contras
The original 'moderate rebels', the Contras, on patrol in 1987.
For the first hour of the show, we were joined by blogger Hugo Turner of Anti-Imperialist U to discuss the thirtieth anniversary of the Iran-Contra scandal. Funding the Contras in Nicaragua was just a small window into a much wider history of American death squads, drug trafficking, torture, arms smuggling, regime change, and terrorism that was nothing new in the 80s, and hasn't changed much at all today. We talked about how it all fits together, and how it relates to what's going on today. You can read Hugo's Iran-Contra series on SOTT:

Beyond the Iran-Contra Affair Part 1: The secret team
Beyond the Iran-Contra Affair Part 2: World War 3 has already happened
Beyond the Iran-Contra Affair Part 3: The World Anti-Communist League

In the second half of the show, discussed the aftermath of the failed coup in Turkey, the mass shooting in Munich, and other current events, followed by a Police State Roundup.

Running Time: 02:20:36

Download: MP3


Here's the transcript of the show:

Harrison: Welcome back everyone to The Truth Perspective. In the studio today we have Shane Lachance.

Shane: Hey everybody.

Harrison: Corey Schink.

Corey: Hello.

Harrison: And I am Harrison Koehli. Today we are pleased to have joining us Hugo Turner who is a writer and his blog is called Anti-Imperialist U. The blog has been around for just over a couple of years now and he focuses on and writes about a wide range of topics in the geopolitical, anti-imperialist theme. Today we are going to be talking about Iran-Contra and branching out from there because this year, 2016 is the 30th year anniversary of the breaking of the Iran-Contra scandal. So we're going to get into that and maybe take a trip deeper down the rabbit hole and see some of the different connections going back leading up to Iran-Contra and extending from then to the present.
So first of all, Hugo I want to welcome you to the show.

Hugo: Thanks. It's great to be on.

Harrison: Cool. To start out with, I'm guessing that a lot of our listeners probably haven't checked out your blog yet. Some of them have because we've posted some of your articles on SOTT but I wanted to know if you could just give us a little bit about your background and how you came to start writing your blog. What inspired you to take up the pen and open the Anti-Imperialist U?

Hugo: It started with September 11th. There was this endless series of wars and finally I decided I had to do my part to try to educate people about why it was happening, what it was all about. So I decided to start really researching history hardcore and writing about what I found and also just talking about what's going on right now. I've written a lot about Ukraine. I've written a lot about Syria and Latin America.

Also when I was a kid my parents were involved with the solidarity with the Central American people. We heard this priest talk about being tortured by the CIA, when I was a kid and that made a big impression on me. But I guess really it was the Aztecs and stuff like that flavouring. I was always interested in history as a kid.

Shane: It's interesting that you mention 9/11 as a starting point. That was largely a starting point for me. Prior to that, I don't think I knew much of anything about what was really going on in the world. I don't think I knew what the word Zionist meant. That kind of blew open the doors for me. It created the shock and some people took it in a direction where they were just accepting the official narrative of things but I think for others it created the spark to ask why these things were going on. In your articles which we have up on SOTT people should definitely check them out because there are so many avenues of research that people could spend months and months and years delving into all the different threads that you talk about. On SOTT the title of the article is Beyond the Iran-Contra Affair Part 1: The Secret Team and Part 2: World War 3 Has Already Happened.

So with all these threads I think when we're looking into these things, somebody might start looking into ISIS and find all these connections to Saudi Arabia and Turkey and delve into these secret networks that have influence. With Iran-Contra it seems such a great representative of the way the US operates covertly in holding so much influence and power and these questions of how these players got to this influence - where the funding came from, what the connections are. It made me wonder too, what was your starting point for the Iran-Contra affair? Was it starting from 9/11 and going back? How did your interest in that come about?

Hugo: Well I was a kid when the Iran-Contra affair happened so the first exposure that there was this whole secret war going on underneath the surface of nice Reagan. He seemed like such a kindly old man but really what was actually going on was the opposite of what people would think. They claimed they were fighting this huge war on drugs but actually they're were bringing the drugs in on planes to fund these death squads in Central America. Or they claim that they're fighting terrorists but actually they're funding terrorists all over the place, like in Afghanistan, in Lebanon.

So Iran-Contra in many ways, you could see it going into the future. 9/11 definitely verged on that whole Iran-Contra era because you had Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Israel. All these same players, Adnan Khashoggi, people like that. Then with Iran-Contra you can also go backwards in time. You can go to the start of the Cold War, Vietnam, the death of JFK. All these things are interconnected. And just because the people were caught in Iran-Contra have these long careers, just by following their careers you could see this whole history of American foreign policy that's the real history, like from the CIA's perspective.

Harrison: Maybe we can start out with a bit of what Iran-Contra really was. Can you give us a little background of even the official story? What was Iran-Contra and how did it become such a big scandal?

Hugo: Supposedly in order to free hostages the US agreed to secretly sell weapons to Iran and then they used that money to fund the Contras who they'd been forbidden by Congress from any further funding because they got caught mining the harbours and things like that. The contras were an army that the CIA set up to make war on Nicaragua which was a country that had a revolution in 1979 that threw out this dictator that had been installed. He was the son of a dictator that had been installed in the 30s. He owned the whole country. To make money people would come and sell their blood and he would ship the blood to America. That's how much of a dictator he was. Anyway, he was overthrown in this huge revolution but then of course it was communism. Some of the families were communists. I wonder what that's like, with a dictator. But America decided "We have to stamp out this new government in Nicaragua because it could spread to El Salvador where they're also having a civil war." Rebels were trying to overthrow the system there, or in Guatemala.

So they sent these death squads in to terrorize the people and try to ruin their effort to make a better Nicaragua. The Nicaraguans were trying to build schools, hospitals. Most of the people were poor so they were trying to improve the lives of the majority of the citizens and America hates that kind of thing. Just like with Cuba earlier, they had sent all these people to invade and perform terrorist acts. That's what they did in Nicaragua and they used the same people that actually had done it in Cuba, were used in Nicaragua.

It's similar to today where they fund these death squads to go in and try and destroy as much as possible, blow up hospitals, schools, try to destroy the society.

Shane: It seems that there's this template that the US has where they find the craziest, most psychopathic, what would you call them? Not rebels.

Hugo: Death squads is a good description.

Shane: Yeah, death squads. So there's this comparison when you look at the contras that you made in Part 1 of the article that they were like the ISIS of the early 1980s. They were extremely, extremely violent to the people in Nicaragua. They were slashing and murdering people. The comparison to ISIS is really apparent when you look at how this template is used over and over and over again.

Hugo: Yeah. It's like a standard tactic of psychological operations that you don't just kill someone. You do it in that stupid gruesome manner because you shock people and they become terrified and paralyzed. Can you imagine if someone down the street had been mutilated and chopped up and you were forced to watch this? Obviously you'd be scared of whoever had done that, it was probably through the law and so you wouldn't want to mess with them.

Harrison: Yeah. That's what was going on for years in Nicaragua and not just there but in dozens of countries. You get into a lot of them in these articles and in other articles that you've written on your blog. So while this is going on for a while in the early '80s, it isn't until October 5, 1986, almost 30 years ago, that a plane carrying weapons to the Contras from El Salvador was shot down over Nicaragua. I'm reading this from the first part of your series of articles here. "Three of the plane's passengers were killed, William Cooper, Wallace Sawyer and an unidentified Latin American.

But Eugene Hasenfus survived - as you write - disastrously for the Reagan administration. He began to talk. So he told this story about how this whole money to the Contras was going on. That's the official story. You've got the arms sales to Iran which the Americans and even a lot of the government like Congress wasn't too happy about because Iran was this evil place now that the Shah had been ousted. So what was the United States doing deals with Iran for; then the same thing with the Contras. Congress had passed some kind of bill forbidding any kind of overt support to the Contras for regime change. Then this story comes out and it's revealed that the Reagan administration had been doing all of this stuff even though they weren't supposed to. Big surprise!

But it goes even deeper than that. One or two of the angles tied directly into Iran-Contra were the drug smuggling angle and then secondly there was the involvement of Israel which doesn't get mentioned a lot when you read mainstream account of it. So I was wondering Hugo if you could tell us a little bit about the drug angle and maybe the Israel angle?

Hugo: Once you have secret planes flying in and out of places, it's a very quick way to make money and have the drugs on the planes back and then suddenly you have CIA protection. You can get all your drugs fully into the country and so obviously you're making billions of dollars. You have the whole crack epidemic and everything that Gary Webb talked about. But really this was just a pattern of CIA control of drug smuggling going back to the end of WWII when first they allied with the nationalist Chinese and then for 40 years this heroin was coming out of Asia and then once the Vietnam War ended it started coming out of Afghanistan. And then cocaine started coming out from South America, first from the Condor countries and then it would stop over in Central America so the Contra re-supply operation just became part of that global drug connection.

Shane: Well the Chinese nationalist...

Hugo: The people that rule Taiwan today.

Shane: Yeah, that was a really fascinating piece in your article mainly because I had been wondering where the funding is coming from to support the major power players working behind the scene in the US. Last week we had an interview with Robbie Martin. He did a three-part documentary and one part was covering these modern neocons who have transformed and who have this tremendous influence in Washington. With that kind of influence, behind it is always a ton of money. So you wonder where this money came from. We always hear "it's the drug trade" What you're talking about with these Chinese nationalists is that it goes back in time and the money used from that was to fund these right-wing lobbyists who would create their guy.

Hugo: Yeah, the heroin money funded Joe McCarthy, the rise of Richard Nixon, Reagan, Bush. One of the things Sibel Edmonds, the FBI whistleblower discovered was that the same thing is happening with drug money going to fund the neocons today, connected to Al-Qaeda. So yeah, there's all this foreign money from the drug trade that flows in, buys congressmen and blackmail, prostitution.

Harrison: In the past a lot of this drug money was from the drug trade coming from Asia and Southeast Asia. Today a lot of it's coming from Afghanistan. But if you look at Southeast Asia today it looks like there's a lot of blackmail coming out of there only these days it has to do with - well what do you call them? - the pedophile trips that they take to these nations and where they send congressmen and any people in positions of power. They make trips to these Southeast Asian nations where they sleep with child prostitutes or do worse and oftentimes they are videotaped or otherwise recorded doing this and then that's used as blackmail over them. So we've got the sexual blackmail being used as well, as a way of controlling these perverts in power.

Hugo: Check out Sibel Edmond's book which is a thinly-veiled novel that actually tells the truth but she had to write it as a novel. It's called The Lone Gladio. She's talking about exactly what you're saying, the Southeast Asian blackmail and all these junkets down there. Apparently a congressman who was recently disgraced was one of these people who was being blackmailed for being involved in this pedophile ring in Thailand.

Harrison: Yeah, that was Dennis Hastert, the former Speaker of the House. That's a really interesting story. We've talked about it. I think we've mentioned it a couple of times on the show before. If anyone's familiar with the recent scandal, I believe he's now in prison, I don't know for how long. But what they got him for was sleeping with some of his students when he was a high school teacher 30 years ago. But there's no mention in any of the mainstream reporting about him that this has been an ongoing pattern and that this is one of the guys that Sibel Edmonds was...

Hugo: Absolutely! And he was also getting that drug money too.

Harrison: Yeah.

Hugo: So they had him both ways.

Harrison: I'm pretty sure the character in Lone Gladio that you're talking about - it's a great book by the way. I've recommended it before. It's not only very informative it's a really good thriller. It's fun to read. But I'm pretty sure the character that you're talking about was based on Dennis Hastert. So that's the kind of thing that's been going on.

Hugo: I'm glad you're familiar with all that. The blackmail and that kind of stuff kind of creeps me out.

Corey: Just reading through your article, you really get a good picture of this huge rabbit hole that's opened up that you can get a peek into through the Iran-Contra scandal. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the individuals who were connected to it, especially the names that are familiar to us like Oliver North and first George Bush, and just give an idea of what they were doing, what they were connected to and branch out from there.

Hugo: Oliver North was in some senses like a front man. He wasn't as important. He'd worked with all these people in Vietnam. But this really cool guy called Theodore Shackley, if you trace his career, he was in charge of the Miami station chief during the Bay of Pigs. He might have been connected with the JFK assassination then he goes to Laos where there was a heroin area also Ngun Hand. He was a lifelong CIA agent but most people think that he wasn't. It has been revealed actually yeah, he always was. I just knew on instinct just because of the way he was acting in the '80s. He's not like some standard politician. This guy was going and meeting with gangsters, terrorists all over the world. He put himself in charge of this anti-drug operation in Florida which was a joke because the drugs were just flowing in without really doing anything to stop it. He was friends with all the top drug dealers. He was friends with Manuel Noriega. He was friends with the Columbian cartel. He was friends with the Contras so it was obvious that he was not just some guy that was CIA director for a year but actually had always been in the CIA. He was a veteran.

Harrison: And of course something else that Russ Baker talks about in his book is his intimate connections with the Saudis. I believe he was pretty instrumental in setting up the Safari Club. Is that correct? Could you tell us a little bit about the Safari Club?

Hugo: When the CIA got into all this trouble in the '70s with the different operations they decided that their new tactic would be to join an alliance with all these other intelligence agencies so they could deny what they were doing. They just asked the French to do this or the Saudis to do that and they had the Safari Club. That is what Al-Qaeda grew out of. Originally it started just to fund the war in Angola but then they started funding the Iran-Contra stuff, the war in Afghanistan and the birth of Al-Qaeda.

Harrison: So all that is pretty much everything that we see going on in the world today in the past 15 years with Al-Qaeda and ISIS and numerous groups all over the Middle East and North Africa with these Al-Qaeda offshoots. It pretty much all traces back 30+ years to the Safari Club, to the clique of people who were involved in Iran-Contra. I think what really comes across in your articles is just how wide-ranging this stuff was and it's not necessarily that Iran-Contra itself was wide-ranging but it was this one small piece of a vast puzzle with all of the pieces inter-linking.

I don't have all of the names at the tip of my tongue, but every once in a while you'll mention an individual and then mention all of the different covert and dirty wars that they were involved in either before and after. Some of these guys were either involved in all of these things before and during Iran-Contra or during Iran-Contra and afterwards. It's a totally continuous stream of this group of people. So I think that the secret team is a good angle that you took to write your first article on this. Fletcher Prouty uses that term and used it for the title of one of his books. It's not like they all have a name that they call themselves, so I think that Secret Team is as good as any moniker to call them by because it's this relatively small group of people and it's just been wreaking havoc for decades.

Hugo: Yeah.

Corey: It sounds like a separate organism.

Hugo: The CIA is compartmentalized. The really dirty stuff, only a certain number of people know so a lot of knowledgeable people were working there but up until they got busted for all this Iran-Contra, a lot of people that worked for the CIA didn't know they were involved in drugs or something. Or they wouldn't know that the CIA was involved in terrorism. So there's only a group that knows all the dirty stuff and that would be these secret team people that have just been going from country to country launching coups, covert wars, running assassination programs, training right-wing dictators, death squads and stuff like that. It had been 30 years at that point (Iran-Contra) and now since then there's been another 30 years.

Harrison: Yeah.

Hugo: It's more vast than it has ever been before.

Shane: You think how evolved that secret team has become over the past decade. It's got to be much more elaborate and complicated in ways that we know nothing about.

Harrison: Yeah, they've had generations to perfect their craft. They know what they're doing because they've been doing it for literally generations.

Corey: Not only that, they kill each other so survival of the fittest to the nth degree in those groups, the survival of the craziest.

Hugo: Yeah definitely. Hundreds of thousands of people died just in Central America alone, so Americans killed during Iran-Contra. They don't talk about. Barry Seal. When he was 16 he was at the same air national guard battalion as Oswald and David Ferrie. If people have seen JFK David Ferrie was the Joe Pesci guy. Barry Seal and Oswald were both under this David Ferrie and then for 30 years Barry Seal was flying into Cuba, flying weapons and then he became the biggest drug smuggler in the world. Then he was a personal friend with George Bush. When he got busted he was like "What the hell man!? I was doing this for you, for the government! Get me off of this!" They were like "We'll see what we can do" and "I'm going to tell them! You're involved!" And then these Columbian death squads machine-gunned him down.

Another Bush friend was Todd Arnow and he was the inventor of the cigarette boat which was used in drug smuggling and he died around the same time as Barry Seal. One of the top people was William Casey, the CIA director. He was supposed to testify for Iran-Contra. He collapsed on the ground so he never could go and then before he could testify he died of a brain tumour three months later. People might think that it's paranoid to think that the CIA can give people cancer or a heart attack, but they can do that. They've had that capability since the '50s. Just common sense would tell you that there's all sorts of things that can give you cancer that are just in the public, like asbestos and things like that so it's no problem for them.

Harrison: I think that Barry Seal really got the bad end of that bargain because it reminds me of a story from some time in the last couple of years. This British guy who had gone to Syria to fight for the so-called rebels came back to the UK and they actually put him on trial. He was going to court and his defence was "Well you can't charge me because I was there working for British intelligence. They were the guys that were supporting the group that I was fighting for." So they actually let him go. They said, "Oh, well you're right so we can't charge you." They didn't even have to kill him. The British just said "Oh yeah, you're right. We were funding you and supporting you."

Hugo: Yeah, they didn't want him to talk into the court records or whatever. And Barry Seal said it's not a smart thing to do, to threaten to tell everything you know, was the gist of it. He was seen as committing suicide in his cell instead of being released.

Shane: And this is the guy that had George H.W. Bush's phone number in his pocket when they found that he'd died.

Hugo: It was Bush himself that he was threatening. Daniel Hopsicker is this independent journalist. He was talking to this guy and he was like "I'm scared. You don't want to work for Bush, man. Anyone who pisses him off, you're just dead."

Harrison: Well just to come back to the topic of creepy politician pedophilia that I got into earlier, George H.W. Bush, whenever we talk about him I just like to point out that in Nick Bryant's book The Franklin Scandal, a huge pedophile scandal in the states in the '80s that we've talked about on the show before, a whole bunch of kids came forward saying that they were brought into this sick pedophile ring that involved top level politicians. It did become a huge scandal and almost broke but of course it turned into a total whitewash. Everyone got away pretty much. But one of the child witnesses says that she was sure that George H.W. Bush was one of these violent pedophiles that was at these parties that these guys were putting on. So I just wanted to throw that out there.

Corey: Blacken that name!

Harrison: Yeah.

Hugo: I've heard of the Franklin scandal. I looked into it and that's one of the things that came across my first time really looking at this stuff. I was like "Jeez!" That's what goes on. They blackmail people, you know. They get to do whatever they want sexually but then they also have all this stuff they have control over.

Shane: Well one of the interesting connections too that you made with Bush senior was that he supervised the Iran-Contra affair through the Phoenix program, through this guy Donald Gregg. Like Harrison mentioned, they have all these connections. Donald Gregg appointed the head of the anti-drug operations in Florida. But in relation to the Phoenix program, I was wondering if we could get into that. What is the Phoenix program and what was and is its influence over these types of operations?

Hugo: Well the best book on the Phoenix program is of course Douglas Valentine's The Phoenix Program. The Phoenix program was to find Vietcong sympathizers, people who were fighting to throw Americans out of Vietnam and redefine Vietnam and make it an independent country which they've been fighting for, for 30 years or something. First they fought the Japanese. Then they fought the French. Then they had to fight the Americans. They'd actually been fighting long before that. But in order to fund their things, they had a whole network of civilian people who collected money and shared information, stuff like that. They were sympathizers. So the Phoenix program was to find all these Vietcong sympathizers, torture them, get names of other sympathizers, kill them, then go hunt those people and then kill them.

It also involved false flag terrorists where they would assassinate people and make it look like the Vietcong did it. So they'd sneak in, cut someone to pieces and they wanted to make it look like it was the communists but actually it was the CIA Special Forces and the Vietnamese death squads that they trained down there, Ranger battalions they called them.

They also used these same forces to wage secret wars in Cambodia and Laos, so the big torture/ assassination program, the exact kind of thing that the "war on terror" is today. It was the exact same template for what's going on today where in theory they were actually fighting these terrorists, kidnap them, torture them, get some names and kidnap those people, torture them, assassinate people.

Shane: So on one hand it was created to suss out the supporters of whatever power they wanted to destroy and on the other it was just to train these nut jobs to be these serial killer crazies.

Hugo: Yeah, definitely. It was supposed to hunt down the sympathizers but of course in reality, with all these programs people would use it to get revenge. "I don't like so-and-so down the street so I'll give the Americans their name." You could threaten people. "I'll put your name on this list if you don't give me a hundred bucks." So you could start blackmailing everybody.

Shane: It sounds a lot like how the Nazis operated. All somebody had to do would be to turn in their neighbour, if there was somebody they didn't like.

Hugo: It's good that you mention the Nazis because the US recruited all the Nazis. The media likes to be like "Oh, they just recruited these rocket scientists" when really they recruited these hardcore Nazi death squad people. These people were the ones who were the founding members of the American Special Forces, the Green Berets. And the reason they were so convenient to keep secret is to put a cap on all the war criminals wanted in Eastern Europe for all the stuff they did with the holocaust and the 20 million Russians they killed and the four million Poles. And the Nazis killed more people than people say, that they just killed six million Jews or something. They killed 40 million people.

So the tactics of the Nazis were adopted by the Green Berets and that was a template for training these death squads to hunt down all the socialists and communists and labour leaders in all the countries of the world. We have been in something like 70 countries.

Corey: You talk about the war in Latin America and all of the subversive activities that occurred there and in Africa and around the world. You talked about it in terms of the Third World War or World War III and how America didn't even pause to take a breath after World War II before immediately initiating that. So then the recruitment of the Nazis and everything feeds into creating that system that eventually turned into the Phoenix program. I think they tortured just thousands and thousands and thousands of people and they refined that down into manuals which they took into the School of Americas with the Kubark Torture Manuals and learned to refine torture to such a form using social science research, psychological research. When we did see the pictures of the people in Abu Ghraib or in the detention centres with the hoods over their heads, and those orange jumpsuits, that was the outcome of decades and decades of training and sophisticated scientific research and just brutal psychopathic instinct.

Hugo: How to break the human spirit, how to make people completely hopeless. Spend those dollars on how to destroy the human spirit. Great scientific research.

Corey: Absolutely. Exactly.

Hugo: There's a great movie called Human Resources that goes into that a bit. It has this really heartbreaking scene where they have a 16-year-old kid that was caught up in the post-September 11th hysteria and he'd been tortured. He was begging the Canadians "Don't turn me back over to the Americans". He was crying. It was just so sad.

Corey: You talk about that, that just after 9/11 a lot of people didn't really catch on to the mass roundup of people.

Hugo: Yeah, while they were flying the Saudis out and flying all the people who were funding it, out of the country in special planes, they were rounding up all these random Arab people and torturing them, because they're pretending that they're fighting this war on terror. It's pretty disgusting. But yeah, it grew out of these plans of doing Iran-Contra. If they invaded Nicaragua they were going to round up all the Central American refugees because they claimed that they were terrorists because they were linked to these guerillas, that they were falsely labeling terrorists who targeted civilians. They only targeted the military that was waging these horrible war crimes. Right after September 11th they put all of those plans into action and it formed part of the Patriot Act and the warrantless wiretapping and detention.

Corey: Basically they got to take over the western hemisphere.

Hugo: Yeah. There's this great clip in the Iran-Contra hearings - mostly it was just a whitewash - but this guy asked Oliver North "Is it true you had plans to suspend the constitution and do all this stuff?" And then Daniel Inouye who was a congressman from Hawaii who actually was bought by the Israeli lobby said "We have to talk about that in closed session. It's top secret."

Harrison: Well Peter Dale Scott, whose newest book is The American Deep State talks a bit about that. It's a really interesting story. Again, it's one of those connections that goes back to the '80s and the Reagan administration and the people involved in the Iran-Contra that has direct relevance for what's going on today, because in the '80s people like Cheney and Rumsfeld were working on these continuity of government plans ,which was in the event of some kind of huge national security emergency there would be a shadow government that would continue the work of the government. So they had all these plans set out like when they asked Oliver North about suspending the constitution, rounding people up and putting them in concentration camps and militarizing the police; and then coincidence - on 9/11 Cheney and Rumsfeld, two of the guys who were actually working on these exact plans, got to actually put them into operation on 9/11. So on 9/11 this continuity of government was put into practice. A state of emergency had been declared.

I think what most people don't realize or even know is that America is still under that state of emergency. It gets renewed every year or two. For all we know the actual government of the United States is possibly not even the actual legitimate government of the US. It could be this continuity of government thing that's been going on for the past 15 years.

Shane: That's what it kind of seems like when you look at all these tentacles that operate. You can't classify the United States government as similar in any form to what we see in any other country. It's a completely different entity that reaches all over the world. It's so covert and even has arms in many other governments and other nations. When we talk about the United States, fundamentally it's so different from any other form of nation that we've ever seen.

Hugo: I definitely agree. It's not just the United States. It's all our allies which is almost everybody. It's like what Bush said, "Anybody who's not with us is against us". There are a couple of little independent countries and they're the ones that everyone is trained to hate like Russia, China or Iran. But as long as you're one of these western European governments that goes along with whatever lies that America says, like "Yeah. I accept it. I believe it. I'll go along with whatever absurdity they come up with." Then you're one of the friends. I call it the axis of chaos because all of our allies, all of the NATO countries, all the GCC countries, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Israel, Japan and South Korea, are all this big alliance to destroy all the countries that still are independent.

Harrison: I just wanted to come back to an earlier comment that the guys here made about the counterinsurgency, doctrines and manuals. There's an interesting little tidbit from the first article that you wrote. I'll just read a little bit of it out.
So all the same, white Russians, the Nazis and many other fascists played a very important role in shaping the American doctrines of counterinsurgency. In fact American army manuals were actually written from the Nazi perspective, claiming that instead of attempting to conquer the east the Nazis had tried to liberate Eastern Europe while partisan resistance forces that were fighting to liberate their lands from Nazi occupation were called terrorists. This attitude persists to this day wherever America is conquering and destroying some new country. They claim to be acting as liberators while all resistance is labeled as terrorism. This is no mere speculation on my part but was thoroughly documented in Michael McClintock's indispensible Instruments of Statecraft.
I just thought that was really interesting; just another little tidbit about the Nazi connection, just how much influence that whole world view had on what Americans call counterinsurgency which is pretty much torture and death squads.

Hugo: Absolutely. And propaganda.

Harrison: Yeah.

Corey: And that goes back to World War I too, the generals and their mentality that they had towards the soldiers as they were sending them into the trenches. Basically they saw that to kill as many soldiers as possible was the best way to discipline their work force. It was a Nazi mentality. The Nazi mentality's been around for a long time, of mass murder, as industrialized as you can get and force as much as you can out of people then just throw them to the wolves so that you don't have to feed them in old age. I think that mentality has been in the west for quite some time.

Hugo: Definitely. At least for 500 years or so. Columbus who started slavery and all that. Nobody knows how many hundreds of millions of people have died. Again, Michael McClintock's book is an awesome book that everyone should check out. It was written before September 11th. I don't know if he would have thought it was a good idea to write it afterwards because it's all about how the US uses terrorism. They don't call it terrorism. They call it irregular warfare, unconventional warfare, counter-guerilla, counter-terrorism, counterinsurgency, but it's all the same tactics. False flag terrorism has always been a tactic of psychological warfare. It's all documented.

Harrison: Yeah, absolutely. Hugo could you tell us a little bit about the WACL?

Hugo: The World Anti-Communist League. It's a great story because it's like a fascist Bilderberger meeting where they would all get together every year, the El Salvadoran death squads leaders, former SS people that wanted to take back Ukraine, take back Croatia. When the Soviet Union collapsed I believe that they played a far more influential role in that process than people give them credit for and that's why in Croatia the Stasi were able to re-take the country and install a fascist government. It wasn't covered in the media at all. The story we were fed was it was the evil Serbs. They're the new Nazis. They're the problem, but during the war the Nazis had backed the Croatians and the Croatians would carry out this genocide. Then after the end of the Cold War all of a sudden, mysteriously these Croatian fascists, the entire WACL take over all of Croatia, the west is backing them, Germany's backing them, and NATO's backing them. And now we have Croatia. They're still in charge of it.

The same thing happened in Bosnia too and in Kosovo. And now Ukraine is the newest example where you have these fascist Ukrainians. The reason that Croatian fascism and Ukrainian fascism were kept alive so long after the end of WWII was because the CIA was funding them all through WACL and they would have these big meetings and get all this money. They would be top Reagan foreign policy advisors. The grandson of the top Ukrainian WACL guy is spreading propaganda today on Twitter. This guy was called Lev Dobriansky. His daughter became a foreign policy advisor to Reagan and now his grandson is spreading propaganda on behalf of the fascist Ukrainian government that they've installed now.

Harrison: It's family business.

Hugo: Yeah. I'm sure his grandfather's up to something more suspicious because Reagan appointed him ambassador to the Bahamas of all places. Why else would you go there except to launder money or smuggle drugs or something? And he's Ukrainian. It's not like the Bahamas come to mind when you think of where would you send this Ukrainian guy.

Harrison: In the description of WACL and where they were influential, you mentioned Ukraine. It also makes me think of Gladio because NATO's Gladio was operating in Ukraine and what we've seen in Ukraine, the coup and the neo-Nazi groups, that directly came out of NATO's support for these neo-fascist groups ever since the end of WWII in order to take back power after the fall of the Soviet Union. Is there any kind of connection between WACL and Gladio?

Hugo: WACL is kind of the public face of fascism. They'd all get together. But Gladio people are part of WACL too. Just like the Operation Condor people were part of WACL and the Phoenix people are part of WACL. The Gladio is like part of WACL.

Harrison: Kind of like the covert arm.

Hugo: Gladio has become a code word for false flags and also for NATO support for fascism. WACL is a much larger umbrella of Gladio. Gladio would be like the secret NATO totally controlled thing whereas WACL is like a big party where all the players get together and talk about the things they want to do. They go back and a lot of them are involved in Gladio.

Harrison: Hugo, could you go back a bit and talk about Taiwan.

Hugo: Yeah, Taiwan is sort of like the Israel of Asia because these Formosan people - there were several people from the Chinese but these Taiwanese nationalists when they were leaving the war, they conquered Formosa and the poor Formosans occupation since the '40s was they totally lost the war in China and Mao and the People's Republic of China was created. Then the only base was Taiwan and some of these other islands and from there they were involved in the drug smuggling. They needed this anti-communist fervor to maintain support for their thing and the world to say that Taiwan was the real China and the billion people that lived in China, don't recognize them. They're nothing. Just a passing phase. Well we'll conquer it someday kind of thing. But to fund themselves they'd always been involved in drugs. Actually it went back before the war with Bugsy Siegel and others were selling heroin for the KNT and stuff like that and Meyer Lansky was all connected with all of those famous gangsters. That's where it came from. But anyway, they used this heroin money to fund the McCarthy hysteria that sparked off the Korean War all so they would become indispensible as an ally of America in a sense.

Harrison: It's the same in practically every country. Like you said, there's the American empire and its vassals and then there's the few nations that buck the trend.

Hugo: It's like if you're crazy enough then you can control America instead of America controlling you, kind of thing. If you're fascist enough then someone in America will say "Okay, we'll do what you say."

Shane: First I had a few questions if we could go back to the actual Iran-Contra affair. So the official story was that the US was interested in getting the hostages back. Can we talk about that hostage crisis because I think the official story is that it was the Lebanese Hezbollah but I believe that Hezbollah said that they never had anything to do with it? Can we dig into that?

Hugo: Well, it's sort of like a murky issue because Hezbollah was more chaotic in the '80s before Sheikh Nasrallah took control over it. So I wouldn't want to say. They probably were sort of involved in some of these connivings because there were all these different kinds of groups under the umbrella of Hezbollah. In the '90s it coalesced and became way more disciplined and orderly, more of an army type of organization; whereas in the mid-80s it was being born.

The people were being held hostage so Iran could get more weapons but it wasn't really about releasing the hostage thing. It didn't really work the way that the October Surprise had worked because they didn't really get hostages back. They'd release them and keep at war if they could get more weapons. The hostage rescue thing was a disaster. Really it was about giving Iran weapons so that Iran and Iraq would just fight each other, causing as much destruction as possible so that after that we could come in there and they'd be softened up for America for what the Americans did to Iraq for the past 27 years after that; the first Gulf War, the sanctions, the second Iraq War, the occupation and destruction. And now they've got a third Iraq War supposedly there to fight ISIS. It never ends.

Shane: So what do you think about the lifting of sanctions in Iran and is there any back story in Iran that you wanted to get into?

Hugo: Well Pepe Escobar says that the Europeans are sick of boycotting Iran. They want to open them up for business. The smarter part of American foreign policy people want Iran back into the US orbit so they can stop persecuting Iran. And the other thing they want is to destroy Iran. They get a lot of mileage out of vilifying Iran so that America has a double policy. They want to be friends but they also want to keep waging war on them and obviously I don't think it's really going to bring Iran into our orbit. We're fighting them in Syria. We're fighting them in Yemen. We're fighting them in Iraq. It's like I don't think they're going to become our friends by waging war on them.

Harrison: Hugo, you've been doing some research on Iran recently, is that correct?

Hugo: Oh yes. The story of the rise of Khomeini, it may be way more complex than I put in. First off the Iranian revolution is sort of like a two part revolution. First there was a democratic revolution at the beginning of the year, so the chaotic new ruler would take over and then Khomeini would lose the power. But what I discovered was that the secret team weren't just involved with the Shah. They were involved with these Khomeini supporters a couple of years before so there's some evidence that they might have preferred Khomeini to some kind of other force arising in Iran, like a nationalist force or something, socialistic. So they were Khomeini's backup people.

So yeah, the secret team was involved in installing Khomeini and in provoking the hostage crisis. They appointed one of Khomeini's followers as the head of security for the embassy and then later he was fired but he led the attack on the embassy.

Harrison: Can you say that again Hugo? You cut out there.

Hugo: This Iranian researcher named Fallah Mansour's research definitely showed there was a connection between the two, an area for further research people should go into.

Harrison: There was an article I just read. I think it was on Boiling Frogs Post commenting on the story that had come out. I think they were CIA cables or memos talking about the ongoing, no necessarily negotiations but just talks with Khomeini. Khomeini wanted to have some kind of agreement with the CIA but like you said, it's pretty interesting. It'll be interesting to see if anything else comes out about that.

Hugo: Yeah, definitely. That's what's cool about studying the secret history, you always discover new things that revise your whole picture sometimes. That's what makes it exciting to research.

Harrison: Well Hugo, I think we're going to end it there. To end off with, do you want to tell us what you've been reading; any books recently or just any resources that you've been looking at recently that really caught your interest?

Hugo: If you want to get into the subjects of deep politics or deep history, the two best are Doug Valentine and Peter Dale Scott. Those are the authors I'd recommend.

Harrison: And what's the url for your blog?

Hugo: anti-imperialists-U.blogspot.com.

Harrison: Alright. Thanks for talking to us today Hugo. There's just so much to talk about we could probably go on and on and on. We'll look forward to your next article and we'll go from there, alright?

Hugo: Alright, cool. Thanks!

Shane: Thanks for coming on Hugo.

Harrison: Thanks Hugo.

Corey: Thank you.

Hugo: Yeah, thanks.

Harrison: Well we're just doing a little personnel change over here for the second half of the show. So we've got Elan in the studio right now.

Elan: Hi everyone.

Harrison: And Joe will be joining us in just a few seconds. Here he is. Joe, are you there?

Joe: I'm here indeed.

Harrison: Okay. There's Joe.

Joe: Can you hear me?

Harrison: Yes, I can hear you loud and clear.

Joe: Alrighty.

Harrison: Following up on Hugo's blog, I just want to say that if you check out his articles, he always has a ton of great sources that you can go to, like YouTube videos and podcasts, and books. So for the Iran-Contra one I've just been checking out some of the things that he's been linking to and it's really great stuff. You can watch talks from Iran-Contra from the '80s and podcasts from the guy - I think he mentioned him in the interview - Dave Emory. It's in the articles at least. This guy's been doing radio shows and podcasts for 30 years and he gets into a ton of stuff, especially the fascist links and Nazis, Project Paper Clip kind of stuff and the involvement in all kinds of counterinsurgencies and secret warfare and stuff like that. So check it out. Lots of stuff.

Moving on, we're going to cover some of the news from the past week because it's getting to the point where every week we say the last week has been totally crazy and this last week is no exception. Of course last week we were talking about the attempted coup in Turkey, failed coup. So we'll give some updates about what's going on there, but also the breaking news from the past few days was the mass shooting in Munich in Germany and just checking the news today it looks like there's another shooting going on in Germany, or something. I'll have to find the headline and we can get into that. What do you guys want to talk about first?

Elan: You wanna talk Turkey?

Harrison: Do some Turkey talk?

Elan: Gobble gobble.

Harrison: We'll shoot some Turkey. Okay, let's talk about Turkey for a bit. So the news coming out on that is focusing mainly on the purge, the aftermath of the coup with a lot of western media focus on how anti-democratic Erdogan is in his reaction to the failed coup. There are something like 60,000 people who have been targeted and lost their positions in government, private and public positions. These would be in schools, charities, various ministries of government, the military. Out of these 60,000 people approximately 13,000 have been arrested and that's just a fraction of the total number who have been detained because they rounded up all these people and are slowly going through and formally arresting several of them with specific charges. The arrest the ones that they can't or won't end up arresting will be let go eventually. They can only be detained for I believe 30 days under the Turkish constitution. Out of those 13,000 who have been arrested, 9,000 of those approximately, are military personnel including something like 2,300 military officers.

So that's what's been going on for the past week and one of the big stories just from the past couple of days is reports about what these guys have been saying. Apparently some of the people who have been arrested are confessing and directly implicating Fetullah Gülen. Of course the reaction to that from a lot of people will be "Well, they're going to say that because they're probably being tortured." If you just ignore that altogether and focus on this other story, probably the biggest new revelation implicating Fetullah Gülen is that one of the high-level people that was taken hostage during the coup was the Chief General Staff Hulusi Akar. They took him hostage and the guys that took him hostage offered to put him in touch with Gülen, basically saying "You don't believe us? Talk to Gülen." Because the coup failed and he was eventually released he has come out and revealed that. So that is pretty damning in itself too.

Also over the past week we had this leak coming out in the Iranian news, the Fars News Agency saying that they had talked to Turkish intelligence and they had sources in there who had gotten it from some other countries' intelligence saying that the Russians had warned the Turkish government and intelligence about the upcoming coup and that is probably the reason it failed. So there have been several people and news outlets taking that approach too which I think is probably pretty accurate; the idea being that there was knowledge that a coup was brewing, probably for months. Like we talked about last week, the first time it really made the news was in March of this year when the western media, especially a bunch of the neocons in the western media, came forward warning about a coup and implying or suggesting that if there were a coup that the US would not help Erdogan's government which is as close to a threat as you can get in the media from these kind of guys.

They even wrote one of their infamous letters to Erdogan. All through the '90s and the 2000s the neocons, PNAC guys were famous for writing these open letters and having them published in big newspapers, to people like Saddam Hussein or Gadaffi. I think they even sent one to Milosevic.

They have this idea that the coup is coming and then it looks like probably in response to that, Erdogan and his government had planned a purge of these Gülenists in the military in previous years, so in the past three or four years Erdogan's government has gone after Gülenists but not in the military. So now they decided to go after the Gülenists in the military and I think planned it to happen this week. So presumably once they found out about this they decided to move the coup up a few days and they planned it for Friday night, but at 3:00 in the morning.

The story is that this is what the Russians were warning Erdogan about, that they got the intelligence that day and learned that the coup had been moved up to this day at this time. Then knowing about it, Erdogan's intelligence figured out what was going on and grounded the military, grounded all troops in their barracks. So they were all on alert that this was going to happen by early afternoon on Friday. Then the coup plotters got wind of this and said "Okay, well it's now or never" and launched it at 9:00 or 10:00 p.m., several hours before they had planned on doing it and that's one of the main reasons that the coup failed. They just launched it too early.

When you're launching a coup you want to do it in the middle of the night when everyone is asleep so people wake up and it has already happened. They did it late in the evening when everyone was still awake and because they hadn't managed to get full control of the media Erdogan managed to get on the air on CNN Turk via Facetime and call everyone onto the streets. By that time there was nothing they could do. They could have tried to escalate into a civil war but that would have been disastrous as well.

So I think those are the main highlights for me for the past week of news on Turkey.

Elan: Just to back it up a little, the whole reason, as we understand it, the coup might have been in progress many months before for various other reasons, but certainly the nail in the coffin according to the west's perception of Erdogan, is his rapprochement with Russia. This was big news a few weeks ago. Erdogan making conciliatory statements towards Russia for the downing of the bomber of several months ago and trying to re-establish economic and other types of ties with Russia. Just to bring this up to date, hot on the lips of many in Turkey right now is this meeting that's scheduled between Erdogan and Putin sometime early in August where they will probably be talking not only about the gas or oil project, Turkstream I think it was called, which was shelved sometime back, but probably a whole other set of security considerations considering that this attempt at a coup in Turkey is probably not the last attempt we'll see at destabilizing Erdogan's government.

Harrison: No, I don't necessarily think there will be another traditional coup attempt. That's the first thing that Sibel Edmonds had said and she's an expert on Turkey. That's where she's from. She was viewing this initially as a test run, a dry run. But I don't think so. I think this was the real deal and they put all their eggs in one basket and now that it's failed, what can they do through the military and the existing power structures in Turkey when they're all being rounded up and thrown in prison.

I think what's left now as other options are covert options of destabilization. We'll see where that goes. But on the subject of Russia and Putin, just another insight into what was going on during the coup was that Putin was apparently the first foreign leader that Erdogan talked to on the phone, which is telling in and of itself. And right when that happened, in one of the focus pieces I wrote about it, my speculation is that for the Russians the renewed relationship with Turkey is very conditional. There are some big, heavy conditions attached to it. It's not this unconditional love and friendship going on and that was confirmed for me this morning when there was a news article on a statement from Sergei Lavrov, Russia's foreign minister and he essentially said "This is conditional on Turkey's approach to the war in Syria. They're going to do what we want them to do in Syria or we're not going to be very happy about it." And now they probably won't be either.

To me it really looks like Erdogan did get serious about changing the policy in relation to Russia and Syria and that it wasn't all talk, and that's why this coup was put into motion. Now it has totally backfired for the US because having failed it will just push Turkey even harder and further in that direction. So it's going to be very interesting and horrifying at the same time to watch.

If you look at the past week's events in Syria, a couple of things going on. First of all, in the north the US-backed rebels, SDF-Syrian Democratic Forces which are mainly Kurdish and Arab forces, are trying to retake this northern town of Manbij. This is where last week the US and France were accused of dropping all these bombs and killing hundreds of civilians. They didn't deny it. It's pretty certain that it happened and they said "Oh, yeah. We're not going to stop bombing. We're going to take back the city."

So there's that going on in the north. Then closer to Aleppo there's a US-backed group, something al-Zenki and these were the guys who beheaded the 12-year-old Palestinian boy, pulled him out of the hospital where he was getting blood transfusions and put him on the back of a truck and cut his head off and videotaped it. These were the guys being supplied with US TOW Missiles who were on the official list of US-backed moderate rebels, so the US is getting a lot of flak for that. It's like we didn't really need any more confirmation of it but its still coming that there is no such thing as a moderate rebel in Syria and the guys that they're calling moderate rebels are just as bad as ISIS. I wouldn't recommend watching the video but you can look at the pictures and see for yourself how moderate these "moderate" rebels are.

If there's any good news to come out of that, I believe Far East News reported that the Syrian Special Forces sent out a commando unit to hunt down these guys and apparently last night they hunted them down and killed them. What do you say?

Elan: Just to add to some of what you were saying about Erdogan's choice as it's now presented to him by Russia, it seems like he has already taken a few tentative steps in the direction of stopping his support for the jihadis and called back some of his intelligence people from Syria.

Harrison: Yeah, and coincidentally, in those news reports that came pretty much right after the coup, again Fars News Agency reported that Turkish intelligence agents, the guys running the show in northern Aleppo, were getting pulled out of the region back into Turkey and the group that they cited was this al-Zenki group, the same group that beheaded this 12-year-old Palestinian. It's just an interesting connection. I think it's probably true that the Turks are pulling some of their high-level assets out and they're just going to leave the rest to their fate.

Elan: Well like you were saying, it's going to be very interesting to see how this pans out. When you listen and think about Erdogan you don't exactly envision or perceive a stable leader there but if anything, it seems that it has become very clear to him at this point who his friends are or at least who he can be allied with, who isn't going to stab him in the back. And like you were saying Harrison, whatever future covert aggression the US, NATO, CIA tries to employ against Erdogan isn't going to come in the form of a coup. It is going to come in the form of some kind of hybrid warfare, some kind of covert destabilization plan that's going to come from possibly a very different angle. So yeah, we just have to see and it'll be interesting to hear what statements come out of Erdogan and Putin's meeting in a couple of weeks, what agreements will be made and how closely Erdogan will follow through on those agreements.

Harrison: There was one more story that I found really rich in the past week. This was the report that first came out in the Wall Street Journal that the Russian bombers had bombed this joint US/UK base in eastern Syria where they were training these moderate rebels. This is probably the group that they're calling the New Syrian Army. So it came out in the Wall Street Journal and at first Dmitry Peskov gave a sort of denial saying he had no knowledge of it and it was a question that would be better directed to the Ministry of Defence. Now one of the military big generals, Konashenkov I think, basically admitted it and said "It's the US's fault. If you're not going to tell us where your moderate rebels are and where your bases are then there's nothing to protect them from being bombed by our bombers."

I just thought this was pretty hilarious because from the very beginning of course, the US and all of the media were saying "The Russians are bombing our rebels. They're bombing our guys." There was no explicit acknowledgement that they were targeting US rebels and US bases where they're training these rebels. It was just left unsaid. So now they're saying it. "Yeah, we're bombing your guys and if you don't tell us where they are we're going to keep bombing them because we can't tell where they are," wink-wink.

So that raised the stakes a bit I think, especially coming after all of those meetings between Putin, Lavrov and Kerry.

Elan: Joe Quinn, do you want to weigh in on any of this?

Joe: Yeah. No. You guys have pretty much said it. I thought it was interesting to think about the timeline and stuff in Turkey in terms of the coup. Initially last week when we were talking about it we talked about it as a rush job, that it was a bit amateurish and since then, as more details have come out I realized that it wasn't really a rush job. It wasn't really that amateurish either. It was quite serious and it was only, it seems as you were saying, with the help of the Russians with their electronic eyes and ears in Syria and their base in Syria, that they were able to intercept off the coast in the Mediterranean on the ships and pick up on the military coup plotters' communications.

So it was pretty serious. Erdogan missed being captured and I think that was a major part of it, not capturing and silencing him and giving him a means to get on TV, which he did via FaceTime or whatever it is and speak to the people calling them out into the streets. That was pretty significant. It seems it came down to Russian intel with maybe the Iranians helping a little bit, giving some advice. You notice that Erdogan knows who his friends are because the only people who helped him during this coup attempt against him effectively, was Russia and Iran. It took the US government quite a long time to come out and actually say anything when everybody knew a coup was going down. I think they waited several hours before actually saying anything at all. So that's quite telling to Erdogan and to his Turks. It's quite telling about who his friends are and it's quite telling about who really was behind it or who certainly was happy to have it happen and who wasn't. America at the very least appears to be happy to see it happen and would have been happy if Erdogan was gone. Russian and Iran did not want to see that happen and did what they could to make sure it didn't and happily they stopped it.

People need to remember here that the position we're taking here is that anything that happens to America in terms of what the American government and its intel agencies and military is doing anywhere around the world today, anything that happens to screw them over - for want of a better expression - is good as far as we're concerned. Of course people might think that's a bit simplistic and can't just say "Yeah! America got screwed!"

Harrison: Yeah you can.

Joe: But with good reason to think that and take that approach because we know the history of what America has done and still does today and we know their perfidy and their lies and manipulations and how they want to take over the world and enslave effectively as many people as possible. So anything that stops them doing that is good, even just from a humanist point of view.
I think it was interesting that Erdogan missed being captured by about 30 or 40 minutes.

Harrison: Yeah, there are different reports. Some say 15 minutes, some say an hour.

Joe: So he got out of there just in time and if you factor in the idea that Russia had warned him in advance and had warned Erdogan's people in Turkish intelligence, the military and the government in advance. That was really the deciding factor because this would have come down very differently otherwise. The fact that Russia did that allowed for Erdogan effectively to escape being captured and possibly killed, by a very small margin.

The other thing is the story about his plane. Apparently the story is that a special ops team arrived in helicopters to the hotel he was staying in on the coast, in Marmara. They didn't know that the coup had been brought forward because Russia had warned Erdogan and Co. that a coup was coming early in the day on the 15th. Then the coup plotters got wind of this, that there had been a tipoff so - as you were saying Harrison - they decided to bring forward the coup. But apparently this team went to Marmara to get rid of Erdogan which should have been the first blow struck. (In any coup the blow is to remove the President or leader who can rally the people. You want to get him off scene straight-away. )

So they arrived at about 3:00 o'clock in the morning as per the original plan because those guys had apparently been told that they had to get Erdogan and where he was, but because of the secrecy surrounding it, they all handed in their cell phones and electronic devices in an effort to avoid anyone finding out that they were going for Erdogan. They wanted communication silence. But this caused a problem for them in that because there was no way to contact them because they were stationed somewhere to go and get him, they didn't know about having it brought forward so they stuck to the original time of 3:00 a.m. So they went to get him out about 3:00 a.m. and that was meant to be the first blow but they didn't realize and they couldn't be contacted and told, that it had already started because of the tipoff as it turned out, because of that Erdogan wasn't there.

It just shows you the determination of these people because even though they missed him, they sent up to Turkish F-16 jets to find his plane. And we know the story. They want to shoot down his plane but they have a problem then because I think the idea was at least if they got him in the hotel they would at least have been able to capture him. They may not have wanted to kill him but they wanted to capture him and humiliate him and that kind of thing.

So the problem is that when he takes off in his jet and then they have to send up two F-16s, they don't really have many options. At that point you're going to shoot it down, right? But apparently they didn't and the story goes that they didn't shoot it down because the pilot of Erdogan's Lear jet changed his transponder code to match the transponder code of a Turkish airlines plane that was in the area, thereby making the plane indistinguishable effectively so that they weren't willing to possibly shoot down a Turkish airlines plane thinking it was Erdogan's.

This is all speculation. As you mentioned Harrison, this is information coming from Turkish government officials, unnamed people. I wondered also if it wasn't the case - let's put it this way, it would have been funny in line with Russia bombing the CIA and MI6 faces in southern Syria which was fun - it would have been fun as well if those two F-16s that had locked their radars onto Erdogan's jet, if they suddenly found that they were being targeted. Because when you're in a jet basically if you're locked onto by any radar, from another jet or from an anti-aircraft missile for example, your plane knows it and you get this warning. Then you've got a choice; you get the hell out of there or chances are you're going to be blown out of the sky.

It's speculation on my part, but it would have been funny if that's what happened and the locking radar came from one of Russia's S-400s in northern Syria.

Harrison: There was actually some speculation in the Russian media blogosphere that it was actually Russian jamming technology...
Niall: Electronic warfare?

Harrison: Yeah, electronic warfare because if you read the original reports that were I believe published first in Reuters, they talked to, like you said, these anonymous Turkish officials that told the story and they said that Erdogan's jet had two F-16s guarding it, escorting it, and these two F-16s locked on their radar's to Erdogan's three planes essentially, and that they didn't fire, but they didn't know why they didn't fire. There are a few possibilities, like the ones you mentioned. Some of the Russians think that it might have been the Russians jamming the coup plotters' jets targeting or guidance systems.

Joe: Yeah. Obviously Russia here was very interested in stopping a coup against Erdogan. I suppose that's the best information or the best evidence we have, strangely enough, of US involvement, which is the determination or enthusiasm with which Russia wanted to stop Erdogan being deposed. It's a good rule of thumb. Anything that Russia wants, America doesn't, and vice versa, generally speaking. And it can also lead you to be able to implicate people in various events, like this one for example. If Russia doesn't want Erdogan to be deposed then you could bet your ass that the US does.

Russia doesn't want there to be a coup in Turkey because they have their own long-term analysis of it and the whole geopolitical details of the situation in the Middle East over the past few years with Turkey and Syria, etc., so they don't want that to happen. They know why. They know more or less who's behind it. They know what the goal of deposing Erdogan would be. It more than likely would involve in some way or other, screwing over Russia, if you haven't noticed, apart from maybe the terror attacks in Europe and in the US for example, pretty much every other significant event on the geopolitical stage in recent years has been for the purpose of screwing over Russia and has been led by the US and to a certain extent the EU.

So if Russia provided intelligence that saved Erdogan from being captured from his hotel, the first time that evening, that they more or less potentially saved his life, and if they did in some way, as you were reflecting Harrison, prevent these F-16s from shooting down Erdogan's plane, then that's the second time. So it's building up some serious "You owe me Erdogan" for Russia. Russia is going to have some serious strings attached or details attached, to rapprochement between Russia and Turkey. Of course on top of that there's the leverage in any meeting where Erdogan's digging his heels in, "No, I don't want to change that", to say "Erdogan, you basically owe us your life twice, so just shut up!"

So it's all pretty interesting in that sense but people don't talk much about it and you only get bits and pieces and you just have to put the details together based on a broad understanding of the situation. Then you can fill in the pieces and the details.

Harrison: Well speaking of that, maybe we can attempt to do a little bit of that on the recent shooting in Munich. If anyone hasn't been reading the news, this happened on Friday night?

Joe: With the machete?

Harrison: No. Today's the one with the machete. That's just breaking news. We'll go with that one first just because there are fewer details. I'll just read the report from RT. It's short.
At least one person has been killed and two more injured in an incident in the German town of Reutlingen. A man wielding a machete apparently randomly attacked passersby in the street. The man was identified as a Syrian asylum seeker, aged 21 who was previously known to law enforcement. The motives of the man are still unclear. The perpetrator had an argument with the woman near the central bus terminal in Reutlingen and during the altercation severely injured the woman using a machete. The woman died of her injuries at the scene. The perpetrator was then detained near the scene "in minutes" after the incident but managed to injure another woman and a man. The eye witnesses described the attacker to Bild as "fully insane," adding that he tried to attack a police car with his machete. He acted alone and there's no further threat to the public.
That's pretty much all the news we have on that.

Joe: I think we're going to see more and more of those kinds of attacks. You could even, to some extent, put the Nice attack in that category and also the other attack in Munich, that same category of people just losing the plot but to a large extent with a good enough reason or understandably - not to justify what they do or anything, but in this case a Syrian refugee. I suppose it's not possible for us to imagine the kind of experiences of that guy and the trauma that he may well have experienced over the past four or five years in Syria and then as a refug,ee in Germany from Syria. This is shocking, but to say that it's unexpected or that "we have to do something about this" is so horrendously obtuse on the part of politicians. I'm sure they're going to say thing. Look what they've been doing. We've seen politicians in the US and Europe who condemn this kind of an attack, have been or are directly responsible for fomenting and encouraging the war in Syria over the past four or five years that produces trauma that leads people like this guy to do this.

So for any western politician to stand up there and condemn this and say we need more security of something, like Valls said after the Nice attacks, is just unconscionable and those people need to be booted out as quickly as possible. The only thing I saw when Valls went down for some kind of a ceremony down in Nice after these attacks, there were a lot of people there in the crowd all shouting for him to resign and calling him an assassin. They called him a murderer and a criminal and an assassin and he had to resign because the kind of things he said which was "Well you're just going to have to live with it. Just deal with it."

So these people have some serious cajones to come out and say that kind of stuff. They're so detached from the situation or they think people are so stupid. It's shocking. I want to mention a little story on the Munich and Nice attacks. There's an article on SOTT that we put up. It's actually an article from a local Nice newspaper called Nice-Matin that was just published yesterday - it's on SOTT in English - where they reported on this German independent journalist called Richard Gutjahr who was the guy on the video in Nice from the balcony of a hotel of the truck starting its rampage through the crowd. You can't see very much. It's from a distance from the other side of the road but this was one of the first videos released of this truck attack in Nice. It was filmed by this German independent journalist, Richard Gutjahr. He happened to be there. He was in France, by his own admission that he was there on a long weekend to experience the July 14th festivities for the first time and he just happened to be in a hotel directly opposite the area where this guy started to drive into people.

He's from Munich, so a week later he's back at home in Munich and he just happens to be outside the shopping mall where this other guy in Munich starts to shoot people. Now you can say that's interesting or a strange coincidence. In fact the Nice-Matin called it a tragic coincidence that this guy was at both places, perfectly positioned to record these videos and upload them to the internet. But the only thing that would maybe skew it a little from just a bizarre coincidence is that this guy is married to an Israeli politician who is an avowed Zionist and an "Israel Firster" and there's no mention that she's in Mossad but there never is. But she did military service. She reached the rank of Lieutenant in military intelligence before she finished.

So that's an interesting little detail. It's hard to tease it out but you've got to say it's pretty unusual, that this guy, for the first time ever in France - he'd never been to France on the 14th of July before - just happens to decide to go to Nice and just happens to decide to book into a hotel right opposite where this guy in the truck decided to start his killing spree. And then he went back home for some R&R and just happened to be walking down the street and happened to stop outside the shopping mall where another terrorist was shooting people.

Elan: Well just on the point of this new machete attack, there was another one actually, several days ago where a young man from Afghanistan who was only 17 had attacked passengers on a German train in Bavaria. It's almost like the same story practically except he was gunned down by the German police. After this occurred there was a German MP who came out in criticism of the police who said "He was only armed with a knife. I don't believe you had to kill him." She was jumped on by the German head of police, figuratively speaking, who totally belittled her role and the role of all MPs in the parliament there and reduced her opinion to nothing.

So just another dot there and an indication that the police state mentality that we've seen in the US certainly for a number of years and that has also visited France, especially in the past year, is now spread to Germany. This kind of pathological "kill first, ask questions later" idea I think is becoming the rule instead of the exception.

Harrison: I wanted to comment on a similarity that I'm seeing between the Nice and the Munich attacks. If you look at both of them, they both appear to be these lone wolf guys in a sense that snap at some point and then commit these massacres. In the case of the Munich kid, just to give some background of what's been coming out in the past day or so, apparently this kid was Iranian/German. He was born in Germany, so he was fully German but he had dual Iranian citizenship as well. He was a young kid, 21 or something? He was depressed. He was on medication. He said in the video that was filmed of him on the top of the parking lot that he'd been bullied for seven years. There were reports from his friends and people who knew him saying that he was quiet, shy, also a gamer and in these games that he would play he would threaten people he was playing with that he was going to kill them. When the police searched his apartment, he lived with his parents, and they searched his room and found a whole bunch of material on mass shootings.

So they found a book written by an American I believe called Why Kids Kill. They found printouts on all kinds of shootings. They said he was obsessed with mass shootings. This happened on the five year anniversary of Anders Breivik's mass shooting. So this is the background that they're giving. They're saying that he has no ties to anyone else. The German police say they think he had been planning this for a year, that he'd had the idea to do something like this at least a year ago and that he did it a couple of days ago.

If you look at the Nice attack, it's a similar story. Again, this guy had some mental illness, history of violence and while he too seems to have committed the act on his own, French police are saying that while they can't find any links with any kind of terrorist groups like ISIS, that he did have accomplices in the sense of people who he got the weapons from, people who he was in contact with and texting about getting a truck. They say he received a text from one guy saying "Load the truck with a whole bunch of something to weight it down and then just run through, take the brakes off and let it go."

So it looks like he was in contact with some people who maybe had some kind of influence over him in this attack, but again they say that he had been planning this for at least a year or something like that, or several months at least. I'm just curious what's the reality going on here. Did these people involved and in contact with Bouhlel in Nice? What was their role exactly? They've all been arrested now. Who knows what will come out of that.

Joe: I bet you they're not going to find anything there other than people who are of a similar mindset to the guy who actually drove the truck, but not as unhinged as him. There are certainly a lot of people in Europe who are anti-establishment and certainly amongst the Muslim community there's going to be a certain amount of people who are very anti-western and don't like France very much and if they hear some guy who says he knows this guy who drove the truck and he's a bit unhinged and he's talking about going and killing a bunch of French people, blah, blah, blah, they're maybe willing to say "Yeah, you should do that!" But those kinds of people are not going to do it themselves; the kind of people who stand behind and say "Yeah, you do that! Yeah, you go do it!" Maybe not even thinking that he would do it or the implications of it. There are a lot of stupid, angry people out there.

For me anyway, with the Nice attack, it marked a change to a certain extent, a change in the air in the sense that this was one of the first times where a major terror attack did not have some involvement of shadowy figures who then disappeared from the scene afterwards and never get caught and it gets turned into a lone wolf event. It seemed to me this pretty much was the first genuine lone wolf terror attack as in it was a real terror attack by a really angry person and a really disturbed person. We're going to see more and more of these because I'm sure people listening can relate to the idea that the state of the world with these events that have been happening over the past 10 or 15 years, but increasingly in recent years with the Syria situation and the immigrants and the deaths and the police brutality in America, all serves to leave the average person, you, me or anybody else, fairly unsettled. It has a direct effect on a lot of people I think and there are some very susceptible, fragile people in society who are feeling that as well but who are acting on it, who are prepared or in a position or susceptible to actually going out and just going postal, as we were talking about last week.

Again, the fact that that is the case, the blame for that would have to be laid at the doorstep of the western powers who have, since 9/11 in particular, gone about the process of messing this world up, screwing this world up, causing untold suffering, chaos and death with a real gusto, with real enthusiasms. That can't but have an effect on pretty much everybody on the planet to one extent or another. So if these people like Manuel Valls the French Prime Minister or German or American politicians, it's totally disingenuous of them to turn around and blame anybody. They just need to look in the mirror. But of course they're not going to do that because looking in a mirror means kind of reflecting on your actions and psychopaths tend not to do that.

Elan: Yeah. And of course even if they're lone wolf acts perpetrated by folks who are unstable, it just serves the war on terror narrative further. But I just have a couple of points about the shootings in Munich which seem interesting. There were reports actually of a total of four shooters, three having gotten away, which is reminiscent of the shootings that we heard about in Dallas against the cops who were present during the Black Lives Matter protest. So once again, one shooter, who dies, and then...

Joe: That's something that I'd really like to figure out, what's going on with that.

Elan: Yeah.

Joe: Because it's been so common, particularly in the US because that's where most of these mass shootings have happened, the high profile ones with a lot of deaths. On every occasion there are immediate reports of more than one person shooting and then invariably it gets turned into a lone wolf. I'd just love to understand what the mechanism is behind that or what causes that to happen, assuming it's genuine. It's very easy to understand it if you assume it not to be genuine, as in "It's bullshit, there was more than one shooter" and the rest were part of a team that were involved in it and got away and no one's interested in looking for them because someone figures out or word is passed down "Drop that story. It's a lone wolf".

But in the case of Munich for example, is there something about eyewitnesses in that kind of a situation that would lead people to tend to report gunfire coming from more than one place? Is it easy for that to happen? When you only have one person shooting a gun it's so easy for several eyewitnesses to say "There was definitely more than one shooter"? I don't know.

Harrison: This is something I want to look into - eyewitness testimony because I haven't really researched it and gone into any kind of scientific studies on it. But just from the little bit I've read and the little bit I know about human psychology I'd say it's probably possible, given certain conditions so I think there might be different explanations in different circumstances. So of course I think absolutely in some examples it is multiple shooters who then get covered up but in others I think it probably is possible for bad memory, especially during a traumatic event.

Now in the Munich case I haven't read the direct statements or heard or seen the videos of these people making these statements to know exactly what they say they saw because I can imagine in a tense situation like that where someone is firing and you look around and you see three people, their posture and body language may be such that you see them as a threat but they're not. If you look over and you see them with three rifles and they're shooting, that's harder to discount as a valid witness to what's going on. So I just need to see exactly what these people said about the multiple shooters. Have you guys read any direct statements from these people?

Elan: No, I haven't. I have one last point on Munich unless we have more to say on the subject. This occurred at the Olympic Mall in Munich. For those who aren't familiar with the story, in the 1972 Olympics you had a situation where the Israeli wrestling team was taken hostage by a group of Palestinians at the time and in a botched rescue effort on the part of the German government and/or other interested parties, all of the nine or ten wrestlers were killed. I couldn't help remembering that and this kind of odd echo of that event, maybe a kind of reminder of terrorism and who to lay the blame on except that in this case the lone wolf who was killed wasn't Palestinian or even Islamic necessarily. Well he was German and Iranian in any case. But I just thought that that was an odd sort of coincidence, if that's what it is with the situation.

Harrison: Just one thing before we go to the police state roundup; if I go "out there" for a second, when I think about the tragic coincidence of this independent journalist being at both sites and then the allusion to the Munich massacre back in 1972, until there's more evidence of direct complicity of intelligence agencies in both attacks, I'm open to coincidences happening. But when I think about highly significant coincidences, I think about them more in terms of synchronicity, in terms of something kind of paranormal going on where it's symbolic information field access type of event going on because I think we've all experienced synchronicities to some degree in our lives and even some really intense ones that go beyond any kind of chance, random explanation. There's some weird stuff. You can read examples of some of the biggest ones in the parapsychological research. I just leave open that possibility too for when we have events that are so significant in the world in geopolitics and everyday life. That taps into something deep I think. But with that said, maybe we can give a few comments at the end of the show. For now we are going to our police state roundup. Brent, are you on the line?

Brent: Yes. Hello guys, how you doing?

Harrison: Hey Brent. Good.

Brent: I have a couple of major stories this week and then some more on the relatively minor side, even though it's kind of weird to call them minor. Probably the big one that's been floating around social media is this officer in North Miami who shot a behavioural therapist who was attempting to calm an autistic guy who was armed with a toy truck. What happened was this autistic man had gotten away from his group home and he was sitting in the middle of the street with a toy truck. Someone called the police and mentioned that there was somebody with a gun and immediately the police went into overdrive mode. They found this behavioural therapist in the middle of the street. The behavioural therapist, a black man, realizing what was happening given the climate of everything going on, got on the ground, laid down on his back, put his hands in the air and clearly reiterated by yelling to the officers over and over again that he is a behavioural tech, that this guy was autistic, that he has a toy truck and that's it, that that's the only thing that was happening.

Nevertheless, an officer decided to fire three shots. One of them hit the behavioural technician and when the tech asked the officer why he shot him, the officer's immediate response was "I don't know". About 24 hours later the head of the Miami-Dade police union said that the officer was attempting to save the behavioural technician whom he thought the autistic man was about to discharge a weapon at. It really doesn't make any sense.

Joe: What I read in that story was that the cop said that he was aiming for the autistic man.

Brent: Yes.

Joe: And he hit the behavioural therapist by accident, which isn't funny obviously, but it just takes the incompetence thing to a whole new level. We're not just talking about idiots in uniforms here. We're talking about idiots in uniforms who can't even shoot straight either, not that it would have been a good idea for the autistic man to be hit either, but Jesus, that would have just been taking it to a whole new level if they had killed him.

Brent: Yeah, it's very strange. There was video of the incident that was recorded by a bystander and clearly the guy is just yelling "I'm a behavioural technician. This man is autistic. He has a toy truck." So there was no gun, no weapon. I'm not sure how an officer can mistake a toy truck for a weapon. If anything, you'd think a police officer of all people would be able to distinguish those two items.

Joe: Right.

Brent: So this has been floating around social media. There's actually another video where the behavioural tech explains what happened in his own words. You can see all that stuff online. I'll post a link in the chat.

The other big thing that came out this week was video from a dashcam of an officer who arrested a black school teacher in 2015. This was out of Austin, Texas. This woman was originally stopped for speeding supposedly. She pulled into a Wendy's parking lot and got out of her car when an officer pulled up behind her and told her to get back in the vehicle. She was confused. She didn't know what was going on, what was happening. He told her that she was being pulled over for speeding and to get back in her vehicle. She was a little confused and distressed but she complied nonetheless. She got back in the car. The officer approached, told her to put her feet back in the car so he could close the door. At this point she got frustrated and asked "Could you please hurry up?" As soon as she dropped that the officer immediately went into violent mode and he grabbed her, started screaming "Stop resisting!! Stop resisting!! Get out of the car!" This woman who weighed easily 50-70 pounds less than the officer was ripped out of the car and thrown to the ground. The video is really shocking. It's hard to watch.

Then she got handcuffed and another officer arrived at the scene. She asked "Why is this happening?" and the other officer explained that "White people are afraid of black people because of their 'violent tendencies'." So this is floating around in the media right now. Like I said, the video is very disturbing to watch. Someone who is pulled over for driving 15 miles per hour over the speed limit to be treated so violently is really disturbing and it goes to reiterate the whole point that Black Lives Matter has been trying to make, that black people are treated differently by police officers and often with violent consequences.

Another story that I found interesting, especially in the aftermath of the shootings of police in Louisiana and in Dallas is that President Obama is now ordering a review of his 2015 ban on military grade equipment being sold to the police. In 2015 Obama said "We're not going to be giving cops tanks anymore. No more grenade launchers. There's no reason for it." Now because of these shootings he's reviewing that ban. Such items include military grade riot gear, armoured vehicles, rocket launchers and other high-powered weaponry.

So now the police might be getting all these crazy advanced toys back in light of these shootings, which makes me wonder, with my tinfoil hat on for a moment, perhaps that was the actual reason for these shootings. Maybe these people were activated so that now we can go back to arming the police and turning them into a paramilitary.

Other stories I found that were very disturbing: a family in Oklahoma was celebrating the fifth birthday of one of their children when their pit bull/bulldog mix Obie, was shot in the back yard by an officer who said that he was serving a warrant but a cursory investigation showed that the person that they were serving the warrants on hadn't lived in that house for over a decade. So this officer had a warrant and an address associated, he went to the address, saw the dog in the back yard. The dog lunged at him through a fence. The officer wasn't really in danger even though in his official report he lied and said that the dog was biting him and grabbing him and that's when he shot him at the side of the house. From the position of where the dog died it's obvious that that's not what happened.

It's really sad for these kids. Once the dog was hit everybody realized what was happening because they heard the gunshot. So they went outside to see what was going on and as they were coming out to check on the dog, the officer fired another two shots and killed it right in front of the family.

Another weird story that has ominous hints to it is that a lot of cops, especially on these law enforcement forums and message boards are now claiming "We are in the midst of a civil war." It's this weird kind of language where officers think that they are on one side of a war and I guess the American public is on the other side. It's very disturbing especially considering if anyone is being "warred on" it's the American public. The number of times that the cops have been a victim of violence from random people in 2015 and 2016 is at all-time lows and now these cops are very thin-skinned. Any time anything happens where a cop is attacked, now they are the victims and they must defend themselves with all violence necessary. It's really, really disturbing. You'd think that cops who are making these kinds of inflammatory comments should have their status as officers questioned, but it seems to be fairly common.

There was one comment that looks like it came from Facebook. It had 561 likes and it says "A lot of these thugs don't realize that a lot of us officers have spent a lot of time down range stomping in the sandbox and are ready for a righteous fight if they want to bring one. Really scary stuff.

Joe: Yeah, it's interesting to notice how the whole civil war business is a meme that came out as a result of simultaneous events almost, or terror attacks or police shootings in the US and in Europe because around the time of the Nice attacks or even before them, there were French politicians, or a former French intelligence chief talking about a civil war in France between Muslims and non-Muslims. Around the same time that's going on you have these shootings in the US and talk about a civil war. The New York Post I think after the Baton Rouge shootings had a headline "Civil War in USA".

Of course I don't think that's really going to happen in either place but I think it serves the powers that be very well to promote that idea because it encourages the social chaos and social discord and keeps people on edge and ultimately as far as they're concerned, pushes as many people as possible into the arms of authority. So I think its rhetoric because I don't really see how a civil war could ever actually happen in the US, for example. Maybe you can have more shootings and that kind of stuff and maybe riots, but you're not really talking about any kind of a civil war as it has been known in other countries.

Brent: Yeah, it blends with the whole "there's a war on cops" narrative which is patently false. Like I said, a lot of the police officers, and especially in the unions, feel that they are under attack and really, it's the American public that is under attack from them and we're just trying to have a legitimate conversation about it in order to save more lives and avert more deaths. But gods forbid you bring that up to them directly!
There's one Cincinnati police officer who's getting a lot of flack and may even face disciplinary action for posts online attempting to have honest conversation about racism. This officer, Freddie Vincent, went online and I'll quote him,
A message to all my Afro-American friends and family, when you're encountered by a white officer make sure that you are in a public place, comply with all of their commands because they are looking for a reason to kill a black man and always keep your hands in the air. Never resist. I'm so tired of cops using the famous words 'I was in fear of my life'. I'm praying for Louisiana and that could have been his nephew in Baton Rouge.
That's all he said. He posted that online and apparently the police are now reacting to that as if it's some sort of inflammatory and damning statement against all officers. It's just really scary. All he was trying to do was calm tensions and have an honest conversation and now he might be facing disciplinary actions for "violating the department's social media policy" which is very obscure.

Grim posted something in the chatroom about death rates of officers being 10 times less than that of woodcutters or people who cut down trees. There's an interesting infographic I posted on Facebook yesterday or the day before which shows deaths by occupation in the United States and how many people die while they're at work. There was a whole skew of different professions that were above police officers. Police officers were at the bottom of the list with 61 deaths a year or something like that.

This isn't directly related to the police, but there's an interesting story about half of all TSA employees being accused of misconduct and many of them are repeat offenders. So it just goes to show that the TSA is like another arm of the police. They work in close quarters with them and the number of times that they get reported for some sort of professional misconduct is ridiculous! The numbers of employees that have at least one complaint against them are about 15,000; the number with two complaints - 6,000; three complaints - almost 3,000. And the total number of employees who have complaints against them is something like 26,878 and that's from the TSA's own data.

Harrison: Yeah, and that's out of something like 60,000 total, so like you said, pretty much 50%, one in two TSA employees is either a one-time or repeat offender.

Brent: Yeah, it's very bizarre and it just keeps happening. Nobody wants to reform the TSA. "Oh, it's just the cost of doing business" or whatever.

Harrison: They then put these people on paid leave while they investigate it and they've spent millions of dollars paying the wages for these people while they're not working. I can't remember how many but there are several that they have put on paid leave for over a year while they investigate this; so they're paying these people full wages, millions of dollars in paid leave. It's just ridiculous.

Brent: The same thing happens with officers. Any time there's an investigation, questioning whether or not their actions were appropriate, they all get placed on paid leave.

There's another video - the story was on Free Thought Project - about police forcing their way into a home and occupying the house with their weapons because they "smelled marijuana". This goes back to America's failed war on drugs and how often stuff like this is used to traumatize and kidnap or imprison citizens. We're talking about a plant here that isn't dangerous. It's just unreal that actual danger can be brought upon someone and they can have their lives threatened because an officer or officers think they smell a plant. It's just unbelievable!

Then there was an interesting story from Georgia where Brandon Lee Gary who openly admitted to sneaking up-skirt videos of a woman while she grocery shopped. This guy is clearly a pervert. He's gotten in trouble for this a lot but he took the decision against him to a higher court and ended up winning because the wording of the law that they said he violated, was too vague to specifically punish him for doing this. So this guy is shooting up-skirt video which is like taking a cellphone camera, holding it under a woman's skirt to get a shot of her private area and that's fine. But the state of Georgia actually is another one of those states that imprisons people for marijuana-related crime at a ridiculously high rate. So there's no problem with kidnapping, caging and shooting people over marijuana, but when a guy is clearly sexually harassing women, they can't do anything about it. Sorry!

Harrison: Hold on one sec Brent. We've got a caller. We're going to go to that and maybe we'll get to your last story afterwards. Is that cool?

Brent: Yeah, go for it.

Harrison: Hi caller. You're on the line. Can you let us know who you are and where you're from?

Kent: Yeah, this is Kent from West Virginia.

Harrison: Hi Kent.

Elan: Hello.

Kent: I just have one real quick comment about you're talking about now. It occurs to me that the rise of these incidents coincides with us, the peasantry, calling these people "officers" instead of cops. We can call them cops and we don't have to call them officers. That's my personal thinking. But I just want to put that out there for your consideration. I don't like calling these guys officers. I just don't. "Cops" is alright. So maybe they get an inflated sense of themselves being called an officer you know?

Elan: Well I certainly wouldn't mind call cops officers if they were worthy on the whole and deserving of respect. Maybe just as a matter of policy and keeping safe it's a good idea to be respectful in any case.

Kent: Well when you're addressing them maybe so, when you're in a fighting situation, but in general conversation, we're just talking about cops, amongst ourselves. So that's just one observation.

Elan: Yeah, but that did just remind me - quickly - of a law that will be discussed when Congress comes back to session in the US and it's called Blue Lives Matter. That's Blue Lives Matter. The idea is that any crime against a cop will be treated as a hate crime so what this effectively does is further create this self-importance and entitlement or exceptionalism - that's another word we've heard being described about acts of any military force coming from the US - it imparts this exceptionalism on police officers who are above and beyond the law.

So I think we're seeing some really scary developments coming from the federal side of things as well, in bolstering this idea that cops or police officers are above the law in some sense.

Harrison: Smerfs Lives Matter.

Elan: Because they're blue.

Kent: It's all very frightening. I hate to contemplate what's happening but it's not going to turn around I don't think.

Harrison: No.

Kent: It's a downward spiral too.

Joe: Yeah.

Kent: And then we'll recover from something - whatever - after the crash we'll just have to pick it all up together I guess.

Harrison: Yeah, absolutely. Well thanks for calling in Kent. We'll talk to you later, alright?

Kent: Okay.

Harrison: Take care.

Kent: Alright. Bye.

Harrison: So Brent, do you have another story?

Brent: Yeah, they actually passed a law similar to that in North Carolina or maybe Georgia, one of the southern states. That law is already on the books in those states. It establishes police as a protected class and anything from insulting an officer to resisting arrest will now have added penalties piled on top of it.

This story is related to the drug war. An innocent man was jailed for a month, lost his apartment and his job, after cops mistook some homemade soap for cocaine. This guy was from Brooklyn. His name is Alexander Bernstein. He was driving to Florida to visit his sister with one of his friends and he was pulled over on an interstate because he was doing 60 miles per hour in a 55 mile per hour zone which in and of itself is kind of unusual. Usually in the states you can get away with five or ten over the limit without getting pulled over but they decided to pull this guy over anyway. He made the mistake of consenting to a search. You should never, ever consent to a search by officers. They found some white soap wrapped in clear plastic with red tape. It was brick shaped and they immediately assumed it was cocaine. They used a field test kit which apparently came up negative but they turned that around and said it was positive.

So this guy ended up in jail for a month and lost his job. He ended up suing and he's been awarded an almost $200,000 settlement. But it's just unbelievable how often stuff like this happens. This is not like an isolated incident. These field test kits are notoriously unreliable on their own, let alone when you have officers forging the test results. It really goes to show that they're out to get people. They're trying to make numbers and they will use anything they can to put people in jail, even when it's not a violation of the law.

I just have two more quick stories. There's a video about a drunken officer pulling a gun on a Jack-in-the-Box employee because he "Was not making his burger fast enough." This is from Santa Clara, California. A drunken officer pulled into a drive-through at Jack-in-the-Box about 2:40 in the morning and when he thought that his food wasn't coming quick enough he ended up pulling his gun out and pointing it at the guy through the window. They called 911 and there was a bit of a tense standoff before police arrested their fellow officer and took him away. Of course in the press conference talking about it, the cops made no mention of the fact that he pulled a gun on this employee and just said the DUI is a big problem and blah, blah, blah.

This story was a little disturbing. This comes from Montana. A while ago there was a small town that hosted a big rodeo and the police were tasked with rounding up the mostly native Americans, the poor homeless people, and throwing them into these open-air prisons without charges for the duration of this weekend of rodeo. Now there's a civil suit against the city and the police because they rounded people up and put them into a concentration camp. When you read the description of these camps, it's very eerily reminiscent of the Nazi era. They were pushed outside in very cold conditions. They were given a pot to pee in. Men were instructed to urinate through the fence. People were soiling themselves because they couldn't get close enough to the fence. They were fed literal goulash when they were fed. There wasn't enough to go around. Then they were all released in waves over the next couple of days with no charges. It's very scary to see if that's how they treat people innocent of any crime, you can imagine how they might treat protestors in the not-too-distant future when things start to get really bad. And that's all I've got for today.

Elan: One last story Brent. Maybe you read about it. It was in an article posted to SOTT and it was about how the mayor of Atlanta, Georgia - you brought up Georgia a little earlier in regards to Blue Lives Matter legislation that went through - so there were people calling for this mayor to stop having his police trained by Israeli police and military; basically, correctly stating that the training that the police were receiving was really bad. Of course it's not only Israeli forces or companies that are doing this training, not only in Atlanta and the US. You have former American military inculcating and programming these police to shoot first and ask questions later.

But it was very interesting to read about this mayor and the fact that he was not only not going to stop this training - I think it's called Elite Training or something - but he himself had a hand in the security business and I think is peripherally connected to the military/industrial complex and would go to these kinds of organizations and conventions that dealt in security. So there's this whole mindset that at least in part, has been imported from Israel, to treat people as if they were in an open-air prison, in much the same way that Israelis treat the people of Gaza and the West Bank. It's part and parcel of what we're seeing here. It's the war of terror and not on terror.

Brent: There have been stories like that coming out of the news since about 2001, a lot of connections between Michael Chertoff who was in the Bush administration. He's also an Israeli-American dual citizen and he's involved in having NYPD officers and other officers either go to Israel or having Israeli military personnel come over here to train cops. It's been going on for quite a while.

Harrison: Alright, well thanks Brent. We'll talk to you again next week.

Brent: Yup!

Harrison: Okay. Take care.

Joe: See you Brent.

Elan: By Brent.

Brent: Take care guys.

Harrison: We've run over but we're going to take one more quick call. So I hope we can keep it short. TC, are you there?

TC: Hi guys. How you doing?

Harrison: Good. How're you doing?

Joe: Hi TC.

TC: Good, good. I know we're running over so I'll be quick as I can. I just wanted to do a quick update on the Dallas shooting of the police officers who died there.

Harrison: Sure.

TC: We were talking about it last week and we were talking about the three people who were arrested. So I looked into this yesterday to see if there was anything else on the story and these three people have disappeared into thin air. CNN has done a video where there's a police officer who's now doing a tour of the shooting site, tracing Micah Johnson's steps and basically saying that he was running around from place to place, lots of different places, and so that was why we thought there were lots of different shooters, because he was magically shooting from one place and then running somewhere else and shooting somewhere else.

The quote is "As we've started to unravel this fishing knot, we realize that the shootings came from one building at different levels." So you're never going to hear about those three suspects ever again. So that's that. Case closed.

And then just one final point; quite a strange thing, the machete attack in Germany. The story broke in Merced Media around 5:00 p.m. UK time. Now they say that it happened at about 4:30 p.m. German time which would be 3:30 p.m. UK time but it's still doing it now. If you guys Google German Machete Attack Times of Israel they broke the story seven hours ago. The Google return says that their story, seven hours old, which is three-and-a-half hours before it was supposed to have happened so I don't know if that's a technical glitch or what, but it's a very strange and interesting phenomenon.

Harrison: Get a screen shot of that.

TC: I already have.

Harrison: Okay. Alright well thanks TC for filling us in on that.

TC: Take care.

Joe: See ya.

Elan: Bye-bye.

Harrison: Alright, any final thoughts before we call it a day?

Joe: Nope.

Harrison: No? All sleepy? Okay then, we're going to call it a day. Thanks to Hugo for coming on for the first part of the show. Thanks to Kent and TC for calling in and we'll be back next week covering the madness, as our planet spirals even deeper into chaos and destruction. At least we've got that to look forward to I guess. Something's gotta give at some point.

Joe: Yeah. Don't temp fate Harrison.

Harrison: Well we'll see. So everyone take care.

Joe: Something's gotta give at some point, in the future at some point. Let's leave it open because it's not looking good but at the same time, it's kind of interesting and it's a weird combination of horrific and fascinating at the same time. But it's only fascinating if you can keep a certain level of detachment from it. It's not always easy to do that but it's possible with the right perspective. Put it this way, if it was just horrible, if it wasn't some kind of interest or fascination about it in terms of just how the whole thing plays out and keeping it in the context of history and historical cycles and that kind of thing, if we didn't have that, I don't think we'd be doing this because who wants to look at just the pure horrific and chaotic decline of a civilization and all the suffering that goes on? No one's going to look at that, for that reason, out of interest in that, but it's almost from a historian's perspective, history being made and watching history develop as you sit there, is both the interesting part of it.

It's what keeps us going and also just trying to keep people informed and keep other people who are listening and people who read our websites, keep them buoyed up to a certain extent or as much as possible and try to remind them to not get too identified with it and too bogged down in it; because it will. Like I was saying earlier on, it gets to people and obviously it gets to some people to the point where they go out and go crazy, but it also gets to all ordinary, normal human beings on this planet and we need to stick together and support each other in that way and make it a little bit easier to handle.

Elan: I think that's important Joe because if we go crazy then on some level they've won. By the same token, I think this past week-and-a-half with the failed coup, we can take a little pleasure anyway, imagining that somewhere in some office in Langley or the Pentagon, there are a bunch of guys sitting around a table stomping their fists, sweating, angry, enraged that their plans fell through and probably many more of their plans will fall through, even if there is some damage along the way that they are able to commit. It's not much of a consolation for all this horror we're seeing, but maybe just a little bit.

Harrison: Alright, and on that note we're going to leave you for the day. So everyone take care.

All: Good-byes.