Podcasts about venezuelan supreme court

PREVIEW: VENEZUELA: ARGENTINA: ARREST MILEI Conversation with colleague Joseph Humire of Secure Free Society regarding Venezuela's Maduro government using the Venezuelan Supreme Court to issue an arrest warrant for Argentina's head of state, Javier Milei. More tonight. 1902 Caracas

In this gripping episode of "Connecting the Dots," Dr. Wilmer Leon and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist Jon Jeter expose the Democratic Party's desperate reliance on voters of color to save them from political collapse.   Find me and the show on social media. Click the following links or search @DrWilmerLeon on X/Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Patreon and YouTube! Hey everyone, Dr. Wilmer here! If you've been enjoying my deep dives into the real stories behind the headlines and appreciate the balanced perspective I bring, I'd love your support on my Patreon channel. Your contribution helps me keep "Connecting the Dots" alive, revealing the truth behind the news. Join our community, and together, let's keep uncovering the hidden truths and making sense of the world. Thank you for being a part of this journey!   FULL TRANSCRIPT: Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:00:00): I have two questions. The first question, has the Democratic Party committed suicide by biting the black hands that feed it? Here's the second question. Has the African-American community allowed itself to be taken for granted and thereby taken advantage of Jon Jeter (00:00:25): Connecting the dots with Dr. Wilmer Leon, where the analysis of politics, culture, and history converge? Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:00:32): Welcome to the Connecting the Dots podcast with Dr. Wilmer Leon. I'm Wilmer Leon. Here's the point. We have a tendency to view current events as though they happen in a vacuum, failing to understand the broader historical context in which a lot of these events occur. During each episode, my guests and I have probing, provocative, and in-depth discussions that connect the dots between these events and the broader historic context in which they occur. This enables you to better understand and analyze the events that impact the global village in which we live. Black Agenda report has a piece entitled How the Democratic Party Committed Suicide by Biting the Black Hands That Feed It On today's episode. The issues before us are, as I stated at the top, has the party in fact committed suicide and has the African-American community allowed itself to be taken for granted and thereby to advantage of for insight into this? (00:01:35): And for answers to these questions, let's turn to my guest. He's a former foreign correspondent for the Washington Post. He's the co-author of a Day Late and a Dollar Short, dark Days and Bright Nights in Obama's post-Racial America. His work can be found at Patreon as well as Black Republic Media. He's the author of this piece. He is John Jeter brother John Jeter. Welcome back. The pleasure is all mine, brother. Thank you for having me. You opened your piece as follows, the Democratic Party dug its own grave decades ago when it began trying to siphon voters from the Republican party or the GOP by appealing to conservatives and ignoring the needs of its strong base of African-American people. If political parties were prominent people, you'd have stumbled upon this obituary. Today, the Democratic Party, one half of America's longstanding ruling duopoly, and the author of political movements as disparate as Jim Crow and the New Deal died Wednesday, July 24. It was 196 sources said the cause was suicide following along illness. John, that's incredibly, incredibly creative. I've gone through the coroner's report. I can't make heads nor tails when it comes to the cause of Speaker 3 (00:02:58): Death. Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:02:59): So what was the cause of death on July 24th? Speaker 3 (00:03:03): It sort of slit death by a thousand cuts, but slitting your throat a thousand times slowly over the years. Man, I really, that piece really meant something to me. I am, as I think you would say, you are a man of a certain age and I remember very clearly Jesse Jackson's 1984 and 88 campaigns for President. I remember the energy and the excitement. I remember, even though I was just in my teens and early twenties, I remember that it was electric, those campaigns. And then I remember Bill Clinton running for president and I voted for Bill Clinton. But I remember thinking, I remember holding my nose while I voted because I remember Bill Clinton lecturing Jesse Jackson about Sister Soldier lecturing black people going to black church, lecturing black people about how we have failed Martin Luther King. And I didn't quite understand it other than I thought, well, bill Clinton is like most white people I know, racists most, not all the most. (00:04:13): And I just wrote it off as that when I was a young journalist at the Detroit Free Press. Later, I got to Washington the same time as Bill Clinton In 1993, January of 1993, I got to the Washington Post, and it sort of dawned on me over the years, particularly as I heard democratic presidents and democratic candidates for President repeat these same tropes scolding black people. I remember, and I was in a very different place at this point, but I remember Barack Obama talking down the black people in a way that just really offended me, scolding black fathers for their failure to raise their kids when a study at that time had been produced, which showed that black men who are separated from their families are actually better parents, actually spend more quality time with their kids than any other ethnic group. Barack Obama telling a black church, I believe it was in South Carolina, that a good plan for economic development would be to stop throwing Popeye's chicken wrappers out of your car window, right? (00:05:23): Just the infantilization of the black voting block, black electorate. And it struck me that this is by design. They're talking to white people. And then this is only in the last few years where I read David Roder, the labor economist, labor, labor historian, I'm sorry, who wrote about the Reagan Democrats in Michigan, who we elected the blue collar white workers who we elected Ronald Reagan, president who crossed over to elect Ronald Reagan president. And how his polling showed that their main motivation was race or racism, I should say. They did not like black people. They defined black people as pulling down the party. And they divided Democrats as people who catered to blacks who were lazy welfare, all the tropes that were popularized by, built by Ronald Reagan. And it struck me that the Democrats in 92, the astrophysicists, I believe they talk about solar systems that are so distant, you can't see the sun, but you can tell by the movement of the planets that there is indeed a solar system by the movement of the stars and the planets that there is indeed a sun there, that it is indeed a solar system. (00:06:43): No one really wrote it down really. Although the poster Stanley Stanley, I can't remember his name now, but the post of the Greenberg for the Democrats, he came close, but we can see by their actions that the Democrats in 1992 especially were wrestling with how to win the White House after they had been exiled by 12 years of Republican rule. And they decided they chose between Jesse Jackson's campaign, which was trying to reunite that New Deal coalition, tenuous as it was, but it was still a new deal, coalition of black and white workers, and then Ronald Reagan's approach, which was to basically return to the old Southern Democrats, George Wallace, basically, and refusing to be out in worded right, keeping up this racist animosity and resentment. Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:07:40): I think that was Strom Thurman who originally made that quote, I will never be. Right. Speaker 3 (00:07:45): Right. That's right. That's right. Yeah. George Wallace took it to another level, and I think that that has been the Democrat's problem ever since. And you would think a child could have told them, this is not going to work well for you to antagonize purposefully your base, but this is the moment we're in where you see the Democrats, it's almost like a circus, a dog and pony show where Democrats spend four years openly denouncing or renouncing their black base and then in the election year trying to make up for it, trying to gin up the black vote. It is almost like this awkward dance that they're doing. And now we're seeing the culmination, because this has been going on pretty much for the last 30 years. I think Obama was the Navy or the Zenith, depending on how you want to look at it. But I think that it's really run its course. I think it's possible Kamala Harris can win this election, but even if that is the case after four years in office, the Democrats are a spent force. They can't continue this dance. Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:08:52): So to those who would say, well, wait a minute, John, how can you say that the party is biting the hand that feeds it when you've had a President Barack Obama from 2009 to 2017, and they are set as we assume that when they come out of their convention in a couple of weeks, that Kamala Harris will be the nominee for 2024. So how do you answer those folks who say, well, they're not taking us for granted. Let's assume that she wins in November. They've had two African American presidents. We could talk about African Jamaican, but we'll just put Kamala in the box over 20 year span, Speaker 3 (00:09:48): And they've completely ignored, completely frustrated black demands, right? You think about Kamala Harris. Well, Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:09:57): Barack Obama told us we didn't make any demands, which is why we didn't get anything. When he was asked that question. His answer was, you didn't demand anything. Yeah. Speaker 3 (00:10:06): And I would have to say, he's actually got to give the devil this dude. He was right on that one. Hey, look, the 2008, what they did, what the Democrats did in pushing Barack Obama passed Hillary Clinton was a stroke of genius. It really was. They had the perfect candidate to whip up to generate this black excitement, excitement in the black community, which at that same time, they were ripping off through these subprime mortgages, right, which were disproportionately aimed at blacks, black homeowners. And what they did by pushing Obama to the fore, the Democrats, I'm talking about bringing blacks, gin up the black vote, getting blacks excited about someone who at that point, Barack just didn't have much of a record for serving the black community. But he went on in his eight years in office to openly excoriate sc disappoint the black community. And in fact, I think you could argue that in terms of black people, I'm 59, I'll be 60 years old in January. (00:11:12): I would argue that Barack Obama has been the worst president in my lifetime for blacks. What I mean by that is the opportunity that he had in 2008 during the Great Recession, the opportunity that he had to actually begin to redistribute, and I'm not talking about socialism or communism. I'm talking about just redistributing wealth, just shaving off a portion of that onerous debt that many of us had accrued through these illegal, that's not my term, that's the FBI term illegal loans, fraudulent loans that the lenders made, and he could have shaved off proportion of that debt revived consumer buying power as we speak. We're talking, we're in the midst of the Wall Street, has seen a week really of decline. And the reasons, because Barack Obama set this in motion by not responding to the asset bubble in 2008, that asset bubble popped. (00:12:14): Usually how you deal with an asset bubble is you shave off a portion of the debt and you put people in jail to disincentivize a fraud, but you shave off a portion of the debt because that will revive buying power. Barack Obama didn't do that. He actually threw more money at the lenders. And so right now we don't have body power and who's leading that? African American. So I say that to say, to answer your question, that the blacks who have been candidates for high office, particularly for the White House, have been put there because they will participate. They will join in on this dance of scolding black people for the benefit of the white vote, and then doing this dance, this sort of vaudevillian kind of act where they, every four years talk about what they've done for the black community, what they're going to do for the black community, how much they love black people. (00:13:11): And I think it's run its course. I feel that it's run its course. And let me just end with this. And I really do believe that the legacy of Barack Obama, we've always had class tension within the black community. Now I think we're going to see the eruption of a real civil war, a real class war within the black community where the black elected officials are very much like conservatives and very much like white liberals. I think we're getting to a point now where we're going to see that the fault lines are very sharply drawn and the black elected officials, black celebrities, van Jones and Jay-Z and Bakari Sellers, that all these people are going to be seen as class enemies to the working class black community and the people who are its allies. Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:13:57): A couple of things. One, you mentioned the asset bubble and former President Obama giving the money back, basically bailing out the banks and not bailing out the homeowners. And I remember because to your point, that would've been the move. Don't give the money to the banks, deal with the loans, and that way you would've enabled people to stay in their homes. You would've been able to maintain the integrity of a number of neighborhoods, even down to the level of public schools and public school budgets because they get their money from property taxes by maintaining the value of property. There are a whole lot of things, a whole lot of benefits that would've come from that action. Instead of giving the money to the banksters, give the money to the homeowners. And I remember a press conference where former President Obama was asked why he did it the way he did it. And his answer was, and I remember this very clearly, his answer was, I didn't expect the banks to do this. People were asking him, why hasn't the money that you've given to the banks been loaned out? Why hasn't that money been distributed to the communities in need? And he said, I didn't expect the banks to do that. I said, well, man, that's what banks do, Speaker 3 (00:15:23): And maybe you shouldn't have run for president if you don't have that kind of understanding of finance. Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:15:27): Well, but that's the same guy that told the Banksters, I'm the one standing between you and the people with the pitch for us. Speaker 3 (00:15:32): Right? Right. And I believe it was in that same interview, I believe it was where he said that the reason he didn't bail out the homeowners who had been defrauded of their homes to these subprime mortgages, he said he didn't want to invite moral hazard. Well, moral hazard is exactly what he invited. But on behalf of the banks, not on behalf Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:15:52): Of, oh, see, I thought he said Merrill haggard not moral hazard. My bad. I thought he didn't like country and western music. I'm glad. I'm glad you straighten that out for me. And the other thing you mentioned about former President Obama, and what I assume we're going to see from Vice President Harris is they have, I call it menstrual diplomacy. They are being used to sell imperialism and neoliberalism. And because it's coming from them, because Kamala Harris was selling us invading Haiti along with Linda Thomas Greenfield and so many, but because it was black people selling it, then there must not be anything wrong with it. We must be able to go ahead and accept it because of who it is that's selling it to us. I want to read another paragraph from your piece wherein you write, you write, it's important, however, to view Biden as a vital organ to a larger body politic that finally flatlined after failing to address a chronic illness, akin say to a diabetic eating Big Max every day for the past 30 years, Biden does not in fact owe his failed reelection bid to senility, though his cognitive decline is apparent. (00:17:24): But to his party's strategic decision three decades ago, to compete with Ronald Reagan's, GOP for racist, white suburban voters, white suburban voters, by openly repudiating the Democrats electoral base of African-Americans. And that gets to what you just opened with. But I also think it's important for people to understand that by taking us for granted and by allowing ourselves to be taken for granted, the Democrats know we're not going anywhere. And so that enables them to speak to a lot of issues while actually appealing to that white middle class male voter because they don't want to appear to be a party that's too black. They don't want to appear to be a party that's catering to black people. John Che. Speaker 3 (00:18:23): No, that's exactly right. I think I ride with black people. I rock with black people. I will to the day I die, particularly the black working class. My father was a UAW member. And as much as the unions are fraught with racism, I still claim the working class. That's the class I was born into in the class I will die in. Although if I hit the lottery, I guess I'll be a Cadillac Communist at that point. Maybe. In Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:18:50): Fact, really quickly, really simply, the CIO was we got the AFL CIO because the A FL was racist and okay, Speaker 3 (00:19:03): Yeah, that's exactly right. And then the CIO turned racist. But that's another story. But no, this is really a choice that the Democrats made, which just shows how unimagined they were. If they had followed Jesse Jackson's model pulling more and more people, which by the way was what RFK planned to do before he was assassinated, was to pull more and more people into the tech, younger people, it's very conceivable they would've never have lost an election over the last 30 years. Right? It's very conceivable. We have 110, a hundred million voters at least every year who are eligible to vote, who don't vote. Pulling those people in more of those people in by giving them something to vote for would be a winning strategy, a sustainable strategy. The Democrats just relied on their own. They just reverted to reform, right? Racist Democrats like Bill Clinton, like Ben Pitchfork, Tillman, that's who they're, and they can't sort of snap out of that. (00:20:10): And so now they're stuck. They're stuck with this dance. It's very awkward dance, performative blackness. That's what Barack Obama is. That's what Kamala Harris, they perform, but they're not radical black political actors because if they were, and we have to bear some of the responsibility for this failure. We black people who have historically been the most sophisticated voters in the United States since they ran Barack Obama, we have for some reason forgotten that we have agency in this that if just sit and wait four years to go cast a ballot for whoever they put up for us to vote, that we might well be buried under a ton of ash, like some lost city of Pompeii or whatever. Because our parents and our grandparents knew much like they did in Chicago with Harold Washington, they faced the same dilemma. The Democrats just basically crapping on them and then asked them for their vote. (00:21:17): And they decided in 1982 that, oh, well, we'll just get our own candidate to run. And they got Harold Washington. They drove each other to the polls, they registered voters. They raised money even though they didn't have much. They raised money and they got him by the finish line right now, it won't look the same way now probably. But the point is that they used their imagination. They didn't just sit there and say, oh, well, this is who we got to vote for. They did something about, they demonstrated their own agency. We need to get back to that. But lemme just say this too, on that point, I do feel though that this isn't a way, a culmination of what Malcolm said when he said, I think there will be another civil war in this country, but it won't be black versus white. There'd be the haves versus the havenots. (00:22:01): And I believe we are getting closer to that. You see now these campus protests that emerged over the spring, which were led by the vanguard of which was Jewish people and Arab people and black people, I think that's going to be the coming revolution where we see what's happening in Gaza, rightfully so, has become the moral center of the universe. But that cause Gaza, which of course does not speak well with Kamala Harris, that cause I believe is going to intersect. We already see it intersecting with other causes. Cop city in Atlanta, right, the Jim Crow justice system. We see it intersecting with these other causes. That's how revolutions are born. So I say all that to say that I think that the Democrats are going to be on the wrong side of history. I think this deal, they struck this Carthage Genian peace deal that black Democrats have struck with the party. I think that it has run its courts and the people no longer have any use for it. I don't know if Trump or Ka Harris is going to be the next president, but I know that the American people are going to lose either way. Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:23:12): And I think evidence to what it is that you've just articulated in terms of this confluence of interest between Jewish Americans, between Arab Americans and African Americans, we're seeing now how Republicans are taking control at the electoral board level, the local electoral board level. They are now denying elections. They are now failing to certify elections. And this is something that people need to pay very, very close attention to because they are gaining control of the apparatus itself. And when they get control of the apparatus itself, then that's going to make our challenges even that much more difficult in terms of challenges, in terms of electoral politics, is going to make our challenges even harder to be successful at when you have members of election boards that fail to certify elections, not because they find wrongdoing in the process, but simply because the candidate that they backed. Look at Donald Trump gave this speech. He was in Atlanta today, I think it was Sunday or Monday, and he's pointing to people in the crowd that are at his campaign rally who are members of the county Boards of Election, and he's applauding them and lauding them for how loyal they are to his efforts. Speaker 3 (00:24:48): Oh, wow. I did not realize that. And that's very dangerous because these elections, these presidential elections tend to be battles of attrition who can do more to turn to vote, which means that they're very slim margins. So I mean, if Donald Trump has a little bit of leverage with the elections board in Milwaukee and Detroit and Philadelphia, you might as well hand the presidency over to him now. So this is something else. Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:25:17): Well, and that's why he is saying, Christians, after this election, you won't need to vote. I mean, he is saying to people, oh, I've got this. I don't even need your vote. I've got this. And after this election, you won't need to vote. And that goes back to, and I think this went over the heads of a lot of folks. His key advisor, the guy that's in jail now went to jail. Speaker 3 (00:25:50): Oh, baton. Baton. Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:25:51): Steve Baton said, our objective is the deconstruction of the administrative state. Steve Bannon was very, very clear about Trump's objective is to deconstruct the administrative state. And I don't think many people paid attention to that. And that is what we see with the January 6th attack on the Capitol with they're getting their talons into local boards of election with this whole project 2025, which isn't new. It's all wine in new bottles. But all of those things are culminating with the Donald Trump. Speaker 3 (00:26:44): Yeah, no, it's really a historic time. We don't know how it's going to turn out. But I mean, if you look at the situation on the ground and Nazi Germany, say in 1934, it'd be very similar to what we're seeing now with this demagogue clearly rising up. And then you see all the other parties in Germany, although we only have one here in the United States, you see all the other parties sort of seeding that ground to this demagogue and the people who support him. And that's shaping up here. And the Democrat, again, it could be an opportunity for the Democrats to actually say, okay, we're going to step in and we're going to restore democracy, but they don't really care about democracy. How do we know the same people who are complaining about January 6th? And the Trump supporters who wanted to overturn the election just announced that the winner of the election in Venezuela is the guy who came in second passed the post, right? (00:27:38): And then the silliness. Well, we believe that the election was stolen. The Carter Center, Jimmy Carter has called the elections in Venezuela, the freest and fairest he has ever observed. Correct. National lawyers, gu, when they're now, and they said, no, this election is fine, but we're going to say that this guy who's a conservative in a country that is 13% black, and probably half of them are of mixed race, we're going to say this white conservative went in there and over and basically beat the socialist party, the Olaine revolution that has been in power since 1998. And not just beat 'em, but beat 'em by 34 percentage points, I Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:28:22): Believe. Now, I was calling this out months ago, and folks, you need to really understand this, and there are numerous, if you go to Oroco Tribune or you go to venezuelan analysis.com, you'll find plenty of articles on this. So the United States started backing the Russian, the Venezuelan conservative candidate, marina Machado Speaker 3 (00:28:50): Machado, Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:28:52): And then she was convicted by the Venezuelan Supreme Court and found to have been basically an unregistered foreign agent. She was operating, I think, on behalf of Peru, I think it was Peru, against the interest of Venezuela. So they said, you are, because you have been operating as this agent for another country against Venezuelan interests, you can't run in the election. So the United States started backing her, knowing she couldn't run, and then they found the Gonzalez, the guy that replaced her, but he's basically her mouthpiece. And I was saying all along the United States is backing her, knowing she can't win, and then backing Gonzalez, knowing he can't win, so that when they lose, they will claim the election was fraud. And that's exactly, now here's the problem. So the United States goes in to Venezuela and they try to ment civil unrest the same way that Victoria Newland went into Madan Square. (00:30:12): That's right. And overthrew the democratically elected government in Ukraine leading us to where we are now in Ukraine. The difference between, or one of the differences between Ukraine and Venezuela, or a couple differences. One, the people are armed. There is a armed popular militia that when the bell rings, or as George Clinton would say, when the horn blow, you better be ready to go. They come in the street packing. In fact, we know this, when we had what we call the Bay of Piglets, about a year and a half ago, some American mercenaries tried to float their way into Venezuela, and they were stopped by a group of Venezuelan fishermen that arrested these guys damn near killed them, but exposed them for trying to come into the country to overthrow the government. So you've got a very strong citizen, heavily armed citizen militia in Venezuela. And here's the other thing. It's not about Maduro. No, it's about the Bolivarian revolution. Speaker 3 (00:31:28): That's right. That's right. Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:31:28): These folks are Speaker 3 (00:31:32): Right. Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:31:33): Ugo Chavez is the man. So they see Maduro not as Maduro. They see Maduro as an agent of the revolution. Speaker 3 (00:31:46): That's right. That's right. Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:31:47): I'll make one more statement about this because you know more about this than I do. I'm going to make this point. This is hyperbole, but I want to say they would say, Nicholas Maduro be damned. It's about the revolution. It's not about him as an individual. And so long as he stays true to the revolution, they will stay true to him. When they see him deviate, he's done. Speaker 3 (00:32:17): I could not agree with you more. I have not stepped foot in Venezuela in 20 years, although I talked to people who are still on the ground there every once in a while. I'm going to tell you something, man, I have never seen, and I've lived in South Africa, I've been through most of Africa, through half of South America. I've never seen France. Nan talked about the need for revolutions make to create the new man, the new woman, a different consciousness. I'm not sure I ever knew what that meant until I went to Venezuela. They really have a different consciousness. Now, I'm going to be honest with you. I think a lot of that was Hugo Chavez. I mean, it really does come down, man. He was as brilliant. I've met Mandela, who I think highly of. I met Mugabi. I never met a man who's more charismatic, more powerful, more visionary than he was. (00:33:09): Robert, I met later in life. I don't know what he was like earlier. Same with Mandela. But Chavez was visionary, and I so have to say that so much of this revolution is doing his understanding. When the United States organized a coup in 2002, the people, they weren't as well armed. They didn't have the malicious then, although some of them had armed the people because the government, the news media, which was controlled by the wealthy, the oligarchs in Venezuela, they told the people that Hugo Chavez is on the beach and she would kicking it with Fidel Castro. The people had these hammer radios. They got on the ham radio and said, nah, that ain't what happened. He would never abandon us like that. I think he's a mirror for us. Let's go get 'em mostly with pots and pan. And you can look at, there's a documentary, I can't remember the name of the documentary. (00:33:58): It's black women who were in the front pots and pans, and look, you're going to give him back. Right? And they did. Right. It took a couple days. It took a little while, right? About two days, right. Cause like I said, they mostly just had pots and pan. But thank God back. Now, look, I think that the vote, which was the closest, it's been, I think in 28 and 20, 26 years now, the vote just a little bit beyond 50% from Mad Gerald. I think it was 53. I want to say it was like 53, 46 or something like that. Yeah, I saw 51 to 44, but something like that. But anyway, it's a diminished margin. I mean, they have had inflation. These sanctions have taken an effect. And I know the people I talked to on the ground, I lived in Ecuador for a year or so a few years ago, and you saw more and more people coming to Ecuador who were disillusioned with the BOLO volume revolution. (00:34:52): And these are people who would've been supportive, people who were of color, mestizos, no blacks, but mestizos. Anyway, so I do think that it's lost a little bit of its luster. But this is what I know, they did not put up a right wing candidate was talking about taking Venezuela back to what it was in 1989 before what they call, I think they called the characters Z. When the president basically told the Venezuela one day we're not going to convert to neoliberalism and ratchet up the bus prices and all that. And the next day they went to work and the bus prices had doubled. And so there was this ride, and that's what produced hug job is. So what I'm saying is that there's a of the Venezuelan voter, the average Venezuelan, I wish we had it here in the United States because they understand as Fred, I know you're going to get sick of me quoting Fred Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:35:47): Hampton. Right? I'll never get sick of you quoting Fred Hampton. Speaker 3 (00:35:50): But it's like the Venezuelans understand. I wish we understood it. I wish you peace if you willing to fight for it. The Venezuelans, they live by that, right? And so, I don't know. I can't tell you, the United States is very powerful, even though we're a diminished force, I can't tell you they'll always be able to hold off the United States, but they're going to have to fight them for Venezuela. Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:36:10): So we started this with your piece, how the Democratic Party committed suicide by biting the hands that feed it. And the way that we got to this discussion about Venezuela was a discussion about democracy and how Joe Biden tells us democracy is on the ballot. And Kamala Harris, the democracy is on the ballot. And Donald Trump democracy, we ought to protect democracy while we're going around the world, overthrowing democracies. That's why we're fighting in Vene in Ukraine because the United States overthrew the democratically elected government. We're trying to have regime change in Russia while the Russians, you can talk about their form of government, all you want to, it is democratic by their definition. And he was democratically elected. We can talk about Syria, we can talk about what they're trying to do in China as it relates to Taiwan. We can talk about what's going on in Gaza. We keep talking about we're defending democracy in Israel, democracy for who Speaker 3 (00:37:19): Democracy. Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:37:19): You even have, there are even Jews in Israel that aren't a part of the Democratic. So that's how we, so, okay. I just wanted to kind of bring us all back to this vice President, Kamala Harris, and still use the word presumptive, because even though she got the vote she needed through the Zoom process, they're going to have a convention which I will attend as a journalist not carrying anybody's banner. Speaker 3 (00:37:56): You sure you don't have that vote blue? No banner who? Banner at home you going to take Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:38:03): No. So, okay, so now she has announced her running mate, and Tim Walsh has debuted as her VP pick in Philly. And my question to you relative to this, is the story that Harris selected Waltz to be her running mate, or is the story that she did not select Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, as the team gets ready to kick off its five state tour, which of those, and they both could be the story, but because we kept hearing that she was going to, A lot of people thought Shapiro was going to be the pick and the fact that they were kicking off in Philly, and now they're not awkward, but which one is the story? Speaker 3 (00:39:18): Yeah, that's a great question. I have to say, if I had to bet money, if I had to bet the farm, I would say that the Democrats are going to lose this election. But I do think Waltz is probably the best choice that she could have made. Shapiro would've been catastrophic, I think just because whether exactly, whether they want to admit it or not, Zionism is on the ballot, right? Right. We know Kamala has said she's a Zionist, right? We know she's had meetings with APAC in which she has asked for it not to be recorded. She is a Zionist. She supports Israel's right to defend itself when it has no such, right? No more so than the Nazis did in Germany. Anyway. So waltz, I think really Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:40:02): Minute. Wait a minute, wait a minute. I need to say. So folks can clearly understand that you are stating that Israel does not have the right to defend itself. That statement is based upon international law, Speaker 3 (00:40:21): Law, Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:40:21): Law. Yes. You're not making this up, right. Kamala Harris coming out and saying, Israel has the right to defend itself as a prosecutor. She should know better because that's wrong. It is just, you might as well say the world is flat and the sun revolves around the earth. The world is not flat, even though when you stand out on the horizon, it looks that way. It ain't necessarily so, and the sun does not revolve around the earth. Speaker 3 (00:40:56): And the rest of the world knows this. Right? The Palestinians are an occupied people. You have the right to, that's why Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:41:02): They're called oppress occupied Speaker 3 (00:41:05): Territory's not right. International law. It's not international law. We'll Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:41:08): Continue, but I just want to be very, very clear on that point. Speaker 3 (00:41:12): Yeah. I just think it's so interesting though. I mean, it seems to me that their choice of, am I pronouncing his name right? Waltz? Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:41:20): Waltz. Waltz. Waltz. No, WALZ. Speaker 3 (00:41:24): Wall. Okay. Waltz. Okay. I think it's a concession to the anti-Zionist protests that I still think are going to be a very big factor in this convention. Chicago is home to the biggest, the largest Palestinian population in the country. And Lord knows how many black people are going to come out and support because they're protesting their mayor there who did a mini, he's a Obama Mini me ran, left, and is governing, right? So it does seem like it's like the best choice. It gives them a shot. He softens their edges, Kamala's edges, the Biden Harris administration's edges in terms of Zionism. But it softens his edges. It doesn't eliminate, from what I understand, he still supports Israel, right? Absolutely. And I don't know. Look, one thing we have to be honest about now is that the media is very much complicit in this game that the Democrats are running, and that's what it is. (00:42:26): The media is very complicit in this. And so are they going to really ask the Harris ticket, Kamala Harris' ticket to tough questions? I don't know. But you'd have to assume that somewhere between now and November that they're going to be confronted in a very public fashion with this question though. Well, what are you going to do about Israel? And that's why I see them losing this race, if nothing else. And I know that foreign policy does not often decide a presidential election, but I think given the state of the first live stream genocide in history, which Daily is bringing these unbearable images into our homes, that combined with their failure to do anything for their black base, especially black men, I have a hard time seeing a path to victory for the Democratic party. Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:43:19): Well, staying in that region. Another thing that folks, you got to stay tuned because these dynamics are changing minute by minute, Hassan Nala, the head of Hezbollah, came out and said, look, we are going to respond. Lemme take a step back. Secretary of State was telling us, Monday, 24 hours, 24 hours, and we expect that Iran is going to respond with man you Speaker 3 (00:43:57): Like he knows. Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:44:00): So Cassandra Sharla comes out and says, well, we're going to respond, and now we don't care what the outcome is. He came out Monday in a very clear speech and said, we are going to respond. We're going in hard, and we don't care what you do. Anah in Yemen saying, please send missiles our way, because every missile you send towards us is a missile you can send in the Palestine. Now, this is the poorest country in the world, the poorest country in the world. They have shut down. I'm talking about Yemen. Yemen, they have shut down the Red Sea. You can't get nothing in or out of the Red Sea. There's a port in Israel called the Port of OT has gone bankrupt because Ansara Allah has been sending missiles into the port of ot, like 13, 1400 miles away. And they're saying, we welcome the fight. Look, that's some smoke you don't want, Speaker 3 (00:45:36): Right? Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:45:37): Because if we were in South central la, this would be the bloods and the Crips saying, I'm about that life. Speaker 3 (00:45:45): Right? Right. The ties and Hezbollah and Hezbollah, you know that about that life. They handed a behind whooping to Israel in 2006, which Israel's never forgotten, right? No. And the ties, I mean, man mean you talk about solidarity. I mean, they, they're what anybody who says they're a revolutionary aspires to be a revolutionary needs to look at. They have a picture. We can take the picture. Well, no, maybe don't take the picture Martin Luther King down, maybe put the Houthis right next to it everywhere kitchen. Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:46:19): And see, they're not new to this game. Speaker 3 (00:46:23): No. Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:46:24): When Anah, I believe means a helper of God, Speaker 3 (00:46:30): Know that, Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:46:31): And I believe that comes from the time of the prophet. May peace be upon him. They traced their lineage that far back when he came through that region, they were assisting him. Speaker 3 (00:46:46): Oh, I did not know that. Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:46:48): So when that's your psyche, when that's your North star look, when Mike Tyson tells you to stop kicking the back of his seat on an airplane, you might want to stop kicking his backseat back of his seat on airplane. Speaker 3 (00:47:02): You might consider doing what he says. Yeah. I Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:47:05): Dunno if you remember that story. Yeah, Speaker 3 (00:47:06): I do. I do. Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:47:07): When they had to carry that guy off of the plane Speaker 3 (00:47:10): And he got off lucky Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:47:13): Because he was able, he survived the assault. Speaker 3 (00:47:15): And I Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:47:16): Don't mean assault in illegal term ass whooping. So anyway, anyway, all of this, I bring this up again, folks. I'm trying to connect these dots. We get into September and October, vice President Harris may be asking questions about the regional war that is ongoing, because that's where we're headed. That's what Israel wants. They are trying to bait the United States into a conflict in the region. And now you've got the supreme leader in Iran saying to Hezbollah, go ahead on, do what you got to do. He's not saying, pump your brakes. Partner saying, do what you got to do. And he's saying, do what you got to do, because we about to do what we got to do. Speaker 3 (00:48:17): We about to put in that work too. And I don't mean to be glib about it, man, this is a horrible thing that's happening. But you've got to look at it. Americans really need to look at it in context. Context. Wait minute. Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:48:27): Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Don't send your money yet, because there's a bamboo steamer that comes with this deal. Turkey Toa, Speaker 3 (00:48:34): Right? Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:48:36): Erwan is saying we in it too. He says, if we have to go in now, he can be a funny dude. Speaker 3 (00:48:43): Yeah. Yeah. Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:48:45): He is at least saying, oh, if we got to go in, we're going in. Speaker 3 (00:48:51): Yeah. This is a perfect storm. I mean, this is the worst perfect storm I've ever seen in my lifetime. You've got this on the one side you've got, and you really think about it, this revolutionary consciousness that has been strengthened and amplified by Israel's decision to commit genocide in front of cameras. And then when we say, yo man, that's the genocide. They say, what's your point? Right? This is the end of Israel. Your Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:49:22): Problem is, Speaker 3 (00:49:23): Yeah, exactly. As we know it, Israel, Israel will never go back to what it was on October 6th of last year. It just won't. Right? It's not going to happen. And the United States, I don't think it's going to go back to what it was on October 6th of last year, either what it's going to be, I don't know. But this is, we're really seeing the end of it, and you can see it in a couple things. One is the congealing of this resistance movement in the Middle East against the white settler colonialism of Israel and the United States and the West. You see it with the bricks whose GDP cumulatively has surpassed the United States. Russia, I believe, has said at reported, they're arming the Houthis. Right? They're arming the Houthis. I've read the, but I dunno if it's true or not, right? And then you've got the peace day resistance, a recession. (00:50:12): Oh, I didn't even think about that. Right? You've got, in the Sahel region in Africa, you've got this resistance is forming, and you've got all of Africa starting to sort of assert itself and say, wait a minute, why do we need these people who speak French, who speak English in here, telling us what to do? They claim to be the boss. Why do they take our resources out? Pay us nothing, take our resources out. You've got that congealing, and then you've got the peace state resistance. You've got that also in South America, although it's in bits and starts, the pink tides kind of a ebb and of flow. But then you've got the peace state resistance, which is what some economists and financial people believe is, at the very least, a very brave and very deep recession. And some people are saying, could be the greatest depression, the greatest depression that the world has ever seen. And there are numbers. I mean, United States has never been 35 trillion in debt. Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:51:07): That Speaker 3 (00:51:07): Never Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:51:08): Happened against a $25 trillion GDP. Speaker 3 (00:51:11): I mean, come on, man. So we've got a lot of issues said Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:51:16): That, try to get a mortgage with that bank balance, Speaker 3 (00:51:19): Man. I was looking at the loans for, and then we've got credit card debt up the kazoo, and the average interest rate, I believe is 25% of these credit card rates. And we're dealing with all these, no, that's the problem. We're not dealing with these problems. We don't address, we don't face these problems. Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:51:34): So all of that, I wrote a piece, you're with her, but is she with you? Yeah. And the piece is contrary to what many people want to say. It's not anti Kamala. It's pro us. Yes. The question in the piece is, what are you as an African-American community demanding from her? And we have just articulated a number of very important issues that are and will impact how much you pay for a pack of chicken wings, a gallon of milk, and a loaf of bread Speaker 3 (00:52:18): Question. Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:52:19): So it's great that she's an AKA. It's great that she went to Howard. It's great that she can do what she do, but what does she stand for? What if you go to her website right now, zero policy, zero, not nary policy reference, Speaker 3 (00:52:47): But she has Megan, the stallion, twerking for Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:52:49): Her. Oh, well, then that gets my Speaker 3 (00:52:51): Vote. I'm just saying, Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:52:53): Hey, I, amen. Speaker 3 (00:52:55): You know what, Earl? You know what Earl but said about black voters, right? Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:52:59): Go ahead. Speaker 3 (00:53:01): I dunno if I can repeat it here, but all we want is a warm toilet seat. A tight, tight, what was it? And a pair of shoe apparently to say, Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:53:17): So here's folks, here's the question. Politics. We are so caught up in the politics of personality and the politics of phenotype. We are trying to defend, oh, Donald Trump said she isn't black. Who cares when a pack of chicken wings is $21 a pack, when organic, a gallon of organic milk is $12 a gallon. That matters to me. I drink organic milk. Why are we so caught up in that? When your tax dollars are funding genocide, when your tax dollars are paying the salaries and the retirement of Ukrainians, and you don't have a retirement plan, your pension plan went out the window 25 years ago. That's right. We're paying Ukrainian pensions and healthcare. And healthcare and education budgets are numeric representations of priority. Speaker 3 (00:54:36): That's right. That's right. A moral document, as King said. That's Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:54:40): Right. And we keep being told, we don't have the money. We don't have the money, but F sixteens just landed in Ukraine, which I'll say in the next 10 days will probably be blown into rubble. But we're sending F sixteens. So Lockheed Martin is happy. John Jeter, am I hating black women because I'm questioning policy issues related. Oh, we have to give her a chance. What did Barack Obama say when members of the Black Press said, you didn't really do anything for the black community, said you did not demand anything. Speaker 3 (00:55:34): Yeah. Yeah. Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:55:36): Frederick Douglas says, power yields nothing without demand. It never has. And it never will. That's Speaker 3 (00:55:43): Right. That's right. Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:55:44): But when I asked the question, well, what are you demanding? Oh, no, Wilmer. See, you have to give her a chance. Oh, here's the other. I'll make, explain. Now I'm going to turn it over to you. So you've got folks like Simone Sanders that say, well, she's been vice president for four years. Kamala has earned it. And then you say, but wait a minute. So while she was vice president, what'd she do? Oh, well, you have to understand that vice presidents, those jobs, their job description is really very vague, and you can't really expect, well, no. See, you can't have it both ways, Speaker 3 (00:56:23): Right? That's right. You Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:56:24): Can't tell me she earned it by being vice president. And then when I ask you, well, what did she do? You can't tell me. Well, she didn't do anything because vice presidents don't do anything. John Jeter. Speaker 3 (00:56:35): Yeah. We really need to raise our level of play. All Americans do, but particularly African Americans, because we have historically been the vanguard of this revolution, of the revolution in the United States, a progressive working class revolution. We need to raise our level of play. We need to deepen our understanding of politics. We need to do exactly as you say, we need to develop a list of demands, make them and stick to them. I'll try to say this very succinctly. I'm coming out with a new book in September next month, class War in America, how the elites divide the nation by asking, are you a worker or are you white? I began the book talking about a political movement in the 1870s in the reconstruction period in Virginia where blacks were the majority of a political party called the read adjusters. Poor whites, mostly farmers and blacks in Virginia, who decided to team up and to the elites of both parties, Republicans and Democrats were trying to take their tax money and pay the bonds, the money that was loaned to Virginia by the wealthy, the aristocrats, the Confederates, the people who really were responsible for the war, the Civil War. (00:57:55): And they said they wanted to pay exorbitant interest rates 6%, which would be actually pretty low these days. This coalition said, no, we won't do it. So this group, the Readjusts, they lowered interest rates, they Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:58:07): Readjusted the loans. Speaker 3 (00:58:09): They spent this money on schools and things like that. They started feeling themselves, and the white party leader said, well, the blacks were saying, well, we want also, we want enter the whipping post. We want this and we want that. And the whites in that party, the adjusters didn't hear 'em. They didn't feel 'em, right? So they didn't do it. So the brother said, because it's just black men who voted at that time, although we know that their black women supported them in this. But black men said, okay, cool. So the next election, the readjust lost everything. And they realized, to their credit, they said, oh, they were serious. And so when they returned to power, they did everything the brother said, they eliminate the whipping votes. In the book, there's a point where they talk about the Patronist jobs. They handed out to blacks because black were 60% of this party. There's a postmaster who said, I think it was 1881. He said, my office is so full of blacks, or might have said colors at that time. My office is so full of colors. It looks like Africa in here, right? This is 1881. So I said, that's the same in Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:59:18): Virginia. Speaker 3 (00:59:18): In Virginia, the heart of the Confederacy, right? 1881, people read this and they said, I was lying. I did not make it up. It is a true fact, as we say, right? We need to return to that mindset, that understanding. We need the people in Venezuela like the Houthis, like the Lebanese, the Hezbollah, Lebanon. We need to return to that level of understanding and raise our revolutionary metabolism. Look, man, as Fred Hampton said last time, I'll quote Fred Hampton today, if you say you want to do something revolutionary, but you say, I'm too young to die, you don't realize you are already dead. It's a lot of dead men walking in this country right Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:59:59): Now. John Jeter, my brother, thank you for joining me today. Speaker 3 (01:00:05): My pleasure, man. Always a pleasure. Dr. Wilmer Leon (01:00:08): Folks. Thank you all so much for listening to the Connecting the Dots podcast with me, Dr. Wilmer Leon. Stay tuned for new episodes every week. Also, please follow and subscribe. Go to that Patreon account. Help us out, please. This isn't cheap. We need you to make this work. Leave a review and share the show. Follow us on social media. You can find all the links below in the show description. And remember, this is where the analysis of politics, culture, and history converge. Because talk without analysis is just chatter, and we don't chatter here on connecting the dots. I'm going to see you again next time. Until then, I'm Dr. Wier Leon. Have a great one. Peace. I'm out Jon Jeter (01:00:58): Connecting the dots with Dr. Wilmer Leon, where the analysis of politics, culture, and history converge.  

Find me and the show on social media @DrWilmerLeon on X (Twitter), Instagram, and YouTube Facebook page is www.facebook.com/Drwilmerleonctd   TRANSCRIPT: Speaker 2 (00:14): Welcome to the Connecting the Dots podcast with Dr. Wilmer Leon. I'm Wilmer Leon. Here's the point. We have a tendency to view current events as though they occur in a vacuum, failing to understand and to truly appreciate the broader historical context in which most of these events occur. During each episode of this program, my guests and I will have probing, provocative, and in-depth discussions that connect the dots between current events and the broader historic context in which they occur. This will enable you to better understand and analyze the events that impact the global village in which we live. On today's episode, the questions are why are American neocons hell bent on starting a conflict with Russia? What's going on in Ukraine? Who was Alexi Naval? And is NATO really still relevant? For insight into all of this let's turn to my guest. He's a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm, and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD. (01:31) His most recent book is entitled Disarmament In the Time of Perestroika, he is Scott Ritter. Scott, welcome. Thanks for joining me and let's connect some dots. Well, thanks for having me. And first of all, I have to say I love the name of your show in the intelligence business, connecting the dots is what we do. You never get the full picture. You get little pieces of information, and the question is, how do you connect them to get a proper narrative? So I like the idea. Well, thank you, Scott. I appreciate that. So the answers to each of these questions I think could be a show of their own, but let's start with in 2024, why are neocons so afraid of Russia? I mean, when we go back to this nauseating ongoing narrative, Hillary Clinton blamed Russia for hacking into the DNC server. No evidence was presented, but the narrative held and continues to hold in spite of scientific empiric evidence. (02:39) To the contrary, the whole Russiagate fiasco, even now, representative Mike Turner from Ohio, the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, he warns that Russia may be developing a space-based weapon that can target US satellites, NBC reported on the 19th of this month, alarming new warnings about Russia held zapper erosion. Nuclear power plant may be on the verge of explosion. These are just a few examples and we'll get to the specifics of each of these in a few, but just these are just some overarching examples of example, this Russia phobia. Why? Well, I mean, let's just look at historic examples. At the end of the Second World War, we had built up this economy that was a lot of people forget that before the Second World War happened, we had a thing called the Great Depression, and our economy was not the healthiest in the world, and we used global war as a way to mobilize our economy, to get it up to war footing. (03:48) And there was a recognition that with 12 million guys coming home, we needed jobs. And if we tried to transition back to a civilian economy, we ran the danger of going backwards instead of forward. So we had to keep this military industrial complex up and running. But to do that, you need an enemy, you need a bad guy. Therefore, we have the Iron Curtain, Winston Churchill's, Fulton, Missouri speech in, I think 1946, the creation of nato and then the Red Scare. I mean, Russia has always been communism back then. Not just Russia, but communist China was always the perfect boogeyman to say, Ooh, danger lurks. We therefore now have a justification to militarize our economy and back this up politically by pointing to this threat. Back in the fifties, we had the bomber gap. You remember that? (04:52) Read about it little before my time, but I got you. Yeah, I mean, we weren't around back. We're old Wilber, but we're not that old. But yeah, the idea of, I think the Russians took, had like a dozen bombers, but on a military parade, they just flew them over and over and over again in a circle over Moscow, and the people on the ground looked up and said, oh my goodness, there's a whole bunch of bombers. And so the CIA used this, the Congress used this to justify building more American bombers, even though once we got our satellites up, we went, there's only 12. There's not that many, but we never told the truth. Then there was the missile gap. John F. Kennedy was responsible for that one too. The Russians have missiles. We have to build missiles, missiles, missiles until we found out that they didn't have the missiles. (05:40) But it didn't matter. We continued to build them anyways, and this led to the Cuban missiles crisis, which scared the live and you know what out of everybody and got us on the path of arms control, at least trying to contain, but we still called them the threat. That's all that's happening here. I can guarantee you this Wilmer, the neocons aren't looking for a war with Russia because as politically biased as they are, as fear mongers are, they're not suicidal and they know what the consequences of a war with Russia would be, but what they're doing is they're pushing it right up to the cusp of conflict, especially now when you have an American society that's sort of waking up to the fact that we're spending a lot of money over there when we need to be spending a lot of money back here at home, and people are starting to ask questions. (06:30) So the way that you avoid answering these questions is to create that straw man that threat, the Russian threat. The Russians are evil. You said it perfectly. They interfered with our election. They're doing this, that and the other thing, and therefore we must spend 64 billion in Ukraine even though we can't spend $64 million in Flint, Michigan. I mean, it's this sort of argument that's going on, and this may seem as a somo or a juvenile question, but how dangerous is this? World War? I was to a great degree, started on a fluke. It is in many instances or in many minds attributable to the assassination of Archduke Fran Ferdinand. But that in and of itself isn't what started the war. There were a number of skirmishes and a number of tensions that were going on in Europe, and this was really just the spark that led to World War I. (07:33) If my understanding of history is accurate. So do we find ourselves now, whether it be Russia and Ukraine, China and Taiwan, North Korea and South Korea, I mean the United States, what's going on in Venezuela as the United States is interfering in the Venezuelan elections? There are a number, of course, we've got Gaza in the Middle East, so we've got our hands, we're smoking at the gas station and smoking at a lot of gas stations. I'm going to steal that, by the way. I like that analogy. Just letting everybody know I'm using that from now on. Look, first of all, there's no such thing as a sophomore question. The one thing I learned, and I learned this from guys who are 20 times smarter than me, that the only stupid questions, the one you don't ask, you don't ask, but you're a hundred percent right. Barbara Tuckman wrote a book, the Guns of August, I think it was a PO prize winning book about how we got to World War I. (08:38) And one of the key aspects to that wasn't just the different crises that were taking place, but how people responded to that and the thing that made World War I inevitable, even though everybody, if you read the book, everybody in the summer of 1914, nobody wanted war. Everybody believed it would be avoided, it was just suicidal. But then they got into this cycle of mobilization, mobilizing their societies economically and militarily for conflict because that's just what you did when you had a crisis. But it's okay, we're just mobilizing and we're not really going to war. What scares me about today is there's a recognition on the part of everybody that war would be suicidal, that we don't want this, but look at what we've done. We built up the Ukrainian military from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands and got it equipped, organized, trained to go to war against Russia. (09:44) What do you think we were doing in Ukraine from 2015 to 2022 when we were training a battalion of Ukrainian soldiers every 55 days for the sole purpose of fighting Russians? This helped trigger a conflict. It got Russia to respond. Then we poured more money into Ukraine. What did Russia do? Mobilize People need to put on their hats and go, wait a minute, that's a word we don't want to hear. Russia mobilized not just the 300,000, but the process of mobilization continued to where they trained 450,000 volunteers since January 1st, just for everybody who's wondering what's going on in Ukraine, I know that's going to be later on question. Russia mobilized 53,000 volunteers. This is at a time when Ukraine's thumping people on the head and takes 'em to the front because nobody wants to fight. 53,000 Russians volunteered to go fight in the war since January 1st. (10:42) They're coming in at 1000, 1,500 a day. And let me reiterate, that's not press gangs like they're using in Russia. G roaming the villages taking the men and now women from the streets and putting them into the military. That's not conscription, that's volunteer. And let me make this following point, it's even more interesting than that. It's not a bunch of 22-year-old red meat eating young men who are looking for adventure and romance. The average age of the Russian volunteer going in is about 35 years old. He's married, he has a family, and he has a job. It's the last person in the world that you'd expect to volunteer to go to a war zone. And yet they're doing it because they love their country, because they say we have to do that. What's going on right now is an existential struggle for the survival of Russia against the collective West, which again speaks to the danger of mobilization because Russia is a nation that is mobilizing and has the potential to mobilize even more if necessary. (11:55) And this should scare the heck out of everybody in nato because right now you have nato. What's NATO talking about doing Wilmer mobilizing. They're talking about mobilizing. You have everybody in NATO saying, well, they never say, well, since we kicked this hornets nest and the hornets are now coming out and stinging us, maybe we should stop kicking the hornet's nest. They don't acknowledge the role they played in building the Ukrainian army to trigger this, but what they're saying now is, oh, because Russia now has mobilized and is defeating the proxy army that we built. We have to mobilize in turn. And you have Brits talking about general mobilization, Germans, and what this does. Now, you're a Russian. You're sitting there going, huh? They're talking about mobilizing. Well, if they do that, what do we have to do? I mean, Finland just joined nato. We really don't care until they put on Russia's border, pardon on Russia's border, on Russia's border until they put NATO troops there. (12:50) Now Russia has to say, well, we didn't want to do this. But to give you an example, we keep the determinants mobilized. Wil Russia was compelled to create a new military district, the St. Petersburg military District, because Finland joined nato. There wasn't a St. Petersburg military district. Russia didn't have 70,000 combat troops on the finished border until Finland joined nato. Now, Russia has built mobilized Wilmer. They've put in 70,000 frontline troops divisions ready to march on Helsinki. Not because they wanted to, but because they were compelled to by the mobilization. Bringing Finland and Sweden into NATO is a form of mobilization. What we have here is we are moving in the wrong direction. We are accumulating military power in Europe, and at some point in time you're smoking at the gas station and it's going to go, I'm going to have to use that one, Scott. That's pretty good. (13:51) Feel free. So this time last year, Ukraine was on the front page of every newspaper as of the morning of that we're taping this conversation. I don't see Ukraine referenced. And let me suggest folks, Reid, I don't know if you've read Nikolai Petro and Ted Snyder's piece to end the war in Ukraine expose its core lie. Let me read two quick paragraphs. This is how it opens. The essential argument used to avoid negotiation and continue support for the war in Ukraine is based on a falsehood. That falsehood repeated by President Biden is that when Putin decided to invade, which we can debate that word, he intended to conquer all of Ukraine and annihilated its falsity, has been exposed multiple times by military experts who have pointed out both before and after the invasion, that Russia could not have intended to conquer all of Ukraine because it did not invade with sufficient forces to do so. Scott Ritter, well, look, that was my argument all along. I kept saying they're only going in with around 200,000. Ukraine at the start of the war had around 770,000, and I went, the normal attack defender ratio is supposed to be three to one in favor of the attacker. And Russia's going in with a one to three disadvantage. (15:21) Why? And the answer was because they weren't trying to occupy Ukraine. They were trying to, oh no, it's because Russians can't do math. Well, that too, I mean, I must be Russian because I'm not very good at math either. But my military math was like, this isn't adding up. But Russia's goal is to get 'em to a negotiating table. But I also then when Russia mobilized, because I basically said that Russia's going to have to get 500, 600,000 men to stabilize the frontline just to stabilize the frontline. And they mobilized to do that. And then people said, well, they're going to go on to Odessa. And I went, if they go on to Odessa, they're going to need around 900,000 guys to go on to Odessa and take those things. Russia's got about 900,000 guys there now. So they have enough troops to do that. (16:09) But to go on to Poland, they're going to need about 1.5 million guys. They don't have that. And to go from Poland to Germany, they're going to need around 3 million guys. It's just basic military math. I mean, I could bore you all day about how I come up with these numbers, but it's the logistics of war. It's the scope and scale of the fronts, how to protect flanks, how to sustain offensive operations. The math doesn't lie. I'm pretty good with those numbers and Russia doesn't have it. And here's the thing. We know this. I mean, there's, look, I was a major and I only was a major for a little while. The main part of my military life was spent as a captain. Now, captains are pretty cool, but we're not seniors. We're not the most senior people in the world. So I admit that my perspective was a captain's perspective at senior headquarters. (17:01) I saw the big picture, but I know enough to know what it takes to move troops. I was part of moving 750,000 troops into the Middle East. I know what a tip fiddle is, time phase deployment list, how to surge things in. I planned a core sized operation and had to plan on the logistics sustainability of that. I'm pretty good with the numbers. And so are the people in the Pentagon who are more senior than I am. People who see the bigger picture in more detail. They know what I'm talking about too. And they know no matter how much you talk up somebody, you're only as good as your logistics. I mean, you can have the Lamborghini, but if you ain't got the gasoline, you don't have anything. You have a piece of metal sitting in your driveway, but you got to have the gas and you got to have the gas sustained. (17:53) You got to be able to maintain it, fix it. Lamborghini's brake. You got to have people trained to drive the Lamborghini. We can talk the Russians up all we want to about this, that and the other thing. But the bottom line is they're only human and they can only do that which is physically possible to do. And they don't have the troops to invade NATO to drive on nato. It's a 100% fabrication on the part of these people to justify their own mobilization. But everybody knows that Russia can't. Right now, Russia has sufficient troops to take Odessa to take cargo, to take Nikola, to take nepa, Petros, that's it. They can't do anything more than that. If they want to drive on Kiev, they're going to need another 300,000 troops up in Belarus that they don't have right now. So people just have to put on their thinking caps and think rationally. (18:46) But right now, rational thought isn't in the cards. Apparently, you know a hell of a lot more about this than I do. You speak the language, you listen to the broadcast, I listen to you and other folks, but when I keep hearing statements about what Russia is going to do, the one thing that I never hear following that is evidence to support the position Russia wants to take over Europe. Europe, I've never heard President Putin say that. I've never read anything coming out of Russia that says that. All I hear is Nikki Haley and Joe Biden and Kamala there. There's a litany of folks that'll tell me that, but I haven't seen them present one video of President Putin standing at a podium or taking off his shoe like Stalin and pounding on the podium saying, I'm kicking your, and the other point is, 80% of what I see is defensive, not offensive. Here's another one you might want to use. Don't start nothing, won't be nothing. And it seems as Joe Biden would just shut the up. (20:14) You using my language? I want to be a Marine. Marine. So, okay, you get my point, Scott. Well, here's the thing. If we go back to the January, December, 2021, January 22 timeframe, the US government's running, going, Russia is going to invade, Russia is going to invade. Now, they may have had some intelligence about Russia moving up, logistics and all that stuff, but I said, Russia won't invade right now. They said, why? And I said, because Russia is a nation and the Russian government is ruled by law. Believe it or not. It's their law. It ain't our law, but it's their law. And there are things that have to happen before you can talk about an invasion. I spelled it out. I said, first of all, Russia will not operate in violation of the United Nations charter. So they will have to come up with a cognizable case for invasion. (21:12) And right now, the only one they have is preemptive self-defense. But to get preemptive self-defense, Russia will have to form a security relationship with the Doba, a formal security relationship, which will require the doba to not only declare their independence, but for Russia to recognize that independence. And then once Russia recognizes that independence, then Russia will have to go through, the President will have to go to the Duma, the Duma will have to approve something, go to the Senate, and then the Senate takes it back to the President, who then signs it. And then, and only then can we talk about military intervention. Now, this can take place in a short period of time, but I can promise you guarantee you that Russia ain't crossing the border until that happens. And if we're not seeing that happen, then there will be no military intervention and everybody's like, oh, scout up. Well, everything I said is 100. That's what happened in February. Russia began the process. Now, they did it in a very compact period of time, but every step that I said had to be taken was taken. Why? The rule of law. Putin is not a dictator. Putin is governed by the rule of law. He is not permitted to do things on a whim, and it's the same thing. If he wants to. (22:30) Russian troops cannot operate outside of the border of Russia without the permission of the Duma. He would have to go to them constitutionally, say, Hey, I'd like to send troops to Poland because he can't just send troops to Poland. And then the Duma would say, why are we doing this? What is the threat? And normally, the only reason to justify it is Poland attacked us, so we have to wait for that one. And that's the thing. In order for him to do anything to begin mobilizing, he can't just, why didn't he have 300,000 troops already mobilized to go into Ukraine? Because to justify the mobilization, you need legal justification. He didn't have it, didn't have it, couldn't go to the Duma, couldn't justify it. None of the steps that would be required for Russia to attack Europe are in place. First of all, it's not in Russia's doctrine, their entire approach, and you hit it on the head, their defense. (23:33) Now, the Russians are very good at the counter offensive, so if we attack them, Russian defensive doctors is to receive the attack, to destroy the attack and then to counter attack, and you counter attack to destroy the political center of the beast that attacked you. So yeah, if you want Russian troops in Warsaw, if you want Russian troops in Berlin, attack Russia. But otherwise, don't worry about it because it isn't going to happen. Don't start nothing. It won't be nothing. Won't be nothing. I like it. Alexi Navalny described as, and this is the description, the dominant Western narrative described as Russian President Putin's most formidable domestic opponent fell unconscious and died at polar wolf, Arctic penal colony. Biden described him as a powerful voice for the truth. What has happened to Navali is yet more proof of Putin's brutality. No one should be fooled. Well, the first thing is, if that was true, then what does this say about Biden's unyielding support for genocide in Gaza? What does that say about his brutality looking at the thousands, tens of thousands that people have fought, but that's not the point. If you could quickly unpack the myth of Alexi Navalny and the alleged poisoning and all of that stuff to kind of dispel this myth that Putin has assassinated his most formidable domestic opponent. (25:25) Okay, first of all, we have to understand that the United States government has been in the business of trying to control Russian politics since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The decade of the 1990s was premised on an American policy of promoting democratic reform inside Russia. But what it means by that is by creating institutions that are controlled by the United States and banking and well, money is everything. And what we did in the 1990s is we started using non-governmental organizations. We'd set up these civic societies, these groups for furtherance of democracy, and then we would fund them through various fronts like the National Endowment for Democracy, which in 1983 was created to take over the covert political action functions of the CIA and make it more overt. The US Congress created it, funneled money to it. There's a democratic branch, there's a Republican branch they filter money in. (26:28) The whole idea is again, to create fund, so-called democratic institutions that will lead to the restructuring of a society the way we want it to be restructured. The United States did that in Ukraine in 2014 with the, well, well, we did it before that. If you remember back in the early two thousands, we did a color revolution in Serbia. It was a very successful color revolution, and so we use that as a template that would then repeat it in Georgia, and then we repeated in Ukraine, remember 2004, 2005, the Orange Revolution. What a lot of people don't realize is that we were actively trying to do a color revolution in Russia in 2007, 2008. Why that time period? Again, I don't want to bore people, but this is very important. Vladimir Putin became president end of 1999. He won an election in March of 2000 constitutionally. (27:24) He got to run for two terms, those two terms. It became clear that he was not going to continue the Yeltsin policy of doing whatever the United States wanted to be done, that he was going to try to reform Russia in a Russian image, which we didn't like. So we were pouring money into Russia through these non-governmental organizations for the purpose of carrying out a color revolution in 2007, 2008. The way we were going to do it is in 2007 was the parliamentary elections. The idea of that 2007, 2008 period was that Putin couldn't stand a third term as president, so he was going to do a swap with Dmitri Veev, who at that time was the prime Minister. So Putin was going to become prime minister. Veev would become president, but for this to happen, United Russia, which was Putin's party, had to win the parliamentary election. (28:10) If the opposition could deny United Russia the majority, then Putin couldn't become Prime Minister, and if Putin couldn't become Prime Minister, then vie was vulnerable as president and you could pick him off and suddenly you've swept Putin out of power. This is literally the stated objective of the United States, and we started pouring money into Russia to promote this. One of the guys that got caught up in this was a young lawyer named Alex Navalny. He started working, it's CIA all the way. Look, the CIA trained some people. One of them was this Y Guinea albo. She's a journalist, but she went to Harvard, got groomed by the CIA, whether she knew it or not, but she left the balling, went to Yale. Well, later on, yes, he went to Yale in 2010, but Allach comes in in 2004 and she sets up this political parlor. (29:05) Now she comes from Harvard, she got her PhD. She comes to Russia. The first thing she does is sets up this political parlor funded by British money coming from oligarchs funneled to her through British intelligence. And this parlor attracts these young people, including Navalny, and their job is to create a youth movement that can lead to a color revolution. That's his whole thing. Bottom line is it failed. It failed miserably. But Navalny was identified at that point in time as somebody with potentially started this anti-corruption campaign when mid became the president mid said, I'm against corruption. Naval went good. Let me help you. And he jumped on this thing. He got picked to go to Yale in 2010 where he was groomed by the CIA for what purpose. The next target was, okay, we couldn't stop Putin from doing the swap in 2007, 2008. What we can do now is keep mid in power. (30:01) We can prevent Putin from coming back into office in the 2012 presidential election. Remember Hillary Clinton working the opposition, Michael McFall going in there. It's a big deal. And the volume, he became the front man for this. He went to Yale. He got dipped in, greased by the CIA and he got sent back to Russia. He's a CIA asset, straight up funded by British intelligence trying to overthrow or prevent Putin from coming back in power. Well, what's that thing? If you don't start nothing, there won't be nothing. Don't start nothing. Won't be nothing. Well, Navalny, I mean, before he went to Yale, he spent a summer in Kiro, which is a province about 800 kilometers northeast of Moscow. He got involved in restructuring the timber business, and it looked like he might've done some things that weren't so good. Normally that would be ignored, but he comes back and he immediately starts attacking the interest, the economic interest behind United Russia and Putin. (31:04) And so you started something, okay? So they opened up a criminal case against him, and now you have this situation where Navalny is trying to make himself relevant. And look, he had some traction early on. He ran for Mayor of Moscow and he got 27% of the vote. That ain't bad, but he didn't have any traction outside of Moscow. He couldn't get the kind of numbers necessary to win, but he was a pain in Putin's side. So they started legal, this legal stuff against him, and it ended up in him being convicted of a fraud and embezzlement, some people call it politically motivated. There's no doubt it was politically motivated, but that doesn't mean that the crime didn't take place. He got a suspended sentence. He's on parole. Basically, they did this to keep him from running. They said, because you're convicted, you can't run for office. (31:52) Something needed to happen. And so in 2020, he was poisoned, but he wasn't. Again, I don't want to get too much down the conspiracy track, but let me just put it this way. His medical records clearly show that he wasn't poisoned by Novak. This was a setup to get him out of Russia where he had been effectively neutered over into a safe area, and we know that he landed in Germany, he was flown into Germany, had a miraculous recovery by December. He wait a minute, had a miraculous recovery from Nova Chuck, which from my understanding is one of the most dangerous nerve agents created. I've read. It's so dangerous. It really can't even be used. The story was that he was poisoned at the airport. They poisoned his tea before he got on the plane. No, no. They poisoned his underwear in his hotel room. (32:45) No, no. But wasn't that afterwards, because the story changed. The story changed a couple of times. That's my point that they said that they poisoned his tea in the airport. If I understand it, if you were to put Nova chuck in a cup of tea damn near everybody, at least in that area of the airport would be dead. Then they said, oh, they poisoned his water bottle on the plane. Nobach is so toxic that if they had done that, everybody including the pilot would be dead. Then they poisoned his underwear. The story kept, and this is also interesting to me, is that during all of these changing of the stories, Russia kept saying, send us the toxicology report so that we can investigate this. No toxicology report was ever presented. Yeah, again, I'm not a big conspiracy guy. I don't like it. I am Hamm's razor kind of person. (33:48) But the problem is, CCAM razor points to this because we did get the toxicology, not the ones that the Germans and everybody were saying prove Novare, Wilma, you're a hundred percent right. This is the most deadly substance on the planet, but apparently it can't kill anybody. And by the way, whatever the new name of the kgp is, they're pretty good at assassinating folks as is the ccia. A, if they want you done, cancel your distance and cancel your five bullets. Five bullets in the front of your body tends to do it. You don't have to mess around with Novak. Okay? Yeah. I mean, just look. A Ukrainian pilot, a Russian pilot defected earlier this year to Ukraine and had two of his crew members killed as a result. I mean, he's a murderous traitor in the eyes of the Russians. They just found his body in Spain with five bullets pumped into the front of it. (34:45) That's how the Russians get you. They don't go around doing this Novak stuff. But the point is this Nozek was a manufactured event. It didn't happen. What the German doctors who treated him released the blood work and everything. It showed that Navalny had a whole bunch of different health issues, some serious health issues, and he was also, they found evidence of antidepressants, which is okay. I'm not attacking him, it's not a problem, but it looks like he deliberately overdosed on antidepressants to generate the result that happened so he could be flown out. This was a pre-planned event. I just want everybody to understand that, that Navalny deliberately overdosed on antidepressants to generate a medical crisis that then got him flown out of Russia, because remember, he's on house arrest. He can't leave, but they got him out. What's the first thing that happens after his miraculous recovery? (35:42) They fly him to Germany to a CIA safe house where a film crew comes in and they produce two feature length documentaries in one month, one month, including elaborate computer generated graphics, the whole thing. He claims that he came up with the idea while he was recovering from his and wrote it in a feverish in October, November. Wilmer, I've made a documentary and I'm making one right now. I can guarantee you they didn't get it done in a month. This was prepackaged by the CIA and British intelligence. And then he was, everybody's saying, stay in Germany. And he went, no, I'm going back. Why? Again? In 2021, these election cycles matter. In 2021, Putin was going to change the Constitution so that he could continue to run for office, and he changed the length of the term from four years to six years. He was restructuring the government and everybody who was anybody, including myself, looked at it and went, he's basically guaranteeing that the West will never subvert Russian democracy by doing this. (36:49) He's iron proofing it, bulletproofing it. So the last chance to get rid of Vladimir Putin was to disrupt this effort. Navalny was picked as the guy to do it. Navalny job was to go back to Russia stand trial, and while he's standing trial, they're going to release these documentaries. The first one was called Putin's Palace, which was supposed to expose the corruption of Putin and everything, and the idea that it would generate so much unrest inside Russia that Navalny would be acquitted, put in, become the presidential candidate to oppose Putin. That was the dream. The problem is the people coming up with that didn't understand that Navalny had no support in Russia, never could never get it outside of Moscow. You couldn't get 5%. You might get 12% in Cabo, but that's it. You're not going to win election with 12% support. The numbers I saw for him was about somewhere between two and 5%, more on the 2% side. (37:44) Nationwide, like I said, there's certain bubbles in there where you could get support, but nationwide, he wasn't going anywhere on this. So he goes back and the Russians, what's that? Don't want nothing. Don't start nothing. The Russians know exactly what's going on. I mean, look, Pesco, who's the pre spokesperson in October of 2020, he said, we know what's going on. Navalny is working with the CIA. We know this. We know everything. So they brought him back and they knew what his plan was. They knew what he was supposed to do. So they quickly turned just really quickly because that's what President Putin said to Tucker Carlson when he talked about it's good that you applied to the CIA and that they did not accept you. He was sending a message. I know who you are. I know what you do. Yeah, well, so here's the deal. (38:39) The Russians said, we're not playing this game anymore. We've letting Navali do this stupid stupidity because he's irrelevant. But now you're playing, playing a serious game of messing around with our democracy. So we're just going to end it. The vol, the hammer's coming down, boom, nine years, boom, 30 years, you're in jail for life. Goodbye. Get out of here. Now they did that, and then a lot of people just came out and Bill. Then the Russians turned around and said, okay, we know he's your spy. Do you want him back? We'll trade him for a guy that we want back from Germany. Now, here's the part that gets conspiratorial two days before he died, minute before you get there. Isn't there also footage of Navalny or one of his representatives, but I think it's him talking Tom, I six, about money, about how much money he's going to need to sustain this democracy movement in Russia. (39:38) 2012, Navalny deputy met with a member of MI six in Moscow. Again, how did they get the video? Because the Russians know everything. I mean, when people are sitting there going, Evan Sitz isn't a CIA spy. He couldn't be. I just want to tell you right now, ladies and gentlemen, the Russians have him on film talking about this, about receiving the documents. It's conspiratorial. Putin was very clear about it. He's a CIA spy and Navalny, the Russians know who was paying for him. They know this. So they're sitting there going, we want to give them back. But that's the last thing. The ccia A wants. Why? Because then they have to admit that we're messing around in Russian politics politic. They can't. So this is the part that, this is what I firmly believe, because I believe that Navalny was induced by his handlers to deliberately overdose on depressants in 2020 to get him out, to get involved in the CIA operation to come back in and disrupt the election. (40:37) That is clear. Two days before he died, he was visited by his lawyer. Some people say that his wife was there as well, and they brought medication that's documented. Have you seen Godfather two so many times? I can't tell you how many Freddy five fingers. Freddy. Five fingers. Okay, so Tom goes to talk to Freddie five fingers. You just take a nice warm bath, you slit your words, nice warm bath, open up your veins with the woman. The family will be taken care of, throws the cigar away, shakes his hand, and it's understood. Navalny daughter got a free ride to Stanford courtesy of Michael McFall. Navalny wife now has been appointed. I mean, she was at the Munich Security Conference ready to step in before he died. He died. The script comes in, boom. She's now the new figure of the opposition. She's not tainted by crime. (41:32) She's at Navalny. That's a headline in the Washington Post today. Yeah, she's the new face of the opposition because Navalny had been neutered by the Russians, but as long as he was alive, he was a problem for the CIA. So Freddy five fingers, that's all I'm going to say. He was told Your family will be taken care of. All they have to do is lie in the tub and open up my veins, and it's a quiet, painful day. He overdosed on the drugs they gave him. He went for a walk and he died, didn't come back. His family's taken care of, and that's what I believe happened. I believe that the CIA knocked this guy off in prison. He took a long walk on a very short pier. Yeah. (42:20) So you've got Alexander the Butcher, sarky Ky, the commander of Ukraine's Ground forces. Since the start of the military operation, he is now the new military chief after Emir, Zelensky replaced zany in this leadership shakeup. What does that tell us at this stage of the game? What does that type of move tell us? Are they transitioning now to another phase of this process, recognizing that the war is lost? Again, everything has to have a setup because nothing happens in a vacuum. Ukraine is called the greatest democracy in the world. We know that's not true, but it's called the greatest democracy in the world by America. We overthrew it in 2014. Yes, we would know. But the key aspect of democracies is civil military relations, meaning that the civilian is the commander in chief, and the military always obeys the orders. Let's look at American history. (43:32) George McClellan, Abraham Lincoln McClellan was the commander of the army of the Potomac, and he thought he knew how to win this war, and Abraham Lincoln disagreed and fired him. And McClellan said, sir, yes sir. And he resigned because civil military relations, that's what you do. McClellan went on to challenge Lincoln in the elections and lost, but he didn't launch a coup. That's not what you do. Douglas MacArthur, during the Korean War thought he knew how to win the war, wanted to drop atomic bombs on China. Harry Truman said, Nope, that's not how we're going to do it. And they met in Midway, and Truman fired him, and MacArthur went, sir, yes sir. And he resigned. That's what civil military relations supposed to be in a democracy. Zelensky met with zany, who's the commander of the Ukrainian Armed forces, and he said, I don't like the fact that you're articulating policy that goes against what I want. (44:31) I want to be more aggressive. I have to go out and sell this conflict to the West, and I have to sell it, that we're going to regain all the lost territory. And you, as the general is supposed to say, sir, yes, sir, but you've gone out and given interviews behind my back saying it's a frozen conflict, a stalemate. I can't do that. You're fired and solution. He said, no, I'm not. And Zelensky went. Zany said, not only am I not fired, but here, let me show you this. Here's my picture. Given a medal to a right sector, Nazi from the organization, said, they're going to hang you from the deck, and if you ever go against this, and behind me is a picture of step on Bandera and the right sector flag. Go ahead and fire me now. Zelensky, you're a dead man walking. (45:14) And when Zelensky started calling people up saying Aslu saying no, one of the people he called up was Ky, who said, I just want to tell you right now, Mr. President, myself and the entire Ukrainian general staff support slu, you fire 'em. We come marching, it's over. And now Victoria Newland, and everybody's back there going, can't do this, guys. We're supposed to be giving 64 billion to the world's greatest democracy. We're against coups, and you're getting ready to launch a coup. She flies in panic, and so she cuts a deal. She explains to everybody, if you do this coup, we can't support you. It's over, and then you're all going to die. And the generals realized that, and they went, yeah, we understand that. Zelensky realized that. So zany stepped aside, Zeki took over, but understand what happened. It's a coup. There's one man in charge of Ukraine today, and his name is not Mir Zelinsky. (46:07) His name is Ky. He's the commander of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, and they're calling the shots. How do we know this? Because within days of him coming in, he said, we're going over to the general defensive. He's calling the shots. Zelinsky said, we'll never leave at vca. KY came and said, get 'em out. Pull 'em out, red, destroy the line. We're going to be pulling back the military's in charge. And now you have some interesting things because the coup we didn't want to happen may happen because the nationalists are all upset. And there's talk about driving on Kiev right now. The Nazi nationalists are you're talking about, yeah, the Nazis, the N right sector guys who became Ovv, who now have renamed themselves. They're the third assault brigade, and everybody's going, there's no Nazis in Ukraine because there's nothing called the Azov, except the Nazis are so stupid. (47:03) They say, nah, third of assault brigade we're azo. And they do it right on camera, seeling all this kind of stuff in the West, everywhere. Oh, no, we don't want to see this guy's just calling himself the third assault brigade. But no, the Nazis are there. They're upset. It's a mess right now. But America, I'm just telling everybody's this, right? There was a coup deta in Ukraine. The generals are in charge. Zelinsky is a figurehead right now, but the people calling the shot is the military. Now, that's a new reality. I just want to quickly take a step back and to the point you were making about Navalny, to those that think what you're saying is fanciful and crazy, the United States did a similar action. They didn't kill him, but they did a similar action in Venezuela with Juan Gudo. The United States told the world that Juan Gudo was the president of Venezuela, even though Nicholas Maduro is the democratically elected president. (48:11) And when Gudo failed, now the United States is trying to do the same thing with a woman named Marina Machado, and she has been convicted by the Venezuelan Supreme Court as having worked with, I think it's Peru, against the interests of Venezuela. So the Venezuelan Supreme Court said, because you've gone outside the country and tried to overthrow this government, you are no longer qualified to be a candidate for president. The United States is trying to ignore the, dictate the decision of the Venezuelan Supreme Court and put this woman in place. Anyway, I bring that up just to show that what you have talked about in terms of, now I forgot the guy's name, Naval, Naval, Navalny, the United States is doing this in doing this, a number of places, and Venezuela is the most recent. But yeah. How about President Diem in Vietnam? Well, we can go for people going, well, this is fanciful. (49:19) This is out of a guys. We do it all the time. All the time. When leaders become inconvenient to the Sharan, the Sharan, the Sha Saddam Hussein. I just want to remind people, one of the more interesting, I was involved with a lot of defectors, Iraqi defectors in my time as a UN weapons inspector, and one guy that I interviewed many, many times was Wafi Samara. He was the head of military intelligence for Saddam. He ended up being in London and run by the Brits. So I'd go there and the MI six would take you to a safe house, and Wafi would come in and we'd have long conversations, and I tried to extract information from him that could lead to good inspections. But he just sat there and he talked about how the US intelligence would fly in, because the place I wanted to inspect was a specific office with a specific safe. (50:13) And he said, Hey, when you're in that safe, if you go down to this drawer, boom, you might find some photographs that you recognize. And I said, whatcha talking about? He goes, that's where we kept the American Spy satellite photographs that were given to us by American Intelligence officers who came in and sat in that conference room right next to it. You'll see it when you go in there. I did. And we met there, and they would brief us on the spy satellites, give us the newest signals, intelligence laying out the Iranian ground forces, and they helped us plan the chemical weapons attacks against the Iranians in 1988 and afa. We had this wonderful relationship. He gave me the names of all the guys that he worked with. What I'm trying to say is, ladies and gentlemen, there was a time in 19 88, 19 89, where Saddam was our boy. (50:58) US intelligence was there. Then Saddam became inconvenient. He fired scud missiles at Israel, which is a capital crime, and we ended up going to war removing them and having him hung by the neck until dead because his continued survival would've been inconvenient for America. Let me just make it as clear as this. Navalny had become inconvenient because the Russians were sitting on, the Russians never go public about anything, and their words mean everything. And when Pesco said, in October of 2020, we know what the CIA is doing, the cia, we know who he's working with. We know what's happening. It meant they know. They know everything. They have all the financials, they have all the videotapes, they have everything. And the US knew it too. That interview with Tucker is very telling. He said, I'm not going to talk to Biden. There's really nothing for me to say, but he says, our special services are talking. (51:58) They're talking the language of the special services. Having been in the special services and engaged in those kinds of conversations, they're very frank, because we don't have to play games. When you sit down with somebody and they know what your background is, we don't have to pretend. We talk about human recruitment, we talk about technical surveillance, we talk about the tools of the trade, we talk about the language that we know is going on. And so when the special services of Russia sit down with the special services of the CI and say, we know exactly what you guys did. You met here, boom, boom, boom. We got the goods. He's your boy. Do you want him back? And the CIA went, Nope, we don't want him back. We're going to have a lawyer visit him. And again, it may sound something like that, a movie. (52:40) But remember, Hollywood gets its greatest cues from reality. Frank Pan, angel, Freddy, five Fingers, Freddy, five Fingers baby. Favorite scene in the world. And it's real. I mean, I'm giving away my article, but I'm writing an article that this is going to be explained in great detail, and I talk about Freddy Five Fingers. So the next point here that I want to get to with you quickly is Mike Turner, Republican of Ohio, chair of the House Intelligence Committee. He's warning that Russia may be developing a space-based weapon that could target US satellites. And a lot of the narrative that's surrounding what he said over last weekend is that now Russia has violated, there were some treaties I think signed in the mid eighties that the countries agreed that they would not militarize space. But what seems to be left out of this conversation is that I think when the United States announced the Space Force that was militarization of space, therefore the treaty that they now want to wrap themselves in and call foul based upon, really the United States has already violated it. (54:00) So go ahead. Well, the treaty is the 1967 treaty, the outer space Treaty 67. Okay? And it talks about, it doesn't say demilitarization. What it says is that space should be used for exclusively peaceful purposes and that nobody should deploy nuclear weapons in the space. Now, what Turner has to show the stupidity of Mike Turner and these people. Apparently there's raw intelligence. That's the term that's used, and that's an important phrase. Finished intelligence is when I collect information, I corroborate it with different sources. You connect the dots, I connect the dots. That's right. Bingo. Good job, Wilmer. And you connect the dots, and then you write up an assessment that it's fact-based. But here's the important thing. You disguise the sources of information because if you're going to release finished intelligence to a congressman or Congress, they do what politicians do. They talk. They bring in somebody, Hey, read this. (55:05) You're not supposed to write about it, but wink, wink, read this. And they go, oh my God, the Russians are going to put a nuclear weapon in space. What are we going to do about it? Okay, finished. Intelligence gets leaked all the time. Everybody does it. The president on down. It's just the name of the game in Washington dc. Raw intelligence though, is almost never leaked. Why? Because raw intelligence means we haven't protected the source. So Turner released raw intelligence. He released a raw intelligence report to Congress. He put it in the reading room and said, everybody needs to come and read this thing. Now, a lot of people did, a lot of people didn't, but it created a storm because he issued a public statement, which means the media now, because he knows how the game's played. Now, every reporter worked their salt in Washington. (55:55) Dcs found their congressional sourcing. What the hell is on that report? And people started talking. So what we do know now is that the Russians are developing an anti-satellite capability that incorporates a nuclear device designed to generate an electromagnetic pulse that can shut down all of our satellites in outer space. Now, why is this important? Understand this. Turner released his report on Wednesday, knowing that on Thursday, the gang of eight, four senators, four Republicans from the Intelligence Committee, the leadership was going to meet with the White House National Security Council about this very report and talk about it. So why would you release it when they're already going to talk about it? What are you trying to do? (56:42) On Wednesday, the day he released his report, SpaceX sent up a Falcon Nine rocket with two satellites. These satellites were experimental missile monitoring satellites, part of a constellation of satellites that the United States started deploying last year. We deployed 28 of them last year. It's going to be a constellation of hundreds. It's sort of like a militarized starlink. And the purpose of this constellation is give America total control over the informational domain. That means that we communicate faster, we navigate, we can target, we can collect. We've militarized space. And the Russians have said, they've written reports to Secretary General saying, Hey, this is a violation of the outer space treaty. You're militarizing space. You're creating an advantage at a time when you say you want to strategically defeat Russia, remember, that's the American objective. And the Russians are saying, if you do this, you could launch a first strike against us, and we might not be able to respond. (57:45) You're getting a unilateral advantage here, and if we do go to war, you're going to have this total control over intelligence, collection, communications, et cetera, that gives you an operational and tactical advantage. We can't allow this to happen. So what the Russians did is they developed a weapon. They haven't deployed it yet, but it's a weapon that it will go up. And in one winding flash of a moment, that doesn't threaten any life here in America. It's not like they're going up there with a giant dirty bomb. It's going to be a neutron type device, a small device that's geared towards emitting radiation, the pulse, and it's going to blind the entire in an instant shut down this entire satellite network. But here's the important thing. From Turner's perspective, the entire American military approach to war depends on this. If we don't have this satellite thing, we put talk about putting all the eggs in one basket, we have literally put all the eggs in one basket. (58:44) Everything we do depends on this. If you shut that satellite network down, ladies and gentlemen, we can't go to war. We can't go to war. It's over. And Turner knows it. So what Turner's trying to do is say, guys, why are we investing all this money? This is going to go on for years when we know the Russians can undo it. This is stupid. We need to either get involved in arms control to prevent this from happening, or we need to come up with a backup plan because these satellites ain't going to work the way you want 'em to work when you want 'em to work. That's noble. But here's the problem. He released raw intelligence, which means the Russians now know how we collected it, and at a time when we need to have continued access to this stream of reporting. Now more than ever, let's imagine that the president says, Hey, what are the Russians up to today on that satellite thing, the thing we've been monitoring, you guys came to me and you said, Hey, boss, we put a, I don't know how they did it. (59:49) We tapped a cable and now we're listening to the conversations of these guys. Oh, wow, that's cool. Okay, but boss, we can't talk about, we can't mention the following words because if we mention the following words, the Russians will know what conversation we listen to, and then they'll stop communicating. Well, raw intelligence gives you those words. It wasn't finished product. Mike Turner compromised his source. We will never listen to them again at a time when we actually need to be monitoring this to come up with a strategy. Remember, let's say we want to do the right thing for once in our pathetic lives as Americans, and we say, maybe it's time we do engage in meaningful arms control. This is when we need to know what Russian intent is. How far along are they? Are they going to deploy this? Is this something that the Russians are doing to get to the negotiating table, or is this something that the Russians are going to keep, no matter what, what's going on, it affects our negotiating strategy. (01:00:44) We don't know now because Mike Turner released the raw intelligence to do an honorable thing to get people, he knew that they were going to sweep it under the rug. He knew that the Gang of eight and the White House were just go, Nope, we're not going to worry about this. We're going to keep deploying the satellites. And he's going, that's stupid. But now we are blind. And that's why I call it Turner's folly. I mean, trying to do the right thing. He did the absolute wrong thing. And now at a time when we need to have this intelligence, it's not there. I know there's a lot of people out there that thinks intelligence is a bad word, and it's been misused throughout history. There's no doubt about that. But I'm here to tell you right now that collecting information of this nature is absolutely essential to the national security of the United States because you want our leaders to be informed about the potential threats that exist around the world. (01:01:32) And there's a need for intelligence, not Iris. I'm not talking about violating American constitutional rights. I'm not talking about, I'm saying there's a need for people like me who did it honorably. It's a tough job. It's a dangerous job. Sometimes you have to do things that you wouldn't want to talk about at the PTA, but it's the reality of the world that you have to go out there and you have to get this information so that your leaders are informed so they can make the right decisions. And Mike Turner has cost us that information at a time when we desperately need it. Final question for you. And that surrounds nato and Donald Trump's comments about nato, and there seems to be an awful lot of furor about his talking about defunding NATO and all this kind of stuff, when all that I can read and understand is that NATO is now really obsolete and that it's a money laundering scheme. (01:02:26) Yeah, let me put it this way. There's a foreign minister of Lithuania Landsburg out there, and he's, I mean, Lithuania, the Baltic countries, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, they're making a lot of noise right now about Article five and how it's essential that NATO must come to the collective defense. But Lithuania is talking about, for instance, blockading Coing grad, the Russian enclave on the Baltic Sea. They're talking about sanctions. They're talking about a whole bunch of stuff that could lead to a war with Russia. And they're saying, that's okay because we're nato, and NATO will protect us. (01:03:05) The American people need to understand that Lithuania has a population of 2.8 million. The greater East Coast megapolis from Boston to Washington DC is 50 million people. Do you really think that we're going to sacrifice 50 million people to defend 2.8 million people who are kicking a hornet's nest right now? The answer is no. And that's the bottom line about nato. The American people are waking up to the fact that NATO is not about defending Europe from the evil Russians, NATO's a suicide pill. Because you have nations like Poland, you have nations like Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, that think that because they have this NATO shield behind them, they can behave aggressively to Russian and not have any consequence to it. If they start a war against Russia and a blockade of Coing, grad is an act of war, Russia will respond militarily. And now if you're Joe Biden, it's a sacred thing. (01:04:04) Every inch of NATO soil is sacred. Article five is a sacred, no, it's a suicide pill. It's a trap having poodles trying to get the rottweilers to fight. NATO is an organization that has outlived its usefulness. Donald Trump, he's not the most eloquent person or the most articulate person. And there's a lot about him that just cannot be supported 100%. But I'll tell you right now, he's speaking the mind of many Americans when he says, we ain't doing this anymore. We're not paying your bills. We're not going to be there for you. When you want to kick a hornet's nest. We don't want to get stung. So you're on your own, and that's what's going to happen. I am predicting that nato, it may not last 10 years. It's out. It's on its way out because it's, here's the thing. Remember we talked about mobilization at the beginning? (01:04:56) We talked about mobilization. It's funny to watch the schizophrenia that exists in people like Jan Stoltenberg who stutters his way through everything. Russia is evil, and we must must stand up through Russia. NATO must do, but we cannot afford to mobilize right now. We have no money. Our industry is no longer working, and we don't, but America will pay for it because NATO is a, I mean, it's going back and forth. NATO can't mobilize right now because they don't have the industrial base to mobilize. Not only that, nobody wants to be part the British who are out there. Boris Johnson doing that ridiculous thing. Lance Corporal Johnson reporting, sir, we're going to mobilize the people. First of all, Britain has two aircraft carriers. They built for, I forget how many billions of dollars they can't get out of port because they don't work. They build a whole bunch of new frigates, brand new modern frigates to defend these aircraft carriers, but they don't have enough sailors. (01:05:51) So in order to get the sailors on these new frigates, they have to retire frigates that are still good. So they're military. We're going to fight the Russians. I mean, you hear this British general, we're going to be on the front lines of the next war with Russia, with what? Your military's 72,000. Right now, you can't fill up a soccer stadium, and in five years it's going to be 56,000. Nobody wants to join the British military anymore. Nobody's joining the Navy. Nobody's joining anything because the youth of Europe don't believe in Europe. They don't believe they're not willing to give their lives for this pathetic little enterprise called Europe or nato. So all this talk about 300,000, this, that mobilize. It's all talk. And that's the good news is it's all talk. The better news is I think NATO's done because you used a word that's very important. And normally, as I said, I shy against conspiracies, but NATO's a money laundering scheme, that's all it is. It's an employment vehicle. I mean, I have to be careful. I have relatives that work for nato. They're not Americans, and thank God, I mean, one's married to my sister. So I like the fact that he has a paycheck. It keeps my sister fed and a roof overhead. (01:07:07) But the jobs not a real job. None of NATO's a real job. It's just an employment vehicle for a political economic elite that automatically fallen on these ES because that's what NATO is. It's a sinecure for people just to sit there and collect a paycheck doing nothing. If I have the chance to speak to President Biden, and I know he watches the show regularly, I would have to ask him about the sanctity of NATO that he holds so near and dear, if you believe in NATO to the degree that you do, Mr. President, why did you engage in an act of war as in blowing up the Nord Stream pipeline? Why did you engage in an act of war against a NATO country that being Germany? Because by doing so, article five, the other NATO countries are supposed to respond to Germany's defense in a manner in which they see fit. (01:08:10) So I guess the fact that they didn't respond means they didn't see a manner that they see fit. But I don't hear anybody asking that question. Why? If NATO is NATO and it's sacrosanct as it is, why did you engage in an act of war against a NATO member? That's my final question, Scott Ritter. Well, I mean, it's a great question, but here's even an equally relevant one. Why did the German chancellor stay silent at the press conference in February when the president said that if Russian and invade Ukraine, I'll take out Nord stream. And when he was asked the question, but it's German, how could you do that? It'll get done, I promise you. And Olaf Schultz is sitting there going, not saying a word, not saying a word. So how can you, I mean, the thing about Article five is it has to be invoked by the person attacked. (01:09:05) And Germany never once said, we've been attacked because they were there when it was designed. Olaf Schultz knew all along that this was going to happen because Germany's not a sovereign state. And that's the thing about NATO that people need to understand. It exists only for the United States. It's the exclusive tool of the United States. It exists to promote American national security interests. And this is why when you have Latvia and Poland now believing that NATO's there for their interest, no, it's not. NATO doesn't exist for anybody's interest, but our own. And as Europe wakes up to this reality, they're going to realize that we don't need to be part of NATO anymore because it doesn't benefit us. And there's a lot of talk now about a European security agency and things of that nature. Yeah, and President Putin asked, I thought, a very relevant as we look at, so people say, well, why did the United States blow up nato? (01:10:05) Well, I mean, blow up Nord Stream basically to de-industrialized Germany de-industrialized Europe, and have the Europeans start buying natural gas from the United States and other things. Putin during his speech said, well, you realize they didn't destroy the entire Nord stream pipeline. There is one pipe that can still transmit gas. Why don't you open that up? He said, there's the ability to send gas through Ukraine. Why don't you open that up? There's the ability to send gas through Poland. Why don't you open that up and haven't heard an answer? But that's, you want the best answer. Go ahead. I'll just say this. I grew up in Germany and the car that I loved, I was in love with the Porsche nine 11 SC Turbo, rough modified, and well, guess what's happening. Wilmer Porsche is moving its production to the United States. Michelin, the French Tire company. Michelin has shut down, I think two tire plants in Germany, and they're moving them. (01:11:15) I don't know where they're moving, but they're moving 'em out of Germany. I know that. Can you imagine a Porsche plant and a Michelin plant? I tell you what, there's going to be a new car in my driveway pretty soon. It's going to stay made in the USA on it, but that's what's going on. We've de-industrialized Europe to our benefit. And again, we come b

Our southern border is a ticking time bomb. This is a consequence of intentional policies by Washington elites seeking demographic shifts and new voters. Now they're calling for updated policies, as if this crisis is policy driven when it is politics driven. Iran has created terrorist sleep cells in the U.S. by transporting them through Venezuela where they are credentialed and transported to our southern border, raising alarms that there will be terror attacks across the U.S. soon. Meanwhile, The Venezuelan Supreme Court has blocked Maria Corina Machado from running for president for the next 15 years and the Biden administration has announced it may apply new sanctions on the regime that never should have been lifted in the first place. MUST WATCH! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

China has held a central financial work conference to deepen reforms in the financial sector. Israel is expanding its ground operations in Gaza. The Venezuelan Supreme Court has suspended the results of the opposition's October primaries.

Please join the CSIS Americas Program for a timely public discussion on the relevance of the international commitment of Responsibility to Protect (R2P) in the context of the rapidly developing crisis in Venezuela.  For this discussion, we will be joined by Luis Almagro, Secretary General of the Organization of American States (OAS) and Miguel Angel Martin, the President of the Venezuelan Supreme Court in Exile.   In 2005, the United Nations developed the concept of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) commitment, the purpose of which is to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. Given the rapidly escalating political and humanitarian crisis in Venezuela, and the repression and physical harm that the Venezuelan people have been subjected to in recent years, the relevance of R2P has become a crucial part of the discussion surrounding the strategy of how the international community should respond to the crisis. The critical question is whether R2P could be used to justify further international action to end the current suffering of the Venezuelan people.   We will discuss the purpose and nuances of R2P as it could apply to Venezuela and how the international community could use this principle as a tool in future crises. The discussion will be moderated by CSIS Americas Associate Director and Venezuela expert, Moises Rendon.  Additional speakers to be announced.This event is made possible through general support to CSIS.

Up until last month, Christian Zerpa was a Justice on Venezuela’s Supreme Court; now he is a high-profile defector from the Maduro regime. With two men claiming to be the country’s President and protestors on the streets, Stephen Sackur asks: is Venezuela's socialist revolution in its death throes?

Up until last month, Christian Zerpa was a Justice on Venezuela’s Supreme Court; now he is a high-profile defector from the Maduro regime. With two men claiming to be the country’s President and protestors on the streets, Stephen Sackur asks: is Venezuela's socialist revolution in its death throes?

Updates on Venezuala :: Manchester NH officials attempting to stop feeding homeless :: Venezuelan Supreme Court upholds sentence for opposition leader :: Trump border control in San Diego :: Tatiana Moroz :: Difference between a liberal & conservative :: Red light cameras :: European Parliament calls for robot regulations :: Ralph calls in to claim he's not racist :: Ashton Kutcher and human trafficking :: HOSTS - Darryl, Heather, Cody & Chris

Politics in Venezuela and Bolivia provide the central themes this week on Latin Pulse. The program analyzes the political fights between Venezuela's new National Assembly and President Nicolas Maduro, often with the Venezuelan Supreme Court reinforcing the president's positions. The program also provides a preview of the important referendum in Bolivia that could extend the term of President Evo Morales. The news segment of the program covers Pope Francis and his recent trip to Mexico, including his scolding of Mexican bishops due to corruption, his condemnation of Donald Trump, and his reaction to the Zika virus.The program includes in-depth interviews with:Michael McCarthy of American University's Center for Latin American & Latino Studies (CLALS); andRob Albro also of (CLALS).Executive Producer: Rick Rockwell; Technical Director: Jim Singer; andAssociate Producer: Natalie Ottinger.(To download or stream this podcast, click here.)   (The program is 30 minutes in length and the file size is 42 MB.) podcastnewsLatin AmericaVenezuelapoliticsMexicoBoliviareferendumUnited States Nicolas MaduroPope FranciseconomicsimmigrationDonald TrumpEvo MoralesDrug Warelectoral fraudHenry RamosAccion DemocraticaPrimero JusticiacorruptionVenezuelan Supreme CourtelectionsimmigrationoilviolencejusticemediaHenrique CaprilesHugo ChavezPSUVrecessioneconomic crisisinflationenergyhomicidegunspoliceMASautocracyEcuadorhydroelectric damsindigenous issuesenvironmental issuesRafael Correa

The DJ on my car radio was incensed. The Lockerbie bomber had been released. My first thoughts echoed his: it was indecent that this killer was not only released, but received a hero’s welcome back home in Libya. Yes, I admit it; I’m just not that forgiving a guy. I don’t think a terminally-ill mass murderer should be released on compassionate grounds so that he might spend his last days with friends and family. If he truly is guilty, he deserves to spend his last days, his last breath, rotting in jail.But other thoughts arose as well. One was that many of the Lockerbie victim’s families doubted his guilt. Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora was killed, said: "I went into that court in Holland thinking I was going to see the trial of those who were responsible for the murder of my daughter. I came out of it thinking he had been framed." A bereaved father’s statement of support for the alleged killer of his child carries a lot of weight with me, as do those of the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, which termed the conviction a possible miscarriage of justice. Where was the media coverage of these nuances? Surely they may even have played a part in his release, yet I heard nothing about them on CNN, ABC, NPR. My next thought was even more troubling, and it brought me back to the outrage of the DJ, and to my own reflexive anger. How, I thought, can we all feel such outrage when the United States has been harboring a serial terrorist bomber for years?Louis Posada Carilles is largely thought to be responsible for the bombing of a Cuban airliner that killed all aboard, including the mostly teenage members of the Cuban National Fencing Team. He has been convicted in abstentia in several countries for bombings and bombing plots, and was thought by our own FBI to have been involved in literally hundreds of bombings of Cuban targets in Cuba, Honduras, Panama and Venezuela. Washington even denied an extradition request from the Venezuelan Supreme Court, and Carilles continues to live in the United States though he has actually admitted to several bombings. He said of one bombing in Cuba, that killed an Italian-Canadian national: “It is sad someone is dead, but we cannot stop.”He also worked for Colonel Oliver North and General Richard Secord as they secretly and illegally armed Contra death squads in Nicaragua. Of course, North, a man who did everything he could to subvert our constitution by doing an end run around our laws and our congress, is now a well paid radio and TV personality and a darling ‘patriot’ of the right. It seems that no bad deed goes unrewarded for these murderous thugs, and the airwaves are strangely mute about their crimes and our government’s continuing complicity.George Bush senior once said these telling words: “One man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist” – and there, in one sentence, is all you need to know about the moral expediency of the United States. We will protect a bloodthirsty killer involved in literally scores of bombings of civilian targets because he is the enemy of our enemy. And while protecting him, we will respond with self-righteous outrage when another bomber, whose guilt is far less established, is set free. How sad that the frothing right, and even the average American citizen has forgotten the wisdom of Thomas Paine, one of the pivotal figures of the American revolution, who said “He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression.”. The American policy of covert wars against countries we do not like, wars that often kill innocent civilians, is immoral and reprehensible. America has no solid moral footing, and seems unlikely to develop one when the Obama administration is enthusiastically continuing Bush polices of rendition and holding people without trial at a sort of Guantanimo lite – the Bagram air force base.Our government, our media, and most of our political commentators, appear to be rank hypocrites as they protest torture, terrorism and oppression in places like Libya and Iran while they refuse to acknowledge, or sometimes even actively cover up, their own country’s equivalent crimes. Powered by Podbean.com All Content Worldwide Copyright - Samuel McKenney Claiborne