howells
British Foreign Office minister Kim Howells posing with the Colombian High Mountain Battalion death squad.
The British government is not a force for peace or democracy. The reality is much darker: British foreign policy supports war, conflict and oppression around the world. Unbeknownst to the broad population, the Shadow State sponsors a 'new world order' that allies Britain with America's quest for global power - what the Pentagon calls 'Full Spectrum Dominance'. In his brand new book, Britain's Secret Wars, T. J. Coles documents how British operatives have interfered in Syria, Libya, Iraq, Iran and Yemen with the aim of deposing unwanted regimes. In doing so, they have helped create extensive terrorist networks across the Middle East, reviving previously-failing Jihadist groups such as ISIL, which has now transformed into an international terror franchise.

In addition to waging clandestine wars in the Middle East, the secret services have used the military to run drugs by proxy in Colombia, train death squads in Bangladesh, and support instability in Ukraine, where NATO's strategic encroachment on Russia is drawing the world closer to terminal nuclear confrontation. Coles unearths Britain's involvement in the recent ethnic cleansing of Tamil civilians by the Sri Lankan government, the invasion of Somalia by Somali and Ethiopian warlords, and Indonesia's atrocities in Papua. He also exposes the extensive use of drones for murder and intimidation across the Middle East and elsewhere.

T. J. Coles studies the philosophy of neurology and cognition at the University of Plymouth, UK. He is director of the Plymouth Institute for Peace Research (PIPR), editor and co-author of Voices for Peace and author of The New Atheism Hoax. His political writings have appeared in the New Statesman, Lobster, Peace Review and Z Magazine. He is also a columnist with Axis of Logic and in 2013 was shortlisted for the Martha Gellhorn Prize for journalism.

Tune in this Sunday for Behind the Headlines' interview with Coles about his new book and the truth about British foreign policy.

Running Time: 02:19:10

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 with me this week as usual is Niall Bradley.

Niall: Is it Sunday already? Hi everyone.

Joe: Yes, it's Sunday already. I don't know how it got to be Sunday but there it is. Anyway, thanks for tuning in. This week we were meant to be talking to T.J. Coles who is a British academic. He studies the philosophy of neurology and cognition at the University of Plymouth UK. He's the director of Plymouth Institute of Research. He's the editor and co-author of Voices for Peace and author of The New Atheism Hoax. His political writing have appeared in The New Statesman, Lobster, Peace Review and Z Magazine. He's also a columnist with Axis of Logic and in 2015 was shortlisted for the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism.

So we sort of have him on the line but not really, T.J. Coles. How's that for an introduction? You may or may not be listening to an interview with T.J. Coles today. Otherwise you'll just be listening to us.

Niall: Yeah, we couldn't connect with him just before the show. Who's there.

Harrison: We may be able to do this. Just hold on a sec. I'll explain what's happening right now. We've got Tim on the line over here and I'm pretty sure if he talks that the audience will be able to hear him but I'm not sure if Joe and Niall will be able to hear him because of the way Skype works with it. So Tim, can you hear me right now? Okay. Hi Tim, we're just going to ask our audience right now, can you hear Tim talking right now? No they can't hear you so Tim just on Skype I sent you a chat message with the call in link to the show. I think it might be a new one, a different one from the one I sent you previously so just try going to that link again and we'll see if that will work.

Joe: If you could ask Tim to go to the Radio SOTT.net page, the straight-up one and click on the show and then just click on that big red button there that says "speak with the host" and if he has a headset...

Harrison: Yeah, he does. How about you just put me on mute and I'll talk to him and get this sorted out.

Joe: Let's have him call in as a caller.

Harrison: Okay, will do.

Joe: Alright.

Niall: The reason we want to speak to Tim today is because he's recently published another book called Britain's Secret Wars. It's a great little book. It's only a couple of hundred pages long. So much could be said about the British government's involvement in many war theatres past and present but Tim Coles just simply said "Alright, I'm going to take a few case studies only and just look at those." It's a simple book. It's got an introduction and then it's split into two parts. The first is a set of case studies about conflict zones. Most you're probably familiar with. We all are in fact. And then part two is a set of case studies some I didn't know Britain was involved to the extent that Tim Coles explains. Hopefully we'll have him on to tell us a bit about those war zones.

The case studies in particular are involvement in Somalia which kind of makes sense because historically that was a British colony. And then Sri Lanka which is still in a state of civil war. Just this week you may have caught it on the news. You probably didn't though because there wasn't really that much about it. Let's be honest, peace doesn't make headlines. Officially Columbia's civil war of 50 years has come to an end. Lots of people have kind of known that the US has been involved with it, but British involvement is very unknown. He's not a guy to speculate. He only relies on statements and documents made by or said by the British government. So he sticks to the facts. I like that about his book. All the sources are solid. He'll only say what he can say and what can be said and based on what is available, is a lot. So it's a neat little book.

Joe: Yeah. And it's written in a very accessible style. It's not very big.

Niall: Yeah, he's straight up. He doesn't waffle around. In fact the first introductory chapter spits it straight out. So this is the why. Why would Britain want to do all this? Okay, the official empire's long gone. Then why on earth is it still doing it? He gives an explanation that makes a lot of sense and off he goes. "Let's look at some cases."

Joe: What is his explanation?

Niall: He does tap a little bit into history to explain what free trade is. He gets down to it. It has to do with economics and trade and the British and the wider Anglo-American world have a certain definition of trade which is inherently unfair. It means "We get all the advantages and all the rest of you will put up with it." It's basically an inherently unfair world view so all trade the British get involved with must produce higher returns for British and western interests than for the interests of anyone else in the developing world, third world, whatever you want to call it - the rest of the world.
Besides an explanation of economics he touches a little bit on the political ideology if you want to call it that - it's not really an ideology - of the British empire and how that gradually became the Anglo-American empire. There's basically a power structure in place, as listeners know, andh all these conflicts with varying degrees of involvement with the extreme being cases of the Middle East and Iraq when the British and the Americans sent in actual troops. But most of the time they don't. They use proxy forces. There are varying degrees of involvement. Sometimes they'll actually create a whole army.

Joe: Hi, is this Tim?

Harrison: Okay, we're going to disconnect from Skype.

Joe: Okay. Hi. Who do we have on the line?

Tim: Hello. This is Tim here. Can you hear me?

Joe: Yes we can Tim.

Tim: Oh great.

Joe: It's great to finally talk to you.

Tim: I'm just plugging in some phones so I can get a better sound.

Joe: Okay.

Tim: Hello. Can you still hear me?

Joe: Yes. We can hear you.

Elan: And we hear you as well from here Tim, so it looks like all systems go.

Tim: These headphones! Okay, the line here is not great I'm afraid but I'll see what I can do.

Joe: Okay. Can you hear us okay?

Tim: Yeah. Just about.

Joe: Just about. We'll speak up.

Tim: Okay. Thank you.

Joe: No problem.

Niall: Tim, welcome to our Behind the Headlines on the SOTT Radio Network. We've just been discussing your book a bit. Why don't you tell us a bit about your background? We know of the website axisoflogic.com. You've been writing there for some years. What made you want to write this book, Britain's Secret Wars?

Tim: I was really appalled by the media coverage of the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and I very quickly realized that innocent people were being torn to pieces by bullets and bombs and they had nothing to do with the kind of politics that the American government and the British government were involved in. So I started to ask questions about this. I'd always been skeptical of authority but this really gave me the motivation to start asking deeper questions and the more questions you ask the more you find out and the more you realize that the media creates a false reality. So I started to research other areas and quickly learned, often from primary sources, that Britain is involved in wars and conflict in many areas of the world.

Joe: When you say involved in wars and conflict in many areas of the world you're saying largely that these are wars or conflicts that the general public don't know about or are being told a very different story about?

Tim: Some of them are simply suppressed by the mainstream media. For example the terrible ethnic cleansing of ethnic Tamils that took place a few years ago in Sri Lanka. We had blanket coverage in the UK of that, that the Sri Lankan government had murdered 20,000 and then the figure became 40,000 ethnic Tamils. There was a lot of condemnation of that. But nobody as far as I know has reported the fact that Britain trained the Sri Lankan military, supplied the arms, vetoed a draft resolution at the United Nations Security Council in order for the Sri Lankan government to conduct this massacre.

This generalizes in other areas such as Papua New Guinea with the Indonesian police and military, their involvement there. For example, Amnesty International, the famous human rights group talks about Indonesia's atrocities in West Papua but doesn't really talk about Britain's involvement. And this information is available, it's just not in the media so you have to look for it in the government record. It's quite an indictment of how the media operates.

And with regard to other wars like Libya, that was justified on the grounds of humanitarian intervention as was the bombing of Serbia back in 1999. So it seems, depending on what agenda policymakers have, they either keep wars quiet or they provide some justification for them or at least try to.

Joe: In the case of Sri Lanka - I'm getting some feedback Tim.

Niall: Do you have speakers on? Could you turn those down?

Joe: If you could just use the headset. Are you still there?

Tim: It's really bad.

Joe: It's really bad?

Tim: Can you hear me?

Joe: Yes.

Tim: I just got every other word you said there, I'm sorry.

Joe: I was getting a bit of feedback. I thought you had some speakers on. It's very choppy.

Tim: Hello?

Joe: Can you hear us Tim? It's very choppy for him I think.

Tim: It's very poor I'm afraid. You're fading in and out.

Joe: Okay, what about now?

Tim: It seems better, yeah.

Joe: Okay. I was just asking about Sri Lanka. Maybe two questions - without British help to the Sri Lankan military, would the Sri Lankan government have been able to wage any kind of a war against the ethnic Tamils?

Tim: I can only catch most of what you said, but I assume it was to what extent did British help contribute to the massacre.

Joe: Yes.

Tim: Okay. So without British help undoubtedly the Sri Lankan government would have attempted to continue suppressing the Tamil population but it's very doubtful that the level of the atrocities and the efficiency with which it was carried out would have been achievable without British help. So if you go to the parliamentary records, such as the House of Commons library or security experts like Global Security run by John Pike, they state that Sri Lanka's longest military ally has been Britain. And in fact Britain of course has a colonial history with Sri Lanka. It was taken over by Britain in the 1700s and the ethnic Tamils were given a position of power, and labour from India was imported to work on tea plantations and so on. Sri Lanka became a source of revenue for the empire.

But once the majority ethnic Sinhalese wanted independence the situation changed where suddenly the Tamils were becoming the oppressed peoples and they have posed a real problem for the Sinhalese elites ever since. For many decades the Tamils have fought for an independent state or at least the Tamil Tigers have and they've experienced the blocking of peace proposals by the Sri Lankan government and this has escalated Tamil terrorism. So it was decided that this was affecting international business, the levels of terrorism that the Tamils Tigers were inflicting on the Sinhalese population and also the very brutal revenge and suppression strategies were becoming a hindrance for business.

So it seems to me, based on the evidence, that it was decided somewhere that the best solution was to do a major ethnic cleansing to simply crush the Tamil problem. This really shows an escalation of British involvement. So Britain had been involved in similar operations in the 1980s which in the long run made the Tamil Tigers stronger because when people are brutalized and subjected to exploitation and oppression, unfortunately sometimes the response is to move further to the right and further towards militarism. That's what happened. So as the Tamils gained strength, Britain's involvement with the Sri Lankan army became more intense.

Niall: And at the same time Tim you found evidence that the British government was arming the Tamil Tigers also.

Tim: Yes, yes, as far as I can see. For a period the British were training the Tamils and this is longstanding colonial policy of divide and rule and in fact during the scramble for Africa in the late 1800s one British colonial official said that "divide and rule was the policy of Rome and it should also be our policy". So Britain has divided in order to rule many peoples throughout history. It happened in India where British agents were working with Muslims and Hindus and obviously in Palestine. It's happened in Nigeria where Britain was working with Muslims and Christians.
So the situation in Sri Lanka was no different. The aim is to control both sides to the extent that that's possible, in order to weaken both sides.

Joe: Is it mainly business interests? Did you get that?

Tim: Sorry I didn't, no.

Joe: Is it mainly business interests that motivate the British?

Tim: You know the motivations are quite complicated. Unfortunately the evidence does suggest that we live in a world run by clinical psychopaths and there's plenty of good work on this by psychologists like Robert Hare and a good one in Britain called Kevin Dutton who's worked with a former SAS man who I think goes under the pseudonym Andy McNabb. They conclude that in any organization where there is a hierarchy - so especially in military and in media, in politics, in organized religion - you tend to get individuals who for various reasons due to upbringing, possibly genetics is a factor as well, there are people who have a very limited emotional response or no emotional response to pain and suffering.

These people, sociopaths, psychopaths, are unable to empathize. So they will charm, lie, stab their way to the top if necessary, of various institutions and we're ending up with a pathocracy, an international global system designed, run and maintained by psychopaths. The psychopathic character seems to need to be in control. So this seems to be a core psychological element of why there is a continuing need among certain individuals to have control over the world, over other peoples' resources, over other peoples' cultures.

Also as an aside to that, there are of course business interests. When you have psychopaths designing wars and designing methods of deception, other people who may also be psychopathic or simply greedy, see an opportunity. So at the very root of this I think it's a lot to do with the psychological nature of people that make plans and also the nature of institutions. When we look at some of the worst atrocities in history like the rise of the Nazis, we see that ordinary people who not necessarily have psychopathic traits and characteristics will follow orders. They will delegate responsibility and so you have individuals who might just simply need a job. They're working for a business. That business happens to be run by a psychopath. The board of directors might have psychopathic traits and so they see opportunity to have control, to maximize profit. As far as I can tell, it's a complicated set of factors that would lead to these kind of wars.

Joe: Have you ever read the book Political Ponerology?

Tim: Sorry I didn't get that.

Joe: Have you ever read the book Political Ponerology?

Tim: No I haven't.

Joe: Okay. It's a good book. We'll maybe send you a copy.

Niall: Yeah, we should. Tim, we've been saying what you just said for 15 years trying to get people to see what we're seeing, that these people are psychopaths and indeed they effectively have created a pathocracy. What you said is like music to our ears so it's great that you see that too.

Tim: I'd be very interested to read the book.

Joe: Okay. We'll send you a copy. Tim, you're English, born and bred, yes?

Tim: Yes.

Joe: I wonder was there a first event or first theatre of war, of conflict that first piqued your interest or started you down this path?

Tim: I think it had been a slow process. I had heard growing up about the so-called troubles in Northern Ireland which I don't know very much about because there's a tremendous amount of state censorship in Britain to do with anything involving Northern Irish politics. What I heard were the troubles I later learned had to do with an escalation of British militarism in Ireland. But we had quite ludicrous state censorship where the leader of the political party Sinn Fรฉin would speak on British television but have their voice changed to discredit them. They would have to speak with an actor's voice. So I thought that was rather strange.

I was quite interested as a teenager in the bombing of Kosovo. I wondered why. But I was really trapped within the state school system where there was no political engagement and there were no real answers or interest. So it wasn't until I freed myself from what I consider to be the prison of school that I began to have some free time to pursue my own interests. I think I mentioned earlier that the more questions you start to ask the more you realize that the culture and the media don't reflect reality.

Harrison: Tim, first of all a little comment on your book, Britain's Secret Wars. It just came out. It's a brand new book and we got to read it. It's a great book so I think all of our listeners should check it out. It's got a tonne of information in there and it's really punchy. It's got short chapters, to the point, all on these different countries in which the UK has been involved, all of their secret wars as you call them.

I want to get into the topic of the secrecy around these wars because you just mentioned growing up and having some kind of inclination but not really knowing the truth about the situation, probably mostly because of the nature of the secrecy surrounding all of these covert operations. In the introduction to your book you've got this section that I just think is amazing. It has some stuff in there that I was not aware of and it's called Foreign Policy as Necessary Exploitation. In there you quote several official policy papers and documents. One was written in 1997. It was a Chatham House book called British Foreign Policy-Challenges and Choices for the 21st Century.

You make the point that this book was publically published but very few copies are available because it's mainly intended for policymakers and businessmen. But in the book the amazing thing for me was just how open the establishment is about what it's doing. So in these publications you really get a glimpse of what's really going on and it's right there printed in ink for anyone to read! So I just want to read a quote that you have here from the book.

You write that the author explain that
A successful foreign policy requires a degree of secrecy and duplicity, a willingness to employ spies, engage in bribery, threaten, even use force, compromise principles, pursue clandestine, sometimes illegal operations and support dubious regimes.
Another quote is
Governments are expected to downplay the interests of humanity as a whole except when those interests overlap with the national interest.
Then you quote some other papers. Some of the things these people say are just remarkable. I was wondering if you could just comment on the nature of what these people say in semi-private versus what we get in the news and through official statements or the things that we see in our everyday perusal of the news.

Tim: Well the quotes that you just mentioned are to me really definitive of the pathological characteristic of the people in power. I wonder who but a sociopath or a psychopath would say that exploitation is necessary. These books as you mentioned, were not intended for public consumption. They are available but you have to look. I actually found that book accidentally in my university library so of course I borrowed it and mysteriously it has disappeared since then so I went and bought a hard copy of it through Amazon. I'd recommend people get the hard copy of that.

But this is quite uniform throughout document which sometimes are classified and the government has a long-term classification policy where it will keep documents secret for many, many decades. One of the best authors is Mark Curtis who has written Web of Deceit and Unpeople. He goes through the post-World War II now declassified records and finds similar statements from all over the establishment, from the foreign office and from other sources which say pretty much the same thing, that any kind of political movement, party, organization, which brings people together and nationalizes resources in the interests of the general public is a severe threat to democracy. Well that is democracy when you have people getting together and organizing their lives. But from the warped perspective of the people in power democracy is a democracy of elites. This has a historical basis. It was as late as the mid-1700s that only six percent of the population of Britain had the right to vote and that was of course the landed gentry, the elites. So it took centuries of struggle among ordinary people to achieve minimal rights such as the right to vote.

The elites that currently form and shape foreign policy are terrified of this wave of democracy, the "crisis of democracy" as the Trilateral Commission called it in the 1970s, that this will take hold in other countries. Another word they have is resource nationalism, another phrase which is this crazy idea that countries have the right to do what they want with their own resources because the resources belong to "us". So we will discuss ways of manipulating not just foreign publics but also the domestic public because the domestic public, whether it's the domestic public in America if we're talking about American policy planners, or the domestic public in Britain if it's British policy planners, their anti-war sentiments are a threat to this agenda of global domination.

So you find quite consistently in these planning documents that when elites and policymakers are talking amongst themselves they're quite open about their objectives, that they have to deceive the domestic population and they have to try and divide and rule foreign populations. To me what was a real indictment when I found a lot of these quotes and sources is the fact that the mainstream media simply don't report them. These are available. You have to look for them, but that's the job of a journalist, to look and investigate. And they're quite easy to find. It doesn't take a lot of research to find them.

Yet if journalists in the mainstream were to report this, journalists would not be doing their job. Their job is to report the interests of whoever they're working for. So in the case of the BBC the journalists are working for the Crown and for the state. In the case of some of the newspapers or in Britain where we have a commercial channel which is sponsored by commercial revenues, their job is to serve their editors and the editors' job is to serve the board of directors, the CEOs and so on, whom as I said, could very well be psychopaths because it's again, that hierarchical institution where responsibility is delegated. There is also the conditioning response of working for a reward rather than working for your own interest and your own need or interest to explore the truth.

Joe: When you said that these people talk quite openly among themselves, I can imagine that they would because this kind of policy of seeing the world and the resources of the world of nominally sovereign countries as their resources, as the resources of the British or Americans, that's been going on for a long time. I'm talking here about hundreds of years in terms of the British empire for example. I would say it first really became seeded in the minds of these elites in the UK or in Britain several hundred years ago when they embarked on this idea of establishing an empire which is effectively pillaging and plundering the resources of other countries.

They have a 300 year history I suppose of doing that and that being normal, that being how business is done. So for the elites who are brought up through the ranks and stuff, that's the world they live in and that's normal so they'll talk about it among themselves in very open terms, but obviously they're aware that they need to keep this information from the general public and as you just said, they do so through by censoring the truth through the media because it would seem that they realize that it doesn't really sound very good. Certainly it doesn't sound democratic and in the words of American Presidents, it doesn't really jive with the idea of spreading freedom and democracy.

Tim: Yeah, I agree completely. I would only add that in Britain it's a very reinforcing class culture where you have many policy planners in the foreign office and in other institutions, the Ministry of Defence, tend to come from wealthy, established backgrounds that do have that colonial history and so for them it's not only normal but it's a reinforcing culture. In some ways the lower classes, the middle classes are kept out. I've never been to the Foreign Office but I've seen pictures of it. It looks like a palace. It's a real establishment venue and it's the kind of place where they want anybody but the upper classes to be kept out.

Now it is obviously possible and it does happen that people from the lower or middle classes would work their way up into that system, but then they become absorbed into it and so there's no interest in trying to make humanitarian changes. And in fact John Pilger who's made some excellent documentaries, in his documentaries has quoted several people who have worked in these establishments who have raised issues of human rights and have been told by their colleagues "Don't be so stupid. Our aim here is to achieve our objectives. We're not interested in human rights. That's just for the public. That's a bit of propaganda for the public." So this long line of colonial mentality is reinforced I think.

Elan: In your chapter on Iraq you mention a story of two British intelligence officers dressed up as Arabs opening fire on the citizens there in Basra. This was a stunning thing to read back in 2006, more than 10 years ago. Basically what had happened was the Iraqi police caught these two British agents effectively wreaking havoc and they were jailed and there was this huge conflict there in Basra where the citizens rallied around the police station holding these two British agents...

Harrison: Terrorists.

Elan: ...terrorists and basically I guess the British military or intelligence had to go into this prison and break them out, like a scene out of a film.

Tim: Yeah.

Elan: It illustrates so well the secret nature of Britain's wars and I was just wondering if you could provide some context there?

Tim: Yeah. I caught most of what you were saying. There was some break up on the line. I think you were talking about agent provocateurs in Basra. So Basra was I think a Shiite majority area which has a port for the oil to be transported out of Iraq. So it was one of the areas that Britain was assigned to take hold of. The British decided quite early on, along with the Americans, that divide and rule would be a strategy in Iraq the way it had been traditionally in other countries.

So death squads which were targeting Sunnis were established by various agencies. There was a black operations unit which worked closely with the British and presumably within that unit - it's secret so we don't really know - but presumably within that unit that was causing discord between Sunnis and Shias through torture and assassination, there were agent provocateurs. So when violence had decreased their role presumably was to go and increase violence in the manner that you mentioned.

And in this particular case the two SAS men were arrested. They were caught with what appeared to be bomb-making equipment in their car and as you mentioned they were taken to the Basra jail and then the British military conducted a special operation to release them because it sends a message that whenever an elite unit is in trouble, force will be used in order to rescue them.

Joe: So what is the implication there then? Is the implication that these two guys were being dressed up in Arab garb to look like locals, driving the makings of a bomb in the back of a car, is the implication that this was evidence of one of the many so-called suicide bombs or car bombs going off in Iraq that, in this case anyway, that the British were behind such a bombing or that they would have been?

Tim: That's certainly what it appears to be and in fact Iraq, by the standards of the region, was a rather secular country and after 13 years of a blockade which was implemented by the British Royal Navy and also the US Navy in which every kind of product you can imagine was banned from entering Iraq, the country had disintegrated and about a million people died in this blockade, these sanctions, that was again suppressed by the media. Inflation went through the roof, child mortality increased to record levels. Life expectancy dropped. Drinking water became polluted and so on.

So in order to try to get the population to rally around him, Saddam Hussein the dictator of Iraq supposedly adopted the Koran and pretended to be a devout Muslim. But apart from that there's not much indication that the country was particularly fundamentalist.

Joe: No.

Tim: So it was very surprising to see such a huge spate of suicide bombings. Now Robert Pate who is an expert on suicide bombings points out that in Lebanon there were secular suicide bombers, there were Marxist suicide bombers, there were Christian suicide bombers. So Islamic fundamentalism in itself is not indicative of suicide bombing. But the sheer volume and the amount of time that it took seemed to indicate that there was a very well designed program of suicide bombers. And in fact we learned from the Washington Post that the United States military had a policy to, as they put it, "inflate the caricature" of a man called Zarqawi who was supposedly the head of Al-Qaeda in Iraq. This was largely a fabrication and they said in their leaked documents that they were going to blame him for tensions.

I mentioned earlier the death squads that were killing Sunnis, Shia death squads and vice-versa. They were going to blame Zarqawi for this and Zarqawi also represented suicide bombers. So you had a countrywide, coordinated suicide bombing strategy. You had already a phantom menace, Zarqawi, and you have British agents who were actually caught in the process of attempting to blow something up.

So when you add this together you have to seriously ask were a lot of these bombings actually the work of the western intelligence services designed to further cause chaos and further divide communities and also push the country further into political divisions.

Joe: Tim, I just wanted to ask if you know the name Captain Ken Masters.

Tim: Sorry, I didn't catch it.

Joe: If you know the name Captain Ken Masters, a British officer in Iraq.

Tim: It doesn't ring a bell.

Joe: In looking at that story of those two SAS operatives who were busted out of the Basra jail, Captain Ken Masters was a British officer in Iraq. He was stationed in Basra I think and his job was to investigate complaints against the British military by Iraqis. The story was in the newspaper just after he died two or three weeks after this event where these two British guys were busted out of the jail. He was found dead in his quarters in Basra a couple of weeks afterwards and he was actively working on that incident where the two guys were broken out of the jail because the Iraqi authorities at the time filed a complaint and he was the one who was dealing with it. I just thought it was a bit of coincidence I suppose you could call it, that this guy who had been in Iraq for several years and who had dealt with all sorts of problems, that the official story goes down that things just got too much for him at that point, but it just happened to be the same point where he was looking into what these two SAS guys were doing as a result of the Iraqi complaint.

Tim: Yes, there seem to be a lot of suspicious, coincidental deaths. I haven't looked into that specifically but I remember the Charlie Hebdo killings in France. One of the high-level French police officers investigating it supposedly committed suicide.

Joe: Right.

Niall: At his desk!

Tim: Yes.

Joe: That brings up an interesting question because what you've just described really is effectively that to one extent or another British covert operatives are playing the role or taking the place of Muslim terrorists and carrying out what are described as Muslim terror attacks. I'm not saying all of them, but I'm saying there seems to be enough evidence here to suggest that there's a policy of carrying out "Muslim terror attacks" by British or other western operatives and then blaming it on Muslim groups. This obviously makes sense.

Talking about what you described earlier about the British policy of going around the world and stealing other peoples' resources, that would necessitate some kind of a justification for going into this country and stealing its resources. And of course Muslim terrorism or the Muslim terror threat provides that justification but at the same time you would assume that someone would have to "create the reality" of Muslim terrorism to justify intervention in other countries to combat Muslim terrorism, the key ingredient there is the commission of terrorist attacks and it's possible that this is being carried out by western operatives themselves. It's vicious circle.

Tim: Yeah, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. We know that what we call Al-Qaeda was created by MI6 and the CIA as part of Operation Cyclone in the late 1970s in which about 20,000 Muslims were brought in by the US Navy Seals, the Green Berets, the British SAS and trained in America in order to draw the Russians into an "Afghan trap" in the words of Jimmy Carter's national security advisor Brzezinski and the Soviets apparently fell for the trap and invaded Afghanistan and were drawn into a long, brutal war with terrorists that were being armed and trained by the Anglo-American secret services and these same terrorists were later called Al-Qaeda according to Britain's now-dead foreign secretary - we were talking about coincidental deaths, well there was another one - Robin Cook who wrote an article saying that Al-Qaeda simply means the computer file or database of operatives that were being trained by the CIA and he could have mentioned MI6 as well for this purpose, to essentially bleed the Soviets.

Within a few months of writing that he was found dead. He was apparently hiking on a hill and died of a heart attack when nobody was around. So what we now call Al-Qaeda were then used to fight in Bosnia and have since spread apparently, all over the east of North Africa. And these are the same regions which the United States is explicit about controlling and dominating. So I'm sure most of your listeners would have read the document Rebuilding America's Defences written by the neoconservatives which came to power under the George Bush administration which talks about needing a new Pearl Harbour in order to justify this global agenda for world dominance.

In that document which happened before 9/11, which has been used to justify a lot of the wars and conflicts, it talks about using drones to project US military power, in their words. It talks about backing out of the antiballistic missile treaty with Russia which it says has prevented the weaponization of space and prevented missile systems. It talks about other high-tech stuff like developing super-enhanced soldiers that take various pharmaceuticals to enhance their capabilities.

Well within a year of this document we get another one of these dreadful coincidences, 9/11 happening. Suddenly Al-Qaeda is used, the very organization that was created by Britain and America, to justify this takeover essentially, of the Middle East and North Africa. It's become a demolition job where country after country, the political system, the infrastructure, is being destroyed through one or another pretext, weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, catching Bin Laden in Afghanistan, hunting the Taliban with drones in Pakistan, hunting Al-Qaeda in Yemen and in Somalia, humanitarian intervention stopping ISIS now in Iraq and Syria, etc. etc. It all leads to the same outcome, which is total was in that region.
I was talking earlier about the Tamils, that when you oppress a population a certain sector tends to get pushed further to the right and further into violence and extremism. So in some cases terrorists are created and led. In other cases it's provocateurs. In other cases it's simply stirring the hornet's nest. In one of the documents that I read by the Ministry of Defence it talks about using proxies in order to distance the state from war because they know that the general public is not going to tolerate war. So if they can use proxies like ISIS or the Free Syria Army or whoever it may be to cause others to fight wars for us, then all the better.

In fact it states these groups will become terrorist organizations but they might get out of control. So they might start doing things that we haven't approved of. But the people designing these policies are perfectly willing to take that chance.

Niall: Indeed. And really, there's no bigger psycho than them so I don't think anyone's really ever gotten away from them.

Tim: I didn't catch that.

Niall: Okay. Sorry. It was just a comment that that risk factor, that something they create may get out of control,...

Tim: Yes.

Niall: It's kind of minimal I think or it's mitigated by the fact that no one is quite as psycho as they are.

Tim: Oh, I understand. Yes. I think the biggest risk of accident or escalation is to do with nuclear weapons. There's another Ministry of Defence document which talks about pursuing global dominance policy even with countries that have nuclear weapons, like Russia, and this would risk what they call "brinksmanship and misunderstanding". And in fact one of the advisors who was drafting the British national security strategy says - again in private, it's not reported in the media - that the threat of terrorism to us in the west is miniscule compared to a potential accident with a nuclear weapon.

Joe: Right. What about Africa? Al-Shabaab, Kenya, Somalia?

Niall: Yeah, you wrote about British involvement in Somalia. Can you go into that some more?

Tim: Yeah. So Somalia is another country where Britain has a colonial history. It was one of the later colonial conquests. Somalia has had decades of civil war. But things were starting to calm down because a government called the Islamic Courts Union came to power in Mogadishu, the capital and according to various human rights groups like Amnesty, they actually raised the social welfare. They were getting children into school. Violence was dissipating. According to the US Congress, despite their name, Islamic Courts Union, they were mostly a socialist organization. They were not extremists or very, very few of the members expressed extremist views.

But under the pretext of combating Islamic extremism and Al-Qaeda in Somalia, the government was overthrown in late 2006 by an invasion of Somali and Ethiopian war lords that were being trained and armed by Britain with involvement from Kenya and the United States; basically an armed, trained gang invaded Somalia, battled the Islamic Courts Union. They were called the Transitional Federal Government just to give them a veneer of legitimacy and really reduced the country to chaos. One journalist in the UK reported on Britain's involvement in this and ironically he was writing for the Daily Mail which is a right-wing, quite racist newspaper in Britain and I think the Daily Mail allowed him to report on it because they could blame the so-called left-wing Labour government in Britain to say "Look at our awful Labour."

And he was reporting that the dreadful famine in Somalia in which literally millions of people were at risk, was caused by the disruption to the social system, not because of climate change. The flow of refugees was horrendous. There were tens of thousands of Somalis, women and children, fleeing this terror of the Transitional Federal Government and they were trying to escape across the Gulf of Aden to Yemen in rickety boats, many of them drowning, some of them being thrown overboard because they couldn't pay fees to smugglers and so on. Hundreds of thousands ended up in Kenya, many of them in refugee camps where they were being abused and food was withheld and so on.

So this was a real humanitarian catastrophe and 99.9% of what we heard in the media was either about Somali pirates harassing European and American ships in the Somali waters, or else it was about Al-Shabaab, supposedly allied with Al-Qaeda, but what Al-Shabaab - which means the youth - was, was simply the armed wing of the Islamic Courts Union, this socialist government in Somalia. It did not become an extremist organization until the Islamic Courts Union was destroyed and until it was largely infiltrated by what we call Al-Qaeda.

Now at that point it was of interest to the media. Suddenly we had Al-Qaeda in Somalia so we had justification then for using drones, for using helicopter acts for various other covert activities.

Harrison: Tim, we've gone for about an hour. Is it cool if we ask a couple more questions?

Tim: Sure.

Harrison: Okay. I just want to make one general comment first about the book. You cover 11 specific countries and each has its own chapter and then you've got one extra chapter on the drone warfare and the multiple countries that that involves. The thing that I get from this relates to what we were talking about earlier, about the reason that there is so much secrecy and that being the reason that most people don't know what's going on. The impression I get is that if anyone were to even read one chapter in your book or look at one of these countries and get an idea of what's going on, that would kind of totally explode the secrecy and totally subvert the foreign policy objective that Britain has, by just revealing the truth about it.

When you look at any of these individual countries you see this pattern. Sometimes in one specific country it's just a couple of the elements but when you look at them all together like you do in your book and you put all the pieces of the puzzle together, then you get this really horrifying picture and that involves not only supplying weapons and bombs and all kinds of materiel that goes into warfare to dictators and people who are committing genocide, you get British intelligence and special forces creating and supporting death squads in countries all over the world. You get these massacres and atrocities against villagers and human rights activists and ordinary people who are standing up for their own country and for their own land against corporate interests. When you put it all together, it's just horrible.

One of the countries that I wasn't as familiar with that you commented on was Columbia. I think that even if you just look at Columbia and the situation that was going on there, that can tell us a lot about what's going on right now in other countries too, for example in Syria. The reason I say this is because there's currently this massive disinformation campaign in the news about what's going on in Syria. We have this image of the United States and Great Britain as being these defenders of democracy and fighting Al-Qaeda and those pesky Russians are just getting in the way. But really if you look at what's going on, the picture is completely different. I was wondering if you could speak a little bit about Columbia and what the situation in Columbia says about what Great Britain actually does in the world?

Tim: Yeah, Columbia is an interesting case because we are bombarded in the British media - and I'm sure it's the same in the US - about the atrocities of ISIS, about torture, beheadings, setting people on fire, drowning them. You can find exactly the same kind of atrocities being committed next door in Saudi Arabia by our allies and also exactly the same atrocities being committed in Columbia again by our allies, the paramilitary forces. Columbia has been essentially in a class war, a real shooting class war for decades with a land-owning elite and a large number of Afro-Columbians who are descendents of slaves and also indigenous people and poor people who are descendents of the Spanish.

For decades people have gradually fought for basic rights, like the right not to have their rivers polluted by giant British corporations or the right to be able to have an education without being assassinated for being involved in a political group. The situation in Columbia, Britain's involvement that I could find out, began in the 1980s because there was supposedly a real drug problem in Columbia. The drugs were getting into Europe and drugs were getting into America and so the SAS and the special boat service from Britain were sent in to try and help the Columbia military and the paramilitaries. But what I found was happening is that Britain's allies were as much involved in the drug trade as their enemies. Now the enemies supposedly were the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia) rebels, what began as a Marxist group and inevitably became corrupted and violent, but most of the atrocities that are committed in Columbia are not committed by FARC although they do commit atrocities. Most of the atrocities are committed by the paramilitaries.

Anyway, both sides essentially get a lot of revenues from cocaine and what I found is that the British were stopping the cocaine where they could, that FARC was running, but facilitating the cocaine that was being run by the paramilitary forces and by the gangs that are related to them. This situation has gone on for decades to the point where it was even exposed recently in the international media that HSBC, which is a quasi-British bank and has connections mostly with Hong Kong now, HSBC's American branch was actually laundering drug money from Mexican gangs. Some of it was coming from Columbia.

So there's a long chain here which involves international banks and it involves national military forces and paramilitary forces.

Niall: Tim, I just want to point out specifically the notorious Medellin cartel of Pablo Escobar, that everyone's aware of in pop culture - "Oh the Columbia cartels" - this guy was trained by the British secret services. Is that about right?

Tim: As far as I can tell there were close connections. I don't know to what extent the training was. If you have other sources I'd be interested to see them. But certainly the British were allied with the gang for a long time.

Niall: It always seems to be part of the pattern globally. You find the worst characters and if you don't inadvertently or directly create them, you end up aligning with them. This is the craziness of it and yet it's the recurring pattern, whether it's the most extremist religious nut jobs in the Middle East or the most extreme cartel leaders in South America. They seem to be like water finding its level. The British state ends up aligned with the worst of the worst. Elan, you were going to say something else.

Elan: Well I was curious as to what Tim's feelings were about the Chilcot inquiry, the Iraq inquiry, the report of which is going to be announced on July 6th. This was a public investigation into Britain's involvement in the Iraq war. It's a funny thing, I'm reading a little bit about it now. It's this supposed public inquiry but it's headed by Sir John Chilcot, Sir Lawrence Freedman, Sir Martin Gilbert, Sir Roderic Lyne, Baroness Prashar, all of these elite Sirs and Baronesses. In any case, my first thought about it is it's going to resemble something like the 9/11 Truth Commission's information. "Yeah, there were intelligence failures. We should have done better but so what?"

In any case Tim, I'm wondering what, if anything can be expected to come out of the report that we're expecting to hear about in just a couple of weeks.

Tim: I really don't waste my time with it because it's the government investigating itself. So what I've found just looking at it in a very general way, I found that the questions that are being asked to the politicians and the policymakers and the military tend to be "Could we have done more to save British lives? Was the equipment you were given the correct sort of equipment for the mission?" These are really marginal issues. They don't get to the core questions such as "Was this an illegal war?" Well that question can be answered in five minutes. Of course it was. And it doesn't, as far as I can tell, go into a lot of detail about not only the illegality of it but about the effect that it has had on the civilian population. Estimates vary but about a million people have been slaughtered because of this invasion. Even before ISIS came along, the life expectancy had dropped even to the standard of the sanctions era. Infant mortality had increased. The political system was destroyed.

None of this is entering the discussion about it and when a British weapons inspector called Dr. David Kelly, again one of these "coincidental deaths", when he supposedly committed suicide after revealing that the government had lied about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction which was the justification for invading Iraq in 2003, the inquiry was a waste of time. The evidence from specialists in trauma who investigated his death was not taken into account. It was not conducted under the parliamentary court. It was conducted merely as an inquiry so nobody would be found culpable of lying for example. So it's going to be like that. It's just going to be another whitewash.

Joe: Just slightly off-topic, but what's your take on this Brexit business?

Tim: On Brexit?

Joe: Yes.

Tim: Well I have to say that surprised me because the policy for Europe has been to essentially create a global system, an ordered union and this is partly what the destruction of the Middle East and North Africa is about. The businesses want to create the unified Middle East like a European Union trading bloc. And in fact the origins of the European Union not only go back to the Nazi era but to the forerunner to the CIA, the OSS. They had committees for a united Europe. So this has been a long-term plan to keep Europe united.

So the vote to leave surprised me. I would have assumed that it would have been fixed to remain in Europe but from what I've read recently among European policy researchers, there is a group of very powerful hedge fund managers that want Britain to be free of the constraints of Europe. They want to bring in more US capital so that London will be even more awash in US capital. They want to further deregulate the city of London and for this they think that Brexit will be the best solution. So it's possible that the Brexit result has resulted from a neoliberal economic push to get London further away from European regulation.

Joe: Interesting.

Harrison: Yeah, we've been listening to T.J. Coles, author of Britain's Secret Wars - How and Why the United Kingdom Sponsors Conflict Around the World. As I've already said, the book is great. It's short. It's easy to read and it's just jam-packed full of information on all these conflicts. I learned a tonne reading it so I highly recommend it. Right now it's available on Amazon.co.uk. You can also go to Amazon.com. It says it's available for pre-order but it hasn't been released in the states yet but there are sellers selling it on the Amazon Marketplace so you can check it out there. Tim do you have any information about when the book will be officially available in the US?

Tim: I'm afraid not but can certainly ask my publisher about what's happening there.

Joe: In our chat room we've just had a couple of people already just bought one and said there's only five copies left and get it before it's gone.

Tim: I don't know about that.

Harrison: That might just be Amazon.co.uk. They just have a certain number in stock before they get more.

Niall: Better crank up the printers Tim!

Joe: Yeah.

Elan: I just had a comment for you Tim. Earlier in the show you mentioned the pathocracy and the psychopathic thinking involved in Britain's secret wars. Reading chapters from your book and listening to you speak, I just want to encourage you to continue in that vein because like Niall was saying, it's something that we at SOTT have been talking about for a very long time. So just a word of encouragement from this end here about continuing in that vein and letting people know how these people really think.

Joe: Yeah, we're going to send him a copy of political ponerology.

Tim: Please. I look forward to it.

Joe: Go ahead Harrison.

Harrison: Thanks for being on Tim. It was great talking to you.

Joe: Yes.

Tim: Thank you.

Joe: And more power to you Tim. You've obviously been doing this for a long time and it's probably taken a lot of effort and energy from you. I think you deserve a nice quiet, peaceful retirement I think, writing books at your leisure.

Tim: I'm sorry the line's dropped. I assume it was something positive.

Harrison: What does Tim deserve?

Joe: I was just saying that you've been doing this for quite a long time and it's probably taken a lot of effort and a lot of energy. It's not exactly the nicest or the easiest thing to have to stick your nose in and keep looking at over and over again and talking and writing about. I was just wishing for you for the future at least some peace and relaxation and down time so you can have some fun.

Tim: Well thank you very much. I appreciate it.

Niall: Alright Tim. Thanks again. We'll talk soon hopefully.

Joe: Yeah, maybe.

Tim: Yeah, looking forward to it.

Joe: Good luck. Have a good evening.

Tim: And you. Bye.

Joe: Alright, so it's time Harrison for - do we want to do the jingle now or do we want to talk to our jingler?

Harrison: Let's do the jingle and then talk.

Joe: Alright. Jingle away.

Harrison: Where's the jingle? I don't have the button!

Joe: Ah Harrison, come on! {laughter} [cop roundup intro]

Joe: Hey Brent! Are you smiling this week?

Brent: Yeah I am. It's Pride in New York City today so I'm very happy.

Joe: Oh yeah. Alrighty.

Brent: It has nothing to do with the stories that I have here for you guys. It's a pretty gruesome collection of stuff.

Joe: Oh god! This is obviously our cop roundup. Shock cop crap roundup. I wish we didn't have to do it but we do have to do it and fair dues to you Brent for looking at it and bringing us the gory details. So what have we got?

Brent: Quite gory. Actually I don't know if you guys heard, but there was this whole big scandal happening in Oakland, California with the police department there. It's like a series of scandals. There's actually this nice little series of tweets that sum it up and I'll just go down the list. There was a cop who allegedly killed his wife and fellow officers helped him cover up the crime trying to make it look like a suicide. The woman was shot twice and so naturally her family was curious about how a woman could commit suicide by shooting herself twice. So it came out that it was actually a murder and it was covered up.

That same officer apparently committed suicide. As to whether or not that was actually suicide or they killed him, we don't really know. He did however leave behind a suicide note that says that he and some of his fellow officers were raping a child trafficking victim. An investigation began that revealed that that was actually happening. After this child trafficking victim turned 18 more cops actually started paying her for sex and some of this was happening in the parking lot of the Oakland Police Department.

The investigation continues.

Joe: What the hell?!

Brent: It's alleged that the officer's wife knew about the raping of the child trafficking victim all along and then that police chief eventually stepped down. It was determined that he was unfit. Whether or not he knew or not, he was just unfit to lead because all this stuff was happening on his watch.

Then the mayor says the police chief stepped down for personal reasons. Then they went through two or three more police chiefs in a week after that, all these people being unfit to lead. It was really crazy. There's a really good article over at US Uncut that sums up the whole thing. I'm trying to not go through it all because it's just so crazy but I will post a link in the chat room in case anybody wants to get into the dirty details of all that.
Also this last week the Supreme Court ruled in a 5-to-3 decision that police have the right to detain anybody without cause and then arrest them on the spot if they have an outstanding warrant. There was quite a big kerfuffle about this because the police can grab anybody off the street and demand ID from them and now if they run a background check and there's any sort of ping in their system...

Joe: A parking ticket?

Brent: ...they can search you - parking ticket, anything, any sort of thing, perhaps child care payments that went overdue.

Joe: Right.

Brent: They can search you on the spot and use anything they find on your person against you in a court of law as reasonable evidence. It's a whole new big win to the police state. What's-her-name, Justice Sonia Sotomayor was one of the dissenting judges. She wrote a really scathing rebuttal of the majority decision. There was a really good quote. Maybe I'll dig it up later. But she was one of the biggest judges and she wrote the minority opinion there and it was really amazing, what she said. Here we are.

We must not pretend that the countless people who are routinely targeted by police are isolated. They are canaries in the coal mine whose deaths, civil and literal warn us that no one can breathe in this atmosphere. They are the ones who recognize that unlawful police stops corrode all of our civil liberties and threaten all of our lives. Until their voices matter too our justice system will continue to be anything but.

She really laid into it. It kind of harkens back to what they were doing here in New York City with the stop and frisk policy. They stopped that but now we're moving back in that direction with this Supreme Court ruling.

Elan: You know Brent, the first story that you covered, that whole debacle in Oakland, the mayor if I remember correctly, had to have the police department be taken over by civilian oversight and her words of disgust over the whole situation seemed to echo Sotomayor's. She was like "This is a sick macho police culture we have here. We can't even let these people run the show right now." So it just seems like something's going to have to happen, if at all, from outside of these police institutions in order to create any change, which seems unlikely.

Brent: Yeah, it's like there's a really toxic sort of masculinity that's very prevalent, especially in the United States where these men feel that they have to assert themselves in using violence against other people and that's how they define masculinity, this violent ability to enforce their will on other people. You see it. I have a couple more stories here.

There's a Missouri teen who was dead eight minutes after cops tased him for 23 seconds. He was a 17-year-old. He was actually the son of a police officer. He was placed in a medically induced coma, suffered brain damage after a taser was used on him repeatedly in the chest for four times the duration police were trained to use on somebody. He was pulled over for some sort of a traffic violation and I guess he was giving "lip" to the officer and then the officer decided that he was going to pull him out of the car and proceed to actually arrest him. He didn't want to get out of the car. The cop opened the door, pulled out his taser, pointed it at the kid, discharged it and he had to pull the trigger multiple times in order to get that duration. Then he dragged this kid out of the car and over to the side of the street. The kid was having semi-conscious convulsions and then he just dropped him onto the ground. His head hit the ground and he got a traumatic brain injury. I think he actually did survive but he was technically dead for eight minutes after this whole incident went down.

I was always told growing up that you're supposed to say "Yes sir, no sir, officers" and I understand that. But it's like blaming the girl for wearing a short skirt after she gets raped. You can't explain to people that "It's your fault" when somebody does this horribly brutally violent thing to you just because you weren't 100% deferent to their authority.

There's another one. "Cop exposed for planting cocaine on a woman while filming an episode of cops". He wanted to be a hero and the cameras caught it. It just makes you wonder with these drug busts against young African American men in the city, how many times are the drugs planted or how many times are they actually there? You just don't know. You get stories like this and it becomes very, very questionable.

Here's another one. "Worse than Sanduski. School cop whose job is to protect students repeatedly rapes 22 boys. This is a story out of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. This is one of these high school cops they keep in schools. This guy was picking out boys from their classroom, taking them to the janitor's closet and sodomizing them repeatedly. He worked in this high school from 1990 to 2012 when he got suspended with pay and then he resigned two months later. So obviously somebody had an idea of what was going on but it took 22 years of him having access to children. They said there were 22 people in this lawsuit being spearheaded by one of his former victims but who knows what the actual number is? Any time you get into these sex abuse cases usually the number of people who come forward is the tip of the iceberg.

Joe: What is wrong with people?!? Twenty-two years this guy's around?!? People must have known. That happens so often. The catholic church obviously is one example. But what is wrong with parents and other people who have children, in particular because their supposed mothering or parental instinct, against children? What is it with people who even have the slightest suspicion that a child is being abused or traumatized or tortured or whatever in any way, and just look away or just say "Oh no, don't rock the boat."

Those people are not human beings!! That's not a human response! There's something wrong. The more I think about it, the more I think we actually live on a planet where probably a majority of people that we share the planet with aren't actually humans, you know? In some way or other they're more like animals. Well actually you wouldn't expect a dog to do it so animals is the wrong term. Lizards!! {laughter} I don't know. 'Animal' doesn't even get it because there's just some instinct that's missing in so many people where they're just like "That's just best left unsaid. Look away. Don't rock the boat. Don't cause trouble. It's okay." I don't get it! Anyway that's just me. Go ahead.

Brent: The lawsuit says that not a single teacher reported him or even questioned him. Not a single teacher made an inquiry to the office. Nobody ever bothered to think "Why are these kids getting taken out of class over and over and over and over again.

Joe: Right! Like nobody's suspicious? "Oh he must just be interested..." I don't know.

Brent: "Oh, he's got a uniform and a badge. He must be doing the right thing!"

Joe: Exactly. And that thing about planting drugs on people, that's got to happen probably 50% of the time or more. It's so similar. It just made me think of the stuff we were talking about with T.J. Coles about the war on terror. One small aspect or example of the whole fakery around terrorism basically where you have western powers who are fighting wars on terror but actually carrying out the terror themselves so they can actually go and fight a war which is really a war of imperial pillage and plunder, in that situation they go into countries. They shoot a bunch of innocent people and then they throw a bunch of guns down and say "Look! Terrorists! We were shot at!" It seems like a world away, that whole scene that I just painted happening in the Middle East somewhere, in Iraq or Syria or Libya. It seems like a world away from the streets of New York or the streets of some town in the US but it's not. The dynamic there is exactly the same, where they have an authority victimizing an innocent civilian; not only victimizing them but incriminating them.

Niall: Blaming the victim.

Joe: Yeah, making them a victim and then blaming them and setting them up for jail time, just so they can what? Feel good about themselves? Feel more authoritarian? Justify their jobs? Justify what they're doing, which is being in authority. It's all about justification for authority over ordinary people. Anyway, carry on.

Brent: It's ridiculous. We see it again and again and people just shrug their shoulders at it. There's a video here of a cop allowing his canine to maul a man for several minutes over riding a bike with no light. What? And this comes out of Florida. Florida comes up again and again in these stories. I don't know what's in the water down there or what they're doing to people down there. But I read terrible stories about the cops down there so often.

Then this story talks about how more and more schools are getting rid of guidance counsellors and hiring police officers. So instead of having people who are trained in child psychology and in helping kids get through those awkward teenage years and make good choices, they're just opting to have enforcers with tasers and guns patrol the schools. "If a student gets a little uppity, we're just going to tase them. We're just going to beat them. We'll arrest them. No problem."

Elan: It's so symbolic of this kind of prison culture we live in because how much more of an example do you need of how the US is in this kind of lock down? Instead of providing these supportive, nurturing services, we're being smacked down for misbehaviour instead of being treated for it.

Joe: Yeah! It's like child guidance counsellors being replaced with police officers is like a kid comes to speak to the guidance counsellor and has got some problems with someone at school, a classmate or something. What'll he do? "You will respect my authority or I will tase you! (southern accent)". "Okay thank you. That's helpful. That's my problem. I'll just shut the hell up and not ask anymore."

Brent: The article goes on to say that 1.6 million students attended a school that employs a law enforcement officer but has no guidance counsellor. It's just unbelievable. There's a report by Civil Rights Data Collection, a group that put a poll together after doing the research and published it in the Washington Post and it's just unbelievable how many times schools called cops. There was a previous report from Free Thought Project where the US Department of Education released some statistics from 2011-2012. This was years ago so you can imagine it's gotten worse. Teachers in the state of California alone called the cops a total 31,961 times leading to 6,341 arrests which means in 175 eight-hour long schools days that a cop was called every 2.6 seconds. And that's just in California.

Joe: Wow. That's amazing!

Brent: My boyfriend is a substitute teacher and I hear about some of the stories. It's hard to deal with kids sometimes but it's just clear that neither teachers or police are not really equipped properly to deal with students if they have severe emotional disruption, whether there's a problem in the home or the kid has some sort of mental disorder.

Joe: Or they're on drugs as in prescription drugs.

Brent: Yeah. They're just not equipped and it's really sad that we're supposed to be the "greatest country in the world" and we can't even educate our students without having armed police patrol the hallways. There's another story here "Innocent father of three in critical condition after cops responded to the wrong home and shot him". This was in Stockbridge, Georgia, responding to a 911 call. "Henry County police arrived at the wrong house on Wednesday and shot an innocent homeowner in the neck."

Niall: And then left saying "sorry about that. Carry on."

Elan: Did they say sorry?

Brent: No they don't. They usually explain it away. This phenomenon of police responding and going to the wrong home and injuring somebody happens all the time! Don't you guys have Google maps or something? I can travel between states, go on a seven hour drive, get from point to point and show up at the right house. You're telling me this is your local jurisdiction. You're supposed to be from there and you guys I guess in the heat of the moment, you go to the wrong house? I just don't understand.

Joe: They're all hopped up on steroids probably. Their brains aren't working properly. Can't read the numbers on the houses.

Brent: Yeah, it could be a lot of that. There was another story I read about cops being found on steroids but it's just unbelievable. There's another story here from McAllen, Texas. "Cop rapes woman in jail. When supervisors see the video they threaten to kill her and offer her a taco." It's unbelievable!!

This is a story originally from May of 2014. This woman was picked up by La Joya police officers for misdemeanour probation violation and booked into the La Joya city jail. While other officers were out on patrol, Felipe Santigo Peralez entered her cell and conducted a "all night invasion of her body" according to court documents. After getting out she sued the city and its former police chief, its administrator and a bunch of officers. I don't even know if I want to read these details, but it's a 38-page complaint. She was crying and in pain throughout all of this. She says she told two female police officers about the rape and other officers apparently had video footage of it but each one refused to take her to the emergency room for an examination, which is actually Texas law. If somebody alleges rape the police are supposed to immediately take them to an emergency room to collect evidence and stuff.

Then it says another lieutenant reviewed the video, questioned the plaintiff about the incident, got her statement, offered her a taco, declined her request for medical attention and then released her to another officer without offering her any medical attention or counselling. It's just unbelievable! Later she said that her life was threatened if she wanted to talk about it to anybody else. She said that the lieutenant advised her that she should forget all about it and go on with her life because become come up missing all the time in the valley.

Joe: Oh wow!

Brent: And these are the people that are supposed to be protecting us!

Joe: They guy thinks he's in a Hollywood movie or something.

Niall: The things they create all around the world in double quick time by expressly training them to be death squads, I was just thinking the US has ended up creating it, inadvertently probably for the most part. It's a natural culmination. There are now the same death squads. They're not killing tens of thousands just yet, but it's going there!

Joe: Yeah, it's the same attitude has infused somehow or other, that policy of the western elite creating death squads around the world and invading countries and victimizing people, somehow that attitude that they've pursued for so long is somehow infusing into the fabric of life in the US and the fabric of societies, particularly amongst authorities like the police. I don't know, it's infected them or something.

Elan: I just wanted to mention, I had a high school chum, a good friend of mine who was a very sensitive guy, wrote poetry, was a creative fellow, showed noble traits in various ways, a very caring guy. He became part of NYPD. This was in the mid-90s and after a few years we saw less and less of each other but it was so clear to me that this police culture had done something to him because his attitudes changed and it's like his mind shut down. So I got to see this to some degree in a very personal way with this friend of mine who became NYPD and I can only imagine that this killer, authoritarian mentality has just been ramped up everywhere. It's just really sad.

Harrison: When I was reading Tim's book Britain's Secret Wars over the last week, he talks about how the British special forces and intelligence and military in general, go over to other countries - I think specifically it was Papua New Guinea, the Indonesian police - and he describes the amount of training and support that the British police give them and then he describes what the Indonesian police do. He basically described the US police. He says they regularly rape and torture. He wasn't even talking about extrajudicial killings or anything like that, but just the number of women who get raped, people who get arrested for no reason. I was just reading that thinking well there's no difference. The British are training these other police squads in these countries that we think of as maybe third-world, but it's the exact same dynamic in the US. So when we think about the corrupt police in all those other countries, well the US is probably the worst, in some ways.

Brent: Yeah. It varies from location to location but generally I see these stories popping up all over the US with scary regularity. Every day I check my feed, I check a couple of websites and then I'll put one of these stories aside in my folder and save it for when we do the roundup. It's amazing how often this stuff happens and a lot of people just shrug their shoulders with a "Well they deserved it". There's a lot of victim blaming which really blows my mind. The way that I've seen it recently is that our country goes abroad and does all this terrorizing of innocent people abroad. Well it's almost like karmically normal that that phenomenon will come back to revisit the populace if we don't speak out against it, and if we're not doing all that we can to stop it or at least to know about it. So it's really something.

There's another story here from Madison, Wisconsin. This is the middle-of-nowhere, US where police grabbed this black girl who was in a mall. I'm not really sure what her "crime" was, but there's a video where they carried her out of the mall and she's upset and she's loud and screaming and one cop was just holding her and then as soon as backup arrived this guys got out of the car, charged right over to her, grabbed her, tried to trip her onto the ground. She was trying to stay standing up and then they started punching and punching her, beating her, holding her down on the ground. She's screaming "I can't breathe". Apparently she might have tried to spit and because she tried to spit at people they put this spit guard/bag over her head. So they basically bagged and tagged her. This video even comes with a trigger warning it's so disturbing. I'll post the link to the chat room in case people want to take a look.

She was an 18-year-old girl outside of a mall and in the video you can watch how she's struggling and as soon as the backup officer shows up he knees her in the ribs and then punches her a bunch of times. They bust out a taser. It's really disturbing! This is a little girl. She's 18, whatever, but how many cops does it take to subdue one little girl?! And was this really all necessary? Why is she suffering all this violence? It's not like she f**king killed somebody! She didn't pull out a gun. She's not crazy. It's just unreal!!

And then there's another story from Michigan. This family had recently purchased a property and they wanted to do some experimenting with off-the-grid living. So they decided they were going to camp out for maybe the summer or a couple of weeks in the summer. But somebody apparently tipped off the local police that there was a family living with a bunch of kids out in the woods so you need to go check this out. And they showed up and they took all the kids away. There were six children they pulled away. They were able to prove "We own the land. We're just experimenting with off-the-grid living. All the kids are well cared for." They had all the facilities that they needed but I guess because there wasn't running water - they said there wasn't electricity but the family did have a generator - they removed the children from the custody of the parents!
Luckily they got their kids back not too long after but it's just really crazy. The children were aged 7 months, 2 years old, 4 years old, 6 years old, 15 and 17 years old had been living in three tents. There's a quote "Our family decided to go camping for the summer to a 10 acre property we are buying. We intended to stay the summer while finalizing plans." Couldn't say they would stay the whole summer due to the fact that the husband was donating a kidney to his mother and they could be called at any time to do the surgery and if that was going to happen they were immediately going to move back into their home. They just wanted to have an outdoor experience with the kids.

Joe: They went on an extended camping trip.

Brent: Yeah. They got some chickens. They got a turkey, some ducks and they were going to try raising the animals and butchering them themselves, "get back to earth" kind of thing. They weren't even at it for two weeks before the police showed up with a CPS representative and took the kids away because "the family was not in a stable living environment. The family had no electricity or water source."

Joe: Yeah, no shit! We're camping!

Brent: "The children were playing in the woods cared for by a 15-year-old. The youngest child had a diaper rash and the 17 year old girl had cerebral palsy and was reportedly cold." So they took all the kids away. But thankfully they got their kids back. They were out of the care of the family for 21 days because they were camping.

Elan: Well a diaper rash is a very serious offence.

Brent: Very serious. You can get that anywhere. It can turn up in the home too. So best use that as evidence the kids aren't being taken care of. It's just unreal. And that's the end of my stories for today.

Joe: Alright. Thanks for that Brent. It's always shocking and horrifying to hear what's going on. It just doesn't seem to be getting any better. It's the one area, the authorities, the front line, the cold face of the authorities which is the police forces, your friendly, neighbourhood police officer and stuff, is the direct interface between the ordinary people in the street, i.e., anybody that's listening to the show, and the pathocracy essentially. So it's important for people to know the attitudes and the behaviours of that front line, of that interface between you and your authorities and what their attitude towards you is. That's really important because it may save your life one day.

Brent: Yeah, and any one of these stories taken in isolation is "Oh that's terrible", but when you really step back and look at the big picture, it's like "Oh my god! These are the police. They're supposed to protect us!" You see these stories again and again and again. What is happening to my country?! It's just unreal.

Joe: Absolutely. Alright, thanks Brent and we'll hear from you next week again, yeah?

Brent: Yeah. Thanks for having me on.

Joe: Okay. Have a good evening.

Niall: Thank you Brent. Take care.

Brent: Bye.

Joe: Alright Harrison, Elan, give an account of yourselves.

Harrison: Well I think that pretty much wraps up the show for today.

Elan: I think so too.

Joe: I reckon. Thanks to T.J. Coles, a very interesting guest with a really good book as we mentioned earlier, Britain's Secret Wars. Check it out. It's an easy to read, short but packed with very important information that will explain what's going on in the world to you. Okay, hang on a minute. We've got a late call. Who have we got on the line?

Ryan: G'day Joe. It's Ryan from Australia.

Joe: Hi Ryan.

Harrison: Hi Ryan.

Niall: G'day.

Elan: Hello.

Joe: You nearly missed us. We were about to knock off.

Ryan: It was a really interesting interview. I was paying a little bit of attention to it.

Joe: Only a little bit?

Ryan: A lot. {laughter}

Niall: Alright. That's better.

Ryan: I've got a few notes that I wrote down.

Joe: Good stuff.

Ryan: I'm just wondering - some other listeners might be interested as well - to know what you guys, maybe quickly, think of the whole Brexit thing that happened during the week.

Joe: We asked T.J. about that.

Niall: Don't ask me because I don't know anything.

Joe: Don't ask Niall. Niall wrote an article on it there during the week and it all went a bit pear-shaped.

Ryan: I'm surprised.

Joe: You're surprised what?

Ryan: I was surprised as well Niall. I tended to agree with what you wrote and was very surprised.

Niall: Our guest said the same thing. He expected if anything, they would have to rig it the other way. They didn't so it's a big question why. Joe you wanted to suggest something. I liked our guest's answer. Tim's answer's probably up there in the ballpark. Some kind of clique high up there in the food chain would like to deepen Britain's already existing role as a kind of offshore banking centre or clearing centre for the world financial elite and they figured being out the EU was better because they can deregulate further and do murkier stuff more of the time to more people. Something like that.

Joe: Yeah. They feel too constrained by being part of some kind of EU consortium that maybe has slightly different goals or isn't quite as psychopathic or isn't quite as off-the-rails as the London banker types and the Anglo-American types are. It's maybe evidence of a moving away or a split at least in terms of between the British and Americans on one side and some European French-German interests who are grumbling increasingly about this whole Russian sanction business and the hysterical US drive backed up by their poodles in London, to isolate Russia at whatever cost, i.e., also at the cost of screwing over business interests of Germany, France, Italy and other European nations.

It's NATO/the USA, John Kerry saying "Listen guys, take one for the team here. We hate Russia. We need you to hate Russia as well. You should take one for the team here and not do a, b, c, d, and e contracts with Russia because we hate them and we want you to hate them as well. Sure, it's going to hurt you financially. Whatever, you're just going to have to suck it up because 'Murica, USA, USA. We rule everything and we want you to be the good, compliant, vassal EU state that we have shaped you to be."

So that kind of attitude from Washington is not really flying, at least with some people within Europe and possibly within the EU central powers type thing. So it's possible that's happening behind the scenes, that they're feeling a change towards that direction by the European powers. So this is their response, to say "Well we can get our friends in London, England to wreck your little EU party right there. We can throw a cat among the pigeons. We can have them leave. Then what are you going to do with your fancy European Union? It's all going to fall apart because then we're going to talk about contagion spreading to other European countries. Are they going to want to leave? What about after Brexit, what about Spexit? What about...?"

Niall: Nexit.

Joe: "Nexit. What about a Bexit? Huh, huh? After that what do you thing about...?"

Niall: Auxit.

Joe: What's that?

Niall: Austria.

Joe: What would an Italian exit be?

Niall: Jesus! An I-xit. {laughter}

Ryan: Itexit.

Niall: Itexit.

Ryan: They're already talking about Aussie-exit on Twitter, the Australian republican movement seems to have gathered a bit of steam from this.

Joe: Oh yeah? Where's Australia going to leave? The South Pacific?

Ryan: The Commonwealth.

Joe: Oh, the Commonwealth. Okay.

Niall: You guys had a referendum in the '90s. Was that rigged? Because it was very close wasn't it?

Ryan: It was rigged in the sense that the option that they put forward to have a non-directly elected President was not what people wanted. People wanted to be able to directly elect the President as in the United States' model, but that I think was the deciding factor as to why most people ended up voting against it. If they'd had the directly elected President model, it probably would have gotten through. But because of that I think that was the deciding factor.

Niall: So now people are talking again about another one. There's Australia and then more directly for London, the Scots. All of their electoral districts voted to remain in the EU and they're talking about having another referendum.

Harrison: They want a second referendum.

Niall: An independence referendum.

Joe: Yeah. Three million people signed a petition in two days to have another referendum. "Ah, I didn't mean it. I only did it as..." That's what a lot of people in the UK are saying. All this stuff's coming out where it seems a large percentage of British citizens who voted to leave did it only for a bit of fun, just for a bit of a laugh because they don't like the government and the government wants to stay so I'm going to say no. Yeah, boo sucks to you. And then we'll see what happens. It's all a bit of fun anyway. And then the next day they're like "You weren't serious were you? I thought it was just a joke. I thought we were just having a vote for a laugh. What do you mean we're leaving Europe? No! No! Why didn't someone tell me this was real?!?" Apparently that's a lot of peoples' position right now, where they made a mistake basically.

Harrison: I don't know if I buy that.

Joe: Well there are people on camera who have said that, on camera.

Harrison: Really?

Joe: Really, on camera, have actually said "I just did it as a protest vote. I didn't think it was serious."

Harrison: Oh wow.

Ryan: Do you think that percentage might be getting played up at all by the media?

Joe: I don't know, but there's 3 million people signed a petition in two days to have a vote again.

Harrison: But anyone can sign it. It doesn't matter what country. You can have people from the US signing it.

Joe: No, no, unless you can make up a postal code, you have to put in your name, address and postal code.

Harrison: Okay, Moon of Alabama had an article up where he was talking about that and he said he signed it and he's in Germany, a German in Germany, so I don't know. Maybe it's just easy to fake, but it takes a little bit of effort.

Ryan: Do you think there's possibly any chance that MI5 somehow mucked it up in some sense? Like instead of correctly reading the referendum like in Scotland, they ...

Harrison: Brought the wrong box of ballots.

Niall: Not likely.

Joe: I don't think so.

Niall: They can keep their involvement in wars they start and fund secret for 20 years to the point where only two journalists, one of whom we interviewed today, even knows about it. I'm talking about Sri Lanka in specific here, which up until very recently - is an ongoing civil war, conflict and nobody knows about the British hand behind it. If they can do that over there in India? And they're not going to make mistakes like that. No way!

Ryan: It does seem unlikely, doesn't it?

Joe: No, but I think when you look at it, almost everything that happens, particularly in Europe, the Middle East and other places around the world over the past 10 or 15 years is all about Russia. We've written about this repeatedly, that this is all about America's hysterical hatred for Russia and fear that Russia and Europe would unite. I think the founder of NATO or some luminary or whatever, said basically that their fear all along has been - and this is going back 60 or 70 years - has been a union, close collaboration between the Soviet Union at the time, but Russia today, and Germany in particular. If Germany and Russia became best buddies, then there would be serious problems for US influence in not just Europe but in many other places around the world and they want to make sure there's a wedge driven between Europe and Russia forever.

So when you know that that is boiling away in the background and has been for many years and will continue to be, then you put events like this Brexit in that context, then see if you can figure out a reason why that happened, in that context. How does it help the driving of the wedge between Russia and Europe?

Elan: What's remarkable to me is how Russia even gets drawn into the conversation at all! They're blamed for it in a way and Putin has to actually come out and say "We're just observing. We didn't have any influence nor did we want to have any influence over the Brexit."

Joe: Right. But don't you think it's really super psychopathic and it takes the psychopathic trait of blaming others for what you're doing yourself almost to a new level where they may have, let's say assume they organized this Brexit as a way ultimately as part of their campaign, to isolate Russia and they organized this Brexit for that specific purpose? And as part of their propaganda around organizing the Brexit, they blame Russia for organizing the Brexit. It's like they punch Russia in the face and then they blame Russia for punching itself in the face and say "Look at Russia. Stupid Russia is punching itself in the face" when they are the ones who punched it in the face.

Ryan: The thing I wonder about that though is why Obama did the whole "Brexit would be just terrible. Don't Brexit! Don't Brexit!" If that was their plan all along, wouldn't Obama perhaps have had more moderate statements to say about Brexit and then they would have just gone and done it in the background?

Joe: I don't know. There's a lot of divisions in Washington as well and I think to a large extent, the White House and Obama don't really know what's going on and don't really have a lot of say or influence or power in terms of what goes on at the level of real political manipulations.

Ryan: So they were surprised as well.

Joe: Surprised and possibly don't even like it because they had a different agenda. It's very difficult to pin down. You look at somebody like John Kerry, the secretary of state, running around, going to Moscow repeatedly over and over again, saying all sorts of nice things. One day saying "Yeah, let's team up with Russia and get ISIS" and then the next day saying "No, Russia's bombing the wrong people. They're not bombing ISIS, they're only helping Assad." Just contradictory statements coming out all the time that suggest that there's a lot of chaos going on behind the scene in deep, dark, policymaking circles, or there's battles between certain groups or whatever. There's different interests there and they're not all on the same page. Poor Kerry's being told by one group of his masters to go and say this and then the next day another group of his masters calls him in and drags him over the coals and says "What did you say that for?! Tomorrow you go out and say the exact opposite!!" And he has to go out and say the exact opposite, you know. He's like "Yeah, okay" and he just looks like an idiot and nobody can make any sense of what he's doing or saying whatsoever.

It's the same for a lot of these overt politicians who just aren't really part of the in-crowd, if you know what I mean, but would love to be and are willing to pay their dues or serve their time as messenger boys for the real power brokers, public messenger boys, in the hope that one day they'll get to know the real super-secret dark deal of what's going on and "how I can get my hands on it". Pathetic people really.

Elan: I think Tim needs to rewrite the "Blame Canada" song in South Park to blame Russia. I think we have to replace the lyrics and do a "Blame Russia, Blame Russia" (singing).

Joe: Absolutely.

Ryan: Sounds like a good idea.

Joe: On the Brexit thing I'm part of a volunteer organization that is recruiting people starting tomorrow, Monday, where we're going up with shovels and spades and we're filling in the channel tunnel. {laughter} Because the public have voted, so fair enough! Just going to close the door.

Ryan: That's a really great idea.

Joe: Yeah? I'm going to organize as many people as I can.

Niall: I would love to fill it in.

Joe: In a couple of weeks we'll fill it in.

Ryan: Actually, that's probably a bit over the top.

Joe: Cement it up! Look, I'm all about democracy. They voted. That's what they want, isolation, out of Europe. Well the first thing to do is block up any gaps. There's a big one there called the channel tunnel. Just block it up and then we'll go back to the old way of just getting a visa, papers please at the border. "No! You can't come in. Don't like the look of you. Don't like your hairdo."

Ryan: There's definite drawbacks to it isn't there, the whole Brexit thing? I don't know why but I get the feeling that it's some kind of victory for democracy or humankind, like in some way it was actually a good thing. I'm not sure. Maybe I'm being naรฏve but I just get that feeling.

Joe: Yeah, that it was flipping the bird to the powers that be type if thing? But at the same time it's not a good thing because a lot of people in the UK and in Ireland, because Northern Ireland is implicated, are young and have grown up and lived and seen themselves as being European and having access to Europe and being able to travel. It has done a lot in that sense, since the EU and a lot more countries are involved, it has made all of those countries a lot more accessible to the citizens of all the other countries and there a lot of exchange and moving back and forth and people buying houses and having a holiday home in this country, whatever, or going there and lots of government education programs, European-funded programs where students from one university and one side of Europe can go and spend a year in another university, a lot of exchange in that respect. And younger people have grown up with that identity of being European and to now suddenly, even if symbolically it has an effect on people where they feel like they're being figuratively or emotionally cut out of a group identity that they had until now.

So it's quite shocking to people and I think if it was a legitimate vote then it's the older generation, all the older little Englanders type thing, and "back in the old days", "we won the war" and whatever English traditions they have, who are harking back to the good old days in the '60s with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and "everybody loved us" and free love or something. It was all about England and pork pies and - help me out here Niall.

Niall: Crumpets.

Joe: Crumpets and whatever.

Elan: Guinness.

Joe: Anyway, Corgies - Guinness? That's Irish. What're you talking about?

Ryan: There was an interesting tweet today on Twitter about a Russian guy who said that all the generation that went through the world wars and they had that experience of how bad things can get and so maybe that was part of what drove their thinking or they could somehow sense where the country is going, in some direction and so that maybe subconsciously drove their thinking, that influenced it.

Joe: Yeah maybe, but definitely I think the younger population aren't happy about it and they all voted to remain. It's interesting to think that it was an actual legitimate vote.

Niall: The map was interesting. Basically England voted to leave and all the others, maybe Wales too. The other countries voted overwhelmingly to remain.

Joe: But that's an argument then for division of the United Kingdom.

Niall: Which would be a massive shooting yourself in the feet. And they were told long in advance. Scottish nationalist have been saying for a year before this vote. "Listen, we'll be leaving. We're staying in Europe so if you want to fine, but keep in mind the risk." They did it consciously in awareness that it's going to give a problem for Scotland.

Joe: Yeah, the Scots were seriously "Don't leave me in this room alone with these people, with the English. Don't leave me on this island! Don't leave me alone on this island with these people!" That's a lot of Scottish peoples' perspective because there's a lot of historical good-natured animosity. We'll have to wait and see what happens. There could be other aspects to it or repercussions. They're talking about 10 years, some people were saying 10 years before it actually happens. Maybe they're just bored. It was a slow news day and somebody said "Let's have a Brexit." They needed to entertain people with some nonsense. It doesn't really change much anyway.

Ryan: I don't think it was that bad but I do see your point in that doesn't change probably some of the larger things that are going on with the environment with changes and that sort of thing.

Joe: And the fact that the pathocracy at the top isn't going to change. A large part of the global pathocracy is located in the city of London, so them distancing themselves from Europe doesn't really change much unless there is a real division there, unless the rest of Europe all of a sudden en masse, looked eastwards and decided to go full steam ahead with a Eurasian block and oppose in every way the Anglo-American, i.e., the UK.

Niall: There can't be any half measures with a pathocracy. It's got to be all or nothing. They will always find some way to win. The referendum I want to see next is that they're given the choice of relocating to the moon. So come back to me when something like that happens.

Joe: Yes.

Niall: And then I'll know something serious is up.

Ryan: Alright guys. Thanks very much for your comments. I really enjoyed the show. I'll definitely be getting that book I think by T.J. Coles. So thanks Tim if you're listening, for the interview. Really interesting and thanks guys for hosting the show.

Joe: Okay Ryan. Thanks for calling in. We'll talk to you again.

Harrison: Thanks.

Niall: G'day mate.

Ryan: Take it easy.

Joe: Alright. So as we were saying before we started talking to Ryan, thanks to Tim and check out his book Britain's Secret Wars. Anybody who has never read a book on the kind of stuff that we have been talking about on SOTT quite a lot for the past 13 years, anybody listening who has been aware of that but they never really liked the whole political angle and the war on terrorism business, were never really that much into it, preferred some other categories and therefore you never really bought a book or never read up on it in any particular way, well, this may be an opportunity to do so, but in a way that makes it very easy. It's a relatively short book, written in very accessible language, easy to read, easy to digest, broken up into small chunks and it's also very interesting. It'll keep you entertained and it won't take you very long to read it and you'll get a good overview of the main points of what has been going on in the world for a long time, how the west maintains its supremacy and how it also fuels and generates the whole war on terror so that it can continue to justify going around the word invading other countries and stealing their resources, to fight the war on terror which is made up of terrorists and terrorism that the west itself actually creates. So if you want to know some specific details about how that is all true, you can find it in Tim's book, Britain's Secret Wars.

So thanks to Tim, thanks to Ryan for calling in, thanks to our chatters and our listeners of course and thanks to Niall and Harrison and Elan.

Harrison: And Brent and Joe.

Joe: Aye Whatever. We'll be back next week I suppose. We always say that don't we? It always happens.

Elan: Same time.

Joe: Until then, have a good evening everybody. Bye.

All: Good-byes.