This week on Stay Free: Tucker Carlson's departure from Fox News and why the Pentagon is so delighted, and why radical liberals are happy to be on the same side of the Department of Defense and the CIA on any sort of issue. Plus, a look at the French riots, and a conspiracy theory about what's going on in the streets of Paris. Stay Free! is produced by BBC Radio 4 and is edited by Emma Rainey. Our theme song is Come Alone by Suneaters, courtesy of Lotuspool Records. To find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to gimlet.fm/OurAdvertisers. Our ad-free version of the podcast is available on all good podcasting platforms, including Audible, iTunes, Podchaser, and Podcoin. Please consider pledging a small monthly fee to help sustain the podcast and keep it free for as long as we can keep bringing you quality quality independent content. Thank you so much to everyone who has helped make this podcast possible. Sincerely. - Your continued support is so appreciated, and we look forward to hearing from you again and again to making it even better. Love, Meadey, Olly, Owen, Ollie, Max, Owen and the rest of the team at Locals Press. Stay free! xx - Olly and Meadeys - The Oasis Project Olly & the Olly is a project of the Oasis Podcast. . . . Olly's new book is out now! is out on all over the world! The Olly s new book, . Oley's new album is out in the world. Oly s new music is out next week! Ole s new album out now. It's out now on the Oley s new song is out here on Soundcloud. We hope you like it's good. is also out on the internet too! - Ole's music is also on SoundCloud and we hope you're listening to it too. and it's amazing. , Ole is a little bit more than that's good, Ole, too. Thank you, Meadedee, I'm looking out for you! , Meadeedee And so much more! - Meadee , and so on and so much so that I can't wait to hear from you.
00:00:16.000Does your mum know you're out this late?
00:00:19.000Or you might already be watching us on Rumble, the home of free speech, where no matter what they tell you, this is a place where people can come together in peace to share opinions that potentially might damage the onward march of an authoritarian movement that seeks to dominate the globe and prevent you from communicating freely.
00:00:39.000We're really having to look a little...
00:00:41.000We're going to be having a look at the departure of Tucker Carlson from Fox and why the Pentagon is so delighted.
00:00:50.000Sometimes I think this about radical liberals and whose views I respect and in so many cases absolutely align with.
00:00:59.000Why are they happy to be on the same side of the Department of Defense and the Pentagon on any sort of issue at all?
00:01:07.000Like when you imagine Woodstock, the late 60s, the civil rights movement, the great hot stirrings of the summer of 68, a counter-cultural movement, the women's movement, all these powerful voices.
00:01:19.000They weren't In alliance with big businesses and with the state, they were anti-establishment.
00:01:26.000It's so extraordinary to me how things have changed.
00:01:30.000We're going to be talking to Max Blumenthal from the grey zone a little bit later.
00:01:34.000We will not be able to have this conversation on YouTube.
00:01:37.000I think it would be dangerous even on Elon Musk's Twitter, even within his great citadel of free speech.
00:01:44.000Would you be able to openly talk about 9-11 and the CIA.
00:03:44.000Ongoing riots and discontent in France because the people there have seen that democracy isn't working.
00:03:49.000They were rioting outside the offices of Blackrock, weren't they, Gareth?
00:03:53.000Because they know that this is about centralised finance usurping the process of democracy.
00:03:59.000And I'm always struck by this, that we are one planet in limitless, potentially infinite space, and on the same little planet with essentially the same kind of interests.
00:04:09.000And I'm, by the way, not suggesting that there should be centralised power.
00:05:11.000Just in your mind, hold the image of that French copper kicking a bin because French democracy has been usurped after all those revolutions and guillotinings they've done.
00:07:54.000It's really, really funny because I'm confused by it.
00:07:57.000I'm confused by it as a concept, and it's certainly very confusing as a noise.
00:08:02.000And look at all of the pageantry that went on then.
00:08:05.000We're talking about the Royal Wedding, not Royal Wedding, Coronation later this week, and the amount of pageantry that went on and that goes on now.
00:10:23.000It looks a bit like, with that mic in front of his mouth, it's like he's at the Met Gala and someone's gone, what are you wearing today?
00:10:34.000Will you be appearing as the Joker again?
00:10:39.000Where did you get those pearls and did it take a long time to get those out of the bottom of the sea and then polish them and then turn them into a dress?
00:10:47.000Can we have four more years of Joe Biden?
00:10:51.000Can we have a press dinner where nobody mentions when celebrating journalism that Julian Assange is in prison without trial in the United Kingdom awaiting extradition?
00:11:02.000Because of the Espionage Act, because he revealed information that's definitely sensitive, but also, I would say, relevant to the American taxpayers who are paying for these wars.
00:11:10.000Remember, you are paying $1,000 every single year to the military-industrial complex.
00:11:14.000We're going to be bringing you a report about that later this week.
00:11:16.000So what you did there, you kind of turned that into a kind of drone, I would suggest.
00:12:05.000We're going to be talking to him, we're off YouTube already, but like we're going to talk to him about, well I think people got the idea that it was going to be about 9-11 saying that the CIA, like the two of the 9-11 hijackers were CIA operatives.
00:12:35.000Or, if you're like a Michael Moore type person, remember Fahrenheit 9-11 when he was saying all the Saudi Royals were getting flown out of there and the Bushes and the Saudi Royal family?
00:12:43.000It used to be that you could get radical stuff from the left, and that's one of the reasons I like Max Blumenthal.
00:12:48.000I don't think he's a right-wing fascist, and I don't think he's an anti-Semite, because I feel like Blumenthal might be a Jewish name I've not asked before.
00:12:57.000All right, Max, are you a right-wing fascist anti-Semite?
00:13:20.000And why they seem to favor sending U.S.
00:13:22.000taxpayer dollars to neo-Nazis in Ukraine.
00:13:27.000You know, they care so much about our history.
00:13:30.000But, uh, you know, it really depends on who you ask what label you want to apply to me.
00:13:35.000It's harder to get to anti-Semitism accusations for someone who is themselves Jewish, I would have thought, than people that are explicitly neo-Nazis, do the actual salute and everything, are down with a swastika.
00:13:50.000Like that, for me, seems like a more legit charge of anti-Semitism.
00:13:54.000I mean, I think we can conclusively say that the Nazis are anti-Semitic.
00:13:57.000Yeah, we can definitely talk about that.
00:14:00.000Can we ask you a little bit about the CIA infiltration of the 9/11 hijackers and how this is distinct
00:14:07.000from the kind of conspiracy theories that have circled around that event for the last 20 years
00:14:12.000or however long it is since it happened?
00:14:14.000Yeah, we can definitely talk about that.
00:14:18.000This was related to a report we ran, another masterpiece by Kit Clarenberg, who you've had on,
00:14:25.000and I've written about this case in my book, the Management of Savagery, which came out in 2019.
00:14:31.000When I wrote that book, which is about the history of the US and its allies using jihadists, As proxies, as assets to undermine their geopolitical foes from the Soviet Union to Syria, we didn't know as much as we know now.
00:14:49.000There had been an investigation called Operation Encore that the FBI, that involved the FBI agents who had been attempting to Prevent or did 9-11 attacks or were at least investigating Al Qaeda and that investigation ended in 2016.
00:15:09.000The results were completely redacted and so it took until 2021, for a 21-page filing by a guy named Don Conestraro, who is the lead investigator for the Office of Military Commissions, which was overseeing the cases of 9-11 defendants, for us to really learn what had always been suspected, and which I got at in my book.
00:15:32.000I said I suspected that two of the hijackers on American Airlines Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon, Had been recruited by the CIA and by a very secretive and I would say corrupt unit within the CIA that had been charged since 1996 with taking on Osama bin Laden and the Al Qaeda network.
00:15:56.000And, you know, this is widely suspected that they had been possibly recruited by the CIA.
00:16:02.000And it's it was confirmed by FBI agents interviewed by Don Conestraro in this bombshell filing, which was and of course, it was completely buried, just like a few blogs had picked it up.
00:16:14.000And so Kit went ahead and put all of the details together for us going back through Operation Encore and, you know, taking us to the beginning of the cover-up of the 9-11 plot, the cover-up by the CIA.
00:16:30.000That's not the same, of course, as saying that 9-11 was an inside job and it certainly doesn't verify some of the ideas that have circulated.
00:16:37.000Although, of course, it's not the only inconsistency or troubling piece of reporting that's taken place around that event.
00:16:46.000And of course, it's well established that the CIA, as you said, participated in the establishment of Al-Qaeda, funded Al-Qaeda.
00:16:53.000So it's not implausible that there were recruits from al-Qaeda operating in the US.
00:17:00.000It's sort of all-- it's kind of sort of likely.
00:17:03.000Does that open the door, though, to conjecture around the events of 9/11 more broadly?
00:17:08.000And sometimes, like, forgive me if this is like a kind of question an idiot would ask.
00:17:13.000It possibly is derived from the fact that, to some degree, I am one.
00:17:16.000Isn't it, like, true that, like, Building 7, that there was a building in New York that kind of went down and then it just sort of stopped talking about it?
00:17:25.000My memories are hazy of that event and, like, you know, it's difficult to deliberately and responsibly put together narrative points that are proven.
00:17:46.000I mean, I remember on the day of 9-11 just hearing that Building 7 had gone down because of the impact to the other buildings, and it just sounded weird to me.
00:17:59.000But I prefer to stick to the facts that I really know the most about, and this case is something that I've
00:18:07.000followed for years, the case of Khaled al-Midhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, who are the two kind of
00:18:15.000muscle hijackers, supposed muscle hijackers on American Flight 77.
00:18:21.000And it's very clear they were recruited by the CIA.
00:18:25.000So within the, you know, the theories, or those who hold theories around 9-11, there's kind of three schools of thought.
00:18:34.000Did the CIA do this because they simply wanted to infiltrate al-Qaeda and gain sources, and they protected these sources from the FBI?
00:18:44.000If the FBI had been alerted about the presence, and I'll tell you the whole story of al-Hazmi and al-Midhar in a second, but if they had not protected these sources from the FBI, the 9-11 plot would have been easily broken up.
00:18:59.000So, was it just because they wanted to gain access to al-Qaeda, or did they allow the 9-11 attacks to happen in order to produce what Paul Wolfowitz called, in the weeks before 9-11, the catastrophic and catalyzing event that would allow the U.S.
00:19:16.000to wage a massive military intervention in the Middle East and carry out its and Israel's goals?
00:19:21.000And then there's the third school of thought, which is that the U.S.
00:19:25.000government Or US intelligence was directly involved in the plotting of the attack in order to carry out those geopolitical and imperial objectives.
00:19:35.000And in the first camp, as I said, I'm a 9-11 conservative, but these new revelations raise a lot of questions about motives.
00:19:46.000I think it's generally obviously sensible to remain conservative particularly when dealing with such sensitive matters and even on our channel where we fuse entertainment and conjecture we are careful to ensure that we only use reliable information that's already been published frequently from Greyzone as a matter of fact but if you apply this conservatism in this instance Where does it take you to even have the information that the CIA had operatives that were on flight 77?
00:20:38.000But in this case, you have, it's pretty fair to say, at least one component of the Day of Planes operation that had been planned for years and years and years to strike strategic targets inside the United States.
00:20:52.000One component was a Saudi CIA intelligence operation gone, to put it conservatively, gone awry.
00:20:58.000So you have Khaled Al-Midhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, two Saudi citizens,
00:21:03.000radical al-Qaeda ideologues, who appear at a 1999 meeting in Malaysia. Sorry, this is a January 5th
00:21:20.000meeting in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, with some of the top lieutenants of al-Qaeda, including a
00:21:28.000figure who is involved in the bombing of the USS Cole just about a few months earlier.
00:21:35.000And here you have CIA operatives videotaping the meeting.
00:22:52.000They're going to flight lessons, and it later turns out that they were actually living
00:22:56.000in that apartment with an FBI informant.
00:23:00.000Bayoumi, of course, turns out to be a Saudi intelligence officer who is managing these two figures.
00:23:06.000And the FBI never learns that these two figures were in the country after attending the super summit of Al Qaeda on their way to carry out an attack that George W. Bush was warned about in Crawford, Texas, A month before it took place in a presidential daily briefing, Bin Laden determined to strike inside the U.S.
00:23:27.000This was at a time when the system was blinking red, according to former U.S.
00:23:34.000And what happened was, the director of Alex Station, this corrupt and highly secretive CIA unit which was charged with recruiting al-Qaeda officials, or recruiting al-Qaeda assets, Richard Blea refused to tell the FBI's unit in charge of investigating al-Qaeda that al-Kadhimi and al-Midhar were even inside the United States.
00:24:01.000There are so many more acts of cover-up that took place to prevent the FBI from learning about them as this plot progressed.
00:24:12.000They weren't even told that they were on the flight manifest of American Airlines Flight 77 until days after the attack.
00:24:19.000The FBI wasn't even told that they had been at a meeting in Malaysia with a planner, a known planner, of the attack on the USS Cole.
00:24:27.000So, the CIA covered this up all the way to 9-11, and it's the same CIA that is responsible in so many ways for fueling the rise of al-Qaeda and keeping it alive to the present day.
00:24:41.000And in fact, yes, you're quite right that you can sort of chart the history of the CIA to the founding of the Mujahideen.
00:24:50.000And also you can say that there are still people in power, as you just did, that are participating, presumably, in
00:25:02.000And I guess that's when we talk about the deep state.
00:25:04.000We're talking about inaccessible institutions and bodies that are able to act without mandate in ways that seem to
00:25:13.000be at odds with the interests of the American population and perhaps the world at large.
00:25:19.000And the way that the kind of global narrative is managed and enacted right up to present day conflicts and potential
00:25:29.000forthcoming conflicts involves these agencies.
00:25:33.000So sometimes even when you're approaching it conservatively in the manner that you understandably are when it's such a potentially incendiary story, it's still difficult not to I feel that the system of government and deep government in particular is concerning.
00:25:48.000Mate, do you suppose that when we talk about a story like the Nord Stream Pipeline, which increasingly appears to have been an operation conducted by forces of this nature, Do you imagine that with the burgeoning conflict between the United States and China, Taiwan could be subject to a kind of a Nord Stream-like event within their semiconductor industry?
00:26:52.000And he was a major figure in the Trump administration's kitchen cabinet of national security advisors.
00:26:57.000And he has called for the US to bomb Taiwan's semiconductor industry, which would be actually a much more serious attack on the global economy than Nord Stream.
00:27:09.000I mean, Taiwan produces the majority of semiconductors through its TSMC, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.
00:27:17.000I mean, just basically a collapse of the global economy in order to prevent the factory and the technology from falling into Chinese hands.
00:27:27.000And this is not just Robert O'Brien calling for this.
00:28:06.000is willing to see Ukraine's economy destroyed and its best men killed to extend a war Against Russia thrown into a slaughterhouse in order to bleed Russia.
00:28:18.000We should pull up that clip of the mainstream media where that current sitting US politicians said like like where they were asked them on the mainstream.
00:29:37.000So do you, in short, do you think that the fact that there are semiconductor factories in Taiwan is a not insignificant consideration amidst this growing hostility?
00:30:10.000I mean, this is about surrounding and encircling China, creating kind of a pressure cooker effect on China's leadership and forcing China to spend more and more money on its military and less on its social programs and, you know, driving this program Xi Jinping has of building a middle class and redeveloping the country.
00:30:33.000It's about, it is also about competing with China, but I assume by now the US would be eager to move those semiconductor plants to a place they would consider safer because as Thomas Friedman wrote, Taiwan is to be the US porcupine against China.
00:30:50.000Taiwan is like, If you consider the concept of Israel, as explained by former Secretary of State Alexander Haig, where Israel is an unsinkable aircraft carrier, it's a colonial implant in the middle of the Middle East that's a Spartan state armed to the teeth with the most advanced weaponry, and the U.S.
00:31:09.000is going to use it to attack any country That takes an independent or adversarial position, and that's why Israel has invaded Lebanon, attacked Hezbollah, why it's constantly bombing Syria these days, and it says it's attacking Iranian targets.
00:31:22.000It just attacked deep in Syria in Homs.
00:31:26.000So, that's also the role of Ukraine against Russia, a country that's controlled from the outside by the U.S., to antagonize Russia, to keep it in a constant state of war, To keep its leadership paranoid.
00:31:40.000And then Taiwan plays that role with China.
00:31:44.000And to a certain extent, South Korea, Japan, and Philippines are intended to play the same role.
00:31:52.000is so hostile to a peace arrangement between North and South Korea.
00:31:56.000With so many unpalatable truths, so palpably and demonstrably factual, it's clear that you require powerful machinery to prevent people assessing reality in those blunt terms.
00:32:13.000You need ongoing deep state operations.
00:32:18.000You don't need people Inquiring about the true nature of geopolitics and the kind of corporate and military relationships and the kind of colonial and resource necessities that underwrite much of the action that we're describing.
00:32:34.000And with the ability for this kind of counter-narrative to be expressed, like either on Greyzone or reported on our channel, you need censorship and surveillance.
00:32:44.000No wonder Julian Assange is in prison.
00:32:50.000What do you think when you see something like that White House Correspondents' Dinner, like this sort of congratulatory circle jerk, where apparently the consensus between the media and the state is sort of reiterated and the framing for what's possible to discuss is reasserted?
00:33:09.000Yeah, I mean, what you see with the White House press correspondence dinner is the most hated group in America.
00:33:17.000The regular American people hate the media because they know they're being lied to.
00:33:22.000And the media is there, the elite beltway media, giving itself awards for publishing fake stories.
00:33:29.000Going back to the Steele dossier on Russiagate, they were celebrating themselves for publishing fake stories because the means justify the ends, and then the means was humiliating and destroying Donald Trump.
00:33:41.000In this case, it's about celebrating and circling the wagons around Joe Biden, a doddering figure who, I mean, he put on a pretty good performance there, but someone who is simply representative of the establishment and the kind of subculture that exists inside the Beltway that the rest of Americans are hostile to for justifiable reasons.
00:34:05.000And this is the same press that's trying to lie us into a war with China over Taiwan that that's continuing to push this endless proxy war with
00:34:15.000Ukraine, that's basically a cheerleader for that war.
00:34:18.000And that was the main vessel for duping the public into supporting war with Iraq.
00:34:25.000And what they're going to do if there is conflict with China is sell the war the same way they
00:34:33.000It's a war for freedom and they'll cover up any false flag or any incident that drives us into that war.
00:34:41.000And you know who knows better than the press is actually the rank and file of the US military.
00:34:47.000They do not want to go to war with China because tens of thousands of enlisted soldiers will die in the name That's not just according to me.
00:35:01.000That's according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which is a neoconservative-oriented, very anti-China think tank in Washington, which ran 24 war games, pitting the U.S.
00:35:13.000military against China, following a hypothetical Chinese invasion of Taiwan in 2026.
00:36:06.000And if that war ever takes place, it will produce an existential crisis inside the U.S.
00:36:11.000that will destroy whatever's left of the of the veneer of democracy and the press.
00:36:17.000Those people cheering Biden like sycophantic, loyal stenographers for the empire.
00:36:23.000They will be responsible and they will be least likely to die because they'll be furthest away from the fight.
00:36:29.000We'll look at the mainstream media now discussing the burgeoning conflict and look at the transition between truth and propaganda that takes place even within the clip.
00:36:38.000This is Michael McCaul, I can't remember if it's CNN or ABC, one of them.
00:36:42.000Make the basic case for why Americans not only should care about what happens in Taiwan, but should be willing to spill American blood and treasure to defend Taiwan.
00:37:00.000We are meeting with our allies, our partners here, if you will.
00:37:04.000They don't have a NATO in the Pacific, but they do have partners.
00:37:08.000We want to make sure that they are ready and supportive of the United States and Taiwan.
00:37:13.000The case for Taiwan, that's a very good question.
00:37:17.000About 50% of international trade goes through the international straits, but I think more importantly, Chuck, is that the TSMC manufactures 90% of the global supply of advanced semiconductor chips.
00:37:35.000If China invades and either owns or breaks this, we're in a world of hurt.
00:38:31.000Um, okay, so listen, right, we're gonna, in a minute, we're talking to Barry Weiss, one of the Twitterphile journalists, she's brilliant, we've spoke to her before.
00:39:35.000Like, I mean, if you can make King Charles's head out of chocolate and medals out of bounty bars and stuff, and that is something that's happened, and we'll be talking about that later in the week, then why can't people just chat about nutbags?
00:39:49.000Join us at Community Festival as well between the 14th and 17th of July.
00:39:53.000And tomorrow on our show, Stay Free, we've got Daniel Chandler, who's my mate, who's talking about the philosophy and politics of John Rawls.
00:40:01.000He's talking about equality, Stuff like that.
00:40:03.000It's going to be a fantastic conversation.
00:40:04.000She's my friend, so I know it'll be brilliant and we'll talk about... I'm going to sneeze.