Mc Cain Belhadj
John McCain with the leader of ISIS in Libya, Abdelhakim Belhadj
The recent terror attack in Manchester has once again brought into focus the problem of alleged 'radical Islam' in Europe. The mainstream media is content to parrot the official government line that these attacks are carried out by young men radicalized by 'Jihadi groups' bent on the destruction of Western society and values and the institution of sharia law. But that contention is obviously over-simplistic and fails to inform the public about the close ties that British and other Western governments, politicians and intelligence officials have had with the very same xtremist Muslim groups that claim responsibility for the attacks.

Long-term Polish-American geopolitical grand master, Zbigniew Brzezinski died yesterday. A quote attributed to him reads:
"For America, the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia... America's global primary is directly dependent on how long and how effectively its preponderance on the Eurasian continent is sustained..."
In this single statement, lies the explanation for everything from Trump's rise to power and the Russiophobia that has gripped the West over the past few years to the rise of China, terror attacks and wars in the Middle East and beyond.

Tune in this week as we analyze the current state of the world, how we got here and where we are likely going.

Running Time: 01:36:24

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Here's the transcript of the show:

Harrison: Hello everyone. Welcome back to Behind the Headlines. It is May 28th. I'm your host for today, Harrison Koehli. Joining me in the studio is Elan Martin.

Elan: Hi everyone.

Harrison: And shortly Joe Quinn will be joining us as well in just a little bit. But before Joe gets to us maybe we'll start with a little summary of some of the events that we're going to be covering on the show that took place over the last week or so. Probably the biggest on everyone's minds and in the media is the suicide bombing at the Ariana Grande concert in Manchester several days ago.

So maybe I'll just start out by giving a description of what we think happened for those that haven't been following the news about it. At the concert there were initial reports of an explosion that weren't confirmed immediately but very soon after, were confirmed, and within just a matter of hours various news outlets - I believe maybe some British but primarily US ones - started releasing a lot of information what allegedly took place. They identified that it was a suicide bombing carried out by a 22-year-old man named Salman Abedi.

So this came out pretty quickly. That was the US media that released the guy's name and very soon in those hours and a day or two after there were two kind of focuses in the media. One was on Abedi himself, his identity and background and the other was the scandal that was going on because the UK was apparently none too pleased about the US media and intelligence with whom US authorities, security officials, intelligence were in contact with sharing information because a lot of this information apparently got leaked in the US media against the wishes of the UK counterparts in this relationship.

This prompted a whole bunch of angry statements from British officials. I'm just going to welcome Joe to the show.

Joe: Hi there.

Harrison: Hello.

Elan: Hi Joe.

Joe: Sorry I'm late.

Harrison: We were just giving a brief description of the Manchester media coverage and what we're on about right now is the rift between US and UK intelligence officials because the UK was very mad at the US for sharing all these details including photographs and information about the attack. They shared the suspect's name when apparently they weren't supposed to and then the New York Times got hold of a whole bunch of pictures from the crime scene that they apparently weren't supposed to share. So the UK was reportedly furious about this and had a lot of things to say in the media and apparently one-on-one with other officials.

It came to the point where Tillerson basically said he takes complete responsibility and it won't happen again and "We're going to do something about it" and Trump says that they're going to do an investigation to find out who was at the root of this and prosecute them to the full extent of the law if possible. So it was kind of humorous and kind of I think just symptomatic of, just the state of the US media and intelligence now. As one commentator put it in the article we had on SOTT, there's a culture of leaks now because the whole Trump thing with all of the leaks coming out about Trump it just seems to be that it's becoming seemingly just a natural practice where more stuff is leaked than at any other time I'd say in the past 20 years where it just seems to be a weekly-to-daily phenomenon.

First of all just a week or two ago there was the whole Israeli intelligence alleged leak by Trump to Lavrov which turned out to be an insider leak to the Washington Post where all the information was actually released. Then this week it's UK information being shared. Well that's that. Do you have anything to comment on that Joe?

Joe: No, it's hilarious to be honest. These leaks about the Manchester bombing were very strange. You might ask the question why were the British so worried, so annoyed that this guy's name was released because it turns out that was his name. That's who he was so what's the big problem. Was it just a face-saving thing like "We wanted to tell the public. You shouldn't tell them."? If the British and Americans collaborate on this kind of thing why is there such a problem? They're all part of the great West anyway, right? So why is there a problem if it comes out of the US?

But as you said the British were extremely annoyed and that's kind of a story in itself as to why they would be annoyed. As I was saying it's kind of hilarious to think that this leak is actually part of, as you mentioned, the ongoing leakage that's been happening since Trump became President and is directed at Trump as an attack on Trump. That seems to be one way that the so-called deep state or whatever has been trying to undermine the Trump Presidency by leaking confidential information to either make them look bad or to cause problems and to maybe send a warning as in "We can release information". So it's this idea of the deep state parallel government to the Trump administration that has arms or tentacles into the intel agencies and a lot of friends in the media and corporations and that they can work at odds with the Trump administration and then they can leak information about what's going on inside the Trump administration, what they're doing and also stuff that just makes them look bad, that's at odds with their Western partner type thing.

It's kind of hilarious to think that this is actually part of that in the sense that they leaked this kind of information in an ongoing leakage attack against Trump. "Leak some information there. Let's make him look bad. Let's piss off the Brits or let's make it look like Trump has no control over the intel agencies or whoever gets this information or let's make it look like it came from within the Trump administration." Obviously it's not the done thing. You're not meant to release that information. You're meant to allow the British to handle it as they want.

So it kind of pissed them off. But the question is why it pissed them off. Obviously one explanation for why they would be annoyed at this is that it doesn't look very good if you know, according to some allegations, that it was within a few hours of the attack itself when the British were saying nothing, where the media was still reporting just that a bomb went off and who knows what the cause was or who was responsible. The Americans released this guy's name. "Yeah, here's the name. Here's who he is. Here's where he's from. Here's where he lived. Here's his history and his background."

If the British were to do that it would look a bit suspicious. "Well if you know immediately who this guy is, if you can do that kind of investigation so quickly surely you had a close eye on him and you could have anticipated this." So it brings up all sorts of problems for them in that sense of questions it raises as to why this actually happened and how do you know this guy so well? How can you be so sure, a few hours afterwards to know exactly who he was? Apparently the Americans did and they released this information and it gets into that whole area of State participation in one way or another with these terror attacks that we've seen in so many previous attacks in Europe and the US. Every single time, even though they wait a little longer to present the person, they always generally say "Yes, he was known to intelligence agencies", this person, the attacker, the bomber the jihadi, whoever. He was known.

So the issue with this guy is that he was really well known to British intelligence and to the Americans and probably people listening have heard or read a bit about where he came from but it more or less centres on Libya back in 2011 although he was quite young at that age. But his father was part of the gangs that were used to attack Libya and help overthrow Gaddafi. We can talk about that a bit more if you want but it's just funny to think that in attacking Trump, the deep state in the US would actually have to some extent - of course not a smoking gun - but they would have let the cat out of the bag a little bit about intel agencies' close association with jihadi suicide bombers.

Harrison: I think at this point that's the most solid angle on this whole attack that should be focused on. Of course there should be more research and more analysis to come but the big thing that I see out of all of this is that even if we accept to a large degree the so-called official story then even that in itself is damning because, like you mentioned, this guy Abedi's father was a member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group which was essentially the major Al-Qaeda in Libya that the US and all their allies supported to overthrow Gaddafi.

So interestingly enough, I think the day of the attack or the day after, this guy's father did an interview with Reuters or AP, one of the wire services and said "My son's innocent. We don't believe in killing" or anything like this and a few hours later he was arrested by Libyan authorities and then it came out that he was a member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, LIFG, which of course were bloody-thirty maniacs that went around killing everyone they could find. So it just exposed some of the hypocrisy there.

Then you look at the wider context that in those couple of days afterwards there were a few really good articles about the whole situation involving these Libyan so-called rebels. So Abedi, the father, had allegedly fled Libya for fear of his life from Gaddafi because Gaddafi was persecuting him. For years Gaddafi was keeping a handle on the country and preventing the radicals, the ones who would become the Al-Qaeda proxies in Libya from gaining any kind of support or power in the country. So these were the guys he was allegedly persecuting. It was really this tiny percentage of Libyans who were anti-Gaddafi and pro-jihadi.

So Abedi was one of these guys. He fled in 1996 or might have been earlier, but he was involved with all of these groups and he went to the UK. In I believe the early 2000s he was put on some variant of the terrorist watch list and he and a bunch of people living in Manchester, the same neighbourhood, the same area, were put on these kinds of lists and they weren't allowed to travel and things like this. Some of them went to prison for various reasons. Then right before 2011 these guys get out of prison. They get their records wiped clean and the MI5 tells them "Oh, we'll totally support you if you go to Libya to overthrow Gaddafi".

So all of these Libyan exiles get sent from the UK to Libya to join these terrorist groups to overthrow Gaddafi. Then they come back and they have basically free passage back and forth between the UK and Libya via other countries. I think some of them got in through Morocco but it just shows that the level of collusion that these people were members of a known and acknowledged terrorist group and yet were essentially told they could do whatever they want, in Libya of course. Now there's a whole community of Libyan exiles who are members of terrorist organizations, or who have been and who are just living freely in the UK because the UK would support them because they were anti-Gaddafi, which of course is just the same template that you see repeated over and over going back to the Mujahideen in the '80s and Al-Qaeda in the '90s and everything else where you have Western governments totally willing to support terrorist organizations and even doing so very openly to a degree.

It's totally acknowledged that this is what the UK did in regards to Libya but it's this weird situation where it's fully acknowledged on the one hand but then totally played down on the other where most people aren't aware of it even though it's part of the public record. So it's kind of confusing how that is, where it can be totally acknowledge but I guess it's just because none of the media actually cover it with any degree of accuracy. But even then you can read it in the Daily Mail. It's out there.

Well that's the situation surrounding this Abedi guy and just a bit about him personally, like you mentioned he was something like 16 years old in 2011. So the initial reports were kind of sketchy on if he'd actually gone to Libya in 2011. Apparently he did. This is despite claims from leaders of LIFG saying that they wouldn't have employed anyone under the age of 18 but that's probably not true.

So this kid apparently went there and engaged in fighting in 2011, came back to the UK and has made several trips to Libya since then. He was actually in Libya just days before the attack happened. I don't know how many days it was, perhaps a week or five days before the attack happened he'd been in Libya and came back to the UK. And in the past five years according to a lot of the big British newspapers, speaking to family friends, distant relatives and acquaintances of the family, they say that even friends had warned the British authorities, called the terror hotline about this guy, warning them about him at least five times in the past five years.

One of his neighbours didn't give the time period but she said in the flat where he was living with his brother because some time in the last year his parents had moved back to Libya, he was living there alone with his older brother and they had an Al-Qaeda flag hanging in the window of their flat. This woman who seemed like a decent person. She wasn't really extreme one way or the other but she just said "Oh that's wrong. They should have done something about that", that these guys were hanging this flag in their window. But no one did anything.

So the UK MI5, all the intelligence agencies and security services knew about this guy. They knew about this whole situation because they knew that all of these Libyans living in Manchester were used by the UK government in Libya, but of course just didn't do anything and there were a number of reasons for that. One is because they're UK allies. They did the dirty work in Libya.

Joe: Right. Why do anything about them?

Elan: Well just to confuse matters a little further, there's one story that a close friend of this guy was killed last summer by six individuals that ran him down with a car. So according to Abedi's mother who had an interview with the Wall Street Journal, he had vowed vengeance for the death of his friend.

Harrison: He viewed it as a hate crime.

Elan: He viewed it as a hate crime and he coupled that with the desire to avenge the deaths of Syrian citizens. So he conflated that. Whether this story is actually correct or factual or not is I guess up to further research and debate. But there seem to be a lot of contradictions here if he was a proponent of Al-Qaeda on the one hand and was out of this vengeance killing, avenging the death of people in Syria who have been killed by Al-Qaeda and other allied groups there.

This reminds me a little bit of the guy who drove down and killed some many dozens in Nice, France some time back, as well as the Munich shootings. There are elements of an unstable individual who just independently went off and did this thing even though the explosion at the Ariana Grande concert indicates it may have been something that he was incapable of creating, bomb and power-wise.

Joe: I don't really buy it in the sense that there's a lot of angry young men out there and most of them end up acting out antisocially in one way or another, acting out their anger in much more benign ways. For a 22-year-old kid to be able to go and assemble a bomb of that size is just absolutely ridiculous. So I think he definitely had someone helping him, someone who gave him the bomb if indeed he was the one who detonated it. It may have been detonated by remote control.

If you think about this from the point of view of strategy, if you take the official narrative, this is ISIS, ISIS claimed responsibility but who is ISIS. That's like saying the bogeyman claimed responsibility. At this point it's ridiculous, especially this guy's background of being from Libya, involved in Libya and involved in the overthrow of Gaddafi which he would in theory be quite happy about since he and his father and brothers and stuff were all anti-Gaddafi and being very well known to British intelligence over the past five or six years. Let's take the narrative that ISIS somehow got hold of this guy in Libya despite what his father says. But his father's complicit because he was staying with his father over the past couple of weeks in Libya. His father's obviously complicit if he was being groomed for this attack in Manchester in Libya over the past few weeks and he's flown back to Manchester and he carries out the bombing.

So these people have an agenda and it's to kill people in Europe, white people, western, nominally Christian people in Europe. But going with that narrative you've got this young guy, obviously very troubled, very angry, unstable and you're just going to give him a bomb and make sure he gets there under his own steam, doesn't have second thoughts, goes in and follows it all through. Remember he's 22 years old so he's going to have to be a very accomplished young man to carry this out or for people to have trust in him to actually carry it out.

So the idea of the suicide bomber in this case doesn't really stack up I think. It was mentioned in the media, official government sources or whatever, investigators aren't sure whether it was a detonator that he detonated himself or could have made mention of the idea that it was remote controlled. That kind of thing is very likely to be remote controlled. But then even with that you have to have a very disturbed individual to just walk with a bomb into a concert arena and just wait for someone who's obviously standing by close enough to see where he is, to detonate the bomb at the right time, in the right place.

It's all very disturbing anyway. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Getting into the issue of British intelligence or Western intelligence agencies' involvement with these people, they don't talk about it, as Harrison was saying, and the media don't tell people about it but you'll hear in a few different reports or publications here and there, and it's been going on for many years, where they'll try and contact some person to be an informant for them. So this is going with the official narrative that the British intelligence are worried about an attack, for example by Islamic extremists or whatever, but they don't have enough information or they don't have enough data or evidence to arrest them all and just get it over with and solve the problem so they have to have informants to find out what's going on, if there are any attacks planned. So they go and approach some young guy - ideally young but it can be anybody - who they can make an offer to or manipulate in some way. "You be our man on the inside."

So the person then is already a part of an organization like that. Usually if they're part of an organization like that they usually have to have something on that person where they can threaten them. So say this guy was a member of some extremist cell committed to blowing up or killing people in England. If some informant for British intelligence comes along to him and says "Listen, you need work for us", he needs to have something on him to force him to do that, like "You work with us or you're going to jail for 25 years", something along those lines. That's one scenario where you identify an active member of a group like that and you manipulate them. You force them to work with you, to play a double agent role.

The other one is where the person that you're targeting isn't necessarily a member but you have an informant that brings them into the organization and then you keep tabs on what's going on inside by your informant acting as another member of the organization. It all gets very complicated but the point being when these spy agencies involve themselves in this way, abusing informants and having contacts, when they say 'this guy Abedi was known to us' that usually means that British intelligence had been talking to him directly or indirectly for quite a long time and had been following him and had direct contact with him.

So the problem then is you want to find out about the kind of attack that he carried out in Manchester but when you find out that an attack like that is being planned from your sources or from this guy himself, he comes back to an MI5 informant and says "They want me to be a suicide bomber at the Ariana Grande concert" well that's when MI5 is faced with a dilemma: Do we swoop in and get this guy so he can't be the bomber or will they just make someone else do it? We need more information. Or can we now swoop in and get all the people who are organizing this and stop this from happening?

So it's a very murky game and there are official records of situations in the past where a Western intelligence agency was using a guy inside a terrorist organization but they had to let the guy actually carry out a terror attack in order for him to prove his credentials as a terrorist. This is part of the official way that these things are done.

So there's one possible situation here where this young guy was effectively working for or being forced to work as an informant for, MI5 and trying to get access or information from terror cells but that in order to prove his credentials and get further into the organization so they could really get information on a bigger terror attack that was going to happen or identify the bigger fish in the organization so then they could get those people, they have to let this guy prove himself. But in this case it means he proves himself to death so that doesn't work because he blew himself up, right? He's not a very good informant anymore because he's dead.

That's the way they talk about these things and that's supposedly that's the process that these people follow. Another analogy for this is many, many FBI terror plots that have happened over the past 10 or so years in the US where the FBI goes down, identifies some young, susceptible guy. They're hearing he might be saying he wants to join Al-Qaeda or he doesn't like America so what they do is the FBI uses an informant that's usually a criminal of some description that is working for the FBI to go down to act like he's a member of Al-Qaeda, contact the young guy and say "Hey, do you want to be part of Al-Qaeda?" And the young guy say "Yeah, sure."
Or maybe the guy says "No, not really". And he says "Well I'll give you $50 if you want to be Al-Qaeda". And he's like "Okay, I'll be Al-Qaeda for $50". He gives him fifty bucks. "Okay, now you're Al-Qaeda. I'll swear you into Al-Qaeda" and after a period of grooming he'll say to him "Well now that you're a member of Al-Qaeda don't you want to do some Al-Qaeda stuff, like blow up America or something?" And the guy will say "Well maybe." "Well what if I give you a bomb? Would you want to go and blow up the Sears Tower?"

The guy's like "I dunno. How much money have you got?" The guys says "Well I've got $500. Will that help you decide?" "Well okay. For $500 I might want to blow up the Sears Tower." Blah, blah, blah. The whole process goes along and what happens is this person is groomed and turned into an unlikely or implausible terrorist to the point where he's given a fake bomb by an FBI informant and told to go down to the Sears Tower one morning and then push the button on the little control he has. So as he appears at the Sears Tower that morning with a fake bomb given to him by the FBI, the FBI swoop in, grab him and say "Gotcha! We've got another terrorist." That they made, from scratch more or less.

The only thing they had to go on at the beginning was the guy was maybe talking stupid stuff. He might have been hanging Al-Qaeda flags on his wall or something like that or posting Al-Qaeda pictures on the internet. That's how they stop terror attacks in America and in the West supposedly. But you can see that basically it's a reality creation. They're creating the thing that they say that exists or they justify it to themselves by saying "Well we've got to stop this at the very beginning in the sense that we've got to lead it through. We can't just go and say to someone "Listen, you posted something supportive of ISIS on Facebook therefore you're going to jail for 25 years. We've got to get him to the point where he actually plays the part of a supposedly real terrorist with our help up to the point of, but not beyond the point of carrying out an attack" and then they've got their terrorist.

The whole thing is just bizarre and ridiculous. It's like drumming up business in a certain sense. The meat and potatoes for intel agencies in Western countries is fighting Islamic terrorism. "If we don't see Islamic terrorism, if we don't see evidence of terrorist planning attacks, that doesn't mean they aren't. It just means they're doing it in secret. So we've got to find the ones that might be planning to do it in secret in the future and take them through the process of doing it all in a controlled way to the point of giving them a fake bomb and then we arrest them and then we say that we foiled a terror plot."

So this is all just to give you an example of the long history and the extent to which Western intel agencies are fully, fully in bed with all of these radical groups and very often control them fully. They're watching them, they know who they are and they control them fully. Now when you realize that is the case and it is the case because there's loads of evidence, loads of documents to show that that is the actual case in the UK for example, you've got a problem then with attacks like Manchester because there's a very good probability as I think was in an Alternet article recently by journalist Max Blumenthal, where he asked the question when he heard about the extent to which British intelligence knew about this guy Abedi, that he asked the question "What did the British government know about him and when did it know it? Was British Intelligence attempting to groom Abedi as an informant?"

Well yes, absolutely. Not only were they attempting to, they already had groomed him as an informant. He was their plaything basically. And there are many others like this guy in the UK who are the playthings in that sense, of intelligence agencies and if they so choose, they are able to whatever they want with them. And that just leads us to the next question of "Is there any benefit to the British government or British intelligence agencies or the British deep state - or whatever you want to call it - "Is there any benefit to them from having a bombing at the Ariana Grande concert in Manchester?" Because if there was, then they have the means to have a groomed, young, disturbed, unstable, young Muslim from Libya, to put in that concert with a bomb because that's their bread and butter.

Elan: Well Joe, as you pointed out in your recent focus, the timing of this act is extremely peculiar in that it's just a couple of weeks before the snap elections in the UK, what inevitably happens with these kinds of acts is that people kind of shut down. An amygdala hijack occurs. Their thinking ability gets cut off and they default to whatever fear response, appeal to authority, safety, security, any promises that they're going to be kept safe from such actions happening again, would be enacted by their government, their big daddy. Theresa May didn't waste any time. In her capacity as head of her party she came out and made her little predictable speech about security.

And further as you pointed out in your focus, there was a simultaneous media assault on Jeremy Corbyn as this terrorist sympathizer just because he's not this rabid warmonger.

Joe: It's kind of hilarious. They accuse him of being weak on terrorism but it's been under the Tories that two of the biggest terror attacks, under the Conservatives that have happened this year within a few months of each other in London on Westminster Bridge a couple of months ago and now this one. So how that Conservative government can turn around and say "Well if you elect the other government more things like this are going to happen." It's like "Yeah, but they're already happening under you." And people really didn't like the fact that the Conservatives and Theresa May, the British Prime Minister came out and tried to use this. It was a really bad idea on their part but they're obviously desperate.

To me that speaks to the essence of this attack in itself where they came out and very unadvisedly tried to use it to increase their chances I suppose, or attempt to garner more votes for the upcoming election on the 8th of June by saying whatever they said. She got on TV and gave the whole "this is why you need us" and "this is terrible" and "more of this will happen under Labour" and "this is why you need a strong government like us", but it was all very disjointed and not very clear. The thing that came through for most people was the fact that she was using the terror attack in a very cynical way, the fact that 22 humans had been killed, to try and increase her chances of continuing as Prime Minister after the next general election, for the conservatives to win.

So it was a really bad idea and anybody with any sense would have realized that. Even if she doesn't think that this was some kind of a manipulated attack, she and her people, her policymakers or her propaganda experts should have realized that so close before an election this is going to work in our favour and if we then exploit it we're going to look bad and we may even cause people to be suspicious about the nature of it as well, about why it happened. And that's happened actually. People have done that and almost mainstream to a certain extent.
There's this news website, the Daily Mail in the UK and it's very much traditionally a conservative tabloid and I've been looking at the comments underneath the articles about this Manchester attack and the vast majority of them are very critical of the Conservatives and that's a conservative paper. Supposedly the people who read that are pro-conservatives but they're really unhappy with that government and that woman Theresa May because of what they've done, their response to this Manchester bombing.

So the fact that they just went ahead and shot themselves in the foot in that sense, by the type of response they had to it, suggests that they're idiots for starters and they're so out of touch with the ordinary people of the UK which is true I think, increasingly in Western countries across the board. We saw that with Trump and I suppose was the reason Trump got elected. The establishment is so out of touch with the people they're just two different realities. That's causing problems. People are just not playing the game anymore and starting to ask serious questions.
One of the mainstream conspiracy theories that I've seen on mainstream websites in the UK after this Manchester bombing is that people are bringing up the Saudi Arabia link, her going and kowtowing or cozying up to the Saudis and a lot of people are aware that the Saudis are a bunch of head-chopper, jihadi extremist Muslim terrorist supporting nutjobs.

Then they see their Prime Minister going and kissing up to them knowing that the Saudis fund extremist Muslims who carry out terror attacks and then you have a terror attack in the UK. Some people have gone as far as to say "Well you know the Saudis probably have a stake in this UK general election." The Saudis very definitely would like to see the Conservatives win because Labour under Jeremy Corbyn have said not nice things about Saudi Arabia and they have said that they would stop selling weapons to them and they said all sorts of other unpleasant things about the Saudis.

So in terms of what other countries like Saudi Arabia would like to see happen on June 8th in the general election, they want to see the conservatives win. So could the Saudis have facilitated this guy to go and blow up an Ariana Grande concert in order to try and influence the election in the same way that the Clintonites in America said that Russia tried to influence? Because that's part of public discourse now, right, that other countries can do things - whether it's true or not - other countries can do things to swing an election in western countries. Like Russia apparently swung the election in America for Donald Trump by publishing stuff about Hillary Clinton supposedly, right? And that gave it to Trump.

Well the Saudis are a bit crazier and they like chopping people's heads off so maybe they wouldn't stop at facilitating this guy to carry out a bombing in order to swing the election for the conservatives against Jeremy Corbyn. And people are talking about that! These people are nuts. The people who are doing this kind of thing, these elites in the UK and Western countries are completely nuts. They have lost the plot. They're so out of touch with people that I don't know what they're going to do because they can't do anything. They have to keep going. I think they get an idea that people aren't reacting the right way anymore. "People are starting to really ask questions about us and be very suspicious" and in response to that they ramp up the policies and the deception and the corruption and the lies and the really blatant manipulation. They ramp that up in an attempt to fool the people, to push them back down, to confuse them again and put them back in their place, not realizing that it's those policies and those things that have led people to question in the first place.

So by continuing to do it you're just going to make them even more suspicious, the people. But apparently they don't know what else to do.

Elan: Well I think they very, very easily could have just repeated their works of fixing the election in Scotland with the Scottish referendum. They could have exchanged notes with their pals in France with, in all likelihood, the recently fixed election for Macron. They could have done this in a much more covert way. They didn't have to kill a bunch of people.

Joe: No, but Elan, there's a problem with fixing elections. You can rig elections and then just assume that people will accept it. But that's not good enough. What these people want is for people to really vote for them, right? It's like the corrupt elite, warmongering type leaders really want the people to genuinely support them. Sure, anybody can rig a vote. "Even though people wanted to kick us out we're going to stay in power because we rigged the vote." That's not very satisfactory because you know that there's this majority and sometimes a big majority of people in the country who friggin' hate you.

It's a very tenuous situation where, let's say of the voting population, 70% of the voting population in the UK want the Tories to be kicked to the curb. They want them out. But then on that 70% of the population you force the so-called reality of "Y'all just voted for us. You actually want us back in." It's a very difficult situation because people know that they don't. You can't push that too far. You can't keep rigging elections in that way. You have to change your policies. The only way you can get people to like you is to change your policies but these people will not change their policies. So where are they going to go?

Elan: So there's a level of control over the thinking, not only as demonstrated by the vote, but that there's a deeper level of control...

Joe: Right. They want to own you, body and soul, mind and soul.

Elan: When you give your freewill...

Joe: Yeah!

Elan: ...over to someone else. I see your point.

Joe: It's like they want the people to like their oppression, to say thank you for it. But they can't change their policies. That's the last thing they'll ever do so they just keep charging ahead. These past few years I've had many times where I've had the recourse to use the quote that I remember from when I studied Macbeth in school where Macbeth goes around killing a bunch of people to try and get to be king of Scotland and he ends up killing the King and everything, but halfway through his killing spree of knocking off all these people who stood in his way to become king, he has a moment of questioning where he thinks to himself whether or not he should keep going. Is this really worth it and he basically says "I am in blood so far steeped in that to go back would be as tedious as to go on."

So he basically says "Well I've come this far and even though I have to wade through lots more blood to get where I want to go, I've already got a bunch of bodies behind me so there's no point in stopping now and going back and trying to atone for all the stuff I've already done." And I think in a general sense, that's the attitude of these people in power in Europe, is that maybe they don't even think that deeply about it or there isn't that much clarity about it, but they seem to be unable to change. They're committed on the path of manipulating the population and forcing the population to accept what the population increasingly does not want and they're going to take it to wherever it needs to go to get there.

But obviously where it needs to go to get there is totalitarian lock-down, a kind of police state. That is the road to a police state. You can't forever oppress people who don't want you and don't like your oppression. The only way you can do that is throw everybody in jail or institute some kind of a totalitarian regime. These people are not taking stock of the fact that they're on the wrong path and people don't like what they're doing, don't like the ridiculous levels of corruption and immorality that defines Western political life.

One major problem for a lot of people is Saudi Arabia. People are tired of Saudi Arabia. It comes up more and more and they try to massage the whole Saudi thing. You notice how they try to put Saudi Arabia - what was it in the UN?

Harrison: Human Rights Council.

Joe: Human Rights Council. Is that not insane, given what everybody knows? Okay, the UN is an international organization, but in the West the UN is understood as this global organization that works for the betterment of humanity and everybody knows what Saudi Arabia is you put them in on the Human Rights Council?!? How stupid do they think people are? And the thing is they think that people who don't respond to that, don't get up in arms and have a massive demonstration or go and wreck the Saudi embassy or something, they think that that means tacit acceptance of that ridiculous situation, that you put a bunch of head choppers on the Human Rights Council. Or you go and sell them a bunch of weapons and then say "Ah, but it's for security". Or you give them loads of money and you know that they're funding extremists and building mosques to spread extremist Islam all around Europe.

They think because people don't react or don't actually get on the streets or do something very specific in response to that, they think that's tacit support. They think that people just go "Okay." "We can pass anything off on these people. It doesn't matter. We're just going to carry on." But they don't realize that the more they do that, there is something building. The average person or the population in general has a lot of tolerance and they will just turn a blind eye over and over again, but eventually I think they have a breaking point. I'm not saying that it's going to lead to a whole new world that's all better or anything like that, but I think these people are pushing the population, forcing them to accept things that they really don't want to accept and eventually there's going to be some kind of a kickback.

I think they're eventually going to let the cat out of the bag in the sense of how they've been operating and the true level of their corruption. As bad as it seems now, once it's exposed everybody's jaws will be on the ground.

Harrison: Yeah. It's a weird situation to think about. What came to mind listening to you talk about this Joe, is we've had this discussion in the past about UFO disclosure. One of the things that Richard Dolan had said about it is that it's an inevitability but it'll never happen. So it's going to happen but it's not going to happen.

Joe: Right.

Harrison: There's this paradox and contradiction inherent in that and it's the same thing when we look at the state of politics in Western countries where, like you said, the only direction that it seems it can possibly go, just due to the nature of the people in charge and the nature of their populations, the only direction it can go is totalitarianism. They'd have to absolutely clamp down on things in order to stay in power and yet at the same time, if that hasn't happened it seems like it's faraway off, like it won't happen. So it's almost as if it's an inevitability but will it ever happen? I don't know. The only other option is that things continue on as they are and what are the chances of that happening? So it's a weird situation to think about. It's almost like one of those situations for me, that seems almost impossible to predict where it will go because no prediction seems to be a certain bet basically.

So when you look at what's going on, just look at Trump in the US for example and then you can translate this to any other Western nation. So let's say that Corby wins the election and becomes Prime Minister. Then what's he going to do and what's going to change because just like in the US you've got a system that has basically managed to entrench itself. If you picture it as a pyramid of triangles and at the top of each triangle you've got positions of influence and power and just due to the way things have been even for the last 20 years but it probably goes back even further, all these positions have now been filled by people who are part of what we can call the establishment. They're the people who agree with everything that you've been saying about them. They've got their policies. They want to do things certain way and they're going to keep doing them.

So you see this in the States where Trump comes to power, puts a bunch of his people in positions of power. I don't know what the percentage would be, I wouldn't even hazard a guess but it would be a small percentage compared to the number of people that are already in their positions and still in their positions.

Joe: Right.

Harrison: So you're coming up against a machine basically that is well-established, well in place and isn't willing to give up its power. So then you get this situation of conflict. Then you have this internal division within the power structure of any given Western country and where does that go? So you've got the new guy or the new girl that comes in and wants to change certain things and disagrees with the way things have been going and tries to institute some kind of reforms and firing people and putting in new people in these positions. But on the other hand they're up against a system of very experienced operators who know the game and know how to be in power and keep power and will do anything to keep it.

So where do you go from there? It's like a pipedream for any new insider with dreams of changing things. It's a pipedream for them to think they're going to be able to change things. So how do things get better? Well chances are they won't. The only solution that I can see to that - or maybe not solution but the only result of that would be the kind of totalitarianism or mass revolution kind of thing and that doesn't even seem likely. So it's just a totally weird situation where it's very hard to predict.

Joe: Yeah, it is very strange. It's this contrast between the narrative that these politicians in the West have to themselves. Most of them tell themselves they're all about the West and they are about freedom and democracy and about high standards of living. But freedom and democracy, the whole standard system of the people elect the representatives who do their will, blah, blah, blah. Of course that's a lovely, wonderful, beautiful image and political system and it's the best that you can get and all that kind of stuff and it's great to be a part of that. We have system1 and system2; your conscious narrative of what you tell yourself and the reasons you give yourself for why you actually do things but the real reason you do things is totally different. Usually the reasons you do things are much more of a base nature, like self-aggrandizement or money or power or any of those things. That's your drives.

I think there are a lot of people in positions of power who have those very basic drives are in the ascendant and they're predatory. They're out for themselves and they're out for all the goodies for themselves which is obviously very much in contrast to a developed Western democracy and justice and freedom, all of those noble ideals. So you have this contrast between these two things where in order to keep feeding off Western populations, these people have to continue to tell them, and at least maintain some structures of actual freedom and actual democracy but all the while their base desires are inexorably leading them to exactly the opposite of that, where they feed more and more and more and eventually get into a totalitarian situation. Because once you cross a certain point of abuse of a population you will have to physically force it on them in some way because the people, despite their tolerance, will eventually reach a breaking point and then you'll have to force it on them.

And even then when they're doing that, they'll have to justify it to themselves and to the people that they're doing it in the interests of freedom and democracy because that's their narrative. It's this schizoidal situation where we clearly have these two track things going on. It's been the big problem in the West for years, people trying to figure out what's really going on and what the nature of Western intentions are and trying to get to the bottom of it because on the one hand it's "freedom and democracy, spread freedom around the world. We love everybody. We want to make the world a wonderful place" but at the same time the results of what you're doing don't really seem to be having that effect. Now is that an accident or some part of you actually planning those negative effects? Not just around the world but at home as well. You say you want the best. You say you love America and the American people and you want us to be the greatest country in the world but you're actually feeding off the body politic more and more and more and decreasing people's' standard of living and causing social problems in the country. So there's a disconnect between what you say and what you do.

That seems to be the truck that we're on. That's the steamroller. So when does it break? When do those two things become so separated between what they say and what they do, that it's no longer tenable to keep up the pretence anymore? I think at that point they'll still justify it but I think they'll have to force their intentions on people eventually in a more direct and physical way. I think these kinds of Manchester bombing terrorist attacks are an example of that although it's still covert.

This is almost like a third option, or a solution to that problem I've been describing where the deep state can actually bludgeon the body public without exposing themselves as being fundamentally anti-democratic and essentially totalitarian and wanting to enslave people in some way or another. That's what they really want. That's their predatory natures but they want to be able to maintain the idea of exactly the opposite of that, that they're freedom loving people.

So you pull in a third actor and you get to manipulate and bludgeon people's consciousness as Elan was saying, and emotions and make little hijacks through these violent attacks but you're still squeaky clean and in fact you can come in and say "I'm here to save everybody".

Elan: I'm just thinking about how this totalitarianism is already present to some degree. In particular the recent revelations in the Seth Rich murder story. He was the DNC staffer who was killed several months ago in Washington, shot four times in the back, none of his possessions stolen. It came out recently that Rod Wheeler I think his name is, who was hired by the family of Seth Rich to investigate the murder because there was no information forthcoming about any kind of investigation, Rod Wheeler said that in fact it was Donna Brazile who is one of the leaders of the DNC, who at one point came to the Washington, D.C. police department after she found out that Wheeler was investigating and said "Why is he snooping?"

So this information comes out, website WND puts out this story which is highly suspicious. You'd think that with no information about one of her employee's murders she would be interested in knowing who was responsible if there was no answer to it, or at least that a good investigation was going forward. So the entire corporate media in the US has been absolutely relentless in shutting down this story and labelling it a conspiracy theory which is the death knell of any story in the US, just label the writer or researcher a conspiracy theorist.

Sean Hannity at Fox News who had helped break this story didn't retract it on his own radio show which is independent of Fox News but I think he had to come out with a statement apologizing for Fox News more or less. Twitter has suppressed the WND mention of Donna Brazile's "why are you snooping" story. You have this dynamite, and we've mentioned this recently on another show, an absolutely incendiary story here because what Seth Rich exposed with the distribution of emails to Wikileaks was a level of corruption far and beyond even the shunting of Bernie Sanders' campaign against Hillary Clinton, but all kinds of malfeasance.

Trey Gowdy recently made a statement in one of these investigative committees that what we're seeing right now with all of this information is far worse than we've even been told. And of course this threatens to tear down a lot of the DNC and Hillary Clinton and all of her cronies. So what we have been seeing, interestingly enough, is the Washington Post and New York Times taking a step back supposedly in making statements in their editorials to say "Well maybe we're being a little too anxious and aggressive about getting Trump out of office right now."

And the bottom line is, they want to ease off of him because they know that he knows that this is a kind of life or death situation for him, so to say. He knows that they're after him and want blood and pressed with this threat, there is the possibility that he would use the death of Seth Rich and the exposure of all of his emails and information, not only politically to his advantage but to also show that it was in fact a DNC insider who leaked the information, that it wasn't Russia who hacked into the emails. Of course that would destroy the whole "Russia hacked our election and freedom and democracy in the US" and would affirm Trump's position as president.

So this story goes into all kinds of different directions. I think it affirms just how powerful and connected the media is to the deep state in the US who would prefer to continue going on as it is but will just allow just enough rope to protect itself in the form of backing off of Trump.

Joe: Elan, there's no official evidence that Seth Rich gave any emails to Wikileaks, right?

Harrison: No. There's just a few allegations and people saying that they know that he did and confirming that but there hasn't been any kind of hard evidence presented.

Elan: Well Kim Dotcom offered to give a statement before no one less than Robert Mueller about this. He affirmed that he knew Seth Rich was the leaker. We also have Craig Murray, former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan implying that he had met Seth Rich at some point.

Harrison: But he hasn't ever mentioned the name Seth Rich though.

Elan: No he didn't but it was kind of implied that that's who he was. Maybe that's neither here nor there. So is there smoking gun evidence? Probably not, but a lot of things pointing to the fact that it was him.

Joe: Yeah. The main thing that it hinges on is the fact that he was killed in that coincidental shooting that happened around the same time. You have leaks coming out of the DNC and a DNC staffer gets killed. It's easy to see why people would question that or put two and two together. What do we expect? That kind of information obviously would be circumstantial but the other thing that suggests, in one sense anyway, that there's something to the Seth Rich story is the extent of the backlash against Sean Hannity of Fox News talking about it, suggesting that he was murdered or that he was the leaker because if that's just a silly contention and it's actually not true, is there any cause for people to get so worked up about it?

It's hard to tell in that situation just by someone's reaction to something you say. If I accuse one of you two guys of being a burglar, if you get so worked up about it it's kind of "the man doth protest too much" in a certain sense. So it's hard to judge that. But I think the main point is that that story, why the Seth Rich story or allegation may have pushed a lot of buttons is that it brought into question, as you were saying Elan, it brings into question or at least brings up the idea of "Did Russia really hack our elections" and that whole situation and threatens, if only to some extent or in potential, to undermine that groundswell that has risen up since Trump came in of an attack against Russia effectively and to try and make sure that Russia is persona non grata forever, that nobody in America should ever do any business with Russia and that the Trump administration should not, under any circumstances, do any positive deals with Russia. Russia has to be public American enemy number one forever. Americans and the American establishment and the American government, whatever administration is in there, must at every turn seek ways to screw Russia over.

That's the message. That's what they're aiming for and that's understandable and gets us actually to what you mentioned at the beginning of the show Elan; Zbigniew Brzezinski who died a few days ago, one of the public faces of the architecture of the Great Game or the great geopolitical game between world powers that's been going on for a few centuries but has a modern incarnation as well. There's a quote by him that I saw somewhere as a result of his passing where he more or less said that Eurasia was vitally important - i.e., the landmass of Europe and Asia from sea to sea - was vitally important for America's position as global hegemon or its position as the top or near the top of the heap and that the extent to which America can remain and dominate as much of Eurasia as possible for as long as possible, will determine whether or not America stays on the top of the heap.

And of course the major player perhaps in Eurasia is Russia and it is at odds with America and America's attempt to dominate the whole world, including Eurasia. It's pushing back against America. It has serious threatened America hegemony in that sense in Eurasia and has been working against American plans for quite a few years. So it's no surprise that you would have this response in the US from the deep state, the ones that want to control the world and make sure that America remains a global hegemon forever.

It's not surprising that they would have produced this ridiculous, hysterical anti-Russian rhetoric that we've seen, particularly since Trump but really since last year, since they concocted the idea of "hacking our election" and stuff. I am not surprised they would come up with that, because they want that at all costs, to make sure that Russia is kept in its place because if Russia is not kept in its place, even if Russia were to do normal business deals with America, if Trump were to simply look towards making mutually beneficial deals with Russia, for them the implication means that America loses.

It's not so much a fear of America losing anything that scares them. It's that if Russia gains and continues to gain, then by definition America will lose. And that's true across the board, from resources, geopolitics, the location, the outlines of the world map, that is true that if Russia in conjunction with China and other major Eurasian countries and Russia is leading that along with China, that push to reassert Eurasia as the centre of the world with 80% of the world's population, 80% of the world's resources, to take its rightful place and they can't be allowed to do that. Russia can't be allowed to move forward with that because it is by definition, at the expense of America. But only because America has overextended itself over the past hundred years across all of the world and is now holding onto it by all sorts of dirty tricks and force.

Elan: So a little bit more about Brzezinski. He was the former National Security Advisor.

Harrison: National Security Advisor.

Elan: National Security Advisor under Jimmy Carter in the mid-to-late '70s. He was you might say, the architect of empowering and arming the Mujahideen in Afghanistan against Russian participation in what they viewed as the stabilization of Afghanistan. So the seeds were created by Brzezinski as far back as 40 years ago or so.

Joe: Right.

Elan: He established a very dominant role in the administration of Jimmy Carter to the point where Carter would defer to Brzezinski in many things. Some even considered Carter a geopolitical disciple of Brzezinski. And of course he had all of these degrees in political science and honorary positions and books and papers that he had written over decades.

So he had all of this caché. He was part of the Trilateral Commission or wrote for the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderbergers, the Council on Foreign Relations. Some people thought that he was the democratic counterpart to Henry Kissinger's Republican deep state head figure or behind-the-scenes, if not in the forefront of the scenes of geopolitical policy in the US. I was reading a bunch of papers and policies by him early today and it seems like for a while he may have had more reasonable points of view on certain issues, like taking part in the SALT II
(Strategic Arms Limitation Talks) which was a limitation of nuclear arms with Russia. He spoke out against the first war in Iraq or the second one and said that it undermines US credibility.

But then you reconcile that with his rabid anti-Russian vehement point of view where Russia had to be suppressed at all costs. It's like he had - I don't know if it's correct to say - two different personalities or some kind of split. So I was just wondering where that comes from or if the question even matters. You have all kinds of politicians who on one hand have very reasonable pro-social policies and on the other hand they're all for destruction and imperial pursuits around the world. So maybe that's just the kind of standard camouflage or substance that a politician is made up of. They know that they have to sound reasonable in certain areas to justify or cover up for certain other really pathological policies that they want to see go through.

Joe: Politicians, political historians that are also politicians and people who know a bit about the history of the world and even just ordinary politicians who don't necessary know much about the history of the world, have an understanding that they come from a very different worldview from us. It's a world view that a lot of people have but definitely people who have studied history and who see themselves as tasked with being the leaders at this stage in history. They look back and they say "You know, war and conflict is an enduring, almost defining aspect of human history and human experience and wars have to be fought. War is a necessity. It's just the rules of the game."

They take a very pragmatic approach to it. Of course there's absolutely no heart in it and they take it to excess as well and are very cynical about it and have no problem with it. But when you start along that path you can lose more and more of whatever heart you had. You lose it all in justifying the suffering and death of people and justifying the state of the world; "that's the way it always was and that's the way it will always be and we just have to do what's best for us".

I think they tend to have a very pragmatic, if that's the right word, approach. It's not pejorative enough but I think it gets more or less...

Harrison: Pragmatic to the point of cynicism.

Joe: Yeah, exactly.

Harrison: And cunning.

Joe: Yeah, and cunning. And there's also a narrative system 1/system 2 kind of thing going on with them as well, as there is with most human beings. So for them war or the deaths of a lot of people is not something to shed any tears over. Once you've accepted that it's a necessity, it's a fairly big step to take. Once you've accepted that then you can go downhill pretty fast where you can say "We need more. We need more". And you can blame the fact that that's the way it always was, that's the way it will always be, a might makes right type of thing, the ethos or a worldview or a vision of life of might makes right, that if you're in a position to dictate terms under threat of destruction, then you should do it!

So there's no scope or aspect it seems, of them questioning that and thinking of a better world or a different world where war isn't necessary or war doesn't have to be that way. They probably see themselves as too intelligent to be so naïve as to think that you can have such a world and "If we don't do it someone else will". There's all sorts of rationalization and that leads to the deaths of millions of people and it apparently being fine.

What made me say this was that you referenced that Brzezinski was against the Iraq war, or after the fact anyway, he said it was a bad idea because it hurt America's reputation. {laughs} No shit! That's the least of the things that it did Mr. Brzezinski! It also killed 1.5 million Iraqis but of course that's just par for the course, right?

Elan: Not only that Joe, but he's spoken out critically against Israel's policy towards the Palestinians as recently as the past few years. So this reminds me a little bit of - and it's something we've mentioned here on the show previously - Andrew Lobaczewski who wrote Political Ponerology, a book that we've referenced a number of times because it so aptly describes not only how pathological psychopaths rise to positions of political power and other seats of power of various kinds, but also that the influence of their thinking has a way of negatively affecting those around them who may not be psychopaths but who don't realize how subject they are to the type of psychopathic thinking that they're being influenced by.

As the story goes Lobaczewski sends off the manuscript to Brzezinski thinking "Hello political compatriot", someone who is definitely in a seat of influence who is also Polish and who has the intellectual capacity certainly to understand and also the experience and the position to have possibly seen this phenomena for himself. So he sends the manuscript to Brzezinski. They have a few exchanges and in the end Brzezinski never responds and Lobaczewski concludes that he squashed the whole possibility of bringing this knowledge to US politics, effectively.

You just have to wonder if at some point some part of Brzezinski, whatever little piece of heart was left in the man, realized - I'm just speculating here - realized the extent to which it's true. I doubt that it was even a conscious process on his part but Political Ponerology certainly was an indictment of him. It's all about him in a way, whether he's the psychopath in the position of power, influencing others or if he was on the other side of the shoe. So that's just an interesting piece about Brzezinski as it relates to one of the most useful books I think we've come across in helping to describe our reality right now. Just looking back at the guy he's going to be remembered far more I think, for his Russophobia, his paranoia and for being the kind of dean of geopolitical mayhem in the form of seeding large proxy militaries against Russia and other nations to destabilize them, even if in other statements he speaks out against that sort of thing. That's what he was a proponent of. That's his legacy! So not very many good things to say about the man ultimately.

Harrison: You mentioned his statements in the last few years criticizing Israel's treatment of Palestinians. I think that's probably a more common viewpoint than people probably acknowledge or believe - I'm just speculating here - but I guess that if you would honestly poll US politicians they'd probably overwhelmingly have negative opinions about Israel in general, mostly just because they're resentful because they know that they're being blackmailed, that the US relationship is totally exploited. I think that for the large part American intelligence and politics don't like Israel but they're forced to like it.

So anytime you get a politician that speaks out against Israel's human rights abuses, again it's not really about the human rights abuses. They just don't like Israel because they're resentful that Israel controls them.

Joe: Right, yeah. Isn't an underling like they like to think everybody else should be.

Harrison: Yeah.

Joe: I'm just waiting for Kissinger to pop off.

Harrison: Well we've got a list; Kissinger, Soros, George W. Bush, David Rockefeller. There's a few more but they're all getting up there.

Elan: Cheney.

Joe: Is David Rockefeller still alive? [Died March 20th}

Harrison: I'm pretty sure he is. He's like 130 or something. Is it Nelson who...

Elan: No, not Nelson. Who was the recent Rockefeller who passed away?

Harrison: I don't know.

Elan: Three weeks ago maybe?

Joe: Somebody in the chat room look that up for us. Wasn't it John D. Rockefeller?

Harrison: Didn't register for me.

Joe: No, David Rockefeller. No John D. was the older guy. He was the father I think.

Elan: The sad fact of the matter is that these guys have created such an infrastructure...

Joe: He's dead! He died in March. Sorry.

Harrison: Oh dead in March.

Joe: David Rockefeller. You missed that one.

Harrison: I forgot about that. We're spreading fake news.

Joe: Oh no.

Elan: We joke and maybe we shouldn't because if they die they die and nothing really good can come of their death, even if they are still influencing things to a certain degree, they have created such an infrastructure of intelligence and business and corporate confluence and military think tanks and socioeconomic policies and all sorts of interconnecting webs of power and oppression that it's almost meaningless. They've done their worst already and we're seeing the fruits of that worst right now pretty much.

The guys that are really active in pulling the strings, most of whom we don't even know who they are, they're that smart and cunning and they might be making phone calls from their houses in the Caribbean.

Joe: It's almost like a given because if you consider the system we have right now, who would be an elected politician if they had another option? Obviously politicians who are in it for power and position and wealth or whatever, that's what they're going for but those people have to actually be concerned about getting re-elected every four or five years and they have to spend some money on the public and they have to go and shake hands and all that kind of stuff. Can you imagine if there was an option where you could just have that power that they are seeking but never have to be questioned on it? Never have to justify yourself?

Elan: Or be in the public eye.

Joe: Yeah! Why would you bother? It's just an illusion, being in the public eye. Maybe there's a bit of prestige but it wears off pretty quickly after a while. You get tired of it. It's not cool to be on the news anymore. It's not cool to be in the public eye anymore. In fact it's more of a headache. And anyway these people are after power and influence.

So if there's an option to wield power and influence from behind the scenes where you never were scrutinized by the public and never had to kowtow in any way, even if it was in a fake way, you never had to appease the public so that they would give you another four years or something, that's pretty low level if you know what I mean. So I think public politicians in the power structure are pretty low in that power structure because they're the ones who have to go cap-in-hand to the public, the great unwashed. Maybe you can throw money at it and be fairly sure that you're going to get re-elected but you still have to go and pretend to these people that you're so much better than, that you rule over! You have to go and ask them to re-elect you?"Please put me in power again!" No, the people with the real power are the ones who never have to do that, behind the scenes and are there for as long as they want.

That's why you hear this term "career civil servants" a lot. In the West, in Europe and America those are the people who are the real instruments of this deep state. And you'd have to identify the positions in each country but there are those positions. In the UK they're just called high level civil servants in the civil service and they rise up and there's different departments that deal with pretty much the same things that government deals with. They're functionaries but they're quite high up and they pull a lot of strings. And they've been in it since they were in their 20s and now they're 50, 60, 70 years old and they know a lot more.

Imagine the amount of information - what's that phrase, "Total information awareness" - those people would have, having been in at the helm behind the scenes, in power pulling the strings for 50 years across seven or eight different governments, various wars! And they've seen it all happening. They know how it works and they have been making it happen in a certain sense or being directing it on a certain course. Those are the people who have an incoming administration for lunch or a new President or Prime Minister for lunch.

We've talked about this before, the idea that the President is suddenly the commander-in-chief or the Prime Minister is suddenly here to make all the decisions. They may have been a member of parliament or maybe not, like Trump and suddenly is in the White House or 10 Downing Street or somewhere and the idea that that person is going to walk in and shake everything up is complete nonsense when you understand how the country is actually run, by these unelected officials.

Harrison: I think unless we have any other stories we want to cover I think that's a wrap for today.

Joe: Alright.

Harrison: So everyone make sure to stay tuned on SOTT.net because we'll be covering these stories as they develop, especially the Manchester bombing because the news is still coming out about that. So stay tuned and Friday we're going to have another Health and Wellness Show and we'll see you all next week for another edition of either Behind the Headlines or The Truth Perspective. So everyone take care and see you then.

Elan: Bye everyone.

Joe: See ya! Thanks for listening.