planned that airport ... (inaudible)

Niall: Yeah indeed. And then he's met by a guy in a suit at Schiphol Airport with no ticket and no passport.

Joe: And he gets onto the plane.

Scott:: And he gets through every single security checkpoint.

Niall: Sixteen years old.

Scott:: Yeah. And there was also a gentleman who's a lawyer who wanted to speak on behalf of Mutallab's innocence and they wouldn't allow him to testify and he witnessed this individual of Indian descent and he was speaking with an American accent and he was helping Abdulmutallab through the airport. Let's be clear here. The airport security video footage was being run by Israeli intelligence security, the security company that manages the airport video surveillance systems in Schiphol and this guy had to walk through the airport and there are multiple, multiple images of this guy in the suit in Schiphol airport, but not one time have we seen that on international news, looking to manhunt this guy as basically public enemy number one. That's what made me the most suspicious. I'm glad you reminded me of that.

Niall: Scott mentioned the Five Eyes. I think this was the term that came up via Snowden leaks; the Five Eyes being the US, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

Scott:: Right.

Niall: Who...

Scott:: All British colonies.

Niall: British colonies forming the British Commonwealth. You can see why there's a connection and how the network sort of developed over time, working as one in effect. My question though concerns other countries. I can see how somebody gets into intelligence or any form of official position in the US or one of these other countries in the Five Eyes and turns a blind eye or says, "Well, it's my career now. I don't want to rat out the mob boss". But how does a German respond in the BND (Bundesnachrichtendienst-German Intelligence Services) when it's clear and public that US intelligence is spying on...

Joe: Everyone.

Niall: ...every one of them and against their own interests in sabotaging the industrial interests of Germany and then participates in hushing it up?

Scott:: Let's be clear here, it's a David versus Goliath type of operation. Certainly the BND is very tiny compared to NSA and CIA and their budget. And the BND also has a very close relationship with American military intelligence and intelligence between Germany. A lot of the work that was being done in post-World War II and certainly throughout the '70s, '80s, '90s and even today, you have these individuals cooperating with their common initiatives.

Now these common initiatives I would believe are changing now that people are becoming more educated. I think what we understood in the'80s versus what we understand today. When you look at the types of activities that are becoming more clear to individuals around the colour revolutions and how NATO has expanded and the types of initiatives the west has taken to vilify and take down Russia, Iran and other countries that aren't participatory in the financial infrastructure that's run by the Five Eyes, let's be clear that the Five Eyes and their European partners are the founders and the supporters of the 250 year old financial system that rules the world. They also have ruled the high seas for 500 years and the only one that has probably gotten the short end of the yardstick is probably Spain because certainly the French have been alongside the British for quite some time.

So, I would say Spain and Russia have received I would say, the main focus of modern times. I'm talking about the Spanish-American War, the take down of the Spanish empire by the French, the British and the Americans. So, outside of that, Russia's been taken down at least three times in the last century, during World War I, World War II and certainly the economic destruction that the west continues to attempt, but was very successful during the drunken Yeltsin years. There was a lot of pilfering going on in Russia. A lot of Americans believed that Russia's economy failed because of the Afghan war when in fact it was more the western economic warfare that was being conducted against Russian economics as it became more, "capitalized".

I look at Russia as one of the most resilient nations that has resisted the alliance of the NATO allies, but also includes the Five Eyes, because that's where Germany really lays. Germany lies at the heart of NATO and it is a very cooperative part in its war crimes although a lot of the people are tired in Germany of supporting the European Union because they're one of the few economic powerhouses of the European Union, but the government is very loyal based upon the individuals that have been put in place in those positions of power, to rule over the German people.
So, when it comes to the intelligence community and the BND, the BND is at the mercy of the political infrastructure that controls that nation.

Joe: Do you think there's an aspect of blackmail? Is that in your experience or anything you've seen or heard, from the US side in terms of signals intelligence or communications intelligence? Is blackmail part of nibbling foreign governments?

Scott:: Sure. Absolutely! Not just foreign governments but individuals; getting people to do things. If somebody who has something to hide and they're doing something that they probably shouldn't be doing - let's say molesting children and unfortunately that's probably the worst case scenario, but there's also taking money on the side, being a corrupt politician - obviously you'd rather be more cooperative than be incarcerated. So, when you have an individual who is potentially going to be in big trouble for something that they might have done, or you may be able to entice them, say, "Look, I've got a way that we could make half a million dollars for you if you're interested". And then once they're interested they say, "Oh, and by the way, I also need you to do this". And now they're like, "Oh crap! You've already pulled me into this illegal scenario and now you're asking me to do something that might jeopardize the sovereignty of my nation" or "now you're asking me to spy on my own people. It seems like you've already got me because you've got dirt on me now."

And it can even be unspoken. Drug abuse is one of them. People are very loyal to their drug and I guess community friends. I'll tell you a funny story about Noriega. One of my friends was stationed in Panama at the time of Noriega. He, as a colonel in the air force, was stationed in Zaragoza, Spain after he was in Panama and he got a phone call from Noriega and he said, "I need you to come here right now." He said, "Hey, I'm in the air force. I can't just jump on a plane. I've got to take leave. I've got to do this." He says, "No, no, I'm contacting the Pentagon. I need you to come right away." So, he gets there, he flies in to the air base there.

The Americans had taken over a very large, nice hotel near the runway because their base just kept expanding. Noriega was in the hotel with about 50 prostitutes and alcohol and drugs and he goes, "Well what did you need me here for?" And he goes, "I just wanted to party with you, haven't seen you in awhile."

Niall: My god!

Scott:: So, that's the relationship that you have. And Noriega was a great money launderer and drug dealer alongside the CIA and the American infrastructure coming out of Peru, Libya and Columbia. There was millions of dollars being made every day in the cocaine trade, probably somewhere in the neighbourhood of about $150 to $200 million a day in profits. So, that's a huge business and the covert operations that that was funding. That was part of the whole Iran Contra thing. When you're looking at that amount of financing, you don't have to go to Congress and ask for any money and you certainly don't have to explain to anybody because it's all being hidden in very lucrative operations within the intelligence community and the drug cartels. They're working alongside each other and there are friendships, and once you've jumped in feet-first, at that point you're willing to do other things.

Joe: I asked that question of blackmail because...

Scott:: It's not even blackmail. They don't even have to blackmail them. They know, "Well you already know I've got a bunch of cocaine and I can put down a bunch of liners. What else won't I do?"

Joe: Right, exactly. But in terms of controlling European individual politicians, Angela Merkel for example, Snowden revealed that these global surveillance programs are run by NSA, Five Eyes and the British GCHQ, etc., in cooperation with telecommunications companies. So, it seems like they would be stupid enough to use that ability to dig up as much dirt as they possibly can on people in positions of influence and power in European countries in order to control them.

Scott:: Oh they do. I'll give you that. I think what it really comes down to is they also can analyze where to lay their loyalties. I think that that's probably a better scenario. They can figure out from analyzing the communications, who would be a better person to approach in order to get what they want. And I think that that's probably more valuable than what you were just talking about with blackmail.

Joe: Right. A psychological profile almost on people they can get from snooping on them.

Scott:: Exactly. I'll give you a really good real world example. In 2004 right before the Summer Olympics in Athens, my friend was chief of station for the CIA there and the Americans alongside the British, had installed a surveillance device on the cell phone networks through Vodafone. It's a British network that had sold the contract to the Greek military and the Greek government, so all the major dignitaries and military officials were using Vodafone phones and it turned out that all the phones that were being tapped, were being tapped in the central office that the Vodafone infrastructure was set up for, to handle all the records and communications for that particular contract.

And they realized I think in 2007, they found the system sitting there. It was still running and they realized that all these phones had basically been monitored and tracked in Greece. And certainly Greece was livid, but unfortunately they're major recipients of America's military aid and Germany is very similar to that. Germany makes a boatload of money because of all the American military operations. I have friends that live in €3,000 homes, five bedroom homes that would be considered palaces to anybody else in Europe, probably around 1,000 square metres, and these individuals are single men, without even families and the American government is paying for that and there's some German guy sitting there collecting a month's rent on a place where he could only get €2,000 if the Americans weren't there, or less, pouring money into the German economy.

So, that's also a factor that's considered by the host nation. They certainly don't like it, that the Americans are looking at their information like they are, but at the same time, they're willing to basically take it in order to get the benefits.

Harrison: Scott, do you see any changing of allegiances going on or anything hinting towards that. I'm thinking specifically in reference to just what's been going on these past couple of months with Russia and specifically in Syria. Do you see anything changing?

Scott:: Well I see a lot more high level individuals coming out and saying, "Hey, we did play a big hand in this and we did create this". I've been saying it since the end of 2011 and the beginning of 2012 and certainly when I got showcased on CNN when I talked about what the Americans and their allies had done in Ukraine, I feel a bit exonerated by the news that's come out since then because that was March 2013, that the Maidan Square was going on?

Joe: Yeah.

Scott:: So, that was two years ago. But over the last two-and-a-half years there's been a lot of individuals that have done similar research similar to what I did at the time that have substantiated it. I think that's the same thing that I've seen with what I was talking about the bombs running coming out of Qatar through Benghazi and through Turkey and into Syria. There were a few news reports that came out in the New York Times and other major publications, but yet that elephant in the room of that particular information and how important that is, never seems to make it in the narrative whenever they start talking about the refugee crisis and so on and so forth.

So, to see a major player like Putin helping to put the pieces together, rather than some small network - I'm sorry, your network's probably not small, but smaller networks like Storm Front Gathering or SOTT or different Ground Zeros and these kinds of networks that do talk about these things. You're seeing the escalation back into major news publications that are carrying Putin's story and not calling it propaganda. But unfortunately I go to massive meetings with think tanks in Washington, DC and as soon as anybody realizes that there's anything to do with TV or Russian television or what Putin says, they automatically hit the nail and say, "Propaganda!!" because it's like training a chicken so that if you hit button A you're going to get a nugget of corn. They're so well trained, every time they see a nail, they've got to hit it with a hammer.

Niall: Their favourite come back for us is, "Oh, Russian troll factory."

Scott:: Yeah, they do the same thing to the folks out of Canada. There's a really nice research centre out of Canada...

Niall: Global Research.

Scott:: Global Research. I like a lot of those writers as well. You get that a lot and I've been accused of that as well. In fact the guy that interviewed me from K2 Intelligence yesterday thought the same thing until he talked to me. He goes, "Oh my god! It's a whole lot more complex than I thought." But he's a 24 year old kid who's working at an intelligence community that was founded by two Jewish left-wing, soft-core, pro-Israel Zionist kids. But the Krolls, Jules and Jeremy Kroll, work out of New York where they created this little intelligence - once again, an unnecessary intelligence collection organization that's influencing western intelligence, whereby it's more or less pushing the pro-Israel/AIPAC Zionist agenda.

Joe: You were interviewed by those guys did you say?

Scott:: I was interviewed by one of their employees. Before he got hired he wrote an article about me last year and had tried to get in touch with me. I saw the article three months ago and I got in contact with him and I said, "I'd be happy to talk to you. I'm interested in what perspective gave you that." But he's just a college graduate in his early-to-mid-20s so he doesn't really have a whole lot of frame of reference. He's a young Jewish boy, grew up in New York City. I told him a little bit about New York politics so he'd know and he was shocked. I think he was like, "Holy crap! There's a whole lot of stuff out there I don't know about."

But the thing is; I told him about this documentary that I highly recommend. Push as much as you can on your networks because it's very good. It's called; The Lottery of Birth. It's a philosophical documentary about why societies become so brainwashed basically. The premise doesn't come out like that. The premise is more along the lines of we are a very well-trained society within our respective nation for a deliberate reason. They want obedience and they want loyalty. It's very difficult to rule a country of individuals who are obviously not obedient and loyal. It goes into excruciating detail about how the societies are formed and manipulated by their respective educations and news agencies. So, it's quite good and I think the more people understand that, it will be less shocking for them to realize that they've been misled, sometimes for a lifetime.

Joe: Scott, I just wanted to ask you something about Edward Snowden. Do we know everything there is to know about Edward Snowden?

Scott:: I don't think so. I think that Edward Snowden, because of his ties to Glenn Greenwald and the success that Glenn Greenwald has. Now don't get me wrong, nine times out of then I agree with Glenn Greenwald, but there's that 10% where's he's kind of a soft core Zionist, kind of like Peter Bernhart, where he has an objective and because Snowden has this almost a get-out-of-jail-free card - who goes to Hong Kong and can sneak out of Hong Kong, on his own passport by the way. By the way, this is a country that is heavily infiltrated by CIA and British Intelligence for decades.

Joe: Right.

Scott:: And certainly very cooperative with the Chinese. I just found it very odd that he could get on a plane leaving Hong Kong. The other thing I found very odd is the way that he sort of trickles down the intelligence. It's a very lucrative business to do that and if you look at the investment that was made by the eBay founder guy Pierre Omidyar, into Glenn Greenwald's network, the Intercept. He made $100 million.

Pierre is a Tufts University graduate. He's a big investor in that university and that university is sort of at the centre of American geopolitical influence. If you look at the founders of Tufts University, that's the Jebsen family. The Jebsen family were shippers for the East India Trading Company out of Sweden. Those ties go back. The British and the Swedes have been allies for 500 years and Tufts University is probably the number one diplomatic training core. I you're a Fletcher School of Law grad in the Tufts University Masters Doctoral program and you have that type of credentials; you have a very good possibility of getting a very good job in the US State Department intelligence community and so on.
The Dean of Schools for the Fletcher School of Law is none other than James Stavridis, who was the supreme allied commander of NATO for quite some time and the mastermind alongside Hillary Clinton and other knuckleheads of the US military around the invasion and destruction of Libya. So, that's the kind of individuals who are training our next generation of diplomats. And Pierre Omidyar is tied in to Tufts University and he's coddled Greenwald and they're carrying Snowden's stuff. It just smells a little fishy to me and it doesn't seem like the right people are involved in that.

I don't know if you know the story behind Lee Harvey Oswald, but it reminds me of that story. Here's a guy who was a Russian linguist in the marine corp. He understood the U2 Downing second collection platform. He had a security clearance and he defected to Russia through Finland which nobody in their right mind knew how to do back in those days. And then while he's there, six months later they shoot down the U2 and Gary Powers is taken into custody by the Russian government and then he's released and then after having a baby and getting married in Russia, here comes Lee Harvey Oswald back to the United States. Not put in Fort Leavenworth. He's not incarcerated for defecting as a military guy or a guy with a security clearance and he's allowed to roam freely and pass out information that's pro-Castro, is kind of looking like fly paper to attract pro-Castro people in New Orleans. It's all very fishy as well.

So, it didn't make sense that they're allowing this guy to survive and do what he's doing in Russia. And if he comes home to a hero's welcome, I'll be even more suspicious of him. Obviously, if you see something wrong and you want to combat it, certainly do that. He may not know he's doing it. He may think he's doing the right thing, just like Oswald did, but at the same time, I don't think that he's revealing any great information. It's stuff that everybody should have known.

Joe: We've also thought in the past and commented that from the point of view of a national security state or a global security regime, putting that information out there that Snowden puts out has the effect of making people feel watched all the time and could possibly lend to people tending to want to keep their heads down and not rock the boat in case you're going to be spotted.

Scott:: Sure! There's that aspect and there's also the aspect that it bolsters the rhetoric around why we need to spend so much money on these initiatives. Even Snowden is an ardent supporter of the war on terror and he's also an ardent supporter of the technology infrastructure to combat cyber warfare. So, let's be clear here. In my opinion he's part of the problem. He's not part of the solution. So yeah, I think there's a lot more to Snowden.

Harrison: Well Scott, on that subject, what are your thoughts on surveillance technology and the things that are going on? What works? What doesn't and what should be done and what shouldn't be done?

Scott:: Well like I said earlier, the human intelligence factor has been forgotten. It's far more effective. Certainly we can gather more information on more people at an alarming rate, than has been seen in the history of the planet. J. Edgar Hoover's dancing in his grave going, "Wow! I wish I had all that!" But it comes to a point where I will agree with what Snowden said, "There's so much information people don't know where to look" and that's absolutely true. But at the same time it also gives people access to information they shouldn't really have. There's no sense of privacy and that's something that violates American civil rights and human rights globally whereby obviously, people have accepted the terminology of, "If you're not doing anything wrong, what do you have to hide?" Well that's not the ideology that the founding fathers set up in the United States and it's certainly not the kind of society that I expected to end up in.

So, I would say it could go far worse than what we ever could have imagined because of the tremendous amount of capability the technology has. Every single phone call, every single financial transaction can easily be recorded and certainly when it comes to information analysis and that kind of dialogue analysis, the kinds of reports that are coming out of some of these systems that they've built have got to be just tremendous. I haven't seen it but I understand what they're doing. Companies like Visible Technologies, I don't know if you're familiar with them, but they're a CIA investment in surveillance on social networking platforms and certainly what I found in my experience, is that social networking platforms provide a tremendous environment to not only share information but also to share perspective about that information.

So, you could easily use that information to categorize individuals or groups within societies and certainly the information that I share does that. I actually encourage that with other people, not because I'm trying to increase the effectiveness of their systems but I'm certainly trying to increase the effectiveness of our ability to communicate. At the same time, those systems are also being designed to pigeonhole us, to minimize our ability to grow our networks. I don't know if you've noticed on your social networks, but things that I used to get hundreds, if not thousand of hits on, I'm getting teens and hundreds on now because of the implementation of algorithms that minimize the breadth of our communications.

Joe: Yeah.

Scott:: Specifically, Edge Rank in Facebook and then they offer an opportunity where we could spend money doing sponsored links in order to increase the effectiveness but right now if you're not spending that money, you're a victim of the construction that's put on the communications and then you have to change the way that you use the platform in order to improve the effectiveness of our communications on that particular platform.

Joe: I hear you on the Facebook thing. We have a caller, Steve from Tampa Bay; Hi, Steve.

Steve:: Hey, how you doing and a hello to Scott. I'm very much an admirer of your work Scott.

Scott:: Well thank you.

Steve:: I've been doing some deep research into this situation having to do with Syria and because of being immersed in my work I became a whistleblower years ago. I got totally shut down here in Florida for exposing a gigantic ecological crime that took place in Osceola County where I exposed the county actually helping a guy rape swamp, fill in sovereign submerged swampland for development and I uncovered a pattern of this going on in Osceola County for decades. I went before the Orange County Environmental Protection. I called a meeting and I declared myself a whistleblower and I exposed this. I went to the Orlando Sentinel. I went to Sierra Club, Audubon Society. Absolutely nobody would help me. Looking back on it I was extremely naïve to expect anything different, but I became so disgusted, being a real advocate and developing my career around protecting the environmental damage that we've done, I just got so disgusted that I had to do something.

Enough with that, I wanted to touch on this Glenn Greenwald. As I did my investigations into this Syria propaganda I just became amazed about how the progressive left, the luminaries among them, have been hugely responsible for sowing confusion among the anti-war ranks to where there's no mobilization against this jackal attack with funnelling terrorist mercenaries into Syria to destroy the government and we have what we have today.
I went on Greenwald's website, The Intercept. By the way Pierre Omidyar is a friend of Obama. He also funnelled money to Kiev, pre-Maidan.

Scott:: That's right.

Steve:: He's funnelled millions of dollars. Then the next thing you know here's Greenwald. He's got The Intercept, so I started researching what kind of coverage they have done on Ukraine. It's been very spotty. Greenwald's done a couple of articles that were decent. Then it's been very spotty. They also featured another propagandist for the Voice of America by the name of (Bad audio) ... who's an outright fabricator of disinformation...

Scott:: Absolutely.

Steve:: They featured her on there. About Syria, I called Greenwald out on his website in the context of a comment section that had to do with BBC soft-balling the Saudis getting weapons from the UK government. In his essay on that article, Greenwald actually says, "I'm not for or against the support of the Syrian rebels". So, he's not calling out the jackal mercenary terrorism on the part of the United States. He confuses it. "I'm not making a moral judgment whether it's good or bad." What the heck!?! So, I called him out in the comment section and I did not cuss him, nothing like that, but I also asked him in the comment section, "Can you please explain why Jeremy Scahill, went out of his way to stop Mother Agnes from Syria, from presenting information that called into question the meme that Assad and his government used chemical weapons on the Syrian people?" Anyway, long story short, he banned me from commenting any further. I cannot comment on The Intercept.

But I find it very puzzling, this individual called Jeremy Scahill who goes on to Bill Marr, he goes on to MSNBC. He just did an exposé in The Intercept about the drone program that was supposedly developed this article from some whistleblower inside the agency. In my view, I believe that Jeremy Scahill has not may any kind of contributions to discussion, elaborating on what he thinks is going on in Syria. He's been very silent about it. I think it's very clear, why did Jeremy Scahill become so driven to stop Mother Afina, to stop the war coalition meeting in London at this crucial juncture. We never got any answers from that. I was shut down.

I'm doing an article right now where I question that. I do not like Glenn Greenwald and as far as Snowden is concerned, on Boiling Frogs, there are a couple of individuals they have there as commentators that get into what they think is going on with Snowden. I think the whole thing's really weird. I'm not saying that he's a bad guy, but the other thing is when people come out and they present themselves as these heroes, well you know what, "Brother Snowden man, I want to know what you think about what's going on in Syria."

Joe: Absolutely.

Steve:: You don't have an opinion?

Scott:: That's exactly right.

Joe: What's your take on that Scott?

Scott:: I totally agree with the caller. Steve had some great points. The point that he's making is that they cherry-pick the situations that they're willing to report on and there's absolute truth to that. There's a lot of blind coverage of the scenarios that Steve painted out there and it certainly stinks. It's not the kind of legitimate coverage that you would expect out of some of the other scenarios. What Greenwald does very well as a progressive liberal perspective, is he fights against the conservative sort of right-wing injustice that's being caused, not only in the United States but in Israel and elsewhere. And he certainly does a good job at that, but at the same time he is a huge flag waver and a huge supporter of the Obama style infrastructure, certainly through his relationships and his lack of criticism of what's being done in the Americans' name under the administration, as well as the other individuals who support that, the individuals like Hillary Clinton and so on. So, certainly Steve is absolutely correct in identifying some of the clear bias and weaknesses of those reporters and that particular publication.

Steve:: I'd like to say one other thing Scott. As I've been doing research for this article, I found this organization called PulseMedia.org. And one of the individuals was interviewed by David Barsamian and in the interview which you can find on a podcast, but this guy just unloads tremendous accusations about culpability about chemical weapons. And David Barsamian, who's a friend of Chomsky never contradicted him, queried him further. He just let this guy spew out this disinformation.

Scott:: Right.

Steve:: Which is really creepy when it comes from the - I used to be a big fan of Chomsky until I found out what position he took when it came to Syria, which I thought was very uncritically thinking, very much duped perspective on it. I would also like to make a last comment before I hang up. I tried to research this Pulse Media. When I used to do when I did a Google search you could find some people that would come out with some critical perspective, like "Yeah, Pulse Media are doing propaganda, blah, blah, blah". But I go after page after page down to 10, 12 pages with nothing counter to Pulse Media. If you keep going on and on you cannot find any kind of critical scrutiny of Pulse Media on your Google search. I'm finding that really weird.

And it's not just the Pulse Media. It's a lot of different sketchy individuals that come out with disinformation having to do with Syria. When I Google search I go page and page and you find nary a critique of these personalities or what they have to say. I believe that the algorithms, especially having to do with Syria, are being manipulated to make it harder to find scrutiny and critique of these individuals and organizations. That's my last comment.

Scott:: I don't disagree. I think what we see here is, once again when you take the different types of ratings for documents and for search results. Reddit is a good example the way it's considered a "social news network" when in fact certainly anybody with very simple computer skills can decide what particular documents that they want to help rise to the top, given their liking and giving it more likes than the next thing.

So, I think what Steve's referring to is that a lot of this information that we're able to even get on the internet today is highly subjected to a type of filtering that gives the impression that something is more acceptable than others and certainly much like the mainstream media, the dissident voice or potential voice of reason - I won't say that dissident voices are always voices of reason - but the potential voice of reason may not be given the same limelight and may also be getting incredibly filtered. It's certainly very easy to do and it's certain not something that I would put past the powers that be that understand that controlling the narrative is far more important than actually any other component.

I think one of the proofs in the pudding of controlling the narrative is if you look at the history of controlling the narrative and you look at how the narrative has been controlled, not only for centuries, but also in more modern times, with individuals like Edward Bernays and what he was able to accomplish with his methodologies in earlier mass media environments, prior to radio and certainly with the advent of radio and television. That methodology has been highly effective on using media to control society, and that was a premise of his public relations firm in New York City in the early 1900s and certainly the premise of the book Propaganda that came out in 1960.

That book unfortunately was adopted by Josef Stalin, Josef Goebbels and others to control their societies and create havoc within the mental direction of the people of those societies. And certainly our societies in France, the United States and elsewhere are subjected to this same type of manipulation.

Steve:: I'm going to let you guys go, but did you get the link to the YouTube video about Hitler. They took a scene out of a movie of Hitler and he's in the bunker the last days. It's in German but they dub it. Hitler's like, "Damn it, that Putin!!"

Scott:: Yeah, they use that scene quite a bit.

Jason: That's a good one. It's a video scene.

Joe: Yeah, there's a new one basically where Hitler reacts to what Putin is doing, yeah. Alright, Steve thanks a million for your call.

Steve:: God bless y'all. Take care, Scott. Bye-bye.

Scott:: Thank you Steve.

Joe: We have another call here. Gene, from Oklahoma; are you there Gene?

Gene: Yes. Hi gentlemen. It's been very interesting listening to the back and forth and give and take and what all is being suggested. You've covered such a huge area and it needs to be covered. For one, I had felt for a long time that Nixon's so-called war on drugs as big a tragedy if not as big a farce as the prohibition war against alcohol and so forth. Now we've had to put up with 40-plus years of that fraud. You can ask any given drug dealer on any given street corner who his biggest competition is and he'll tell you Uncle Sam. It's interesting to hear Scott Rickard only confirm that.

If the ordinary soldier along the drug chain knows that his biggest competitor and really biggest threat on the streets of any given metro area is going to be the cocaine importation agency, CIA, if that doesn't give pause to the average American, I don't know what does. But the bottom line is this. There's not just a hill of evidence, there is a mountain of evidence on this and the bottom line is the average American doesn't care as long as he has his bread and circuses and Roman gladiator coliseums - whatever you want to call them - he doesn't care. It just goes on and on and on no matter how much revelation is made. But we've got to continue to put up with this. Those Clinton/CIA drug cartels, are probably the largest drug cartel in the world that we know adds up to not billions anymore but really trillions of dollars in this drug trafficking around the world. We know what a product is when we see marines guarding the poppy fields in Afghanistan. [Laughs] If that doesn't tell you something about what a fraud this is!

It's pathetic and gentlemen, I know I've covered a huge area here. I'll just end it on this note and then I'd like to hear your comments on this. As I've read Henry Ford's The International Jew and the Talmud and even the Torah I think even gives evidence to this, I don't think it's just a new world order. I think it is definitely the Jew world order after reading these basic public pieces of information; the Torah which talks about "I shall make you rulers of the nations of the world" to the Jews including all the way down to Abraham and then you read The International Jew by Ford and then the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.

Joe: The Protocols, yeah.

Gene: And then on top of that, to which gives finality to the Talmud, but if that doesn't tell you something, I don't know what does. But to me it's very clear. It's not a new world order; it's a Jew world order.

Scott:: I hate to vilify any particular group because like I said earlier, it's relationships of lords and royalty that go back for centuries.

Gene: Sure.

Scott:: And not every one of them is Jewish, that's absolutely true. And at the same time you also have some that are Jewish, some that are Muslims even. So, there's a very symbiotic relationship between how they scratch each others' backs.

Gene: So, there are plenty of gentiles involved.

Scott:: It's certainly not a new world order at all. I would call it more of an old world order that has been in order for quite some time.

Joe: I was going to say that what you need to remember is that the power brokers of this world who are at the top level, they don't really subscribe to any particular religion.

Scott:: Exactly.

Joe: They realize religion is the opium of the masses and that's for people to believe in and to argue and fight over. They themselves are in it just for social engineering and controlling the most valuable resource on the planet, which is human resources, i.e., human being in controlling what they think, in controlling how they act and controlling them on this planet. They've done it for a long time and they'll use any ideology that works. At that level ideology doesn't really matter anymore, other than the ideology of absolute power and control over people on this planet.

Scott:: Yeah.

Gene: We can go round and round and play this game of good cop - bad cop and the bottom line is all they want is your conviction. The same thing boils down to good Jew - bad Jew, when the only thing they're loyal to is their tribe and when you know that their tribe is nothing more than a political or religious mafia and they hate the gentiles and the goyim. Anyone who's a gentile, they're against them. They're never going to go against their tribe. They've made that very clear, from the highest to the lowest Jew and you know that's so gentlemen and I've met my fair share and they will never go against their tribe.

Joe: Gene, we're going to let you go.

Scott:: I've met many an individual that would break that mould. That's absolutely not been my experience.

Niall: It hasn't been ours either, Scott.

Scott:: I've seen individuals across the broad.

Niall: We have people of Jewish extraction, "Jews" who work in our organization and it is not our experience.

Scott:: Yeah, I've seen that mould broken thousands of times, yeah.

Jason: I just really can't believe Jews could believe that stuff.

Joe: Gene's speech there, we saw where he was going and the fact of the matter is...

Scott:: Everybody eats pizza! Come on! [Laughs]

Joe: We have to be pretty careful in terms of...

Scott:: Yeah.

Joe: There's a law in France you know, on that kind of...

Scott:: I'm proudly on the anti-defamation league's website as a target. I don't subscribe to that kind of ideology. [Laughs]

Joe: Scott, I don't want to keep you too long. It's been quite a while here.

Scott:: Well thank you so much.

Joe: I just wanted to ask you one final question which is, if you had a crystal ball and you could see 10 years down the line, or whatever number of years down the line, where do you see us going with this whole situation?

Scott:: It depends on what you call, "us". If it was guys like us, that could actually work together to do something to try to change this world, it's very difficult. I think we're up against a very formidable opponent and I'd say in the future what would happen is that we could have our systems that we manage, that we could communicate and we could be funded with hundreds of millions of dollars a year for our communications platforms. And we could our (inaudible) ...talking to us and helping us provide an avenue into the colleges and the national schools and the private schools across the world, to provide them with an alternative ideology outside of the unfortunate educations and I guess thought processes that they're being given.

I'm not trying to rule the world to break everybody's culture or break everybody's religious beliefs, but I want people to come at it from a more informed perspective so that they don't wake up at 40 years old and go, "My god! Everything I learned was a lie!" And that's pretty much what they're going to find out if they start looking.

Joe: That's the ideal world we'd all like to see. So, you're not going to be pinned down. I know it's a strange question but do you see an evolution of the whole terrorism business evolving towards something?

Scott:: Well I don't see terrorism the same way that they portray it.

Joe: Right.

Scott:: I can easily go take advantage of somebody whose father, son, daughter or mother or brother has been killed and turn them into a vicious killer. That's easy prey. I see it as holding people accountable for their having taken advantage of that for centuries and certainly the ones that are still alive, the ones that are the walking dead like Cheney and those kinds of guys, should be looking at their last days from behind bars. So, ultimately that would be fantastic to have thousands of those individuals being held accountable on a global scale across every nation that's been responsible.

And that includes the kinds of countries whose networks I've been on and obviously there's guys in Russia that have done tremendously bad things, that were not only partners with the Russian government but partners of the American and their western ally governments; speaking of guys like Semion Mogilevich, a very notorious mobster in the history of the world who rides both sides of the fence, as if it was his entire horse farm.
So, there are individuals who play both sides. The Swiss have been doing it for quite some time and have been doing it as silent white collar war criminals. So, they need to be held accountable as well. So, there's absolutely no shortage of witch hunting that could be done, but at the same time there's certainly a serious look that could be taken at this from an intellectual perspective, to clearly identify people that have been key players in causing a tremendous amount of suffering and damage to societies around the world.

Joe: Yeah, well we can hope and dream maybe.

Scott:: Yeah. It's certainly a lot better than it was three or four years ago. I never would have had this call.

Joe: Yeah.

Scott:: So, I appreciate you guys including me.

Joe: Well absolutely. It's been really great having you on and I just want to thank you for spending the time with us here, because there are so few of us, relatively, and you're one of them out there that's fighting the good fight and you've been an absolutely gentleman to come on today and talk to us.

Scott:: Thank you Joe and likewise.

Joe: You don't have a website Scott, do you?

Scott:: I'm just starting one. I'm actually going to finally act on an initiative that I've been working on for some time now with some friends. It has not been set up. It's a work in progress, other than Facebook; I'm just ScottRickard4 and obviously LinkedIn. I find that to be a very good environment as well. I'm also on LinkedIn. But the network is going to be called NationInsight.com, but it's under construction right now and you'll hopefully see some great things and we can start getting those hundreds of millions of dollars to fund our networks so that we can have our own satellite feeds into peoples' living rooms.

Joe: Let's apply for some grants. Maybe the NAD would help us out there.

Scott:: Well we're certainly not going to get it from the powers that be, so we've go to go find it. The powers that want to be are the ones we're looking for.

Joe: Exactly. Alright Scott thanks a million again and we'll stay in touch and see where it goes.

Scott:: Thanks for including me Joe.

Joe: Alright. Have a good evening. Bye.

Scott:: You too.

Joe: Alright so that was Scott Rickard people. He said a lot. He's a real stalwart. He just keeps on keeping on, and he keeps it real, and he keeps it true. I don't know. I think we've kind of done our time here this evening. We might have talked about some other stuff, but we don't want to bore people too much so we're going to end with a new segment on our show that's just debuting. It's called the State of the Universe Report brought to you by a new reporter at large, or a large reporter maybe. His name is Aloysius Reilly. Aloysius is a Vietnam veteran turned media hack who when not travelling the world in search of ever more salacious details about the dirty deeds of corporate and political criminals, spends his time plotting world peace in his all terrain RV in the dangerous alligator-infested swamp in southern Louisiana.

So, Aloysius I think is on the line right now. What have you got for us this week Aloysius?

Aloysius: Well, what with all the terrorism going on lately, the Paris attack and the crazy Tel Aviv stabbings. I thought we could take a moment out of our day to learn the ABCs of western-backed terror. Western-backed terror you exclaim? Hey, that can't be true! Well allow me to force that kind of view in through the putrescent waters of objective truth. America gave 'em money, guns and propaganda support for fuelling its dirty little proxy war to overthrow Assad, mainly because he looks a bit like James Cromwell from Babe.

No one really knows why Barak Obama and the west have such a hard on for Assad. Maybe he forgot to send the Obamas a Christmas card or something. But the, "He's an evil dictator" is a bit old and tired and by now no one's buying it on account of America creating the black-clad, head-chopping Allahu Akbar-screaming terrorists we all know and love, ISIS or ISIL or IS or whatever the hell they've changed their name to these days. Beginning to wonder if it's Caitlyn Jenner is in charge of the PR department. Either that or you know schizophrenic.

As an aside, have you noticed how all the ISIS terrorists have at least one photo of themselves holding a Koran and a black flag; "Hey op-man, here's my phone. Take a picture of me looking all hard with a Koran and an ISIS flag" like they're trying to prove something. To who?! You'd think suicide bombing would kind of define you as a tourist, but now they need head chops and casting calls too?!

But curiously like all them school shooters who post high school pics of themselves holding a shotgun and wearing sunglasses and a trench coat, like they're some kind of cult fans in the basketball diaries. None of these nerds could pull of a ménage-à-trois in the penthouse, let me tell you. So now we know about the A of terrorism, anarchy. Basically you give a bunch of fanatical but more of the bankrupt 20-somethings some guns, a bible and a steady stream of English baby mamas and set them loose on a country that you've been starving with sanctions and libelling with propaganda. The best laid plans of mice and a man is this A.

Now here comes B for backlash. Now that you've created this swarm of strung-out, psychologically sick and swarm 'em with sex and steroids and sit back and wait for them to do what all proxy armies, i.e., mercenaries, have done since time immemorial, betray you faster than Cypher with Trinity if trapped in a room with a two-week supply of retinol as in capitulate to Putin because he has you by the balls. Russia's been bombing ISIS like they did in Dresden and Obama hasn't been able to take off long enough to do a damn thing about it. All those captured ISIS jihadis've been singing like Tina Turner once they realized they was beyond Thunder Dome and on their way to the do-da. Russia has more dirt on the CIA's dirty little wars than a flea market floor during the dustbowl. Beans are spilt and there's no use crying over a skinned cat.

So, Obama swaggers up to the G20 like a high school football hero who gained 20 pounds, a widow's peak and his Chevrolet dealership, all to find out that Putin's been hitting the gym and huntin' tigers or riding on the back of a bear that's actually an extraterrestrial.

Joe: You know what Aloysius, are you still there?

Aloysius: Yup.

Joe: What were you saying about a tyrannosaurus?

Aloysius: An extraterrestrial transformer on a first-name basis with Mark Walberg. Obama definitely didn't feel any of the vibrations now so what does he do? The only thing he knows how to do; grab ankles like he was under a bed. Now it seems Obama has decided it's better to live on your knees than die on your feet. Better a sage slave than a dead freed man. He'd happily make slaves of everyone to save their lives. After all freedom and democracy is overrated. Why is it always the people who seem to deserve life the least who cling to it the most? Those who would trade freedom for safety will receive neither. Won't deserve neither. While American presidential candidates continue to posture more than a break dance crew on methamphetamines, Russian bomber crews have taken the rightly on the bomb that dropped two tourists. I hope someone has the presence of mind to write From Russia with Love.

The Russians are the only ones who are actually intent on killing tourists these days as most western politicians and generals make more like Harry practice wizards make magic, which is to say not at all! Apparently two tourists were able to keep 170 people hostage in a Radisson hotel in Mali. It seems all these people that are part of Haim Saban's personal harem or at least adhere to his philosophy, the very idea that two people with guns can control 170 people in a 190 room hotel which actually had security guards, ostensibly armed only with improvised stick ball shooters or something, is some kind of indictment of humanity as a whole. Why even have security guards if they ain't goin' to actually secure nothin'? The tragedy is that 18 people still died. So, much for livin' on yer knees, and relying on authority; the terrorist will just kill you. Die here or die hostage. It is a far, far better thing I do than I have ever done. It is a far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.

On a lighter note, the US Coast Guard has during the last few months, seized 750 million dollars of fine Columbian cocaine, about 25 tons of the stuff. Apparently upon making it into port, Chris Christie made a tour of the boat where they was holding all that. Now the new is Chris Christie is in trouble with the IRS after $700 million appeared in his bank account. [Laughter] Unfortunately he couldn't be questioned yet by the police on account of him having to undergo facial reconstruction surgery from a collapsed sinus cavity.

The US, Canada and the Ukraine voted against a UN resolution condemning Nazism. Apparently the Ukrainian ambassador took issue with the fact that the resolution didn't also include Stalinism. It seems he sees Nazism as A-OK unless mixed with Stalinism because only then does it become evil. It's not like mixing Red Bull and milk or whiskey before being (Bad audio)... Hitler and Stalin are also appalling but Nazism alone makes Ukraine its home.

Ad lib skills aside, it's pretty interesting to see the US get it on Ukraine, a formed up into a triumvirate stupid, so I believe in the three stooges. Having Canada vote with you is a bit like dressing up your retarded cousin in a sham disguise and using him as a shill.

Now the whacky - pardon the pun - Saudis have decided now would be a great time to execute a known politician. For those of you who don't have the ten dollars to spare for Aquestasi, it means he stopped believing in Islam. Of course he claims the opposite, saying he's been and practices Islam. But that won't stop the Saudis and their decapitation fetish. Considering how in an uproar the entire world is about the radical Islamic extremists and the terrorists they create, the hometown representatives of Sharia law and Wahhabism will be running into the shadows faster than a cockroach at a jazzercise convention.

Then on a brighter note, Jurgen Todenhöfer, a German journalist spent 10 days with ISIS and discovered what we all pretty much knew; the majority of the recruits are intellectually challenged, were impoverished kids recruited from the west by promises of money and glory and big show down for America. Many of them probably escaped a life of petty crime in the projects of various western nations or perhaps were recruited because of it. In Todenhöfer's opinion the way to beat ISIS is to cut off funds, which is plain is coming mainly from - yes, it's a surprise - Saudi Arabia and other gulf states. Hmm, where have we heard that before? Alright; a new military alliance forming, one in which the USA may not even make the second string, the days of ISIS and their supporters are numbered. You have been weak. You have been measured and you have been found wanting.

Joe: Wow! That's a state of the universe address there by Aloysius Reilly. I think he pretty much covered it all, right down to Chris Christie and some inside details there on $700 million worth of crank gold.

Niall: Where did you find this guy? Louisiana?

Joe: Yeah, he's in Louisiana, as I was saying. That's where he reported from anyway, an alligator infested swamp in Louisiana.

Niall: Let's get him back next week.

Joe: In an all-terrain RV. It's as good a place as anywhere I suppose. Anyway, we might be able to connect with him next week and get him back again with another update on what's been going on, on the big blue marble and beyond it, maybe. But until then, we're going to leave it there for this week folks. I just want to thank Scott Rickard again for coming on. He was a great guest and also to Jason who was here earlier on who had a bit of an input on the show but he took off.

Niall: Next week we hope to have someone on; you may have seen him recently on RT.

Joe: Right.

Niall: Telling it as it is. He's an independent analyst, Gearóid O'Colmáin, based in Paris. So, he'll be on with us next week.

Joe: Okay, so until then, we hope you'll tune in until then. Have a good evening. Thanks for listening.

Niall: Stay safe and see you next week!