RFK Jr. The Defender - September 22, 2023


War and Peace with Navy Seal Jack Carr

Topics
conspiracies
Hosted by
Robert F. Kennedy
Guests
Navy Seal Jack Carr
Mentioned
John McComb Osama Bin Laden Uncle Jack Eisenhower Lee Harvey Oswald Ethel Kennedy George Marshall Craig Whitlock Bill Harvey Castro James Jesus Angleton Harry Ruiz Williams Gary Francis Powers Daniel Ellsberg Lyndon Johnson Megan Townsend Alan Dulles Jack Carr Jack Ruby Jackie and 29 more
The W.H.O. and Pandemics with Dr Meryl Nass Civil Rights Then and Now with Hylton Bros

Episode Stats


Length

46 minutes

Words per minute

178.73

Word count

8,323

Sentence count

528

Harmful content

Toxicity

15

sentences flagged

Hate speech

12

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

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

Transcript

Transcripts from "RFK Jr. The Defender" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Hey everybody, I have really an amazing guest today and I really feel honored to have him.
00:00:05.000 Jack Carr is a former Navy SEAL special operations team as team leader, platoon commander.
00:00:13.000 He served as troop commander and a task unit commander over his 20 years in naval special warfare.
00:00:19.000 He 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.
00:00:44.000 He is a warfighter, but in addition to that, he is an extraordinary writer.
00:00:50.000 He's one of the most successful writers today.
00:00:53.000 He's been called the most impactful men's fiction author of his generation.
00:00:59.000 He exploded as a writer onto the bookshelves in 2018 with The Terminal List, his Goodreads choice award-winning debut novel of conspiracy and revenge.
00:01:11.000 Since then, Carr has gone on to write five more novels in this thrilling series, sold millions of books.
00:01:17.000 And his fictional protagonist, James Reese, has been brought to television and screen by actor Chris Pratt, who incidentally is married to my niece. - Yes.
00:01:28.000 A little fact people don't know, don't care to know.
00:01:32.000 Anyway, your biography goes on and on.
00:01:35.000 It's extraordinarily impressive.
00:01:38.000 You've led a really interesting and eventful life, which we see throughout your novels.
00:01:45.000 You know, and I've admired you for a long time, Jack.
00:01:48.000 I really wanted to get you on this show.
00:01:51.000 And I called you immediately after reading the postmortem that you wrote on Afghanistan, this very, very moving postmortem.
00:01:58.000 And I just wanted to start, I want to let you talk and not me.
00:02:02.000 People see enough of me talking.
00:02:04.000 But in 1971, the Pentagon Papers were released.
00:02:08.000 Daniel Ellsberg had led the team that wrote them in the Rand Corporation.
00:02:12.000 And it was a question about how did we get into Vietnam?
00:02:16.000 And it was a very, very candid inside view of the decision-making process that had gotten us into that war.
00:02:24.000 And, of course, the Pentagon, and after my uncle died, and I think it was that 26 volumes was completed.
00:02:31.000 They 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
00:02:56.000 And they made these decisions with incredible cynicism that just shocked the American people when they saw it back then.
00:03:04.000 Now, 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.
00:03:14.000 And 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.
00:03:27.000 So tell us what you found in reading these candid inside accounts that were classified Well, the modern iteration of the Pentagon Papers.
00:03:50.000 Well, the heartbreaking part of all that is that the American citizenry is not surprised by the Afghanistan Papers.
00:03:57.000 And that's a book by Craig Whitlock from the Washington Post.
00:04:00.000 And 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.
00:04:19.000 And 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.
00:04:28.000 So there are true opinions about the war in Afghanistan and what they were saying in front of Congress.
00:04:33.000 So therefore, essentially lying to Congress, lying to the American people, and essentially lying to their troops at the same time.
00:04:40.000 And 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.
00:04:52.000 We are making progress.
00:04:53.000 All we need is a little more money, more troops.
00:04:56.000 And you can take off the year and it's the same thing.
00:05:00.000 It's the same answers to the same type of questions and just prolonging this conflict, the conflict that they did not understand the nature.
00:05:08.000 Of this conflict from the very beginning, very clear.
00:05:11.000 If 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. 0.82
00:05:24.000 So the whole thing is heartbreaking because it led to 20 years of war.
00:05:28.000 And during this 20 years, most people knew we were going to leave eventually.
00:05:32.000 At the 10-year mark, 15-year mark, 20-year mark, 25-year mark, We're good to go.
00:05:54.000 But 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.
00:06:03.000 They've checked all these boxes throughout this career and really to impress the person above them in the chain of command.
00:06:10.000 And 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.
00:06:17.000 It is heartbreaking beyond allot.
00:06:19.000 So I encourage every American to read that book, The Afghanistan Papers by Craig Whitlock.
00:06:25.000 But thinking about it again, it is just a different time that we're in, 1971.
00:06:29.000 There are so many more distractions now.
00:06:31.000 And as you said, this behavior by the federal government has been normalized.
00:06:35.000 It's expected.
00:06:36.000 We expect them to lie to us.
00:06:38.000 We expect them to fail and then fail upward in these positions.
00:06:42.000 And we expect these politicians to be lifelong and these bureaucrats to be appointed Essentially for life, this is what we get.
00:06:49.000 So 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.
00:06:56.000 You aren't owned by anybody else, and you're willing to take those hits.
00:07:01.000 You're willing to take those arrows and those daggers and say what you truly believe.
00:07:05.000 So 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.
00:07:10.000 Jack, let me ask you, thank you for those very kind words.
00:07:14.000 Let 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.
00:07:24.000 It is extraordinary, because...
00:07:27.000 When we left Vietnam, we were like, that is never going to happen again. 1.00
00:07:31.000 We will never be so stupid. 0.99
00:07:33.000 And then we went into Iraq in 2001. 1.00
00:07:35.000 We were like, what is going on?
00:07:38.000 And now, you know, then Afghanistan and Yemen and Pakistan and Syria and Libya.
00:07:45.000 And now we're in Ukraine.
00:07:48.000 And 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.
00:07:57.000 And of course, the whole punchline to Afghanistan was identical to what happened when we left We lost 13 people.
00:08:07.000 Tell me what your take is on that last day withdrawal when all those people were unnecessarily killed because I think they wanted to...
00:08:18.000 The brass wanted to hit a deadline, wanted to do it before September 11th.
00:08:23.000 So they basically sacrificed 13 American lives so that they could get a good press release.
00:08:30.000 Is that your take on it, too, or is that just me?
00:08:33.000 No, 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
00:09:05.000 would they do that?
00:09:06.000 And 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?
00:09:32.000 But any citizen can apply common sense to that and come to that conclusion and ask that question.
00:09:38.000 And it's not just those 13 members who were killed.
00:09:41.000 There 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.
00:09:51.000 And 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.
00:10:00.000 So 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.
00:10:11.000 Your 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.
00:10:25.000 So thank you.
00:10:25.000 It is so heartbreaking for me.
00:10:27.000 Heartbreaking to watch.
00:10:28.000 Heartbreaking 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.
00:10:43.000 Just forget about those 20 years.
00:10:45.000 Forget about those 13 people.
00:10:46.000 Forget about what happened at Abbey Gate.
00:10:48.000 Forget about what happened in August of 2001.
00:10:50.000 Get distracted over here by this.
00:10:52.000 It's heartbreaking.
00:10:53.000 Absolutely.
00:10:55.000 They keep jangling the keys and say, look over here.
00:10:58.000 Exactly.
00:10:59.000 That's exactly what they do.
00:11:01.000 And I think there's a lot of similarities between pharmaceutical industries and the lobbyists and the same thing with defense industry and those lobbyists.
00:11:09.000 These are corporations.
00:11:09.000 These are businesses that need to show profit.
00:11:12.000 And they've been making a lot of money for a lot of years.
00:11:16.000 It's very hard for us to find a war we don't like.
00:11:18.000 These 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.
00:11:31.000 And it is just, it's a corporation.
00:11:33.000 Those corporations need to show profits.
00:11:34.000 So what do we do as soon as we're out of Afghanistan?
00:11:37.000 Well, we find another war.
00:11:38.000 And when we bring more countries into NATO, what does that mean?
00:11:42.000 Oh, it means that all NATO countries have to use The same type of ammunition and the same type of armaments.
00:11:46.000 And that's a lot of sales taking place right there when a new country joins NATO. So there's a lot at work here.
00:11:52.000 But I think 1947, we can go all the way back then and we can see the Department of War being changed to the Department of Defense.
00:11:58.000 A Secretary of War is now a Secretary of Defense.
00:12:01.000 And we don't really...
00:12:02.000 Kind 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.
00:12:11.000 And what that did was just grow an entirely new industry that was fairly new to America back then, but it's only grown since.
00:12:21.000 And what do we get from that?
00:12:22.000 Well, we get what we saw in Afghanistan in August of 2021.
00:12:27.000 Yeah, 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.
00:12:54.000 In 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.
00:13:07.000 So it's interesting that you just said that about the pharmaceutical company.
00:13:10.000 Just, 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.
00:13:25.000 You know, it was a very dramatic footage with these tens of thousands of terrified people running from the Taliban.
00:13:33.000 And you can see the Taliban.
00:13:34.000 They are also on the airstrip shooting in the air and hurting people.
00:13:41.000 I'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. 0.98
00:13:54.000 And then they take off with people literally hanging on the wings and, you know, dropping off one by one onto the runway.
00:14:01.000 They're just horrific, horrific photos.
00:14:04.000 Just talk about that and what they should have done instead.
00:14:07.000 Yeah, we owned an airfield, Bagram, not too far away, with standoff distance between those walls and a place where the enemy can set up.
00:14:16.000 And yeah, they can mortar, they could hit, but we can...
00:14:18.000 Triangulate 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.
00:14:27.000 Instead, we went down to an airfield, a civilian airfield for lack of a better term, and there was no standoff.
00:14:36.000 There 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.
00:14:48.000 It would happen to be on the other side with a lot of Constantinowire and you have babies bleeding out in this wire.
00:14:53.000 People 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?
00:15:04.000 If 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? 0.93
00:15:12.000 That's my business.
00:15:13.000 That's my competition.
00:15:14.000 They helped the Americans over the last 20 years.
00:15:16.000 Oh, guess what happens? 0.97
00:15:18.000 The Taliban go to that house and behead that head of the household or whatever it might be. 0.84
00:15:21.000 So there's all that going on as well.
00:15:24.000 So 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.
00:15:33.000 So it was just complete chaos.
00:15:36.000 And that chaos did not need to happen.
00:15:38.000 If you have 20 years to prepare, you don't even need 20 years to prepare.
00:15:41.000 You 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.
00:15:47.000 Just push it out maybe a little bit farther to make it a little more secure for this month that we're getting out.
00:15:53.000 If that's what we're going to do, get out all the way out.
00:15:55.000 It's just common sense, which is what Carlon Klausiewicz said was the most important attribute of a battlefield leader was common sense.
00:16:02.000 And he's not the only one to say that.
00:16:04.000 And that common sense is severely lacking across the board in senior military leadership ranks and politicians that apply common sense to these problem sets.
00:16:15.000 And we don't do that these days.
00:16:17.000 And 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.
00:16:26.000 But that entire speech is very important to watch from beginning to end.
00:16:31.000 Let me understand, because, you know, you're a very interesting guy.
00:16:36.000 What do you...
00:16:37.000 And I'll just tell you my reaction when we went into Afghanistan.
00:16:41.000 My reaction was that we should have a limited objective, which was to remove and punish Osama bin Laden.
00:16:51.000 When we took on to invade and then rebuild the country and do regime change and then nation building there...
00:16:59.000 It seemed to me that like we were ignoring not only what happened to the Russians, but what's happened to every...
00:17:05.000 I mean, Afghanistan is called the graveyard of empires.
00:17:08.000 That's where empires go to die.
00:17:10.000 The Russians died there. 0.92
00:17:12.000 I mean, everybody since Alexander the Great, the British Empire.
00:17:16.000 Nobody's been able to hold on to it or do anything useful for the people there.
00:17:21.000 So from the beginning, I was very skeptical about it.
00:17:25.000 But you were fighting in Iran at that time.
00:17:28.000 And were you completely gung-ho at that time?
00:17:33.000 Or 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?
00:17:42.000 Was there any of that in you at that point?
00:17:44.000 I've always had a mistrust of authority and senior-level leadership.
00:17:49.000 I don't know where exactly it comes from.
00:17:50.000 I 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.
00:17:57.000 I think it was just in me from an early age to question.
00:18:00.000 But for that, what we were afraid of is that we were going to miss it, meaning I was deployed to Guam at the time.
00:18:10.000 September 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.
00:18:27.000 and on Al Qaeda and Afghanistan had been a particular interest to me over the years.
00:18:32.000 So 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.
00:18:43.000 It's not to go to war, it's to be prepared for that call.
00:18:45.000 And that was our generation's call.
00:18:48.000 So we were going to answer that call.
00:18:49.000 We 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?
00:18:57.000 And that's what we thought.
00:18:58.000 We thought it was going to be.
00:18:59.000 Because since the end of Vietnam, we'd had Desert One. 0.64
00:19:03.000 We'd had Grenada.
00:19:04.000 We'd had Panama.
00:19:05.000 We'd had the first Gulf War.
00:19:07.000 We had Mogadishu.
00:19:08.000 So things that were really flashpoints.
00:19:10.000 We hadn't been in sustained combat operations since the end of Vietnam.
00:19:14.000 And so now we're going into one and...
00:19:17.000 Looking 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.
00:19:29.000 But really, we're going after Osama bin Laden and his top level leaders. 0.78
00:19:33.000 So we thought we've gotten pretty good at manhunting over the years in Bosnia and Panama was essentially a manhunt for Noriega.
00:19:41.000 So we had some background in this at this point.
00:19:44.000 So we thought we were going to go in and take out Osama bin Laden and essentially be done with it. 0.61
00:19:48.000 And so the big worry was that we were going to miss it.
00:19:51.000 Obviously, 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.
00:19:57.000 But no, from the beginning, we thought it was going to be a lot quicker because it seemed like the objectives were limited.
00:20:03.000 And 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.
00:20:10.000 So that's what we thought.
00:20:12.000 But 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. 0.90
00:20:20.000 And now we have this war on drugs and opium going on.
00:20:24.000 And now we're building this road all around Afghanistan.
00:20:26.000 And now we're building wells and we're writing protection for building wells.
00:20:29.000 And 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.
00:20:36.000 All 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.
00:20:45.000 And that takes a lot of money to do that sort of thing.
00:20:48.000 So 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.
00:20:57.000 We thought it was going to be very limited.
00:20:58.000 It did not turn out to be limited, as we all know now.
00:21:02.000 And a similar thing happened in Iraq.
00:21:04.000 We just couldn't understand the nature of the conflict.
00:21:07.000 And so we kept pouring money, kept pouring troops, kept pouring more contractors at the problem and it didn't help the problem.
00:21:14.000 There'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.
00:21:30.000 But guess what you just did?
00:21:31.000 Well, his son just saw that.
00:21:32.000 And that nine-year-old, 10-year-old, 12-year-old, guess what he's going to do now?
00:21:35.000 He's going to turn up, he's going to hate America and end up being a terrorist.
00:21:39.000 They're going to fight a few years down the line.
00:21:41.000 But 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.
00:21:52.000 And we haven't had that really in our experience up to that point.
00:21:56.000 Yeah, well, Vietnam did last 20 years, too. 0.92
00:21:58.000 But, 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.
00:22:25.000 It's just this big money laundering scheme.
00:22:29.000 It really is.
00:22:30.000 And it's very clear that that's what it is.
00:22:32.000 But as a citizen, now I think we're in a position where we say, what are we supposed to do?
00:22:37.000 Because this gigantic bureaucracy, this gigantic government that has so much power, what are you supposed to do to change this?
00:22:43.000 Because up until World War II, leaders were held accountable.
00:22:46.000 George Marshall helped.
00:22:47.000 We didn't start all those names that we know from World War II, from Patton to Eisenhower.
00:22:51.000 They didn't start in those positions for the most part.
00:22:54.000 Someone else did, but they didn't measure up.
00:22:55.000 They were held accountable.
00:22:56.000 They were replaced.
00:22:57.000 And that's Jordan.
00:22:58.000 People know George Marshall for the Marshall Plan after World War II, rebuilding Europe.
00:23:02.000 But 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.
00:23:11.000 So 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.
00:23:19.000 He didn't start with Grant.
00:23:20.000 He went through a lot of generals before he got to Grant.
00:23:24.000 So leaders were held accountable for most of our history.
00:23:26.000 And for some reason, after World War II, that starts to wane.
00:23:30.000 It certainly does during Vietnam.
00:23:32.000 And 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.
00:23:42.000 And 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.
00:23:49.000 And 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.
00:23:50.000 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.
00:24:03.000 So there was a shift at the end of World War II.
00:24:03.000 So there was a shift at the end of World War II.
00:24:05.000 You had accountability up until that point, and then you really haven't had it the same way leading up to today.
00:24:12.000 So 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.
00:24:26.000 And it's very similar to the pharmaceutical industry in that respect.
00:24:30.000 Similar models.
00:24:32.000 But I don't know how you get away from that now that it is so big and so powerful.
00:24:37.000 So many lobbyists.
00:24:38.000 So much money.
00:24:39.000 So many of these projects in multiple congressional districts.
00:24:44.000 So it's this huge monstrosity at this point that really is an industry.
00:24:49.000 And as a citizen, what are you supposed to do?
00:24:51.000 We can still vote.
00:24:52.000 That's why that vote is so important.
00:24:54.000 And that's why everyone has to go in and vote.
00:24:57.000 Because 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.
00:25:06.000 So we have to take that time to do that.
00:25:09.000 And it's always shocking to me how few people actually vote in this country.
00:25:13.000 So if you're going to complain about it, you better get in there and vote.
00:25:17.000 You know, Doug McGregor points out that in World War II, there were only seven, four or five star generals.
00:25:26.000 Yeah.
00:25:27.000 And we all, we can all name them.
00:25:30.000 These were, you know, famous, like Marshall and MacArthur and Omar Bradley.
00:25:40.000 And there was just seven of them.
00:25:42.000 And today there's 44 generals.
00:25:45.000 Four and five-star generals.
00:25:47.000 And it's not...
00:25:48.000 Back then, the entire world economy was mobilized for that war.
00:25:51.000 And you had seven guys who were running the whole thing.
00:25:54.000 And now, you know, what are all these people doing?
00:25:57.000 And we know what they're doing.
00:25:59.000 They're making deals.
00:26:00.000 They're carving up their little fiefdoms, making sure that they get the contracts, that they...
00:26:06.000 It's just a bureaucracy that feeds on itself, and that is essentially predatory on the American public.
00:26:14.000 It is not making us safer in this country.
00:26:17.000 $8 trillion on war has not made America safer.
00:26:21.000 It's made it more dangerous to be an American here and abroad.
00:26:24.000 It's weakened our economy, which ultimately is the real source of national strength and national security, a strong economy.
00:26:32.000 It's sad to see what's happening.
00:26:34.000 Let me ask you this.
00:26:36.000 I 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?
00:26:45.000 I have a little bit.
00:26:46.000 I have to say this.
00:26:48.000 If 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.
00:26:57.000 You hit your limit?
00:26:58.000 Yeah, I hit my limit.
00:27:00.000 My uncle used to say that he was worried about a coup d'etat from the Pentagon.
00:27:05.000 And he said, I made it in Laos.
00:27:07.000 They got mad at me.
00:27:09.000 The Bay of Pigs is another, and I can't afford a third mistake.
00:27:13.000 He thought they were, he was scared of them, that the military might do something or that he would be impeached.
00:27:18.000 Oh, I've hit my limit on conspiracy theories.
00:27:21.000 But 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.
00:27:33.000 Oh, it's interesting to me whether you have any doubts about the official narrative.
00:27:38.000 Well, I wrote a book.
00:27:39.000 My fourth book is called The Devil's Hand, and I offer another narrative about 9-11 there.
00:27:46.000 So I do have that.
00:27:47.000 But in The Devil's Hand, I go and explore some alternate theories into 9-11 and an Iranian connection there.
00:27:56.000 And in my latest book, actually, I go back to November of 1963 and offer up a fictional possibility for what happened then.
00:28:05.000 And I know that you've talked about this before, about the first call that your father made in November of 1963 was to the CIA.
00:28:12.000 And there was a reason for that.
00:28:14.000 I think a lot of things changed.
00:28:16.000 I mean, he made three calls that day.
00:28:18.000 He made one to a...
00:28:20.000 To 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.
00:28:32.000 We 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.
00:28:51.000 And we watched the building go up.
00:28:54.000 And then when they appointed McComb, they fired Dulles.
00:28:58.000 And they appointed McComb.
00:29:00.000 Originally, President Kennedy wanted to appoint my father because he really wanted to reform the agency.
00:29:05.000 But 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.
00:29:15.000 You don't want that kind of, you know...
00:29:17.000 Collusion between the, or potential for collusion.
00:29:21.000 So they brought in this very kind of rigid Roman Catholic Republican, John McComb.
00:29:27.000 And of course, the people, the clandestine services at CIA never told him anything. 0.96
00:29:32.000 He 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. 0.96
00:29:48.000 My father then had McComb over. 0.99
00:29:50.000 McComb came over to our house right over as soon as the president was shot.
00:29:55.000 And when I arrived home, my father was walking with him in the yard.
00:29:58.000 And we went down and hugged my father.
00:30:00.000 And he left McComb.
00:30:02.000 McComb then left.
00:30:03.000 But he, during that short walk, he said to McComb, did we?
00:30:06.000 Did your people do this to my brother?
00:30:09.000 And 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.
00:30:22.000 And he was a, you know, close personal friend.
00:30:25.000 He had fought alongside Castro and the Sierra Maestre.
00:30:29.000 And then in 58 and 59, he'd been an engineer.
00:30:32.000 He was highly educated.
00:30:35.000 He thought Batista was a tyrant.
00:30:37.000 And then when Castro declared that it was a Marxist regime, Ruiz turned against him and joined the resistance.
00:30:46.000 And he was very, very close to my dad.
00:30:49.000 And so my dad called him up.
00:30:51.000 And he was still...
00:30:53.000 You know, one of the big leaders in the Cuban community, my father called him up.
00:30:57.000 He was staying at a Washington hotel and he said, you know, did your guys do this to my brother?
00:31:03.000 Oh, that was his first instinct.
00:31:05.000 But go ahead.
00:31:06.000 I interrupted you.
00:31:07.000 I didn't mean to, Jack.
00:31:08.000 Oh, no.
00:31:09.000 No, I think that's very telling that those are his first instincts on that day.
00:31:13.000 So I thought about that a lot over the years.
00:31:17.000 And I think a lot of things in this country changed on that day, not for the better.
00:31:22.000 And 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.
00:31:31.000 Had that been the case?
00:31:33.000 I 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.
00:31:49.000 Because then we get the Warren Commission and Dulles, I mean, it shouldn't have been called the Warren Commission, right?
00:31:55.000 Oh, he ran the Warrant Commission.
00:31:57.000 He was, you know, because he instigated himself into the Warrant Commission. 1.00
00:32:01.000 There's Alan Dulles, who, when my uncle was killed, he said to a young reporter, I'm glad the little shit is dead. 0.99
00:32:07.000 He thought he was a god. 0.99
00:32:09.000 So that was his...
00:32:11.000 He had a big resentment against my uncle who had fired him.
00:32:14.000 And then he becomes the head of the...
00:32:17.000 All the other guys on the Warren Commission had full-time jobs.
00:32:21.000 Earl Warren was the chief justice of the Supreme Court.
00:32:23.000 All the other ones were congressmen and senators.
00:32:26.000 They were, you know, full-time job.
00:32:29.000 The only one who wasn't working was Dulles.
00:32:32.000 So he ended up running the whole thing.
00:32:34.000 He's the only one who showed up for every single meeting.
00:32:37.000 And, you know, and of course, now we know that he was conspiring the whole time.
00:32:42.000 He was meeting at night with the CIA agents who were hiding their involvement, you know, Johannides and Angleton, who was his best friend.
00:32:52.000 And 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.
00:33:00.000 And it was a mess.
00:33:01.000 I want to make an observation.
00:33:03.000 I 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.
00:33:11.000 Your article was about government lying to us and about the normalization of lying.
00:33:18.000 I've been thinking about this since I read your article.
00:33:21.000 The 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.
00:33:32.000 I 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.
00:33:41.000 I'm 10 years old.
00:33:43.000 And Lyndon Johnson comes in and tells my father, I was standing beside my father, my aunt Jackie, and my mom.
00:33:53.000 And Lyndon Johnson comes into that room and says that Lee Harvey Oswald has just been shot by a man, and the man's name was Jack Ruby.
00:34:03.000 And I said to my mom at that time, I said, why did he shoot?
00:34:08.000 You know, they said, he's the guy who killed, you know, Uncle Jack.
00:34:12.000 And I said, why did the man shoot him?
00:34:15.000 Did he love our family?
00:34:16.000 So in my 10-year-old mind, the story didn't make any sense to me.
00:34:21.000 And Ruby, of course, said that initially, he said he later, you know, came clean.
00:34:28.000 And they wouldn't let him out of that jail cell.
00:34:30.000 But he said originally his story was he was trying to kill Oswald in order to protect Jackie from a long and difficult trial.
00:34:38.000 So he goes into a police station that's loaded with friends and murders the man in broad daylight.
00:34:44.000 And 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.
00:34:58.000 But anyway, it made no sense to me.
00:35:00.000 It's made no sense to the American people ever since.
00:35:03.000 Even Congress in 79, when they investigated it, said, no, it was a conspiracy.
00:35:08.000 That was the conclusion of the House Select Assassinations Committee report.
00:35:12.000 But the mainstream press, led by the New York Times, continues to push this lie that it was a single shooter, a madman, Lee Harvey Oswald.
00:35:21.000 Even now that we know, Lee Harvey Oswald himself is a CIA asset.
00:35:25.000 But they just tell the lie again and again.
00:35:28.000 Now, when I was a little boy, Nobody in our country would believe that the American government would lie to them or that the press...
00:35:36.000 The press were the most...
00:35:37.000 Chancellor, Hundley Brinkley, Walter Cronkite, the most trusted people in America.
00:35:42.000 The press never lied.
00:35:44.000 And 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.
00:36:00.000 Alan Dulles is running the U-2 program.
00:36:02.000 He sends the U-2 over Russia.
00:36:04.000 It's shot down. 0.85
00:36:05.000 The pilot's supposed to kill himself. 0.92
00:36:07.000 He has an arsenic pin that he's supposed to hit himself with, but he doesn't. 0.66
00:36:11.000 And the Russians don't tell that they've captured him. 0.84
00:36:14.000 They accuse America of sending a U-2.
00:36:16.000 Dulles tells Eisenhower to lie about it.
00:36:19.000 We don't have such a program.
00:36:20.000 So Eisenhower goes on national TV and says the Russians are lying about this.
00:36:25.000 And then the Russians, a day later, produce Gary Francis Powers, the pilot.
00:36:31.000 Everybody in the world now knows that the U.S. government lied.
00:36:36.000 And the American people said, oh, they lied to us, too.
00:36:40.000 This is shocking.
00:36:42.000 And before that, Americans could not believe the government lied on.
00:36:46.000 Then, you know, they get away with this big lie in 63 about my uncle.
00:36:50.000 And then they do that.
00:36:52.000 You know, the Pentagon Papers comes out in 71.
00:36:55.000 And everybody says, oh my God, they've been lying about the entire Vietnam War.
00:37:00.000 And then, you know, ever since then, it's just become like de rigueur that they, you know, they lie about everything.
00:37:08.000 And now the press lies to us about everything.
00:37:10.000 And the press is now...
00:37:12.000 A 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.
00:37:22.000 That'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.
00:37:44.000 Oh, yeah.
00:37:45.000 No, I've thought about that since my earliest days.
00:37:49.000 And 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.
00:38:06.000 And those reforms are put into place in the late 70s and early 80s.
00:38:10.000 And I think you have some changes, but you're right.
00:38:13.000 You go back to November of 1963.
00:38:15.000 You go back to 60, 61, 62 in the lead up of the years leading up to November of 1963.
00:38:20.000 And there was a definite change in the tone.
00:38:23.000 Of the government, of the intelligence services, of the military, and what the people expect.
00:38:28.000 Now we expect those lies.
00:38:30.000 But we're so distracted by all these other things, raising families and paying rent and taxes and all the rest of it, juggling life.
00:38:40.000 That those lies just continue to get told.
00:38:42.000 More get told.
00:38:44.000 More money gets spent.
00:38:45.000 More programs are in the hopper for whatever war is next or whatever war we're pushing for going forward.
00:38:51.000 And it really did start back there in November of 1963.
00:38:57.000 I mean, it was so profound.
00:38:58.000 I talk about it in my last book, and I don't know if you remember this or not, but we met at Megan and Billy Berzel's wedding at Hansport.
00:39:06.000 And just so people know, my sister's daughter, Megan Townsend, my eldest sister's Kathleen, She's two years older than I am.
00:39:15.000 One of her four daughters is Megan Townsend.
00:39:18.000 Megan married Billy Burtzel, who's a Special Operations.
00:39:22.000 At their wedding, almost all of the ushers were from the Special Operations, from the Green Beret and the Seals.
00:39:29.000 I think there was one who was a ranger.
00:39:32.000 But yeah, so you and I met at his wedding.
00:39:35.000 Yep, yep.
00:39:36.000 And he was a Marine.
00:39:37.000 We were actually in Najaf, Iraq together, fighting together.
00:39:40.000 We didn't know each other then.
00:39:41.000 We met after Najaf, Iraq, summer of 2004.
00:39:44.000 I ended up doing something in Mali together years later and stayed dear friends ever since.
00:39:49.000 But so we got to go out there and it was incredible to be there.
00:39:53.000 And I don't know if you remember this, but I got to escort Ethel the next day for the christening.
00:39:57.000 I did a reading and then escorted her to the breakfast that we had the next day.
00:40:01.000 So I got to sit with Ethel and with your wife Cheryl and sit at this table together.
00:40:07.000 And my experience there made its way into my last novel.
00:40:11.000 And people who have read it will know the characters that I'm talking about, but they inspired this storyline that I wanted to explore.
00:40:19.000 And I did so.
00:40:20.000 It was...
00:40:21.000 I can't force a storyline, so it has to be natural.
00:40:25.000 And 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.
00:40:43.000 And so there's all these things coming together and it was the right time and the place.
00:40:47.000 But for people who have read the novel, they'll know the inspiration of Ethel Kennedy to my latest novel.
00:40:52.000 But 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.
00:41:01.000 I have a first edition of the Warren Commission report inside.
00:41:04.000 And 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?
00:41:16.000 That they were mandated to release in 2017, by the way.
00:41:19.000 So 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.
00:41:27.000 I can't imagine Well, I can't imagine what they said to Trump.
00:41:32.000 Trump 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.
00:41:38.000 Well, I can't imagine what they said to him.
00:41:41.000 what, 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.
00:41:56.000 He's got Avril Haines, who's the master of the cover-up, who's his director of national intelligence.
00:42:01.000 I can't imagine, there's 5,000, almost 5,000 documents that they haven't released.
00:42:06.000 The key documents that people most want to see are documents of the travel itinerary, the travel schedule of Bill Harvey.
00:42:16.000 Bill Harvey was a Miami stationer chief, but he was stationed at Langley and fought with my father every day.
00:42:24.000 At 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. 0.66
00:42:37.000 You know, if he wasn't a coward or something, he was telling my father that my uncle was a coward.
00:42:43.000 My uncle is the only president of history who's won the Purple Heart.
00:42:47.000 And my father was a volatile person who did not like his brother insulted.
00:42:53.000 but they sideline Harvey.
00:42:56.000 They sent him over to Italy.
00:42:57.000 And there's been testimony that he flew to Dallas on that day.
00:43:02.000 And if that's true, it fits in with a lot of the other evidence that there's a very inculpatory.
00:43:08.000 And that's one of the things that people want to know about.
00:43:11.000 And that apparently is in those documents.
00:43:14.000 Listen, 62 years after my uncle's death, what could they possibly have in there?
00:43:21.000 That is so top secret.
00:43:23.000 The Soviet Union has collapsed.
00:43:26.000 The enemy is gone.
00:43:28.000 What are they trying to hide?
00:43:30.000 I also go back to if they are not guilty of anything, they have sure gone way out of their way to make themselves look very guilty.
00:43:38.000 So I don't quite get it.
00:43:40.000 And 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.
00:43:53.000 What they possibly could have said.
00:43:55.000 I am so curious about that meeting in particular.
00:43:59.000 Maybe we will find out one day, but maybe not.
00:44:02.000 But your original question was about conspiracies.
00:44:05.000 So a lot of conspiracies have become fact over the last decade, decade plus.
00:44:10.000 So, you know, it's good to be skeptical.
00:44:13.000 You don't need to be cynical to be skeptical, but you can definitely be skeptical.
00:44:16.000 Ask those questions.
00:44:18.000 Remember that our elected leaders are just that.
00:44:20.000 They are our employees.
00:44:21.000 And 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.
00:44:30.000 That's our tax dollars being spent by our employees.
00:44:33.000 And we tend to forget that just because of how much power the federal government has.
00:44:38.000 So 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.
00:44:51.000 And that's a long road, but I'm hopeful.
00:44:54.000 I try to remain hopeful because I have kids and one day maybe grandkids.
00:44:57.000 And I try to remain hopeful so I can manifest that future for them.
00:45:02.000 It's been more difficult as every day passes.
00:45:05.000 because 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?
00:45:13.000 And so I try to do what I can through the, the power of popular fiction through my novels.
00:45:18.000 First nonfiction comes out in a year and it's on the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing.
00:45:22.000 So I want to keep some of these lessons alive so that future generations don't have to learn them in blood.
00:45:27.000 Like those soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines had to learn in August of 2021 in Afghanistan.
00:45:33.000 So I want to keep those lessons alive so we can apply them going forward as wisdom.
00:45:37.000 And we really neglect to do that time and time again.
00:45:41.000 We neglected those lessons of Vietnam. 0.96
00:45:43.000 We did not apply them.
00:45:45.000 to 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.
00:46:01.000 And thanks for this conversation.
00:46:02.000 I hope you'll come back.
00:46:03.000 Our Ernest Hemingway said that if you want to write about life, you've got to go live it first.
00:46:09.000 And you really have, you've lived an amazing life.
00:46:14.000 And, you know, you've emerged, as your critics say, the most important men's fiction writer of this generation.
00:46:21.000 Thank you so much for joining us.
00:46:23.000 And thank you for your service to our country.
00:46:25.000 And thanks for your commitment to telling the truth, Jack.
00:46:28.000 Thank you very much.
00:46:29.000 Thank you so much.
00:46:30.000 Thank you for everything you and your family have done for us as well.
00:46:32.000 And I'll talk to you again soon.
00:46:34.000 Yeah, soon.