Jack Carr is a former Navy SEAL sniper and author of The Terminal List, a best-selling novel about the war in Afghanistan. He s also the author of five other novels that have sold millions of copies and has been adapted to TV and screen by Chris Pratt, who incidentally is married to Jack s niece. In this episode, Jack talks about how he became a writer, why he s written so many of his own books, and why he thinks the United States should be doing a better job of declassifying the documents that lead us to the Afghanistan War. He also talks about why the Afghanistan Papers are so important to the American people and why we should all be reading them. Jack is a great friend of mine, and I am so honored to have him on the show. I hope you enjoy this episode and that it makes you think about the value of declassified documents and documents, and how important it is to declassify them. I hope that you can find something valuable in these documents and use them in your own writing and research. Thank you for listening and tweet me to let me know what you think of it! Timestamps: 3:00 - The Afghanistan Papers 4:30 - Why we should declassify these documents 5:15 - What are your thoughts on the Papers? 6:20 - Why I think the Papers should be declassified 7:40 - Why declassification is a good thing 8:10 - What would you do with these documents? 9:15 10:00 11: What is your favorite part of The Afghanistan 12:00: What do you think the most important to you? 13: What are you looking for in Afghanistan? 14: What s your biggest takeaway from the Afghanistan papers? 15:00 | What is the biggest thing you would like to see in Afghanistan s biggest takeaway? 16:10 | What s the most impactful part of this book? 17:30 | What are some of the biggest lesson you ve learned from Afghanistan s most important thing you ve done in the past 20 years? 18:40 | What kind of information you re going to do next? 19:30: What would be your biggest challenge in the next 20 years in Afghanistan ? 21:10 22: Is there a better way to make a better Afghanistan book about Afghanistan s history in the future? 26:30
00:00:00.000Hey everybody, I have really an amazing guest today and I really feel honored to have him.
00:00:05.000Jack Carr is a former Navy SEAL special operations team as team leader, platoon commander.
00:00:13.000He served as troop commander and a task unit commander over his 20 years in naval special warfare.
00:00:19.000He transitioned from an enlisted SEAL sniper To a junior officer leading assault and sniper teams in Iraq and Afghanistan, to a platoon commander practicing counterinsurgency in the southern Philippines, and then to commanding a special operations task force in the most Iranian-influenced section of southern Iraq throughout the tumultuous drawdown of U.S. forces.
00:00:44.000He is a warfighter, but in addition to that, he is an extraordinary writer.
00:00:50.000He's one of the most successful writers today.
00:00:53.000He's been called the most impactful men's fiction author of his generation.
00:00:59.000He exploded as a writer onto the bookshelves in 2018 with The Terminal List, his Goodreads choice award-winning debut novel of conspiracy and revenge.
00:01:11.000Since then, Carr has gone on to write five more novels in this thrilling series, sold millions of books.
00:01:17.000And his fictional protagonist, James Reese, has been brought to television and screen by actor Chris Pratt, who incidentally is married to my niece. - Yes.
00:01:28.000A little fact people don't know, don't care to know.
00:01:32.000Anyway, your biography goes on and on.
00:02:04.000But in 1971, the Pentagon Papers were released.
00:02:08.000Daniel Ellsberg had led the team that wrote them in the Rand Corporation.
00:02:12.000And it was a question about how did we get into Vietnam?
00:02:16.000And it was a very, very candid inside view of the decision-making process that had gotten us into that war.
00:02:24.000And, of course, the Pentagon, and after my uncle died, and I think it was that 26 volumes was completed.
00:02:31.000They intended to sit on it forever, but Daniel Ellsberg released it in 1971, and it showed this very, very candid conversations between Pentagon officials and State Department officials and White House officials, in which they all very candid conversations between Pentagon officials and State Department officials and White House officials, in which they all knew that the war was unwinnable, but they had to
00:02:56.000And they made these decisions with incredible cynicism that just shocked the American people when they saw it back then.
00:03:04.000Now, that kind of cynicism, that kind of lying, government lying, has been normalized by the media, by the government, and the cynicism is no longer surprising to the American people.
00:03:14.000And that's one of the reasons I was so moved by your account, because it shows that there's part of us that is still susceptible, still believes that our military should behave as they're supposed to.
00:03:27.000So tell us what you found in reading these candid inside accounts that were classified Well, the modern iteration of the Pentagon Papers.
00:03:50.000Well, the heartbreaking part of all that is that the American citizenry is not surprised by the Afghanistan Papers.
00:03:57.000And that's a book by Craig Whitlock from the Washington Post.
00:04:00.000And through two Freedom of Information Act lawsuits, they were able to gain access to these interviews with senior ranking officers coming back from Afghanistan in conversations that those officers thought were going to remain classified through these Freedom of Act lawsuits, those are now public.
00:04:19.000And every American should read Craig Whitlock's book, The Afghanistan Papers, because he juxtaposes what they're saying in what they think are going to be classified conversations.
00:04:28.000So there are true opinions about the war in Afghanistan and what they were saying in front of Congress.
00:04:33.000So therefore, essentially lying to Congress, lying to the American people, and essentially lying to their troops at the same time.
00:04:40.000And you can go back and you can go and read transcripts or go on YouTube and watch those same type of officers in front of Congress year after year after year saying the exact same things.
00:04:53.000All we need is a little more money, more troops.
00:04:56.000And you can take off the year and it's the same thing.
00:05:00.000It's the same answers to the same type of questions and just prolonging this conflict, the conflict that they did not understand the nature.
00:05:08.000Of this conflict from the very beginning, very clear.
00:05:11.000If they had studied the Soviet experience in Afghanistan from 79 to 89, they drew the wrong lessons and applied them to this country, Afghanistan, through a lens of imperial hubris, is how I put it.
00:05:24.000So the whole thing is heartbreaking because it led to 20 years of war.
00:05:28.000And during this 20 years, most people knew we were going to leave eventually.
00:05:32.000At the 10-year mark, 15-year mark, 20-year mark, 25-year mark, We're good to go.
00:05:54.000But one of the worst parts for me is that these senior ranking officers who we've sent to the best schools, a lot of them have doctorates even, we've paid for their master's.
00:06:03.000They've checked all these boxes throughout this career and really to impress the person above them in the chain of command.
00:06:10.000And now they're presiding over this withdrawal of U.S. forces for which they had 20 years to prepare, and that's the best they could do.
00:06:38.000We expect them to fail and then fail upward in these positions.
00:06:42.000And we expect these politicians to be lifelong and these bureaucrats to be appointed Essentially for life, this is what we get.
00:06:49.000So that's why I'm so excited about your candidacy and what you're bringing to this fight, because you're not afraid to say what you believe.
00:06:56.000You aren't owned by anybody else, and you're willing to take those hits.
00:07:01.000You're willing to take those arrows and those daggers and say what you truly believe.
00:07:05.000So it's a tough space to be in that you're stepping into right now, but you've had a life to prepare for it as well.
00:07:10.000Jack, let me ask you, thank you for those very kind words.
00:07:14.000Let me just ask you, because you keep looking at this, when I posted about your piece, I said something about we literally learn nothing from Vietnam.
00:07:48.000And it's like, you know, it's like they say about the definition of insanity is repeating the same behavior over and over and expecting different results.
00:07:57.000And of course, the whole punchline to Afghanistan was identical to what happened when we left We lost 13 people.
00:08:07.000Tell me what your take is on that last day withdrawal when all those people were unnecessarily killed because I think they wanted to...
00:08:18.000The brass wanted to hit a deadline, wanted to do it before September 11th.
00:08:23.000So they basically sacrificed 13 American lives so that they could get a good press release.
00:08:30.000Is that your take on it, too, or is that just me?
00:08:33.000No, and that is why so many people were outraged, because you don't need to have studied military history, strategy, tactics, have a touchpoint with anything in the military to apply common sense to that problem set and ask that question, why did these senior level military leaders Why
00:09:06.000And if they were being forced to do that by members of the administration that certainly didn't know tactics, why did not one single senior officer take those stars off, drop them on the table, and say, I'm resigning in disgust in trying to get the administration to take a breath and say, oh, maybe we should hold on to Bagram and not put these soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines at this gate in total chaos in a tactically disadvantageous position?
00:09:32.000But any citizen can apply common sense to that and come to that conclusion and ask that question.
00:09:38.000And it's not just those 13 members who were killed.
00:09:41.000There were numerous people that are wounded and have lost arms and legs, are in wheelchairs for life, dealing with post-traumatic stress, dealing with traumatic brain injury.
00:09:51.000And so we concentrate on those 13 people who died, but there are other people who have been impacted for life and their families have been impacted for life because of what happened on that airfield that day.
00:10:00.000So for me, looking at it from the outside, having been out since 2016 and looking at it from the outside in, I cannot imagine why you would do that to your troops.
00:10:11.000Your responsibility as a leader is to lead and to advocate for those troops and to resign in disgust and protest if you're going to be forced to put them in a tactically disadvantageous position at that gate.
00:10:28.000Heartbreaking for every, not just veteran to watch, but every citizen who cares about this country and cares about the next generation to watch what happened there essentially in real time and then to be manipulated by the press and by politicians and to be distracted to other things.
00:11:01.000And I think there's a lot of similarities between pharmaceutical industries and the lobbyists and the same thing with defense industry and those lobbyists.
00:11:09.000These are businesses that need to show profit.
00:11:12.000And they've been making a lot of money for a lot of years.
00:11:16.000It's very hard for us to find a war we don't like.
00:11:18.000These days, because of these connections between the military, between the senior military leaders, lobbyists, media, and all these corporations that have their fingers in all these pieces of the pie across most of the states.
00:12:02.000Kind of the irony is that we don't use the military for defense, even though we changed the name back then when we reorganized the military and reorganized the intelligence services.
00:12:11.000And what that did was just grow an entirely new industry that was fairly new to America back then, but it's only grown since.
00:12:22.000Well, we get what we saw in Afghanistan in August of 2021.
00:12:27.000Yeah, and I know that you've read Eisenhower's speech in January 17, 1961, his farewell address, warning America that, you know, the emergence of this military-industrial complex, in which he said, the quote that you just said, new to the American experience, that would undermine and subvert our democracy, that would transform America into an imperial state abroad, a security surveillance garrison state at home.
00:12:54.000In that same speech, in a little, mostly forgotten paragraph, he also talks about the rise of this federal scientific bureaucracy and the medical cartel, and makes a similar warning about that.
00:13:07.000So it's interesting that you just said that about the pharmaceutical company.
00:13:10.000Just, you know, not to belabor this point, but for any Americans, I'm sure there's a lot of your listeners and few of mine that don't understand what happened in Kabul, Or maybe miss the—because the media did not play a lot of it.
00:13:25.000You know, it was a very dramatic footage with these tens of thousands of terrified people running from the Taliban.
00:13:34.000They are also on the airstrip shooting in the air and hurting people.
00:13:41.000I'm trying to get them away from the airplanes, and you have these Americans frantically loading the airplanes, people climbing on the planes, and literally, I think they're mainly C-130 transports or some big cargo transport.
00:13:54.000And then they take off with people literally hanging on the wings and, you know, dropping off one by one onto the runway.
00:14:01.000They're just horrific, horrific photos.
00:14:04.000Just talk about that and what they should have done instead.
00:14:07.000Yeah, we owned an airfield, Bagram, not too far away, with standoff distance between those walls and a place where the enemy can set up.
00:14:16.000And yeah, they can mortar, they could hit, but we can...
00:14:18.000Triangulate that fairly quickly these days, and we could have pushed out to make it even more secure knowing that they were drawing down and leaving from Bagram.
00:14:27.000Instead, we went down to an airfield, a civilian airfield for lack of a better term, and there was no standoff.
00:14:36.000There was no, you could see photos and video of those soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines, and they are face to face with people through these gates and people throwing babies over the walls, not knowing what's on the other side.
00:14:48.000It would happen to be on the other side with a lot of Constantinowire and you have babies bleeding out in this wire.
00:14:53.000People just wanted to get out of Afghanistan because they knew what was going to happen to them if they'd had any sort of connection to the U S if they had, or not even if they'd had that connection, guess what?
00:15:04.000If you have an issue with, let's say, a neighbor or another business, they can just tell the Taliban, these people over here, guess what?
00:15:24.000So you are not in a good position if you either help the Americans or think someone's going to tell the Taliban that you helped the Americans.
00:15:36.000And that chaos did not need to happen.
00:15:38.000If you have 20 years to prepare, you don't even need 20 years to prepare.
00:15:41.000You just need to look at that terrain and look at Bagram and see how you can secure that airfield or you already had it secured.
00:15:47.000Just push it out maybe a little bit farther to make it a little more secure for this month that we're getting out.
00:15:53.000If that's what we're going to do, get out all the way out.
00:15:55.000It's just common sense, which is what Carlon Klausiewicz said was the most important attribute of a battlefield leader was common sense.
00:16:02.000And he's not the only one to say that.
00:16:04.000And that common sense is severely lacking across the board in senior military leadership ranks and politicians that apply common sense to these problem sets.
00:16:17.000And every time I talk about Eisenhower and his speech, I encourage people to go listen, watch the entire thing because we all know the military industrial complex piece.
00:16:26.000But that entire speech is very important to watch from beginning to end.
00:16:31.000Let me understand, because, you know, you're a very interesting guy.
00:17:12.000I mean, everybody since Alexander the Great, the British Empire.
00:17:16.000Nobody's been able to hold on to it or do anything useful for the people there.
00:17:21.000So from the beginning, I was very skeptical about it.
00:17:25.000But you were fighting in Iran at that time.
00:17:28.000And were you completely gung-ho at that time?
00:17:33.000Or was there part of your brain that was saying, I don't completely 100% trust the people who are giving me my orders from the top down?
00:17:42.000Was there any of that in you at that point?
00:17:44.000I've always had a mistrust of authority and senior-level leadership.
00:17:49.000I don't know where exactly it comes from.
00:17:50.000I think it might be just innate or perhaps watching too many episodes of Baba Black Sheep with Robert Conrad as Pappy Boynton as a kid.
00:17:57.000I think it was just in me from an early age to question.
00:18:00.000But for that, what we were afraid of is that we were going to miss it, meaning I was deployed to Guam at the time.
00:18:10.000September 11th happens, and phones start ringing up and down the floor of our barracks, and we go down to the basement, turn on the TV. Only TV was in the basement there, and we watched the Twin Towers fall on TV. I was the intelligence rep for my platoon as a SEAL, so I'd read up on Osama bin Laden.
00:18:27.000and on Al Qaeda and Afghanistan had been a particular interest to me over the years.
00:18:32.000So I had a solid foundation and all of us just hoped that we were going to be able to get in this fight because really in special operations or in military in general, your job is to be prepared for war.
00:18:43.000It's not to go to war, it's to be prepared for that call.
00:18:49.000We wanted to get downrange, but what we all thought was that, oh, what if they send another Or what if they wrap this thing up before we can get there?
00:19:08.000So things that were really flashpoints.
00:19:10.000We hadn't been in sustained combat operations since the end of Vietnam.
00:19:14.000And so now we're going into one and...
00:19:17.000Looking back over the previous 20 years, most things were flashpoints, which we thought this was going to be because it's essentially a manhunt for one person in particular, but and his senior level leaders and management and bomb makers.
00:19:29.000But really, we're going after Osama bin Laden and his top level leaders.
00:19:33.000So we thought we've gotten pretty good at manhunting over the years in Bosnia and Panama was essentially a manhunt for Noriega.
00:19:41.000So we had some background in this at this point.
00:19:44.000So we thought we were going to go in and take out Osama bin Laden and essentially be done with it.
00:19:48.000And so the big worry was that we were going to miss it.
00:19:51.000Obviously, looking back over the last 20 years, that was not a threat because if you stayed in long enough, you were going to get in the fight.
00:19:57.000But no, from the beginning, we thought it was going to be a lot quicker because it seemed like the objectives were limited.
00:20:03.000And it was to go to take out Osama bin Laden to capture or kill Osama bin Laden and his top level leaders who planned 9-11.
00:20:12.000But then, OK, now we stay and now we're building these big bases and we're building these big chow halls and we're building outstations.
00:20:20.000And now we have this war on drugs and opium going on.
00:20:24.000And now we're building this road all around Afghanistan.
00:20:26.000And now we're building wells and we're writing protection for building wells.
00:20:29.000And you're seeing more and more troops come in, and you're seeing more and more contractors come in, more and more chow halls go up.
00:20:36.000All those things you need to do to support any town or city in the United States, you need to do for any base overseas that you're starting from scratch.
00:20:45.000And that takes a lot of money to do that sort of thing.
00:20:48.000So it grew, and it grew way larger than anything any of us, most of us, people that I talk to, thought it would grow into from the beginning.
00:20:57.000We thought it was going to be very limited.
00:20:58.000It did not turn out to be limited, as we all know now.
00:21:04.000We just couldn't understand the nature of the conflict.
00:21:07.000And so we kept pouring money, kept pouring troops, kept pouring more contractors at the problem and it didn't help the problem.
00:21:14.000There's a great book called The Accidental Gorilla by David Kulcolan and where he talks about going into a place and creating more problems than you went there to solve in the first place by creating these accidental gorillas, kicking these doors in, taking out the bad guy.
00:21:32.000And that nine-year-old, 10-year-old, 12-year-old, guess what he's going to do now?
00:21:35.000He's going to turn up, he's going to hate America and end up being a terrorist.
00:21:39.000They're going to fight a few years down the line.
00:21:41.000But Afghanistan is interesting in that you could join the military after September 11th, 2001, and retire from the military all in this 20-year span of one war.
00:21:52.000And we haven't had that really in our experience up to that point.
00:21:56.000Yeah, well, Vietnam did last 20 years, too.
00:21:58.000But, you know, the interesting thing is when these guys go join Raytheon and General Dynamics and Boeing and Lockheed, and then their next job, you next see them on CNN. We're talking about giving advice about the next war that we really need to get into, that it's absolutely critical that America go into Ukraine or wherever.
00:22:25.000It's just this big money laundering scheme.
00:22:58.000People know George Marshall for the Marshall Plan after World War II, rebuilding Europe.
00:23:02.000But really, it's that lead up to World War II and during World War II where he held leaders accountable and replaced them if they didn't measure up.
00:23:11.000So then we got all those names that we all know that we all associate with leading us to victory in World War II. Same thing with President Lincoln in the Civil War.
00:23:32.000And you're seeing these guys who are four-star generals one day who are approving this purchase or this program that is going to greatly enrich Corporation X.
00:23:42.000And next thing you know, a couple months later after retirement, they're on that board going to a couple meetings a year and making a lot of money.
00:23:49.000And I can't really think of a general other than someone who was held accountable for personal behavior that has been held accountable for professional behavior over the last 20 years or since the end, since Vietnam.
00:23:50.000can't really think of a general other than someone who was held accountable for personal behavior that has been held accountable for professional behavior over the last 20 years or since the end, since Vietnam.
00:24:03.000So there was a shift at the end of World War II.
00:24:03.000So there was a shift at the end of World War II.
00:24:05.000You had accountability up until that point, and then you really haven't had it the same way leading up to today.
00:24:12.000So for whatever reason, whatever that shift is, and I think it has a lot to do with these corporations and these senior level officers that can approve programs and weapon systems and then go sit on a board in retirement or multiple boards in retirement.
00:24:26.000And it's very similar to the pharmaceutical industry in that respect.
00:24:54.000And that's why everyone has to go in and vote.
00:24:57.000Because people have sacrificed from the inception of this country up until today to give us that right, but also because it is one of the only things that we can do as a citizen to change things.
00:25:06.000So we have to take that time to do that.
00:25:09.000And it's always shocking to me how few people actually vote in this country.
00:25:13.000So if you're going to complain about it, you better get in there and vote.
00:25:17.000You know, Doug McGregor points out that in World War II, there were only seven, four or five star generals.
00:26:36.000I get asked about this all the time, and I've never really looked into it, but have you looked into any of the conspiracy stuff around 9-11?
00:26:48.000If you want to avoid this question, God bless you, because I try to avoid it because I can't afford to be involved in another conspiracy theory.
00:27:09.000The Bay of Pigs is another, and I can't afford a third mistake.
00:27:13.000He thought they were, he was scared of them, that the military might do something or that he would be impeached.
00:27:18.000Oh, I've hit my limit on conspiracy theories.
00:27:21.000But I am very curious because you're such a thoughtful person and you came in, you know, as a functionary in the orthodoxy, you know, kind of a high priest of the orthodoxy.
00:27:33.000Oh, it's interesting to me whether you have any doubts about the official narrative.
00:28:20.000To a desk officer at CIA. And then McComb, who was the CIA director, you know, CIA was only three quarters of a mile from my house.
00:28:32.000We could walk, in fact, every morning when the CIA was being built at Langley, My father took me and eight or nine of my brothers and sisters horseback riding through the campus there, which was, you know, the beautiful kind of rolling woodland and fields and forests, former farms over there.
00:29:00.000Originally, President Kennedy wanted to appoint my father because he really wanted to reform the agency.
00:29:05.000But my father and my grandfather said, you can't have a brother of the president running the intelligence agency because it's just bad for democracy.
00:29:15.000You don't want that kind of, you know...
00:29:17.000Collusion between the, or potential for collusion.
00:29:21.000So they brought in this very kind of rigid Roman Catholic Republican, John McComb.
00:29:27.000And of course, the people, the clandestine services at CIA never told him anything.
00:29:32.000He was kind of, I would say, a useful idiot for them because the people like Bill Harvey and David Attlee Phillips and James Jesus Angleton, who are actually running all of the dirty business there, We're not sharing that with the president.
00:30:03.000But he, during that short walk, he said to McComb, did we?
00:30:06.000Did your people do this to my brother?
00:30:09.000And then he made one other call that day to Harry Ruiz Williams, who was one of the leaders of the Cuban Brigade, and who was one of the few members of the Cuban Brigade who had remained very loyal to my father.
00:30:22.000And he was a, you know, close personal friend.
00:30:25.000He had fought alongside Castro and the Sierra Maestre.
00:30:29.000And then in 58 and 59, he'd been an engineer.
00:31:09.000No, I think that's very telling that those are his first instincts on that day.
00:31:13.000So I thought about that a lot over the years.
00:31:17.000And I think a lot of things in this country changed on that day, not for the better.
00:31:22.000And I heard you talk about this before, about your father almost being appointed or being a possibility to lead the CIA. And I think how different things could have been.
00:31:33.000I mean, I understand the optic of not wanting your brother running an intelligence service if you're looking at what's going on in other parts of the world with those types of interior type of agencies, but I often think how different things would be had they gone through and actually done that.
00:31:49.000Because then we get the Warren Commission and Dulles, I mean, it shouldn't have been called the Warren Commission, right?
00:32:29.000The only one who wasn't working was Dulles.
00:32:32.000So he ended up running the whole thing.
00:32:34.000He's the only one who showed up for every single meeting.
00:32:37.000And, you know, and of course, now we know that he was conspiring the whole time.
00:32:42.000He was meeting at night with the CIA agents who were hiding their involvement, you know, Johannides and Angleton, who was his best friend.
00:32:52.000And they were all meeting with each other and collaborating on what they would say the next day and what questions would be asked and what their response was.
00:33:03.000I don't want to talk because you're like one of the most interesting people I've ever had on this, but I want to just share a thought with you about this.
00:33:11.000Your article was about government lying to us and about the normalization of lying.
00:33:18.000I've been thinking about this since I read your article.
00:33:21.000The lies really started with my uncle's death and them realizing that they're going to tell a big lie about this, that everybody knows a lie.
00:33:32.000I mean, when I was a little boy in 63, November 63, well, I was standing there next to my uncle's casket in the East Room of the White House.
00:34:16.000So in my 10-year-old mind, the story didn't make any sense to me.
00:34:21.000And Ruby, of course, said that initially, he said he later, you know, came clean.
00:34:28.000And they wouldn't let him out of that jail cell.
00:34:30.000But he said originally his story was he was trying to kill Oswald in order to protect Jackie from a long and difficult trial.
00:34:38.000So he goes into a police station that's loaded with friends and murders the man in broad daylight.
00:34:44.000And then it turns out he's, you know, working for Carlos Marcello's mob and Sam Giancana's mob, who were the guys who were part of the CIA group that was trying to kill Castro to get their casinos back in Havana.
00:35:44.000And then Gary Francis Powers is shot down in his U2. In 1960, in May of 1960, right during the election, Eisenhower is about to go to Russia to do a summit to make peace with Khrushchev.
00:36:00.000Alan Dulles is running the U-2 program.
00:37:12.000A lie with the government, the press, which is supposed to be speaking truth to power, instead is broadcasting public government propaganda to the rest of us.
00:37:22.000That's why I do think it's important to really investigate President Kennedy's death and have some kind of truth and reconciliation commission to come clean, because if you don't go back and correct that initial lie, You know, it just, it sets this precedent for them lying about everything, and they can get away with it.
00:37:45.000No, I've thought about that since my earliest days.
00:37:49.000And then, of course, we have the Pike Committee and the Church Committee hearings in the 70s, where they unearth numerous oversteps, that would be the kindest way to put it, by institutions of the federal government, specifically the CIA. And there's the reform that comes out of the Church Committee and the Pike Committee.
00:38:06.000And those reforms are put into place in the late 70s and early 80s.
00:38:10.000And I think you have some changes, but you're right.
00:40:21.000I can't force a storyline, so it has to be natural.
00:40:25.000And at book number six, which is my last one called Only the Dead, that's where it was natural to go into this storyline and go into the past and to these connections to November of 1963 and the father of my main character who is a Navy SEAL, but his dad was a Navy SEAL in Vietnam and then went into the CIA.
00:40:43.000And so there's all these things coming together and it was the right time and the place.
00:40:47.000But for people who have read the novel, they'll know the inspiration of Ethel Kennedy to my latest novel.
00:40:52.000But the point being is that it's been with me for my earliest days and that seminal moment in our history And I thought about it quite a bit.
00:41:01.000I have a first edition of the Warren Commission report inside.
00:41:04.000And if you are elected president, is there any possible thing that the CIA could say to you that would make you not release whatever files are left over?
00:41:16.000That they were mandated to release in 2017, by the way.
00:41:19.000So we have two administrations, two different parties that got a visit from the CIA on the eve, essentially, of releasing these documents and didn't.
00:41:27.000I can't imagine Well, I can't imagine what they said to Trump.
00:41:32.000Trump said that he was going to release him, and he doesn't give a damn about the CIA. He would love to have heard him.
00:41:38.000Well, I can't imagine what they said to him.
00:41:41.000what, you know, Biden, I don't know what is going on in his head now, but I know he's surrounded by, you know, his whole life has been immersed in the military and intelligence apparatus, and he does what they tell him to do.
00:41:56.000He's got Avril Haines, who's the master of the cover-up, who's his director of national intelligence.
00:42:01.000I can't imagine, there's 5,000, almost 5,000 documents that they haven't released.
00:42:06.000The key documents that people most want to see are documents of the travel itinerary, the travel schedule of Bill Harvey.
00:42:16.000Bill Harvey was a Miami stationer chief, but he was stationed at Langley and fought with my father every day.
00:42:24.000At one point, he was put on administrative leave because he screamed at my father, we wouldn't be in this mess if your brother hadn't chickened out at the Bay of Pigs and had gone in there and cleaned up that mess.
00:42:37.000You know, if he wasn't a coward or something, he was telling my father that my uncle was a coward.
00:42:43.000My uncle is the only president of history who's won the Purple Heart.
00:42:47.000And my father was a volatile person who did not like his brother insulted.
00:43:40.000And I'm very curious if we ever will find out or get notes from the meeting that Trump had with whoever from the CIA came over, essentially on the eve of releasing those documents, which for those listening, once again, mandated by law to release those documents in 2017.
00:44:21.000And those tax dollars, those weapon systems going into new NATO countries and into Ukraine or whatever other war we find next, that's our money.
00:44:30.000That's our tax dollars being spent by our employees.
00:44:33.000And we tend to forget that just because of how much power the federal government has.
00:44:38.000So someone like you going in there who is obviously not afraid to speak truth to power and returning us to those days, those pre- November 1963 days where we do have trust in government again.
00:44:51.000And that's a long road, but I'm hopeful.
00:44:54.000I try to remain hopeful because I have kids and one day maybe grandkids.
00:44:57.000And I try to remain hopeful so I can manifest that future for them.
00:45:02.000It's been more difficult as every day passes.
00:45:05.000because there is something else that happens that makes you just rethink of our direction and then think as a citizen, what am I supposed to do?
00:45:13.000And so I try to do what I can through the, the power of popular fiction through my novels.
00:45:18.000First nonfiction comes out in a year and it's on the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing.
00:45:22.000So I want to keep some of these lessons alive so that future generations don't have to learn them in blood.
00:45:27.000Like those soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines had to learn in August of 2021 in Afghanistan.
00:45:33.000So I want to keep those lessons alive so we can apply them going forward as wisdom.
00:45:37.000And we really neglect to do that time and time again.
00:45:41.000We neglected those lessons of Vietnam.
00:45:45.000to Afghanistan and Iraq and if we did we applied the wrong lessons so applying those lessons as wisdom is something that is extremely important to me as a citizen and as a parent for me seeing somebody like you out there doing what you're doing my hat is off to you sir Well, thank you very much, Jack.