Title: The Bitter Truth with Abe
Show: The Bitter Truth with Abe Abdelhadi
Date: 2021-02-01
URL: https://youtu.be/5ETk7Q-8Ez4
Duration: 28:00

---

[00:00] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] readings and salutations this is abe abdelhadi with the bitter truth where we may not have all the answers but we're going to ask an awful lot of questions you can also help the show out by visiting the bitter truth dot info info and there you could buy some fabulous swag to make your life better or support us on the patreon link that's there

[00:30] uh so it's nice to have people support the show these things can be heard on spotify itunes youtube all the usual suspects at no charge but the support is always appreciated today i'm excited to have a a guest a friend of the show been on before former cia counter counter terrorist chief in pakistan and the first whistleblower that obama put in the joint back in the day and what was funny because he blew the whistle on the bush administration and he didn't even give anybody anything he just said some stuff on the news uh john karachi how are you man hey very well thanks thanks for having me back

[01:01] gabe hey man thanks for coming on so um some some uh some it sounds like you got some legal victories before you jump into the main thing what's going on yeah you know it's it's it's a slog but uh over the course of the last you know 13 years uh i've had my detractors and in some cases these detractors went too far and uh you know i've connected with some really amazing attorneys over the last few years people like you know harvard law

[01:34] professors and georgetown law professors and now after being reactive and responsive for the last decade i'm going to start going after people i wish i could go into more detail things are turning around and i'm i'm very excited about it i appreciate the generosity even saying anything at all and number one number two good for you because you i i followed you before we even met cyber cyber spacey or whatever you want to call it but um yeah i've always admired you and i thought you know you're you're principled guy that

[02:05] yeah i i don't know if i would have taken what you took even even the 23 months i would have probably hung myself and you know just as an aside in august um i was offered a job that was like like the job dropped out of heaven into my lap and it was my big comeback i was going to be the chief operating officer of a private equity firm based in athens uh i'm a dual us greek citizen now and um it was more money than i could ever have

[02:38] dreamt of i gladly took the job and then you know six weeks into it i realized this is a money laundering operation and so i had to resign and i had to call the fbi and yeah you know it's always something doing something man i get it i get it um well hey man listen uh you know i know we uh we gotta we got a little bit of time um before you gotta take off yourself um now now you you're no longer doing loud and clear with uh brian becker right you guys uh yeah i'm no longer doing loud and clear

[03:09] with brian becker um that was such a wonderful show and i have such deep respect for brian even if we don't agree on everything politically he's such a he's such a good kind good-hearted person i i learned a lot from him uh but the show ran its course uh it was uh you know the contract was up is what it was so we all left they shut the show down uh sometime in at the end of august i think it was uh i went into the private sector as i just said that didn't work out i

[03:40] called sputnik back and said hey uh i wouldn't mind having another show and yeah so they they put me on in the same time slot four to six pm with lee stranahan good for you and what's that show called that's called the back story the backstory good times all right i'll put that in the uh it's much less newsy it's uh it's a lot of um how can i say it it's it's two guys drinking a beer uh just talking about the day yeah yeah

[04:11] and and mostly it's much more newsy yeah and that's i i i when i first started this almost three years ago and i just didn't want it i mean obviously i'm going to talk about current events and this than the other but i want it to be more evergreen where like if people go back and hear a show with you or mikko palette or somebody yes regardless of when they hear it they go oh man that's oh i didn't know that right as opposed to oh yeah well this already happened and he already went to jail for that or whatever um and and then plus because i'm only on a couple of days a week anyway so i don't want it i didn't want it to be so um so newsy you know but uh speaking of

[04:42] evergreen topics uh i guess we could talk about uh april haynes who is the uh new biden director of national intelligence and she seems like the rest of this cabinet like a nice prize what's uh i was very very disappointed yeah and remember she was the first biden national security appointee right so avril avril actually doesn't have a long history in intelligence but the history that she has is dark right she

[05:13] um she was up on the hill when biden was on the hill biden took her to the white house when he became vice president she and tony blinken both right and um and avril became the general counsel for the national security council now in that position she was working directly for john brennan dangerous in and of itself i would say your your old buddy my old buddy john brennan yeah that's that's a whole other topic a whole nother we've talked about it so yeah

[05:44] so um you know john was responsible for the kill list right which was a list of people that he would come up with every tuesday who were to be killed uh that week with usually with a drone sometimes with a hit squad that the agency would send out right and so avril was the lawyer who approved the uh the kill list and there are press reports uh saying that and i mean like legitimate press reports from the post

[06:15] and the times in the journal and places like that saying that that arrow frequently would take a call in the middle of the night saying we've got the guy in our sights request permission to launch and it was avril who gave permission to launch wow and uh you know she was so good at that job that when john became cia director he took avril with him and um and she was the uh the deputy director of the cia and there she didn't even really tackle any of this any of these things she just kind of went after hacks and leaking right that was it and you know that's very

[06:46] much a john brennan thing to do right john brennan was known for having a nixonian obsession with national security leagues so that's what she did now another thing that avril did that bothers me very much is that um it was avril who gave the the legal um justification for cia officers breaking into the senate intelligence committee's computer system to to try to spy on the investigators there to see what they were

[07:16] collecting uh in the run-up to the to the completion of the torture report uh dianne feinstein referred that to the justice department for prosecution it was never taken up never even investigated wow and um and she got away with it right but she never had to answer questions about the kill list she never had to answer questions about breaking into this the senate intelligence committee's computer system right never see and and to your point that you know you know you mentioned blinking earlier uh he is another one you know

[07:49] the biden pretty much gave his entire career and then when i watched uh your career it's gentile and then when i watched part of his uh confirmation hearing i was blown away you know that that phrase i stopped clock until the time right twice a day i was shocked that rand paul a actually had a spine to say anything and then the things that he went after him for because other republicans didn't even ask those kinds of questions and it just seems like this kind of [ __ ] just gets rewarded where like you know guys like you or snowden or assange you get punished we get punished and the reason why even

[08:21] republicans didn't challenge tony blanken in his confirmation hearing is that there is no difference between a neo-liberal foreign policy and a neoconservative foreign policy it's interventionist no matter who's in the white house that foreign policy is interventionist you said correctly that tony blinken owes his entire career to joe biden i knew tony when i was up on the uh on the senate uh foreign relations committee i even took his desk when when he finally went to the white house um but he started off as a junior staff

[08:52] member right joe biden right for years he worked in biden's uh personal office in the senate and then he worked his way up through the ranks in the senate uh foreign relations committee when biden was the chairman he became the staff director then he became uh briefly biden's national security advisor as vice president and then deputy national security advisor so the guy's been around you know forever right forever and he parrots the biden neoliberal foreign policy i

[09:23] mean what's the first foreign policy thing joe biden did literally on his first day as president he sent additional troops to syria oh and and on the same day doubled down on venezuela with the 30 million the 30 million that trump left in the uh last uh covet bill yes we dedicated 30 million to coup venezuela again and joe biden just vowed to double down on venezuela recognizing juan guado as the interim president i think it's down to what three countries now that recognize them israel us and i think you know malaysia or some [ __ ] like there's no credible governments

[09:54] that you know what i mean like there's nobody recognizing this and he ain't got any him in his entire faction got voted out of office in december yeah even his own supporters don't recognize him anymore right so like why are we still like pimping this dead horse and and saying it runs it's just and he's under investigation by the fbi for for hacking 90 million or ganking 90 million dollars out of the money he out of the moneys he was given it's like this is exactly what ahmed chalabi did when we decided that he was going to be the president of iraq that's right next

[10:26] thing you know 60 million dollars in cia money is missing that's right you know that's right let me ask you something because it just seems like you said it a second ago it's intervention it doesn't mean it doesn't matter if it's it's just neo you know we should just we should make up our own term called neo interventionists because whether they're whether they like gay people or don't like gay people the one thing they do like to do is invade other countries and take their [ __ ] for free that's right and we just got lloyd austin a general yes who mattis was a general and he's also a former a former raytheon guy who you took the

[10:56] words right out of my mouth yeah you took the words right out of my mouth he's a four-star general and a raytheon lobbyist yeah and guess what he's like the third one in a row who's been a defense industry lobbyist right defense yeah and there's nobody else in america not qualified to be the secretary of defense and and and had to get a waiver like mattis had to get a waiver and had to get a waiver because we put the stop on that [ __ ] 1948 and eisenhower had to get away but he you know but still just those are only three guys in history that had to get a waiver since 1948 to

[11:28] actually be a former military guy to run for office or be appointed in a cabinet that's actually quite important to me you know people used to ask me all the time especially when uh petraeus was the director of cia what my thoughts were on having generals run the cia well i'm opposed to generals running the cia the odni dod i'm opposed to generals in any of these national security positions national security advisor for the very simple reason that generals became generals

[12:00] by saying yes sir that's right right what you need in a position like that is somebody who can say mr president let me tell you why that's a terrible idea right and stand up generals don't stand up right not to the commander-in-chief they don't no they don't they say yes sir yeah so we don't want generals in positions like that yeah yeah now you're making i mean and then and i just watched doctor strangelove again last night because i haven't seen i haven't seen it on netflix right now it's awesome yeah i i caught it on amazon i was just like oh my god i'm excited

[12:32] i let my dvd with the bonus dvd and it with kubrick and i never got it back so i a long story but but um but you know but the george c scott character in there is exactly like what you're saying yes he's just nervously chewing gum and the president's asking these questions he can't answer because clearly somebody [ __ ] up well isn't it true then if i have the chain of command then i'm suppo then i'm supposed to you know authorize nuclear weapons well that's right sir well then why didn't that happen like it was like who's on first

[13:02] but with nukes yes and it just seems like and then you know but kind of back to haines um because this is kind of my theory i mean you know i can't prove it because that hasn't happened yet but you know without with a with a kamala with the kamala harris presidency which let's be honest if if biden's not drooling into a rubber diaper by summer i'll be shocked and i am taking bets i might lose some money yes i've said the same thing yeah he's gonna he's he's off but so she comes in and and and it just seems to me like these are the machinations of turning the doj into a modern-day stasi

[13:34] right where where this time it's willingly because we give our information to for for for we put our face on avatars we you know amazon has a contract bozo and hamilton has a surveillance contract uh you know we you know google has a contract with the cia nsa so does twitter so does facebook um how bad do you think it could possibly be because democrats are going to go to sleep the so-called liberal in this country is going to go to sleep under harris administration oh my god yes where do you even start first of all kamala harris is no liberal she is no

[14:04] progressive remember this is a woman who spent most of her career as a prosecutor yep and imagine how many lives she ruined how many families she ruined by seeking the longest possible sentence for first-time non-violent drug offenses so let's not pretend that she's some enlightened liberal she's not secondly uh yeah i mean it's like every every president or would-be president wants to put his or her uh uh

[14:36] personal stamp on foreign policy and how do you do that other than sending troops somewhere look at barack obama who was supposed to be the great liberal savior right right and he put us in oh he kept us in iraq and afghanistan he put us in somalia in libya in syria in yemen in countless uh saharan and sub-saharan countries we're not even really sure what all of our special forces troops are doing in those countries right so i i would expect more of

[15:09] exactly the same from president biden or uh president uh harris yeah and there's no reason to think that anything would change see and this is why this is what frustrates me i live in austin texas right and and the big crack they always make is well yeah you was like california you're still loop yeah we're like california we got a bunch of [ __ ] chewy blue people that's what i call them i have i have like four friends that think like you and i do right and and and meaning like some of them are you know lean a little bit on the right side but they at least think and they don't start calling you names just

[15:39] because you don't agree with them that's you know like like my friends that voted for trump you know they're not like the classic trumper people right and my friends that you know and then i got friends that are more like like me they think both sides are corrupt both sides are full of [ __ ] and you just like insist on having your spirit animal yeah and get mad when i punch your teddy bear so but that's the challenge i have with what's going on is this this cabinet is almost identical resume wise to the trump cabinet oh oh yeah totally totally the only place where i'm just

[16:10] slightly optimistic is merrick garland um because he's he's not really a political animal right and so i'm slightly optimistic that he'll be able to keep doj independent but when it comes to well you a minute ago you raised the issue of surveillance state surveillance if if you could spend a month in london oh my god you'll see state surveillance oh yeah

[16:40] it's ridiculous they're the most surveilled country in the world right the uk is yeah well we're we're headed right for that sure we're going to have cameras everywhere we already have cameras everywhere how do you think so many people from the capitol riots were arrested so quickly it was because of facial recognition software absolutely wasn't just people ratting them out from seeing their pictures on facebook right it was facial recognition software all the feds had to do was take stills from the videos that we saw from the news and feed it into their their facial

[17:11] recognition database remember they have our pictures from driver's licenses they have our pictures from facebook and from google and from youtube and tick tock and it's easy to figure out who people are absolutely essentially just give them the information we give them the info we just the stasi whoever anastasia back in the day is probably spinning his grave right now if he knew it would be this easy yeah seriously instead of going 1984 he'd have gotten brave new world no no no no let me give this vibrator that's gonna take your picture at the same time here have it and people would have bought it right and you don't

[17:42] even have to pay people you don't have to pay sources we put all the information out there on ourselves that's right that's right what facebook did i remember when it came out and i got talked into getting on it a good friend of mine talked to tried talking and i wasn't a very social media person and it was remember when not myspace was the big deal sure and it was such a pain in the ass to use like if somebody liked you you had to go through this act of congress to accept them or if you went to go like them or or add them as a friend it was like you know are you you know it was just it was a pain in the ass i think i had like 10 friends i didn't care and then my

[18:12] friend said no no you gotta try this it's easier it's better to all it was was it was easier for facebook to take our info yes that's all it was and they and they sell it and remember they facebook doesn't give us the platform out of the goodness of their hearts they monetize our personal data right yeah i'll give you another example too because they go farther than they even admit to i mean they'll come out and and admit it if you ask them in front of a congressional panel but uh

[18:42] um i've gone through periods where i've gotten a lot of threats right if i if i go on tv i go on fox news or i go on msnbc or whatever i get threats right there are a lot of crazy people out there that's right that's right so i was talking to a buddy of mine on the phone who happens to be a firearms instructor and he said um he said have you ever had a concealed carry permit and i say yeah i had a concealed carry until 2012 but then you know i have a felony conviction now so i i can't own a gun anymore that's why i need a pardon

[19:13] well it's one of the reasons why i need a party oh yeah countries and uh he said yeah it's too bad you can't carry a gun and you know we ended our conversation five minutes later i go onto facebook and every single ad in my facebook feed is for a concealed carry class every single ad oh yeah so they're even listening on the phone oh they're listening when your phone is turned off i play in a in a band out here in town right saturday nights we jam and you know we're like a cover band we play we play like rage against the machine and [ __ ] like that and get drunk and so one night we're in practice and

[19:43] my phone is usually on sleep and we're talking about a base that i used to have it was a fender jazz bass it was a 1980 cream color tortoiseshell pickguard bitchin base next day i wake up turn on my facebook and i got five different ads with people playing that base that specific base with a specific color scheme one girl's like giving lessons on this base you know and i'm going isn't that interesting how that base came up and i was just talking about it last night i must have had eight or nine in a row

[20:13] with your phone in sleep mode my phone was in sleep mode this is why when people say you know oh my god i'm so paranoid of um you know i'm like i i if i'm dating somebody you know and let's just be candid sometimes you send pictures back and forth because that's what people who date do and then she could say oh my god what if they're going to see it i go oh count on it they are seeing it they've already seen it let's give the poor guys in the van a good show that's what i say and i'm a half decent writer so so the fiction is just you know is is penthouse form level material for weeks knock yourselves out boys that's my that's my taxpayer contribution to your cause to your entertainment

[20:44] because we're i'm not you're online i'm online we have a show you know whatever i mean it's it doesn't matter how many viewers you got or don't have it's like it's you're you're putting yourself out there they track you with algorithms and everything else and i'm also getting to this sinister point where i'm not trusting certain people based on their language and i'm sure you've been there for a while you know yeah you can't imagine the the emails and calls i get from people who want to offer me a job and the job is always it's it's consulting and it's

[21:15] always just baiting me to to violate federal law right to get you in trouble to keep you from your case moving forward and getting your just desserts actually it happens all the time yeah yeah and and and that and seeing and you know we got a few a couple more minutes before i have to start wrapping up but um you know earlier you mentioned uh uh john brennan it just seems that it just seems that for at least the last 70 years regard i mean foreign policy is domestic policy to me

[21:46] because we spend two thirds of our budget on military not defense but military more than the next eight largest countries combined combined and if we and if we cut down to 300 billion a year we'd still be able to we don't need to buy more weapons we could just maintain but it just seems like no matter who's in office it just it's just the same [ __ ] over and over and they just dress it up different you know they're gonna dress up uh china now and you know that we've had ships in the south china sea now for what eight or nine months right floating around because because why we're concerned about asia

[22:16] yeah because because we're concerned about it uh uyghurs we've been bombing real muslims for 20 you know it doesn't mean these people aren't muslims but we've been bombing muslim muslims for 20 years now we're concerned about chinese muslims yeah right we just want their oil and natural gas because they've been pulling out of there for three years in their own backyard yes but it but people go on the party thing and if you say what i just said that biden harris won't be any different than trump uh pence they get really angry and the sad truth is and i say this as a

[22:46] former third generation democrat i'm no longer a democrat but the sad truth is that the trump foreign policy was more traditionally democratic than the obama biden foreign policy oh absolutely 100 well that's why they had to keep coming up with crap like like russians paying to kill soldiers because every time you try to pull back a little bit and use it he was a chicken [ __ ] as a human being anyway but anytime you try to pull back the slightest bit something that made him unlikable would pop out and he would freak out and reverse course you know what i mean

[23:18] and it's just it just doesn't seem like it's ever going to go away i mean you know people ask me all the time you know well how do you think it's going to have to how do you think the change is going to come how do you think the change is going to come right uh you know what i'm not sure that in the near tor the in the near term change will come i think that donald trump did such a good job at energizing mainstream democrats that and so many people came out to vote like we had such ridiculously high voter turnout by american standards

[23:48] that i think this neoliberal interventionist foreign policy uh has been cemented in the mainstream yeah you know when for example aid when biden sent these troops to syria on january the 20th did it even make the the media i mean i had to look for the information i had it wasn't in the washington post it wasn't in the new york times because i read them cover to cover every every day nope but uh it's it's nobody really cares nobody cares and

[24:19] when you say and when you say anything it's it's kind of like what nixon had intended came true get rid of the draft quit drafting middle class white kids yeah no one's going to give a [ __ ] and this and that's my friends here my liberal friends here that are like well you know bolivia he was there 14 years that was a long time well angela merkel ran germany for 15 years how come we didn't pull a coup in germany that's right you know it was because she was white and then when you say well i don't want i don't want to send kids of oblivion like yeah well [ __ ] i don't care well you don't care because you don't have a kid in service you don't care because it wasn't your kid got bombed in an apartment building by us you know

[24:50] just this lack of empathy and as long as you're i know we're short on time but you know i said this internet you just you just triggered something yeah i just said this in an interview the other day one of the things that i learned when i was the chief of counterterrorism operations in pakistan after 9 11 is that all of the low-level al-qaeda fighters i i was responsible for capturing and there were many dozens of them right they all said the same thing they all told the same story and the story was that they had grown up in some isolated village

[25:21] in their home country whatever it was yemen saudi arabia algeria whatever they had um no job prospects they had no they had no uh job skills they were illiterate no man would want their daughter his daughter to marry somebody like this right because you know why why would you the guy can't read and write he's got no job skills so the local imam went to them and said hey what are you doing in this village you should go to afghanistan and make jihad against the americans

[25:53] right we'll give you 500 a month and then if you're martyred we'll give your family a 500 martyrdom bonus right so they went they went to afghanistan they didn't read the quran they didn't even know the prayers they didn't have any beef against the united states until we bombed their village right until we killed their cousin or their brother or their grandfather or whatever it was that's right and then they decided they were up for the fight that's right that's right and and and you know that and that is

[26:23] that is exactly the point and that is exactly the goal that has been achieved here i mean especially when you look at afghanistan that was true up until carter a traditional a traditionally pretty passive bunch of people they weren't involved in you know except for except for uh overturning the the ottoman empire which everybody was was fighting those guys you know in world war one i mean they had for 67 years they weren't doing anything and that's what and to your point that's what is so frustrating is that people just people will just look sideways as long as it does not affect them

[26:54] absolutely right and even even the crime bill i mean i i was i i lost quite a few black friends of mine that i knew for a long time one guy i knew 15 years called me left a voicemail threatening to kick my ass like that because i'm going dude because i asked him online do you not know what the crime bill is and he got mad at me i don't give a [ __ ] about the crime i want to trump out of there go do you know what the crime bill is tell me and then i'll just accept your philosophy but christ it's like you know it's just ridiculous but listen man um i know you gotta get going um again thank you for your time appreciate it good luck with the new show and uh get folks my uh my guest is

[27:27] i appreciate you hey man as all i just i'm i'm tickled anytime you say you're gonna come on because you're you're just a super smarty pants guy so i like that thank you folks um i guess it's been john kiriakou and uh hopefully you heard some stuff that made a lot of sense and if it didn't i don't give a [ __ ] uh there's because that's why it's called facts versus opinion and if this stuff makes you uncomfortable it's supposed to sleep [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause]

[27:57] [Music] [Applause] [Music] tight in the city
