The Tucker Carlson Show - Ex-CIA Officer John Kiriakou on the Truth About Iran, False Flags, and What’s Really Happening in DC

00:00:00.000 John, thanks for doing this.

00:00:05.560 Thanks for the invitation.

00:00:06.520 So a lot of us have been trying to figure out

00:00:08.920 how we got into this war with Iran.

00:00:10.740 I think the reporting is clear at this point

00:00:12.480 that there was really nobody at the White House

00:00:16.020 or in the American intelligence community

00:00:18.320 who was telling the president,

00:00:19.880 yeah, this is gonna be really easy.

00:00:22.800 Right.

00:00:23.580 But he came to that conclusion anyway.

00:00:25.840 There's a lot of speculation as to why.

00:00:28.740 But tell us about the process.

00:00:30.600 You're the president.

00:00:32.000 You're trying to figure out what's going to happen if you declare war on this country.

00:00:36.780 How do you find that information?

00:00:39.680 Where does that come from?

00:00:40.360 Well, I can tell you how President George H.W. Bush did it and how President George W. Bush did it.

00:00:46.380 It's a process.

00:00:47.780 Right.

00:00:48.100 You have to—

00:00:49.220 Formal.

00:00:49.520 Formal process.

00:00:50.640 You have to commission estimates from the intelligence community.

00:00:55.240 You, you commission intelligence, finished intelligence reports from the CIA's directorate

00:01:01.640 of intelligence. You get an idea of what the state department is thinking about it. You're

00:01:06.100 talking to your secretaries of state and defense, the national security advisor, but then, and I

00:01:11.360 think this is even as important. You need to talk to your friends and allies. You need to know what

00:01:17.520 the, what the European countries are saying or seeing, and then our Gulf allies, the Arab allies,

00:01:23.940 We really needed to engage with all of them.

00:01:27.880 And then there's going to be a consensus at some point, at least among most of those countries.

00:01:34.240 And then you come up with a policy.

00:01:36.660 I think that that's not what took place in this case.

00:01:41.080 As you know, you've heard the same criticisms that I've heard in the Gulf.

00:01:46.400 The complaints are that they were not consulted as allies.

00:01:49.780 They were just sort of brought along.

00:01:51.540 And I was in Europe a couple of weeks ago

00:01:53.440 and a couple of weeks before that.

00:01:54.940 And I heard the same complaints

00:01:56.460 that they weren't consulted.

00:01:58.140 The only apparent consultation

00:02:00.280 that was taking place was with the Israelis.

00:02:03.100 And the Israelis really, really wanted this to get done.

00:02:06.360 So why would you as a practical matter

00:02:08.580 need to consult other countries?

00:02:10.140 Because there is this sense,

00:02:11.320 like as an exceptional nation,

00:02:12.540 we don't need anyone's permission to act.

00:02:15.540 But again, not as an ideological matter

00:02:18.260 or a matter of politeness or good form,

00:02:20.620 But as a practical matter before launching a war, why do you need to talk to the Europeans in the Gulf states?

00:02:25.800 At the very least, you're going to want political cover.

00:02:29.020 You're also going to want to give them an opportunity to come up with plan B for their, let's say, oil or gas needs or transportation issues.

00:02:41.740 You don't want them to be taken by surprise because they're going to resent you in the end.

00:02:46.160 And we didn't do that.

00:02:48.260 And they resent us.

00:02:49.720 I'll give you an example.

00:02:50.460 I was in Ireland two weeks ago and at the hotel, they told me I was probably going to have to leave extra early for the airport because they were expecting the largest demonstration in Irish history, which took place the next morning.

00:03:07.800 And it was all because of home heating oil prices and gasoline prices.

00:03:12.860 We didn't consult with the Irish or the British or anybody else before launching this thing.

00:03:19.320 they were already having problems because of the cutoff of home heating oil coming from Russia

00:03:24.900 because of the Ukraine war. And then this was just doubly difficult for them. And so gas was,

00:03:31.900 we figured it out. Gas was $12 and a half dollars a gallon. I mean, if you don't have an-

00:03:37.080 Gasoline.

00:03:37.740 Gasoline, $12 and a half dollars a gallon. And home heating oil was astronomical to the point

00:03:42.980 where people were just, you know, freezing and they're blaming us for it. So you want to be

00:03:48.340 able to consult our friends and allies so that they have a chance to come up with a plan to make

00:03:54.320 the hurt on their own people a little bit less severe um ireland is an enemy of israel's the

00:04:03.060 prime minister and many cabinet ministers in israel have said that they hate ireland

00:04:07.860 they hate europe they hate europeans so do you think that the president's um

00:04:13.240 reluctance or failure to bring them into this conversation reflects Israel's priorities? 0.95

00:04:20.660 I hate to say it, but I do actually. I think that the Israelis, look, I understand what a close 0.93

00:04:27.860 friend and ally Israel is and always has been. I get it. But I feel like sometimes we act

00:04:34.920 in Israel's best interests rather than in our own best interests. I think this is one of those cases.

00:04:42.540 The Israelis, of course, are going to jump up and down

00:04:45.180 and yell about the Irish and the Spanish and the Italians.

00:04:49.880 Right.

00:04:51.180 But we should, you know, let them vent

00:04:53.860 and then do what's in the best interest of the United States.

00:04:56.820 And I feel like we're not really doing that. 0.90

00:04:59.180 We're doing Israel's bidding for it. 0.99

00:05:02.080 Have you seen this before? 0.98

00:05:02.960 You said it's been a close relationship.

00:05:05.040 You were for many, many years.

00:05:07.180 That's true, since the formation of the country, really, 1948.

00:05:11.740 And there's always been pressure to help Israel go along with its priorities.

00:05:16.620 But have you seen other instances when you served in government where the United States government put Israel's interests above those of the United States?

00:05:25.060 No. In fact, to the contrary, in the Gulf War, the 1990-91 Gulf War, and again in the Iraq War from 2003 onward,

00:05:35.680 We specifically made decisions that were in the best interest of the United States to the point where the Israelis complained vociferously to us that they wanted us to do A and instead we did B because B was better for the United States.

00:05:50.480 And, you know, we would say, well, you know, that's that's foreign policy. You have your interests. We have our interests. There's no such thing as permanent friends. There is such a thing as permanent interests. This is our interest and this is what we're going to do.

00:06:03.040 And that's just not, it doesn't seem to be the case today.

00:06:06.280 I don't understand how attacking Iran was in U.S. national interest. 0.95

00:06:13.200 I fully understand how this was in Israel's interest. 0.69

00:06:17.120 And the Israelis have long wanted us to attack Iran and to overthrow the regime in Tehran. 0.96

00:06:22.960 I get that. 0.85

00:06:23.980 It's in their interest.

00:06:24.820 But I've never believed, I don't think any CIA officer past or present believes or has believed that the Iranians were anywhere near a nuclear weapon.

00:06:37.020 They don't have a delivery system that could deliver a nuclear weapon to the United States.

00:06:44.260 And, you know, when you've got two national intelligence estimates, a national intelligence estimate is a sense of the entire intelligence community, all 18 organizations within the U.S. intelligence community, unanimously concluding that there is no Iranian nuclear weapons program twice, as well as the late-

00:07:06.840 But there's no program.

00:07:07.760 no program no ayatollah khamenei issued a fatwa in 2003 declaring it a sin to develop a nuclear

00:07:16.560 weapon and then the cia twice said they don't have a nuclear weapons program so it's interesting on

00:07:21.520 that question so the the fatwa been in place all these years more than 20 years we're told

00:07:27.020 simultaneously that iran is a fanatical suicidal homicidal theocracy totally beyond reason so 0.55

00:07:34.560 besotted are they by their crazy religious views so there's that but we also can't take the fatwa 0.96

00:07:41.200 seriously because it's iran and they lie all the time right but sometimes you can take things

00:07:46.940 seriously but i mean it's one or the other either either it's a country that issues fatwas and takes

00:07:51.360 them seriously and therefore we should be afraid of them because they're a theocracy or it's a

00:07:54.980 country that issues fake fatwas because they don't really believe in the end in the idea of a fatwa

00:07:59.060 like what is it god god forgive me for quoting hillary clinton but i'm gonna quote hillary

00:08:03.920 Clinton. She said when she was secretary of state that she had come to the realization that Iran was

00:08:08.240 not a theocracy. It was a military dictatorship. There was this theocratic group that sort of sat

00:08:14.640 on the top of the heap, but the day-to-day operation of the country was run by the IRGC.

00:08:21.160 And the IRGC being a military organization was going to run the country as a military

00:08:27.180 dictatorship would. I think we should have addressed it that way. We shouldn't have

00:08:31.340 gotten wrapped around the axle on theocratic issues. We shouldn't have been afraid to engage

00:08:38.160 the Iranians, or maybe not even afraid, just refusing to engage the Iranians. We should 1.00

00:08:42.720 have been constantly engaged, whether it was through the Qataris or the Omanis or even the 0.52

00:08:47.400 Algerians. There were different ways in which we could speak with the Iranians, and we just never

00:08:53.940 bothered. I will add, I do not have rose-colored glasses when thinking about the Iranians. I know 0.87

00:09:02.500 what the Iranians have done. The Iranians made an attempt to kill me several decades ago. I haven't 1.00

00:09:08.260 forgotten that. I know that they're bad guys. I know that they've carried out terrorist attacks

00:09:12.560 and that they've killed Americans in many of those terrorist attacks. But we're talking

00:09:16.580 single digits over the last several decades. Now, support for Hezbollah in the 80s, the 90s,

00:09:24.460 yes, very bad, very big problem. The Houthis are a little bit of a thorn in our side. 0.99

00:09:30.920 The Hamas thing, the CIA was late to the game on the Hamas thing because the analytic

00:09:35.300 judgment for a long time was incorrectly, I might add, that the Iranians are not supporting Hamas

00:09:41.920 because the Iranians are Shia Muslim

00:09:43.520 and Hamas is Sunni Muslim.

00:09:45.020 That was wrong. 0.99

00:09:46.100 They were supporting Hamas.

00:09:48.300 I get all that.

00:09:49.820 But again, Hamas has never carried out

00:09:53.280 an anti-American terrorist attack.

00:09:55.180 So was it in US national interest

00:09:57.560 to attack Iran for supporting Hamas?

00:10:00.480 I think not.

00:10:01.320 Hamas is designated a terror group in the US?

00:10:03.720 I think just recently it was maybe Trump one,

00:10:07.840 maybe early Trump two, I don't recall.

00:10:09.720 But I think, yeah, recently it was designated a terrorist attack.

00:10:11.960 But Hamas has never carried out a terror attack against Americans?

00:10:15.720 No. 0.58

00:10:17.240 We spend a lot of time talking about Hamas.

00:10:19.300 Yeah, and the Muslim Brotherhood,

00:10:20.620 which also has never carried out a terrorist attack on Americans.

00:10:25.380 Huh.

00:10:27.100 I'm not for either one, just for the record.

00:10:28.860 No, no, nor am I.

00:10:29.940 But I don't have strong feelings about either one, for the record.

00:10:33.840 No.

00:10:34.540 But why do we talk about both so much?

00:10:36.900 Ah, you know, it's been my experience. I first came to this realization when I first joined the CIA. We always have this need to have a boogeyman, whether it was, you know, Bolshevism in the 1910s, whether it was, you know, socialism in the 20s and the early 30s, Nazism, legitimately so.

00:11:00.320 um but then you know in the in the 70s the 80s it became islamism we it's like we always have to 0.94

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00:13:14.280 well i don't know everywhere i go i meet people who are addicted to drugs who've lost loved ones

00:13:19.700 i know a bunch of people have died of drug ods and i see a country that's really been gravely

00:13:25.460 damaged if not destroyed by narcotics which are being imported by drug latin american drug cartels

00:13:30.840 if you're looking for an enemy there it is right with a death count that seems like the one oh may

00:13:35.700 i tell you a story i hope you will when i was the senior investigator on the senate foreign relations

00:13:40.780 Committee, 2009 to 2011, end of 2011, I told the then chairman, John Kerry, I wanted to go to

00:13:49.920 Afghanistan to do a formal Senate study on the heroin poppy crop, right? Afghanistan at the time

00:13:58.600 was producing 93% of the world's heroin. And so I flew to Afghanistan, went to Bagram Air Base.

00:14:05.920 I told them I needed to fly to Kandahar

00:14:09.600 and then to Lashkar Gah,

00:14:11.280 which is the capital of Helmand province.

00:14:13.320 And I was doing this study.

00:14:14.940 Now, as a senior congressional staff member,

00:14:17.620 I had the rank of brigadier general.

00:14:20.000 This is the only time in my life

00:14:21.540 I ever pulled rank on somebody.

00:14:23.700 And I said, they wouldn't take me down there.

00:14:25.660 And I said, I'm not asking you,

00:14:27.260 I'm telling you, you are going to fly me to Kandahar 0.69

00:14:30.780 and then we will fly to Lashkar Gah

00:14:33.200 and then we'll fly back to Bagram.

00:14:36.040 So they relented.

00:14:37.960 We went to Kandahar, did some meetings.

00:14:40.420 When we got to Lashkarga, as you're landing,

00:14:43.640 for as far as the eye could see,

00:14:46.600 all you see is heroin poppy.

00:14:48.960 And so I said, I want to go into the poppy fields

00:14:51.740 and I want to find a farmer and I want to talk to him.

00:14:54.900 So I had security, I had a translator, Pashto translator.

00:14:58.980 We just drive out into the fields 0.90

00:15:00.900 and sure enough, we stumble on a poppy farmer.

00:15:04.140 And I asked him a very naive question.

00:15:06.820 I said, instead of poppy,

00:15:09.320 why don't you grow things that have two growing seasons

00:15:12.420 like tomatoes or onions or pomegranates?

00:15:15.520 And he goes like this,

00:15:16.620 the Americans told me in 2001

00:15:21.000 that if I told them where the Arabs were,

00:15:23.420 I could grow all the poppy I wanted.

00:15:25.500 I said, what Americans told you you could grow poppy?

00:15:28.180 And just as I said the question,

00:15:29.580 my military handler pulls me by the arm and he says,

00:15:32.320 we're under threat.

00:15:33.440 we have to go back to the base i never got an answer we got back into the jeep and they took me

00:15:38.560 back to the helicopter i flew back to bagram actually actually like out of a movie so i come

00:15:45.400 back to washington and i said to to the chief investigator i said i'm i'm onto something here

00:15:52.180 this is not good so i wrote it all up just as i collected it well i had a friend at dea the drug

00:15:59.540 enforcement administration. And I called him. I said, listen, I'm going to send you a paper,

00:16:04.960 eyes only. I just want your thoughts on it before I send it to John Kerry.

00:16:09.420 So he calls me back a couple of days later and he says, buddy, you know, you're not going to

00:16:13.860 get this paper published, right? I said, why not? He said, Afghanistan produces 93% of the world's

00:16:21.500 heroin. Almost all of that heroin goes to Iran and Russia. And we want them to be addicted to

00:16:28.740 heroin it weakens their societies and i never got it published well fast forward years later

00:16:37.240 that's disgusting we've got a fentanyl epidemic in this country that fentanyl is coming from china

00:16:43.460 and mexico they want us to be addicted to fentanyl because it weakens our society

00:16:51.360 and that's why we're in the predicament that we're in so you believe that the u.s government

00:16:57.020 allowed poppy production in Afghanistan

00:16:59.120 in order to weaken Iran and Russia. 1.00

00:17:01.460 I do. 1.00

00:17:01.980 And the reason I have come to that conclusion

00:17:04.400 is not because I'm any smarter than anybody else,

00:17:06.860 but do you know how much of the world's heroin

00:17:09.480 was produced in Afghanistan

00:17:11.900 in the last year of Taliban rule, 2000?

00:17:14.800 Not too much.

00:17:15.660 Zero, none.

00:17:18.140 They didn't grow any,

00:17:19.320 not only did they not grow any heroin poppy in 2000,

00:17:22.800 They were a net food exporter to Iran and to Pakistan.

00:17:28.500 And as soon as we took over, it was all about the heroin.

00:17:33.700 So the idea that it's, that's quite amazing.

00:17:38.720 That is a quite amazing statistic.

00:17:41.020 Terrible.

00:17:43.140 Does anyone in a meeting where these plans were formulated say,

00:17:46.360 you know, we're the United States,

00:17:47.660 like we can't flood other people's countries with heroin.

00:17:50.480 That's just so immoral.

00:17:51.440 I never sat in a meeting like that.

00:17:54.060 The meetings were all about how do we win?

00:17:57.120 How do we get a leg up?

00:17:58.580 How do we implement the policy

00:18:00.680 that we want whatever country to follow?

00:18:03.620 That was it.

00:18:04.980 But if you intentionally flood

00:18:07.340 other people's countries with heroin,

00:18:09.340 it's kind of hard to tell yourself you're the good guy.

00:18:12.580 Like that's-

00:18:13.180 Oh, Tucker, that was something that I struggled with

00:18:15.460 for at least half of my career at the CIA.

00:18:18.840 We're supposed to be the good guys.

00:18:20.400 so why are we doing so much of this i just never understood it and what was what do you think the

00:18:26.060 answer is the answer was that i uh had the stars in my eyes that that i just i was not fully

00:18:34.120 understanding of realpolitik that you're a liberal well i'm not a liberal at all and i find that 0.52

00:18:40.740 disgusting i find it disgusting i don't want my government to be involved in any way in heroin

00:18:46.800 trafficking. No, nor do I. And I also don't know why Russia's our enemy, but big picture. But even 0.91

00:18:51.840 if there was a good reason to have Russia as an enemy, I still wouldn't be for flooding

00:18:55.420 their cities with heroin. Right after the Russians invaded Ukraine, I was one of seven

00:19:01.880 journalists, independent journalists, who were invited to lunch with the Russian ambassador

00:19:06.560 in Washington. And what he wanted was our ideas on how the U.S. and Russia could continue to

00:19:15.480 cooperate diplomatically, even during a time of war. And I said, I was actually proud of what I

00:19:22.540 said. I went prepared and I said, the U.S. and Russia have identical interests in counterterrorism,

00:19:29.400 counterproliferation, and counter-narcotics. We should never stop cooperating on those three

00:19:35.000 issues. And I said, and you know what? There's a fourth thing. I said, Your Excellency, when you

00:19:42.040 arrest an American, a female American basketball player and give her a draconian tenure sentence 1.00

00:19:48.680 for having a little bit of weed oil. It's a bad look. That was the only time he got angry. 1.00

00:19:55.180 And he said, do you have any idea how many Russians are in American prisons?

00:19:59.600 1500. I know that it's 1500 because I have to send my staff out to visit them.

00:20:04.880 So if you want to talk about not arresting people, talk to your own government about it.

00:20:09.580 Well, frankly, I would see that as an opportunity.

00:20:12.520 That's yet another thing on which we should be engaged with the Russian government.

00:20:17.300 And we're not.

00:20:17.960 And it doesn't matter who's in the White House, whether it's a Democrat or a Republican.

00:20:22.640 We just have this idea that the Russians are bad, bad, bad, and we shouldn't be cooperating 0.99

00:20:27.840 with them. 1.00

00:20:28.420 I'll tell you another thing.

00:20:29.400 My former wife was also a senior CIA officer.

00:20:34.060 and as as recently as like 2017 she said to me the russians are the gravest threat that the united 0.97

00:20:44.020 states has ever faced and i'm like what what newspapers are you reading because i know these

00:20:50.300 people and they want to work with us they're not going to roll over for us but they want to be

00:20:55.340 engaged diplomatically and we just won't do it in what way in what way i i would be far more worried

00:21:01.840 about the Chinese than about the Russians. 0.95

00:21:04.560 I'm far more worried about the Mexicans. 0.99

00:21:06.420 And the Mexicans. 1.00

00:21:07.500 I'll tell you another thing too.

00:21:09.160 You know, I actually left the Democratic Party years ago

00:21:12.880 because I thought that it moved too far to the right.

00:21:16.280 The truth is that the ideological spectrum

00:21:18.340 is not a straight line from left to right.

00:21:20.140 It's a circle.

00:21:21.120 And there are a lot of issues

00:21:22.400 on which the right and the left can meet and agree.

00:21:25.020 Yes.

00:21:25.660 That's where I am.

00:21:26.600 I'm at the point where the circle meets.

00:21:28.480 So some of my friends, some of my former friends won't speak to me because they say I'm far too conservative, that I've gone over to MAGA and they just don't want to be friends anymore.

00:21:38.620 And that's fine. I don't care because then they weren't real friends anyway.

00:21:42.060 But the issue is I agreed with Donald Trump's policy about building the wall.

00:21:49.020 I lost a lot of friends because of that.

00:21:51.640 And I said, you know, you have to look at it this way.

00:21:54.420 I read the Greek press every single day.

00:21:56.480 I'm a recently, relatively recently, a dual U.S.-Greek citizen now.

00:22:02.240 And Turkey takes something like a billion and a half euros every year to hold economic

00:22:09.900 refugees in camps in Turkey until they can be processed and resettled in places like

00:22:15.980 Germany and Sweden and France, etc. 0.89

00:22:18.700 But what the Turks really do is they put them on little boats and they send them to Greece 0.89

00:22:22.100 in the middle of the night. 0.98

00:22:23.180 The purpose being to crash the Greek economy. 0.97

00:22:26.060 To destroy Greece. 0.98

00:22:26.900 Right. 0.93

00:22:27.480 So what the Greeks did is they built a wall.

00:22:31.060 And all of a sudden, nobody can cross the border where the wall is.

00:22:35.200 So the Greeks now focus on the islands and have the Coast Guard intercept these boats

00:22:39.940 that are coming in almost every night. 0.99

00:22:41.560 The wall worked.

00:22:43.220 Yes, our border with Mexico is long.

00:22:48.500 Much of the land is just desolate.

00:22:50.760 It's desert.

00:22:51.380 It's wasteland.

00:22:52.460 But the wall works.

00:22:53.820 Of course. 1.00

00:22:55.160 That's why Israel has them. 0.83

00:22:56.760 Yeah. 0.98

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00:24:16.340 No, I completely agree.

00:24:17.660 So just back to the focus of counterterrorism, really, the focus of the entire U.S. government has been on Islamic extremism, has been on Israel's enemies for over 20 years now.

00:24:31.020 You don't hear any, or you don't see a mobilization of men and money to fight the drug cartels who are responsible objectively for so many more deaths in our country.

00:24:43.420 You're exactly right.

00:24:44.080 so does anyone ever bring that up and say wait a second we have a hundred thousand people dying a

00:24:48.780 year because of these on the on the contrary on the contrary the cia has something called the

00:24:53.740 what used to be called the counter narcotic center now it's called the crime and narcotic center

00:24:58.160 and that is the graveyard where people's careers go to die yeah the cia really care about stopping

00:25:06.980 the flow of drugs they just don't care you know this this wonderful show on netflix narcos yes so

00:25:12.820 in seasons one and two, just as the DEA is going to go in and grab Pablo Escobar or grab the

00:25:19.220 gentleman of Cali, the CIA station chief comes in and just screws the whole thing up. That's in that

00:25:25.280 show because that's what happens in real life. The CIA at the time cared only about communism

00:25:31.900 and stopping communism. And if the drug cartels were going to tell the CIA where the communists

00:25:37.920 were hiding, then the CIA was a-okay with the drug cartels. And that attitude has really never

00:25:43.940 changed. Why do you think that is? It doesn't make any sense. It's old think, Tucker. It's old think

00:25:51.020 where instead of saying our job is to disrupt any threat to the United States. Yes, that's what I

00:25:56.560 thought the job was. Their view is our job is to disrupt any Islamist, communist, fascist, whatever

00:26:06.400 foreign official challenge to the United States, whether it's governmental or it's an organized

00:26:13.920 terrorist group. They're just not thinking about the cartel. So it sounds like they're doing what

00:26:18.780 all organizations do ultimately, which is to protect themselves. Yes. It's all about kingdom

00:26:24.080 building. I will say I wrote a piece. I don't even remember for whom when President Trump

00:26:29.480 first declared that the drug cartels would be reclassified as foreign terrorist groups.

00:26:37.080 And everybody was laughing and making fun and how silly this was. I said, no, no, no, no.

00:26:42.980 You're underestimating him. He knows exactly what he's doing. He's not doing this for the PR

00:26:48.900 of naming the cartels as terrorist groups. He's doing it because legally it frees up

00:26:55.380 some agencies' abilities to act unilaterally against the cartels, and it frees up a great

00:27:03.560 deal of money to be used by CIA, NSA, DOD against the cartels. I said, this is a big deal.

00:27:11.300 This is not window dressing.

00:27:13.020 Did it have any effect?

00:27:14.780 I think not yet.

00:27:16.880 Yeah.

00:27:17.880 Not yet. Frankly, the army of people that we put against terrorism,

00:27:25.380 after 9-11 is what we need to do against drugs it's hard to think that that could happen now

00:27:32.520 considering that all resources of government certainly all attention in government is focused

00:27:36.400 on this iran i think i think that's the most important point yes i agree that there's just

00:27:42.740 no bandwidth for anything no and the the demands of a war especially one that you're losing which

00:27:49.400 we are, by any real measurement, they're so overwhelming. There's no time to think about

00:27:57.060 anything else, correct? You know, in the 91 Gulf War and in 03, the State Department initiated

00:28:03.400 this policy called burden sharing. Really what it is was a nice way of saying, we want all of

00:28:09.120 our allies to pay for this. But it worked. The Kuwaitis in 1990, the year that they were invaded

00:28:15.900 by Iraq. For the very first time in their history, they made more from their investments than they

00:28:21.080 made from oil. So they had this bottomless pit of money. They paid for most of the liberation of

00:28:26.960 their own country, but the Europeans also paid. And so it ended up not costing us anything. 0.68

00:28:32.920 We went down the burden sharing road again in 2003, and a lot of it came out of our own pockets,

00:28:39.200 but our European and Gulf allies also paid for it. This time, nobody was consulted.

00:28:44.900 And so this is all coming from our own pockets.

00:28:48.020 And I think that's unsustainable over the long term.

00:28:53.040 To the beginning of it, the president said, well, two things.

00:28:57.660 One, that we destroyed Iran's nuclear program in June.

00:29:01.020 But you're saying that there was no nuclear program.

00:29:04.320 There was no nuclear program.

00:29:05.640 They had partially enriched uranium, certainly, which under the NPT they're allowed to do.

00:29:11.960 It's subject to United Nations inspection.

00:29:15.560 Yeah, they were not in violation.

00:29:17.200 But there was no nuclear program in June.

00:29:19.480 No nuclear weapons program.

00:29:20.880 So nuclear weapons program, right.

00:29:23.040 So we destroyed the nuclear weapons program,

00:29:25.300 which doesn't exist.

00:29:26.100 But then in February, we were told again

00:29:29.040 that the nuclear weapons program is absolutely real,

00:29:31.220 that the threat is imminent.

00:29:32.760 Yes.

00:29:33.060 People go on television, on Fox News and say,

00:29:35.340 Iran can lob an ICBM into Miami

00:29:37.820 and obliterate the United States. 1.00

00:29:39.580 You know, I'm glad that you brought that up too,

00:29:41.280 because that is also not true. And a lot of people are saying it. The Iranians did something

00:29:46.260 recently that was interesting in that they took two of their medium range missiles. 0.57

00:29:55.120 They stripped them down to the point where it was just the missile and the engine. And that was it.

00:30:00.660 There was nothing inside of them just to see how much distance they could get. And they made it

00:30:05.120 almost to Diego Garcia, which is far. So if you instead point them toward Europe,

00:30:14.120 yes, without anything inside these missiles, they could reach Western Europe. That's not

00:30:20.700 a delivery system. That's just smoke and mirrors. They can only go that far if they're completely

00:30:27.320 empty. If you weigh them down with explosives or God forbid with nuclear material, even if

00:30:34.960 it's just to make a dirty bomb they can't get that far they could get to cyprus they could get

00:30:40.380 certainly to israel and easily to the the arab gulf countries but there was no threat to the

00:30:47.440 united states so the ic the american intel community the those 18 agencies you referred to

00:30:54.600 did anybody in those agencies say to the president this is a major threat the nuclear program in

00:31:00.940 iran the people that i still talk to at the agency say specifically no no so that information that

00:31:08.120 lie came from israel yes right why would a president believe a foreign intel agency before

00:31:15.780 his own i don't know that's really the 64 000 question you you recall in the in the first term

00:31:22.580 when president uh trump met with uh vladimir putin he did not take his intelligence people

00:31:30.080 into the meeting with him.

00:31:31.820 Putin took his intelligence people

00:31:33.340 into meeting with him

00:31:34.060 because the president said

00:31:35.240 he trusted the other side's intelligence people

00:31:38.300 more than he trusted his own.

00:31:39.980 And I get it.

00:31:41.520 I get that he believes

00:31:43.060 that he was under direct threat

00:31:44.340 from the deep state

00:31:46.760 and the John Brennans of the world.

00:31:48.740 I understand that.

00:31:49.920 But I'm surprised that that feeling,

00:31:54.880 that belief has held over

00:31:56.640 all this way into the second term

00:31:59.000 where you would believe the Israeli information

00:32:03.280 before you would believe your own people's information, 0.83

00:32:06.380 especially when you know that the Israelis 0.95

00:32:08.180 have a vested interest in you doing their dirty work for them.

00:32:11.520 What about General Dan Cain,

00:32:12.940 chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff?

00:32:14.280 So this is someone who I think the president,

00:32:16.580 well, I know the president likes,

00:32:18.260 certainly speaks well of,

00:32:20.400 he would be informed on this, right?

00:32:22.400 The chairman has a pretty clear readout

00:32:25.800 on what the intelligence is, right?

00:32:27.080 Yes, I'm glad you brought him up.

00:32:29.000 I wanted to bring him up too.

00:32:30.900 We have some mutual friends

00:32:32.340 and not only have I never heard

00:32:35.560 a single negative ever about General Cain,

00:32:40.380 I hear only the most superlative things.

00:32:43.500 Yeah, me too.

00:32:43.880 That he is the best chairman

00:32:46.900 of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

00:32:48.420 that the country could hope for right now.

00:32:50.820 But we also hear these leaks

00:32:52.900 into the political press in Washington

00:32:55.500 that he has argued against this war

00:32:59.100 from the very beginning.

00:33:00.400 It was my own experience.

00:33:02.060 I don't believe that's true.

00:33:03.080 I hope that I'm right.

00:33:07.020 I hope that I'm right.

00:33:08.600 It was my experience at the CIA

00:33:09.940 that the Joint Chiefs were the last ones to go to war.

00:33:13.280 They were the ones that always argued

00:33:15.580 until the bitter end not to attack Iraq in 2003

00:33:20.580 because there was no exit strategy.

00:33:23.400 I think that's the problem today.

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00:34:44.380 You want to hear an interesting coincidence?

00:34:46.680 I'm sure it's just a coincidence,

00:34:47.920 but on 9-11 on the actual day,

00:34:50.460 September 11th,

00:34:51.820 there are four planes.

00:34:53.220 Two hit the World Trade Center.

00:34:54.120 One hits the Pentagon.

00:34:54.800 on the fourth, which was late, Flight 93,

00:34:57.500 wound up crashing in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

00:34:59.400 We know that the vice president gave an order

00:35:01.280 to shoot that plane down because,

00:35:02.980 understandably, by the way,

00:35:04.840 believed it was headed into Washington,

00:35:06.280 which I think it was.

00:35:07.880 Four American fighter jets were scrambled from D.C.,

00:35:11.700 chased that plane, and the word story was,

00:35:14.960 their explanation was, we didn't get there in time,

00:35:17.480 and the plane was brought down instead by Todd Beamer

00:35:20.460 and the other passengers, famously.

00:35:22.360 of those four fighter jets of the pilots of those four fighter jets they were national guard pilots

00:35:28.800 two became generals wow and one of them is dan kane i did not know that yeah it's not widely

00:35:35.900 known but it's a fact what are the odds of that not good i i don't know anything beyond what i

00:35:43.660 just said but i just think that's such an interesting interesting fact um so okay let's

00:35:50.540 say you're the and i've never heard a bad word about general kane other than he did not take

00:35:56.840 a strong position on on the iran war before it started i'd be very disappointed in that that's

00:36:02.500 i believe that's a fact i think there's a lot of backfilling going on through leaking but when it

00:36:08.500 came down to it general kane did not say this is a bad idea he did not say that in fact he said it's

00:36:13.580 not my job to say things like that my question to you is is it his job to say things like that like

00:36:17.680 if you're him, if you're a senior briefer, if you're John Ratcliffe at CIA, or any of the people

00:36:22.980 who advise the president on foreign policy questions, wars, what's your view of what they

00:36:28.460 should say to him? If you think this is a terrible idea, should you say that? At the CIA, that's an

00:36:34.060 easy one to answer. The CIA is not supposed to be a policy organization, supposed to be a policy

00:36:39.980 support organization. So the CIA director should never take a position on things like that.

00:36:44.180 they do, obviously, but they're not supposed to. When George W. Bush was president in his second

00:36:50.340 term, he changed the structure of the PDB, the president's daily brief. It used to be for most

00:36:56.360 of the articles, it would be a paragraph of fact and a paragraph of analysis. He ordered a third

00:37:02.220 paragraph to be added policy recommendation. And it was like setting the building on fire.

00:37:08.880 Nobody wanted to be responsible for telling the president of the United States what he should do

00:37:12.840 about a policy. That's just not what the CIA was created for. Behind closed doors, of course,

00:37:19.240 they're going to offer advice. When I was there, the Joint Chiefs almost always deferred to the

00:37:26.440 Secretary of Defense, but they were also almost always of one mind. When we attacked Iraq in 2003,

00:37:36.040 there was a very significant split where it was the office of the vice president, the office of

00:37:40.420 the secretary of defense and the um nsc that were the pro-war faction right and the anti-war

00:37:47.080 the political people the political people crazy as it sounds well maybe not crazy cia state

00:37:52.320 department and joint chiefs that were opposed to the war i'm not surprised at all i'm not

00:37:57.020 surprised at all i will never defend the cia um however like massad they're a stakeholder in the

00:38:05.160 country yeah it probably shouldn't be but they are yeah right and so sometimes the voices of

00:38:09.900 restraint come from the people with the you know the long-term interest in the state i think that's

00:38:15.340 right right yes yeah yeah so yeah that does not surprise and i i'm not complimenting cia no no i

00:38:22.340 know in the chat i'm going to be accused of being a shill for the cia which i'm not i mean when the

00:38:26.820 israelis bombed doha on september 10th right before um september 9th i guess the day before

00:38:33.700 charlie kirk was murdered uh that was like lunatic there's a lunatic thing to do to bomb

00:38:38.220 you know one of our closest allies in the world yeah it was insane and massad did not participate

00:38:44.040 in that because they thought it was reckless which it was oh it was bonkers um but so massad

00:38:50.880 was a voice of restraint in israel which is like hard to get your head around but does that surprise

00:38:54.960 you no because you always always have to consider the potential for blowback unintended unintended

00:39:00.660 consequences responses that you haven't fully thought through yeah blowback is a problem

00:39:06.440 so what kind of blowback is the united states looking at now that we've

00:39:10.520 killed the religious leader of this country and his family yeah you know we haven't had a

00:39:17.800 problem with shiite terrorism in the united states during my lifetime or ever no are we

00:39:23.760 going to have one now i think not only because it's always been so hard for iranians or iranian

00:39:33.660 proxies to get visas to come to the united states so you know these these rumors i think they came

00:39:38.960 from the fbi right after the conflict began that there's a cell in honolulu there's a cell in

00:39:45.560 detroit no there aren't if there were you'd just grab them instead of but to say why are you telling

00:39:51.360 me about cells shouldn't you be arresting the cells exactly planning terror exactly i remember

00:39:55.600 when i was still with the cia driving down first avenue in new york and with two fbi agents one of

00:40:01.380 them said you see that storefront that's the headquarters of hezbollah's cell in new york

00:40:07.200 and i said well why don't you do something about it they're a terrorist group what did he say

00:40:12.500 taking me on a tour for just go kick the door down and grab them if it's a the headquarters

00:40:17.800 of hezbollah's terrorist cell oh they just kept driving like i didn't understand yeah but i think

00:40:24.780 the um i think that the that the attack on iran has galvanized the iranian public the government

00:40:33.200 was not a house of cards we are not going to be seen as liberators we're going to be seen as

00:40:37.560 attackers and possibly occupiers and i think that's the most immediate challenge we're going

00:40:43.920 to face so that i guess seems obvious now yeah seven weeks in but at the time my impression is 0.94

00:40:51.640 the president really believe that if you kill the ayatollah the whole country collapses but coming

00:40:56.620 back to hillary clinton the reason why it didn't is that it's not actually a theocracy it's a

00:41:02.120 military dictatorship oh it's actually one of the most liberal countries in the entire you know what

00:41:07.960 it is i think you and i are the only ones who are the only people who know that yes and we haven't

00:41:13.540 been to iran so many of my friends have been to iran relatively recently before the hostilities

00:41:18.740 began and they they posted videos on youtube of just walking down the street in tehran and the

00:41:25.560 restaurants are open and the cafes and there's music and people laughing and having late dinners

00:41:31.020 and it's just normal life yeah no i i remember my father working in iran going back and forth to

00:41:38.400 iran and and telling me now it's like tehran specifically i mean i think they're it's a huge

00:41:44.220 country but tehran yeah there's tons of of liberals yeah that one of the most amazing pictures i think

00:41:52.320 that's one of the reasons trump was convinced that the regime would fall right because there

00:41:58.280 were lots of you know secular liberals in tehran yes but one of the most amazing pictures i think 0.95

00:42:04.740 i've ever seen was a picture of a very butch looking lesbian type woman with a nose ring

00:42:09.220 standing at in tehran standing at an intersection waving a photograph of the ayatollah after he was

00:42:16.740 killed and the point is this is exactly the person who opposed him while he was still alive but now 0.92

00:42:22.220 that we've killed him you got all the you know the lesbians of tehran are all of a sudden for the 0.91

00:42:28.020 ayatollah i think that's exactly right we've forced them together we really have so look at 0.99

00:42:35.980 it this way if if i don't like whoever happens to be in the uh in the white house and i go to

00:42:42.000 demonstrations and my fist is in the air and i don't like this person's policy and then the 0.97

00:42:46.540 russians attack i'm gonna pick up a gun and i'm gonna fight the russians oh for sure no matter 0.56

00:42:51.880 who attacks no matter who attacks right but human nature gets suspended for our adversaries because 1.00

00:42:57.360 they're not human beings so they're not going to behave in ways that we would recognize they're

00:43:00.960 totally irrational it's a suicide cult or whatever they're telling you on fox news it's a but the

00:43:06.800 but the point is that you will suspend all rational analysis and because you can't predict people like

00:43:14.680 that other than they want to kill you're right and when you're the only analysis that you're

00:43:18.260 getting or paying attention to is from either the israelis or the mek the mujahideen hulk which is

00:43:24.640 really no more than a quasi communist cult, you know, then you can't rely on the information.

00:43:31.940 Okay. So what, can you explain the MEK? So there are, there are big allies in Iran, right?

00:43:36.860 Yeah. Which just sends chills up my spine. Okay. So who are they?

00:43:40.680 So they were founded by a husband and wife team, uh, back in the sixties. And in the seventies,

00:43:47.500 they were based in Iraq, uh, Northeastern Iraq, and they would launch these cross border attacks

00:43:53.360 into iran deep into iran like in tehran terrorist attacks they they uh attempted to murder the

00:44:01.960 american ambassador they attempted to murder a three-star general who was the the senior most

00:44:06.960 american military official in iran they've carried out anti-american terrorist attacks over the course

00:44:12.380 of decades. Anti-American. Anti-American. And then they switched sides. When Saddam Hussein

00:44:23.480 pushed them out of Iraq, they relocated mostly to Paris. Now, the husband disappeared. It's always

00:44:31.740 Paris. Always Paris. Well, that's where the Aitole Khomeini lived until 1979. Yeah, for years.

00:44:35.860 Yeah. And that's where the Greek, what became the Greek terrorist groups, 17 November and

00:44:41.260 popular revolutionary struggle they started in paris that's where paul pot started paul pot

00:44:45.520 studied in paris yep carl marx's daughter married paul la fargue the the father of french

00:44:52.040 communism so uh yeah paris is kind of a kind of a screwed up place it can be anyway um miriam

00:44:59.680 rajavi's husband vanished never to be seen again the conventional wisdom is that she killed him 0.92

00:45:06.680 or had him killed. And she took over the MEK. So in 2009, when Barack Obama is elected president,

00:45:16.360 Hillary Clinton becomes, God forbid, becomes secretary of state. The MEK hires some of the

00:45:25.880 most high-powered lobbyists in Washington to get them off the terrorism list. And they engaged with

00:45:33.400 both Democrats and Republicans.

00:45:35.920 I mean, everybody from Howard Dean to Rudy Giuliani.

00:45:40.240 Howard Dean was lobbying for M.E.K.?

00:45:42.660 Oh, yeah.

00:45:43.700 And Rudy Giuliani. 1.00

00:45:44.880 That's pathetic. 0.99

00:45:45.580 You should see the pictures of them together. 1.00

00:45:47.320 It's sickening.

00:45:48.640 At these big banquets in Washington to raise money for the M.E.K. 0.80

00:45:51.360 These are the people who tried to kill the U.S. ambassador?

00:45:53.660 But they're the good guys now.

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00:46:56.120 saying, you know, we're the enemy of Israel's enemy. Therefore we're your friend. That's

00:47:01.680 exactly what the argument is. And so they got themselves off the terrorism list. They pay

00:47:07.220 millions of dollars to D.C. lobbyists, senior political figures, former political figures,

00:47:14.300 and now can accept American weapons. Well, the MEK doesn't have the wherewithal to fight

00:47:24.040 the Iranian government. It's just all about arming themselves.

00:47:28.580 What do they believe?

00:47:30.300 They're ardently communist.

00:47:33.200 And Howard Dean and Rudy Giuliani were lobbying for them? 0.78

00:47:37.160 Because remember, the Iranian regime is this theocratic terrorist cabal, 0.96

00:47:43.800 and we have to overthrow them to make the Middle East safe. 0.99

00:47:48.420 It's insane. 0.99

00:47:50.640 I know very little about MEK other than what you've said,

00:47:56.280 But I do know that they are feared.

00:47:58.660 Yes.

00:47:59.480 And I know that- 0.53

00:48:00.480 They're murderous.

00:48:01.420 Yes.

00:48:02.040 And it's suspected,

00:48:03.780 because I've heard this from intel people,

00:48:05.860 that they are used basically as assassins for hire. 0.98

00:48:10.260 Well, the conventional wisdom is that the Israelis

00:48:12.700 use the MEK regularly 0.98

00:48:14.400 to carry out these assassinations

00:48:16.300 we've seen over the years in Tehran.

00:48:18.600 Yeah.

00:48:19.140 And I have heard,

00:48:21.120 I don't know if it's true,

00:48:22.500 in the United States.

00:48:23.620 oh so that was yeah and i heard that from someone who's pretty informed doesn't mean it's true

00:48:29.680 of course it's hard to know what is true now but but the mek is getting taking money from israel

00:48:36.200 yes lots of money and i think most people who pay attention think the mek is like reasonable

00:48:43.700 pro-america group right you know from the very beginning when they were rehabilitated in 2009

00:48:49.840 i just started shaking my head like what are we doing what are these obama people thinking but it

00:48:56.260 turned out wasn't just the obama people the mek first of all had the money to hire all these

00:49:02.320 multi-million dollar lobbyists and they were smart in that they did it across the political spectrum

00:49:07.660 democrats money from rich iranian exiles who are willing to hold their nose over the you know

00:49:16.440 personal ideology of the organization and just say, well, if you're going to kill, you know,

00:49:21.380 Ayatollahs and Hojatollah Slams, then okay, I'll write you a check. And the Israelis, of course, 0.97

00:49:26.660 see them as useful. Yes. That's quite amazing. What about the Shah's son, who we've also been

00:49:35.020 trained to think of as a good guy? Yeah. He is most definitely not a good guy. So who is he? So

00:49:41.840 he's the son of the Shah who was deposed famously in 1979. Correct. Correct. And when his father 0.99

00:49:48.400 was deposed, he was only, what, 19 years old, 18, 19 years old. So he came to the United States

00:49:54.680 with his family. The Shah got sick almost as soon as he came to the United States. He developed 0.86

00:50:01.060 cancer. He was treated in, I think it was in Houston. The Iranian government under the Ayatollahs

00:50:08.440 objected so vociferously that they raided the American embassy and took our diplomats hostage,

00:50:13.800 held them for 444 days. We told the Shah to go get cancer treatment somewhere else. That's right. 0.61

00:50:17.940 He went to the Bahamas for a while, then to Panama, and then ended up finally settling in

00:50:22.580 Cairo, and he died in Cairo. Well, his family stayed here in the United States, both in

00:50:27.320 Northern Virginia. Well, Reza Pallavi, the crown prince in Northern Virginia,

00:50:32.300 the mother in North Carolina, and Reza's younger brother in Boston.

00:50:38.160 Reza Pellavi is not equipped to lead anything.

00:50:43.860 He is a playboy. 0.95

00:50:46.560 He had an affair with his brother's wife. 0.76

00:50:49.600 His brother-

00:50:50.260 Actually?

00:50:50.540 Actually.

00:50:51.320 His brother turned to drugs and committed suicide.

00:50:55.500 His own wife, Reza Pellavi's wife, is having a very public affair right now with her personal trainer.

00:51:02.240 The Parisian press is just crazy over it.

00:51:05.880 And they have pictures.

00:51:07.680 They publish pictures of the two of them together all the time. 1.00

00:51:10.020 It's humiliating in anybody's culture, let alone in Iranian culture, which is supposed 0.99

00:51:15.700 to be very pious and very Muslim. 0.61

00:51:18.380 So on top of that, he has said repeatedly, most recently on the Patrick Bet David podcast,

00:51:24.280 that now he doesn't think he wants to go back to Iran. 0.90

00:51:28.220 He's made a life here.

00:51:30.900 He's very wealthy.

00:51:32.220 His kids are Americans.

00:51:33.940 There's really no reason to go back to Iran.

00:51:35.860 Okay, so why are we talking about you, Ben,

00:51:38.140 in the first place?

00:51:39.000 Well, he was all over Mar-a-Lago and the White House.

00:51:41.740 I'm the guy, I'm the guy.

00:51:43.340 And then, well, maybe I'm not the guy.

00:51:45.300 I'm kind of afraid.

00:51:45.780 So what has he done for the last 47 years?

00:51:48.200 Nothing.

00:51:48.960 You see him every once in a while at cultural events.

00:51:52.920 You see him every once, twice a year,

00:51:55.960 Iranian singers will come to Washington

00:51:58.720 or there will be a Farsi language play,

00:52:02.160 a performance or something.

00:52:03.360 And he'll go to those things.

00:52:05.500 But he's just not a player in Washington.

00:52:08.760 Even in Iranian exile circles, he's just not a player.

00:52:12.760 So why were we talking about him nonstop all summer?

00:52:16.120 Because the Israelis like him very much.

00:52:18.800 Remember, his father opened diplomatic relations with Israel.

00:52:21.940 There was an Israeli embassy in Tehran.

00:52:24.580 Oh, yeah.

00:52:25.380 And there was an Iranian embassy in Jerusalem. 0.54

00:52:28.720 And so I think there are a lot of people who pine for those days and think that, well, in a perfect world, if Reza Pahlavi were Reza Shah, then Israel and Iran would be friends and all the Iranian people would fall into line and we could all live happily ever after.

00:52:46.300 But is there any indication that the people of Iran,

00:52:50.780 to the extent their view matters, obviously it doesn't,

00:52:53.360 but let's just say it did,

00:52:56.800 that they want to exchange a theocracy for a monarchy?

00:53:01.060 Not a chance.

00:53:02.140 The only place where he has solid support 0.98

00:53:05.000 is in the Iranian,

00:53:07.040 now the Iranian-American community in Southern California.

00:53:10.520 Yeah, in Beverly Hills.

00:53:11.840 Yeah, the only zip code in LA to go for Trump.

00:53:14.300 That's right.

00:53:15.260 Yeah.

00:53:15.420 In fact, I think the mayor of Beverly Hills is Iranian.

00:53:18.180 Yeah, and by the way,

00:53:19.200 some of the most entertaining people in the world,

00:53:21.800 some of the warmest people in the world

00:53:23.560 are the Persian Jews of Southern California. 1.00

00:53:27.940 Very intense, extremely intense. 1.00

00:53:30.240 And very successful.

00:53:31.260 Super successful,

00:53:32.180 but I've never had a bad experience with them.

00:53:34.240 I've always really liked them.

00:53:34.960 Agreed.

00:53:35.760 But a lot.

00:53:37.080 Yeah, no, they're great. 1.00

00:53:38.320 But this is yet another example of an exile community

00:53:41.520 leveraging the power of the US economy and military 0.74

00:53:44.760 for its own parochial ends.

00:53:46.740 Like, just be grateful you're here.

00:53:48.880 Like, stop trying to get my neighbors killed 0.99

00:53:51.580 in another dumb war. 0.99

00:53:52.940 But no one can say that. 0.99

00:53:54.420 No, no, you can't say that.

00:53:56.500 There's political fallout.

00:53:57.360 So the Shaw's son thing was like totally fake

00:54:00.800 from the very beginning.

00:54:01.520 Totally manufactured.

00:54:03.440 Yeah. 0.99

00:54:03.840 Didn't we do this in Afghanistan?

00:54:05.920 Boy, did we.

00:54:07.520 Some guy ran a restaurant in Baltimore

00:54:09.120 was going to be like the king of Afghanistan.

00:54:11.180 Do you remember this?

00:54:12.280 I mean, Karzai's brother.

00:54:13.640 Yeah.

00:54:13.800 He still has the restaurant in Baltimore.

00:54:16.400 What?

00:54:17.320 It's quite good.

00:54:19.140 But where does the U, I mean, in the face of like 100 years of failing to pull off these schemes, 0.96

00:54:26.520 why does no one pause and say, we can't just install someone to run a foreign country? 0.72

00:54:33.220 We don't even speak the language.

00:54:34.360 We know nothing about it.

00:54:35.260 It's because we don't understand history.

00:54:38.340 again one of my experiences at the cia is and not just at the cia john carey made the same mistakes

00:54:46.120 we always think we're the smartest people in the room that we know better than everybody else

00:54:52.420 on what basis arrogance it's just arrogance yeah and uh and we're not the smartest people in the

00:55:00.700 room and we don't know history i've told this story a million times the night before we attacked

00:55:04.840 uh iraq we we had the final principles committee meeting principles committee is normally chaired

00:55:10.500 by the president it includes the vice president the secretaries of state and defense the national

00:55:14.600 security advisor the chairman of the joint chiefs the vice chairman and um in this case the head of

00:55:20.960 and then a bunch of senior level nsc people and everybody brings a note taker i was george tenet's

00:55:27.620 note taker and uh director he's the director of the cia at the time and uh for whatever reason

00:55:32.940 the president didn't attend this meeting there was something else going on so the vice president

00:55:36.820 chaired the meeting and the president didn't attend the final principals meeting before the 0.81

00:55:43.180 iraq war right but dick cheney did but dick cheney did boy did he okay sorry and uh to make a long

00:55:52.040 story short um general tommy franks who was the commander of central command at the time 0.93

00:55:57.340 gave his briefing we know our men are here and there and elements of this group and that group

00:56:02.400 and the third core and the first core.

00:56:04.640 And I'm like, okay, and I'm writing it all down.

00:56:07.020 And then he says, if all goes as well,

00:56:10.080 we're gonna invade Iraq the next morning. 0.73

00:56:11.540 If all goes as well, we can be in Tehran by August.

00:56:15.300 And George discreetly turns off his microphone

00:56:17.720 and then he turns to me,

00:56:19.000 I'm sitting behind his right shoulder and he says,

00:56:21.300 did he say Tehran or did he say Baghdad?

00:56:25.480 And I said, he said Tehran.

00:56:28.080 And George says, have these people lost their minds?

00:56:31.620 I got back to the office at the end of the meeting

00:56:33.820 and the deputy director said to me,

00:56:35.660 how'd the principal's committee meeting go? 0.90

00:56:37.280 And I said, did you know we were gonna attack Iran?

00:56:39.940 And he said, are they still talking about that?

00:56:42.680 We're not gonna attack Iran.

00:56:44.380 That's just a pipe dream

00:56:45.560 that these people at the White House have.

00:56:47.740 And I said, do they know nothing about history?

00:56:51.320 And he said, no, they know nothing about history.

00:56:54.400 As we were walking out of that meeting,

00:56:57.120 one of the NSC people,

00:56:58.820 a guy who i disrespected i think the most of of my colleagues at the nsc he said giddily as we were

00:57:10.180 standing up to walk out of the meeting he said when we cross that border tomorrow they're going

00:57:14.340 to throw flowers at us and i thought buddy have you never read a history book they're not going

00:57:20.200 to see us as as liberators they're going to see us as invaders and occupiers and you know we thought

00:57:27.380 well, not we, so many of my contemporaries thought, well, we're going to move into Southern Iraq and 0.79

00:57:33.480 that's the Shia part. And they've been just so brutalized by Saddam Hussein. They're going to

00:57:38.800 greet us as liberators. We're going to arm them and we're going to go together to Baghdad and 0.99

00:57:44.620 liberate Baghdad. It's like, no, first of all, we scared the hell out of them when we crossed the 0.95

00:57:48.880 border. There was this very tense standoff where we moved into Najaf, which is one of the holiest

00:57:55.520 sites in all of Shia Islam. And there was a huge group of people and several ran inside one of the

00:58:05.020 mosques to take refuge. And we're like, no, no, no, we don't mean you any harm. We came to liberate

00:58:11.520 you. And they were like, get out of our city. And so finally, what the military guys did is they

00:58:18.480 set down their weapons and they asked to see the tribal leaders. And so they met with the tribal

00:58:25.120 leaders inside the mosque and said, we came here to liberate you. And the tribal leaders said,

00:58:32.020 we don't want your liberation. If you're here to fight Saddam, go fight Saddam, leave us out of it.

00:58:38.720 And so that's why we didn't have support in the South. Why should we expect anything different

00:58:43.960 in Iran? No, no. And an invading army inevitably mistreats civilians. I saw it in Iraq. I don't

00:58:51.240 think any they don't mean it most american soldiers are nice guys and but there's just

00:58:56.260 no way around it because they're under threat or the perception of threat and so they have to get

00:59:01.460 you know rough they have to stick rifles in people's faces all the time and then it's just

00:59:07.120 a slippery slope from there yeah even if they don't shoot anybody it's just like engenders

00:59:11.740 hatred and resentment why wouldn't it if someone did that to you that's right i saw i remember

00:59:16.240 seeing this at a gas station in nazaria where they you know whatever humiliate a man in front

00:59:21.500 of his son and i don't think there was an option you know everyone's afraid of getting killed so

00:59:26.840 they get they have to act that way but downstream from that where's that son now right 23 years

00:59:32.980 later and how anti-american is he now yeah so yeah by definition it's counterproductive so

00:59:39.180 um just to your point about the president believing that iran was a house of cards

00:59:44.400 It just needed one swift push to collapse.

00:59:48.220 Where did he get that idea? 0.60

00:59:50.260 He could only have gotten that idea from Benjamin Netanyahu.

00:59:54.520 That's it.

00:59:55.420 Because the CIA analysis has been consistent over the course of decades.

01:00:01.820 We can't just fire a couple of rockets and take down a government in a country of 93

01:00:07.340 million people.

01:00:08.280 That's just not the way real life works.

01:00:10.480 They're going to rally around their leadership because we're outsiders.

01:00:14.400 um and just you make the point about history but i mean i think you could

01:00:20.800 saudi is probably in uh competition but i mean of all the countries in that part of the world

01:00:27.960 iran is the most durable i mean it's a real country it's a real country with a proud

01:00:35.620 history stretching back millennia yes i have a lot of iranian american friends

01:00:42.800 some quite close and they never stop talking about the history to the point where i have to say

01:00:50.000 please can we please talk about something other than you know cyrus empire please and xerxes and

01:00:56.720 i i just can't anymore i need a break but that's how proud they are of their you don't see that

01:01:01.480 with say kuwaitis no no who you know god bless them i love kuwait oh me too i'm not they don't

01:01:06.880 have a history no right no so iran of all the countries maybe in the world that would be high

01:01:13.580 on the list of ones that's pretty hard to to beat i couldn't agree more okay so even i know that and

01:01:20.240 the country's the same size as western europe yeah it's not like you can just launch a couple

01:01:25.360 pinprick strikes and the whole thing falls apart it's the size of western europe 93 million people

01:01:31.920 with a forbidding topography on top of it all.

01:01:34.940 Oh, for sure.

01:01:35.900 So yeah, not easy.

01:01:37.460 We go in on February 28th

01:01:40.040 and Iran does not, strictly speaking,

01:01:43.480 control the strait at the outlet of the Persian Gulf.

01:01:49.060 There's unimpeded shipping.

01:01:52.280 The six Gulf states are thriving.

01:01:55.340 Iraq, also in the Persian Gulf,

01:01:57.220 is pretty peaceful for Iraq or whatever.

01:02:00.600 It's fine.

01:02:01.120 we're not reading about it every day. Things are fine. Now they're not fine at all. How are they

01:02:07.860 restored to fine? Only through diplomacy. That's it. Whether we like it or not, especially whether

01:02:16.640 the Israelis like it or not, we are going to have to sit across the table from these people

01:02:21.260 and come up with an agreement. It's going to be an agreement that we are not going to be 100%

01:02:26.820 happy with but that's what diplomacy is all about not by not happy with you mean iran will be

01:02:32.720 more powerful at the end of this than they were i think that's an inevitability we have forced 0.89

01:02:38.360 the iranians into the embrace of the chinese and the russians and the indians and we're going to 1.00

01:02:44.040 get to the point where we're just not going to be able to stand up against that kind of an alliance 0.96

01:02:51.580 and make meaningful gains.

01:02:54.800 Just think about this.

01:02:56.600 Iran is a BRICS country, right?

01:02:58.600 Brazil, Russia, India, China,

01:03:01.900 plus South Africa and Argentina and Iran

01:03:04.580 and a couple of others, South Korea.

01:03:07.160 Eventually, using the European Union as their model,

01:03:10.800 they're going to come up with a unified currency.

01:03:13.540 It's probably 20 or 30 years down the road,

01:03:15.920 but it's going to happen one of these days.

01:03:17.580 that will be the end of American hegemony in the region.

01:03:23.120 Because as things stand now,

01:03:25.980 all oil transactions in the world,

01:03:27.740 almost all, are done in dollars, right?

01:03:30.900 The famous petrodollar.

01:03:32.760 Well, a year ago, Kuwait sold a shipment of oil to China

01:03:35.940 for yuan. 0.96

01:03:37.440 And the Indians, what, a week ago, 0.84

01:03:39.540 paid for a shipment of oil in yuan. 0.97

01:03:43.020 So we're already seeing the cracks in the dam.

01:03:45.340 and then just blasting the place

01:03:48.420 is only going to make this inevitability come sooner.

01:03:51.760 I think it weakens us.

01:03:53.800 I couldn't agree more.

01:03:55.220 I think it's definitely the end of something profound.

01:04:00.140 So, but what are our military options at this point?

01:04:05.320 I'm not sure that there are any viable military options.

01:04:10.160 I mean, God forbid we should target

01:04:13.820 the civilian infrastructure. 0.92

01:04:14.780 That's a war crime.

01:04:15.900 It's actually very clear in international law.

01:04:18.040 You can't bomb the civilian infrastructure.

01:04:19.760 You can't bomb the electrical grid

01:04:21.760 or the water treatment plants. 0.98

01:04:23.720 You can't, and we do, but it's a war crime.

01:04:26.500 You can't do it. 0.85

01:04:27.820 And so what are we going to do?

01:04:29.040 Just keep blasting the IRGC?

01:04:31.780 Okay, well, where's that gotten us?

01:04:34.580 They're survivors.

01:04:35.980 It hasn't led to the collapse of the government.

01:04:38.800 So when are we going to finally come to the conclusion

01:04:40.860 that what we're doing is just simply not working?

01:04:44.280 Maybe we can rest some concessions 0.99

01:04:47.140 from the Iranians across the negotiating table. 1.00

01:04:50.880 Maybe we can figure out how to use their closeness

01:04:54.540 with the Chinese and the Russians to our benefit. 0.97

01:04:57.280 I'm not really sure how, but maybe we can get there.

01:04:59.760 But we're going to have to let the diplomats

01:05:01.560 do what diplomats are paid to do.

01:05:03.660 I don't think we have any left.

01:05:04.960 No.

01:05:06.060 I mean, all of these negotiations

01:05:08.760 have been run by non-diplomats, real estate developers.

01:05:11.620 I'm glad that you brought that up.

01:05:12.980 I had made a mental note to raise that, and I forgot.

01:05:16.540 We have almost no U.S. ambassadors in the six GCC countries.

01:05:21.200 Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates.

01:05:24.520 Most of them were relieved of their duties a year ago and have never been replaced.

01:05:29.560 And so there is no Philip Habib to go from country to country right now, as there was in the 1980s.

01:05:35.640 Why? Why do we have no ambassadors in our most important allies?

01:05:38.520 I think the president concluded that these ambassadors were not fully bought into his foreign policy, and he withdrew them short of tour.

01:05:48.740 They were all professional diplomats, career diplomats, not political appointees.

01:05:54.620 And the department just never named new ambassadors.

01:06:00.260 It almost seems like this is an intentional effort to destroy the United States by our own government.

01:06:06.000 It feels that way, doesn't it?

01:06:06.880 Yes.

01:06:08.520 Okay, so back, I just want to ask one last question about how we got here. So two or three

01:06:15.540 weeks after this war began, the head of the National Counterterrorism Center, Joe Kent,

01:06:19.860 resigned. In his resignation letter, he said, I believe, he didn't say this in his letter,

01:06:25.120 he said it in an interview with me shortly after the next day. He said, I believe the Butler 0.95

01:06:30.660 assassination attempt, the other assassination attempt in Florida, a couple of breaches of

01:06:37.680 Donald Trump's personal security secret service detail and Charlie Kirk's murder may all have

01:06:44.120 played a role in convincing the president to go to war with Iran. What do you think that means?

01:06:50.760 I would not be at all surprised. You know what? Let me preface this by saying I don't have any

01:06:55.440 inside information. I don't either. But I would not be surprised if a person or multiple people

01:07:03.520 got into the president's ear and said, this isn't a coincidence that there were these three events. 1.00

01:07:10.400 There were these three events because the Iranians are behind it. They've got these cells. They're 0.96

01:07:15.620 around the United States. We can't identify them. We can't catch them, but they're gunning for you.

01:07:21.180 And Charlie Kirk was a practice hit or Charlie Kirk was a message or whatever. And I wouldn't

01:07:30.520 be surprised if the president would believe something like that. If people he trusts are

01:07:35.600 telling him there's a problem and the problem originates in Iran, whether it's true or not,

01:07:41.760 that he would respond to that. A lot of people did tell him that. That's a fact. I can confirm

01:07:46.940 it. People told him Iran is out to kill you. The Butler assassination attempt, Iran was behind it. 0.99

01:07:53.880 People were saying that, fact.

01:07:56.920 But where that theory falls down

01:07:59.220 is with the Charlie Kirk assassination.

01:08:01.160 So if you were trying to claim

01:08:03.440 that the Iranians were behind it

01:08:05.960 and there were leads

01:08:07.100 from the National Counterterrorism Center

01:08:08.800 or the ODNI

01:08:10.560 that suggested foreign involvement,

01:08:12.940 who knows if they go anywhere,

01:08:14.800 you would follow up on those leads.

01:08:16.260 You would have to follow up on those leads.

01:08:17.980 But they shut them down.

01:08:19.100 Yes.

01:08:19.360 And that's a fact.

01:08:20.280 and you know it doesn't make you a reckless conspiracy theorist or evil to ask what is that

01:08:28.680 why wouldn't you follow up on those leads you know i i'm one of these people that believes

01:08:34.260 that in almost all cases the simplest explanation is probably the correct one but

01:08:40.360 when word came out thanks to joe kent and his brave actions and revelations

01:08:49.540 that he was not permitted to follow up on these leads well call me a conspiracy theorist but

01:08:58.680 that that's the only place i can go well what's the answer there had to be some sort of a

01:09:03.060 what's the other answer i mean i want to find another answer i don't want to have any thoughts

01:09:08.640 like this charlie of course was a good friend of mine he's a good friend of yours but even if he

01:09:11.680 wasn't i just i live in this country i don't but what yeah are there any good answers to that

01:09:17.660 questioned? No. There's literally no reason why you wouldn't follow up on a lead. Why would the

01:09:23.400 president shut down the investigation into Butler, into his own attempted assassination?

01:09:30.240 I can't even fathom a reason, especially because this president has taken such a strong stand

01:09:37.400 against the deep state, right? If there, I mean, we all agreed that there's a deep state. You don't

01:09:42.600 have to call it that. You can call it the federal bureaucracy or whatever you want to call it.

01:09:46.380 Permanent Washington.

01:09:47.380 Permanent Washington.

01:09:47.920 The people who are going to be here when you leave.

01:09:49.480 Exactly right.

01:09:50.760 So somebody like the president who has taken such a strong stance against that deep state,

01:09:57.120 you would think would be the first person to want to run these allegations to ground.

01:10:02.160 Of course.

01:10:03.140 But also just out of self-preservation.

01:10:06.780 Why would the president keep the leadership of the Secret Service in place

01:10:11.900 after his own personal security was breached repeatedly?

01:10:16.220 That's a fact.

01:10:17.460 None of this is speculation.

01:10:19.520 That's all true.

01:10:20.580 What explains that?

01:10:22.420 I worked with a guy in Athens.

01:10:23.920 He was a contractor.

01:10:25.700 He had been a long-time Secret Service agent

01:10:30.000 and was the creator, the founder

01:10:34.020 of the Secret Services Intelligence Division.

01:10:36.560 He started under Eisenhower.

01:10:39.000 He was in Dallas with Kennedy.

01:10:40.640 and finally he was successful in creating this intelligence division to work with the CIA and

01:10:47.840 the FBI to head off threats to the president. He starts getting these letters at the White House

01:10:53.660 from Sarah Jane Moore of San Francisco, California. And she's saying things like, you know,

01:10:58.660 ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee. Well, he flies out to San Francisco and he

01:11:05.240 knocks on her apartment door and she answers. He's got his badge. I'm with the Secret Service. He

01:11:09.820 said, Sarah Jane, you keep threatening the president in these letters. What's going on

01:11:14.680 with this? And he told me, she said, no, I didn't mean it. My social security check was late and I

01:11:21.780 got mad. And so I wrote to the president and I threatened him, but I didn't really mean to

01:11:26.940 threaten him. And he said, you're not going to try to kill the president, are you? And she said,

01:11:30.840 no, I'm not going to kill the president. And two weeks later, the president goes to San Francisco

01:11:35.180 going, she's there, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, trying to kill the president. Heads rolled, his 0.93

01:11:41.400 being the first. He was fired from the Secret Service. And then they cleaned out the entire

01:11:47.480 leadership of the Secret Service. That's what normal people do. Yeah. So here we've got two

01:11:54.560 legitimate attempts to murder the president of the United States or the president-elect or the

01:12:00.140 president, the former president, whatever he happened to be when these attacks took place.

01:12:05.180 And it's the same people, the same people who let the bad guys get close enough to him to 0.92

01:12:10.560 take a shot and hit him in the ear. So given that we both have conceded, we don't know the answer

01:12:16.660 to this question. Tell me as someone who spent a lot of his life abroad working for the U.S.

01:12:21.240 government as a CIA officer, assessing the workings of other governments and drawing

01:12:28.260 rational conclusions. So let's say the facts as we just have agreed are real, which they are,

01:12:35.180 uh applied to pick a country bahrain where you lived for years what would you conclude

01:12:41.060 the head of state of bahrain has had a couple documented assassination attempts against him

01:12:49.080 and and possibly others that have never been written about that's right and i think that is

01:12:54.760 true yes and doesn't investigate them they come down with an iron fist of course they don't they

01:13:02.420 don't plan bahrain or most other countries but if but if you found out that the head of state

01:13:07.040 the emir of country x was not investigating an assassination attempt against himself

01:13:11.620 what would you conclude that he's weak that he's weak and either he's afraid of what he's going to

01:13:19.180 stir up or he's just such a weak leader that it hasn't occurred to him to follow through on this

01:13:25.960 yeah but it's an attempt on his life it's an attempt on his life yeah he gets shot in the ear 0.57

01:13:32.160 Like I say, I don't think a single American would have been surprised or unsupportive

01:13:38.140 if he had come down with an iron fist.

01:13:40.940 First of all, everybody in Butler that day in the Secret Service and everybody in the

01:13:46.580 Secret Service leadership should have had their badges confiscated and walked to the

01:13:50.800 door.

01:13:51.260 You're fired and you're not working in government again.

01:13:53.800 You allow an assassin, a child, to get onto the roof of a building and say, on my walkie

01:14:00.520 talking. There's a guy on the roof over there with a high powered rifle and he's pointing it at the

01:14:04.260 president. What should I do? Do I have authorization to shoot? What is that? I can't even imagine

01:14:12.220 somebody behaving in that way. Everybody should have lost his or her job. And instead, literally

01:14:19.100 nobody lost their job. So that's so weird because normally there's like a one-to-one between

01:14:27.660 someone's obvious interest in his actions it's like that's a threat to me i'm not putting up with

01:14:32.440 it but here you have a case where it's a clear threat to him but he's absolutely putting up with

01:14:38.880 it you're ascribing that to weakness like he's just weak just like he's got too much else to

01:14:45.040 deal with just can't imagine and i don't think he's weak man i think he's proven time and time

01:14:49.260 again that he's not then like what are we looking at we're missing something here yeah there's

01:14:53.820 something deeper in the system that's not permitting him to go forward or that's not

01:14:58.920 permitting the government, the rest of the government to conduct an appropriate investigation.

01:15:03.920 What are historians going to say about this 20, 30, 50 years from now? What are PhD candidates?

01:15:08.360 They're going to say at very least there's a mystery at the center of it, at the center of

01:15:12.440 global events. And now that we've embarked on this war against the counsel of the entire

01:15:20.920 u.s government like you just said there's no one in the u.s government who was for this that we

01:15:25.720 know of anyway and he does it anyway in the wake of those acts of violence joe kent says there's

01:15:34.700 a connection i have a he's not really a friend so much he's he's a friendly acquaintance who

01:15:40.580 spent 30 plus years at mi6 the british foreign intelligence service i i spoke with him recently

01:15:46.740 And he said, you know, you Americans, you're a mystery to us now.

01:15:50.440 We thought we knew you until 9-11. 0.99

01:15:54.000 And then you went out and just started killing everybody.

01:15:57.080 And we thought, well, the Americans were traumatized. 0.77

01:15:59.640 This is going to run its course.

01:16:00.920 And then it seemed to run its course. 0.78

01:16:03.120 And then you invade Iran and you don't consult with us. 0.78

01:16:06.700 You don't ask for our help.

01:16:07.840 And then you blame us when things start turning against you.

01:16:12.520 Like, why aren't the British helping us?

01:16:14.700 Well, you haven't asked for any help.

01:16:16.020 And you didn't tell us what you were going to do in advance.

01:16:19.120 And he said, what are we supposed to think?

01:16:21.620 The only conclusion that we can draw is that you're not really the great friends that we thought you were.

01:16:26.220 We hate them.

01:16:27.480 So my read on it, having watched us all pretty carefully over a long time, 0.99

01:16:31.600 is that we have just taken Israeli priorities and made them our own. 0.72

01:16:37.180 And Israeli priorities would include destabilizing Iran, 0.62

01:16:40.780 turning it into a chaotic mass civil war, and destroying Europe. 0.95

01:16:46.020 the israelis hate europe yeah and the israelis thrive on chaos the chaos in iraq was good for

01:16:52.220 israel chaos in iran is good for israel chaos in libya in syria is good for israel yeah it's not 0.55

01:16:59.380 good for us but it's good for them when you were serving in government who were the allies we

01:17:05.460 were closest to oh well we were joined at the hip with the brits yeah i mean we were kind of

01:17:12.600 we were very close to the israelis but we we tried to keep the israelis at arm's length

01:17:18.780 they would constantly make demands that we would deny but we were still close but we were really

01:17:26.420 closest to the brits to the australians to a very slightly lesser extent the new zealanders and the

01:17:33.580 canadians right but the anglo english-speaking countries yeah without a doubt and that's not

01:17:39.040 true anymore. No, not really. The Canadians and the United States have an actively hostile

01:17:45.280 relationship. I mean, we still sit together and share information on stuff, but we genuinely

01:17:49.300 don't like each other. Okay. So if you were running the United States for its own benefit,

01:17:53.500 of course, you would be closest to the countries that share the language, the culture, the religion,

01:18:00.560 and certainly the border, the longest border is Canada. Yes, that's exactly right.

01:18:05.760 But all of those countries are hated by Israel for reasons that are ancient and hard to understand.

01:18:13.600 And now we hate all those countries. 0.92

01:18:15.500 So it does seem like we've assumed Israel's priorities. 1.00

01:18:18.820 It really does.

01:18:19.780 Tucker, when I was serving in Bahrain from 1994 to 96, I was the economic officer.

01:18:24.340 And I would have to go over to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to see the director of economic affairs every three, four weeks.

01:18:30.360 I would save up a bunch of demarches or what are called white papers and just go over and say,

01:18:35.280 Your Excellency, the United States of America officially requests your government's vote

01:18:40.860 in the elections for the International Telecommunications Organization, you know,

01:18:46.720 next month. And he'd say, done. And I say, okay. And I'd go back and write, you know,

01:18:51.680 cables back to state. One of them was, Your Excellency, I said, we're involved in a dispute

01:18:57.420 with the government of Canada. We believe that clams are fish. And the Canadians class

01:19:05.260 clams as shellfish. But the definition of a shellfish is that it can't move more than,

01:19:10.500 I think it was 10 feet a day. And clams move like 12 feet a day. And so we're in this dispute. It's

01:19:16.820 going to the United Nations. We would like Bahrain support. And then I'd go out with a Canadian

01:19:20.760 diplomat and I'd say, what are we going to do about this shellfish situation? And we would laugh

01:19:25.200 and have lunch and have a beer and go back to our embassies. Now we disagree on basic fundamentals

01:19:32.960 of foreign policy. We're all still in agreement on terrorism and proliferation. That's all great.

01:19:40.160 But we have, in some cases, an actively hostile relationship with the Canadians,

01:19:47.460 mostly with the Canadians, sometimes with the Brits, to the point where it's impacting

01:19:53.820 the relationship now. This MI6 officer I mentioned a moment ago, he said,

01:19:59.180 he said we still love you we just don't like you very much and i think that's really what it comes

01:20:06.180 down to what does it mean for u.s national security and economic interest going forward 1.00

01:20:10.060 if canada becomes a south asian country run by the chinese which is what it's becoming 1.00

01:20:15.460 that's a real thing and i think it's going to pose a challenge that we are woefully unprepared for 1.00

01:20:22.160 so if you think that um by the way i just want to be clear i'm not blaming the israelis for any of

01:20:27.880 this it was u.s government officials who decided to sell out their country that's right um because

01:20:34.360 i don't know who knows why exactly but anyway they did um how do you disengage how do you

01:20:43.660 get american sovereignty back how do you break the stranglehold of the israeli lobby on

01:20:50.160 the U.S. government? You know, just like I do, that it wasn't always like this.

01:20:58.420 The AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, only became a major player in American

01:21:06.220 politics beginning around 1970, when President Nixon formally changed U.S. policy toward Israel

01:21:14.940 to guarantee the safety and security of Israel.

01:21:18.020 That changed things.

01:21:19.800 What he should have done at the same time

01:21:21.660 was to force AIPAC to register as a foreign agent, right?

01:21:26.040 I mean, it clearly represents the foreign policy of Israel.

01:21:29.500 John F. Kennedy tried to do that.

01:21:30.620 John F. Kennedy did try to do that.

01:21:32.000 Yeah, it didn't work well for him.

01:21:34.420 And I think President Johnson was afraid to take them on.

01:21:37.640 And he never did anything.

01:21:39.160 He was working with them.

01:21:40.420 Very closely.

01:21:41.420 He covered up the USS Liberty.

01:21:42.800 Liberty. The Israelis take the blame for that. They're the ones who committed the murders, 1.00

01:21:47.060 but it, I don't think Lyndon Johnson gets the credit he deserves. Absolutely not. I agree with

01:21:52.820 you. For punishing the surviving crew of that ship for talking about it. Yes. You know, I went back

01:21:59.880 to the original press reporting. I wanted to do an episode of my own podcast on the Liberty just

01:22:05.640 because so many people still talk about it. We're talking about 19, what, 67. So I went back to the

01:22:11.160 original reporting and the the press releases coming out of the state department and the defense

01:22:18.720 department were blistering and then the president said what are you doing stop criticizing israel

01:22:27.480 well they yeah what do you think that was yeah that was the israel lobby but why would lyndon

01:22:35.240 johnson have been such a slave i think he was afraid what do you think the root of his fear

01:22:40.540 was? What was he afraid of? You know, there has been credible reporting over the years that the

01:22:45.220 Israelis may have had something to do with the Kennedy assassination, may have had advanced

01:22:51.360 warning about the Kennedy assassination, and that they either participated in it or allowed it to

01:22:56.500 happen or didn't warn the United States that it was going to happen because Kennedy not just refused

01:23:01.880 to give them nuclear technology, he actively stood in the way of them acquiring nuclear technology

01:23:07.080 to create a bomb.

01:23:07.860 Ben-Gurion resigned over it.

01:23:09.100 That's right.

01:23:10.020 He was demanding inspections of the Dimona facility,

01:23:12.800 the nuclear facility in Israel.

01:23:14.060 That's right.

01:23:14.940 Yeah, I don't know the answer.

01:23:16.700 I can promise you everyone around the world

01:23:18.240 thinks that's true.

01:23:19.000 Yeah.

01:23:19.300 You don't go to a country

01:23:20.220 where people don't think that's true.

01:23:21.320 That's right.

01:23:21.880 But I don't know if it is true.

01:23:25.020 But it's just interesting that Lyndon Johnson

01:23:27.140 was such a slave that he attacked Americans 0.69

01:23:32.380 for talking about the murder of Americans 0.92

01:23:34.800 by a foreign power.

01:23:35.840 mm-hmm that's like and there was the israelis clearly knew that it was an american ship it

01:23:42.080 was flying the american flag and it said uss liberty on the side of it yeah and then they

01:23:48.000 waited something like 45 minutes after attacking it and then they came back and attacked it again

01:23:53.420 oh there's no question they tried to sink it yeah yeah exactly and they said oh no we thought it was

01:23:59.640 from the egyptian navy like come on you guys come on you can come up with something better

01:24:05.420 than that. So how do you disentangle at this point? So my impression is just as an observer

01:24:10.700 of government that the Israeli government is like embedded within the U.S. government at this point.

01:24:15.620 It seems that way to me, yes. So it's probably not a simple thing to undo that. No, I think it's very,

01:24:22.280 very difficult. Yeah. I think that AIPAC really does have to register as a foreign agent. It

01:24:27.900 really does. Listen, if I had to register as a foreign agent because the Abu Dhabi Chamber of

01:24:34.400 commerce hired me to write four op-eds and I had to go to fara.gov and register, then AIPAC should

01:24:40.660 be registered. So, but if the United States were ever to take a more, you know, arm's length posture

01:24:48.160 toward Israel, what do you think the consequences would be? I honestly don't think there would be

01:24:53.080 any consequences. Israel is an important and valuable ally. So are a lot of other countries.

01:24:59.620 Yep. And I just don't think the Israelis should be treated any differently than the Brits or the French or the Greeks or, you know, anybody else. Why do they get special treatment? I just don't understand.

01:25:10.500 Well, it's more than that. We've sacrificed all of our other relationships on their behalf.

01:25:14.100 That's right. Yes.

01:25:15.000 Right. So their priorities become our priorities and all of a sudden they're our only friend. And you can't tell me that's accidental.

01:25:21.020 That's right.

01:25:21.440 They're literally our only friend and they're not a friend.

01:25:23.860 They have a much longer term view of these things than we do. They began to try to implement this policy in the 60s. And it finally came to fruition. It's prime minister after prime minister after prime minister cultivates not just American political figures, but wealthy American Jews and says, look, you know, we've got a lot of lobbying to do. We've got a lot of PR to do. We're going to need money to do this. And money's never been a problem.

01:25:50.480 so back to the war if there's a diplomatic resolution which i think there would be a

01:25:58.880 common sense would suggest because the global economy hangs on this question there's going to

01:26:02.200 be a lot of pressure at some point even from china to like let's just get this fixed getting

01:26:07.880 it fixed leaves iran in a stronger position than at the outset of the war a much stronger without

01:26:13.560 any question. Right. Can Israel live with that? I think that Israel is going to have to live with

01:26:20.820 it. You do. I do. They're going to have to live with it because the American people do not support 1.00

01:26:26.160 a long-term conflict in Iran. The American people do not support boots on the ground. This is one

01:26:31.700 of those areas we were talking about an hour ago where the left and the right come together.

01:26:35.900 They can agree on this and they will not support boots on the ground. I mean, I'm hearing calls

01:26:40.980 for a draft. Oh yeah, I've heard the same thing. So a draft is the most totalitarian thing you can

01:26:47.880 do, forcing people to go die for something they don't agree with. I don't hear any calls for like

01:26:52.720 a nationwide referendum every time we want to send troops abroad. If you coupled the two, if you said

01:26:57.260 we're going to draft your son, but you also get to decide whether to send him or not, that would

01:27:01.720 seem like a democratic way to handle it. That's right. But this is a totalitarian way to handle

01:27:05.760 it can you imagine the electoral bloodbath that would take place if congress voted in favor of a

01:27:12.560 draft i'm just saying this behavior suggests like they don't care yeah about what election

01:27:17.740 what an election produces i think if if doesn't seem to care about the midterms why is that you

01:27:24.800 know he took the words right out of my mouth i was just going to say exactly the same thing he

01:27:28.200 doesn't appear to really care about the midterms okay so what i'm trying not to be i'm trying to

01:27:34.040 like stay calm and everything but like if you're calling for a land invasion of iran a draft to

01:27:41.160 back it up the public hates this there's no polling that suggests otherwise elections are

01:27:47.860 this fall they're clearly going to be punished the party doing this is going to be punished

01:27:52.300 and they don't seem to care what does this all add up to yeah i don't think he has the votes to

01:27:59.260 pull off a draft, um, at least not in the Senate where he would need 60 votes to break

01:28:04.340 cloture.

01:28:05.420 Um, so I, I think that's, I think it's a non-starter.

01:28:09.400 You do?

01:28:09.880 I do.

01:28:11.140 I think that there are enough.

01:28:12.940 He started a war with Iran without Congress. 0.87

01:28:15.240 Yeah, but a draft is something different.

01:28:17.520 I mean, that, that would require very definitive congressional action.

01:28:21.760 There are so many congressional weaklings when it comes to issues of war and peace. 1.00

01:28:25.820 Look at Lindsey Graham. I get so frustrated even just listening to the man speak. Lindsey Graham has been all over the map ideologically. Well, I think he's concluded that neoconservatism is ascendant. And so he's jumped back in. He apparently has the president's ear.

01:28:44.100 And so he's he's the Trump whisperer telling the president, attack, attack, attack. But extending that to a draft just does not have the same kind of support. It's one thing for Lindsey Graham to say the president should be free to bomb our enemies and to send troops and to send, you know, naval strike forces.

01:29:08.020 okay i strongly disagree i think what you're saying is illegal but okay i get that this is

01:29:15.400 a matter for debate reinstating the draft it clearly and obviously can only be done by

01:29:23.320 congressional action and the votes are not there so i i know that the president uh has real concerns

01:29:32.320 about the IC and I think as you said on camera or off that one of the reasons he was willing to

01:29:39.000 take Mossad's view in is because he didn't he doesn't trust his own intel agencies how do you

01:29:46.880 reform them how do you reform CIA you're gonna have to tear the place down to the studs and

01:29:53.360 you're gonna have to enact real controls I'll give you an example this may sound silly but I

01:29:58.820 think it's important. When I first joined the CIA, I had literally no idea the political views of the

01:30:06.080 people that I was working with. No idea. I should say with whom I was working. In 1996, a woman that

01:30:16.160 I sat next to got in trouble for discreetly taping up a Bob Dole for President bumper sticker in her 1.00

01:30:23.920 own cubicle. She was called to HR. She was reprimanded, had a memo put in her file. She 1.00

01:30:29.880 wasn't eligible for promotion for a year because she had violated the cardinal rule that we do not 0.90

01:30:36.320 take political positions. And I remember thinking, wow. And then we got to the point in the not,

01:30:43.480 you know, too distant future where the CIA is so politicized that you end up with 51 senior

01:30:52.260 intelligence service officers lying in writing that the hunter biden laptop bore all the hallmarks

01:31:02.420 of a russian intelligence operation information operation like how did we get there i had no

01:31:10.900 idea i'll give you another example the the 1992 election we had a morning meeting like we did

01:31:17.780 every morning, every group in the entire CIA has its morning meeting at nine o'clock to just

01:31:22.880 discuss whatever happened in the region that you cover the night before. And my boss said at that

01:31:28.180 end of that morning meeting, he said, I know we're not supposed to do this, but I'm just really

01:31:32.640 curious who you guys voted for this morning. And I thought, oh yeah, we never talk about stuff like

01:31:39.040 that. I still remember it was three for Bush, three for Clinton and two for Perot. And I remember

01:31:44.680 thinking, wow, that's interesting. But I would never have known. Well, now it's like, you know,

01:31:51.000 everybody was in bed with Obama. Everybody was in bed with Biden. How did that happen? How did we

01:31:57.960 get there so quickly when you know what the rules are? The rules are very clear. No politics. It's

01:32:05.760 all about keeping the country safe until it's not until it's about politics. And so I think that to

01:32:14.180 reform the place, you have to tear it down and then rebuild. And you have to have real rules

01:32:21.280 that are really followed that you just cannot be political. You can't. And then, you know,

01:32:29.260 maybe even this probably would be unconstitutional, but maybe you put the brakes on political

01:32:35.280 involvement for 12 months or 18 months after you leave, just like there are brakes on lobbying.

01:32:41.420 You can't just go from Friday afternoon, you leave your job, and Monday morning, you begin as a lobbyist lobbying your former colleagues.

01:32:49.500 You can't do that.

01:32:50.080 Well, one way would be to make it more political.

01:32:54.480 So CIA has the fewest political appointees of any agency.

01:32:58.040 That's right.

01:32:58.340 I think they're three or four, something like that.

01:33:00.380 That's it.

01:33:00.940 There's like no civilian control at this point.

01:33:03.060 It's supposed to be the intel agencies, but they're, I mean, the intel committees in the House and Senate, but that, you know.

01:33:08.820 Cheerleaders.

01:33:09.680 Yeah, of course. 1.00

01:33:10.420 they're just cheerleaders the weakest drunkest most compromised people to sit on these committees

01:33:15.380 the conferences do not vote on member on the membership or the chairman or or vice chairman

01:33:22.820 of the intelligence committees the intelligence committees are select committees they're not

01:33:27.040 standing committees and so it's leadership that appoints all of the members the fixes in from the

01:33:31.880 beginning of course no the whole thing is absurd and i have to say as i go down the roster you know 0.96

01:33:37.000 of the members of those committees, I'm like, oh, they're the most screwed up people in the 0.97

01:33:41.480 entire Congress. It's true. Yeah. Oh, I'm aware. Oh, I know them. So why wouldn't you return some 0.98

01:33:49.240 measure of public control to CIA? You know, I hadn't thought of it that way, but that's actually

01:33:56.420 a good idea. If you have a senior intelligence service that's embedded, it's not going anywhere,

01:34:05.180 they're there for 30 35 years right and they're going to be anti anti president or anti republican

01:34:13.720 then maybe you do need political appointees to keep the honest people the public ought to have

01:34:18.760 some control over what its government is doing right yeah you can say that again yeah i spoke

01:34:24.440 with a i spoke with a senator a couple of days ago i don't want to betray a confidence so i'm

01:34:31.500 to be careful with my language. Um, he has entered into something of a dispute with the intelligence

01:34:38.860 committee and they just won't budge. And what he's asking for is legitimately under his purview

01:34:47.240 as the chairman of another committee having to do with security, foreign policy, you know,

01:34:54.620 intelligence, whatever. And the CIA won't budge. The intelligence committee won't budge. And

01:35:01.320 he said, I don't know what to do. And I said, well, you've got to approach leadership. He said,

01:35:05.900 that was the first place I went. And leadership said, they don't want to get involved in a

01:35:10.020 dispute between two chairmen. So what do you do when everybody on the intelligence committee is

01:35:16.400 there just to serve the CIA, not to oversee it, not to ensure that it follows the law,

01:35:22.080 just to cheerlead for it? They spied on members of Congress and were never punished for it.

01:35:26.400 Never. I remember Eric Holder saying, now, now, I got these referrals, these criminal referrals.

01:35:34.360 Everybody needs to calm down. Nobody's going to be investigated. What do you mean nobody's

01:35:38.000 going to be investigated? The CIA broke into the computer system of the Senate Intelligence

01:35:43.080 Committee to steal the information that was being developed there about the torture program.

01:35:47.540 You're spying on members of Congress. What do you mean there's nothing to see here move along?

01:35:52.120 it was a crime but never prosecuted

01:35:55.680 do you have any hope that the government will return to its original purpose

01:36:06.760 which is serving the population of the country

01:36:09.360 i've consistently been criticized as being too optimistic in life about everything i'm always

01:36:18.780 a glass half full guy. That's a great way to be. I'm happy with the way I lead my life.

01:36:26.920 On this, I can't see any reason at all to be optimistic. Really? Yeah. Yeah. There are no more

01:36:35.800 Frank Churches or Barry Goldwaters or real leaders, real leaders. I mean, even Tip O'Neill

01:36:44.620 recognized that congress was a co-equal participant in government and which drove jimmy carter nuts

01:36:53.240 but but allowed him to negotiate successfully with ronald reagan

01:36:57.920 why can't we have that that worked why can't we go back to that i don't know maybe because as

01:37:07.700 governments degrade all the power vests in the executive i think that's what the framers

01:37:14.060 understood that and then you i'm going to come back to lindsey graham just because i have so

01:37:17.760 little respect for him then you have lindsey graham saying we need a weaker congress i mean

01:37:23.880 that's essentially what he's saying about the war powers act well he's a totalitarian so of course

01:37:27.940 he wants that how does lindsey like what is that exactly why do the intel agencies and the government

01:37:34.480 of israel seem to have so much control over lindsey graham i don't know ted cruz is the same

01:37:38.980 way yeah what is that and it's both people with weird personal lives yes is that connected wow

01:37:45.940 you're gonna get me started now uh well i just notice it i notice it every everybody i know

01:37:51.560 who's a cheerleader for the worst things is vulnerable in some way i think there's probably

01:37:57.400 something to that you know it's funny probably something to that alan dershowitz once said that

01:38:03.700 the most intelligent student he ever had was Ted Cruz. I don't get that. I mean, I want my

01:38:14.500 elected officials to be smarter than I am. I want them to think outside the box. I want to believe

01:38:21.500 in them. He thought Ted Cruz was a genius? Yeah, that's what he said. I can say as someone who knows

01:38:27.420 ted really really well that's not a word that's ever come to mind glib but you know glibness is

01:38:36.220 not iq yeah he's not a wise man at all not a well-informed man at all that's what i mean there

01:38:41.720 there are no birch buys or or i mean on both sides birch by frank church bob dole barry goldwater

01:38:50.860 ted kennedy these these thinkers that gave us the government that we had in the 60s the 70s the 80s

01:38:59.420 they're just gone right yeah all victims of affluence and just flaccid thinking which was

01:39:08.440 a result of flaccid living you know it was true nice to worry about nuclear annihilation every

01:39:14.540 day because it makes you sharper we're talking off camera about the the governments around the

01:39:18.520 world that we respect have dealt with think are impressive and smart and they're all countries

01:39:22.640 that can't take anything for granted that's right that are constantly fighting for their own

01:39:27.400 survival having to calculate everything from eight different angles like those are the most 0.78

01:39:32.100 impressive people and the people who think they're just like hegemons from birth and

01:39:36.380 the affluence will never end doesn't work out no

01:39:39.340 mm-hmm john kerry last question are you getting a pardon

01:39:44.460 we've addressed this at length in previous interviews so anyone uh you know wanting to

01:39:52.800 know what pardon for what can look it up but you were targeted um by the u.s government

01:39:58.180 on like insane grounds because you told the truth and the only people who were ever punished the u.s

01:40:04.560 government of those tell the truth no one's ever penalized for lying and you were forced to plead

01:40:10.400 and um and you're a convicted felon and not someone who should be so you're trying to get a

01:40:16.560 pardon i'm trying to get a pardon um i think that i have reached the president i have absolutely

01:40:23.140 wonders wonderful support thanks to you you've supported me from the very very well it's not

01:40:28.580 even about you it's who i think of as a friend yeah it's ridiculous you shouldn't send people

01:40:33.280 to prison for telling the truth. And if you do, you're not the good guy. No, I agree with you.

01:40:38.040 Thank you for that. I have far more support among Republicans than I have among Democrats,

01:40:46.220 far more support among MAGA Republicans. You know, on the surface of things, it's because

01:40:53.960 the Obama administration went after me, but, but it's, it's more than that under the surface,

01:40:58.460 deeper down. I think that I think that MAGA Republicans really do believe in the rule of law

01:41:08.120 and in the Constitution. And really, at the end of the day, this comes down to the Constitution.

01:41:14.140 When I put my hand in the air on my very first day at the CIA and I promised to protect and defend

01:41:19.740 the Constitution against all enemies, domestic and foreign, I meant it.

01:41:24.160 and i hate to think that i was the only person in the room that day that did yeah and i think

01:41:31.320 for the most part it's republicans who respect that so i've spoken with very high level well

01:41:39.720 placed people close to the president both in and out of government i know that the president knows

01:41:45.380 that i've applied for the pardon um i i will admit to you that i disagree with the president's policy

01:41:52.100 on Iran, but I don't think that's a big deal. I mean, people disagree. To me, that's a normal

01:42:01.640 part of life. Maybe you and I don't agree on everything. We're still friends. And so I'm

01:42:07.960 hoping that he does the right thing. I would hate to say that your mild and measured criticism of

01:42:13.020 the state of Israel would in any way affect your eligibility for a pardon because it's one thing 0.98

01:42:17.860 to go to war because you're pushed by a foreign country, 0.53

01:42:20.740 but to decide how you treat your own citizens

01:42:23.460 based on their views of a foreign country,

01:42:26.180 that is treason. 0.99

01:42:27.980 And I just, so I just hope-

01:42:29.200 Thank you.

01:42:29.860 That that plays no role.

01:42:31.540 I appreciate that.

01:42:32.240 Either way.

01:42:32.900 I'm optimistic.

01:42:34.100 Good.

01:42:34.760 John Carrick, thank you so much.

01:42:36.080 Thanks so much.

01:42:36.760 Good to see you.

01:42:37.300 Good to see you.

The Tucker Carlson Show - April 27, 2026

Ex-CIA Officer John Kiriakou on the Truth About Iran, False Flags, and What’s Really Happening in DC

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