Title: Ex-CIA Spy Breaks Down How He Captured Abu Zubaydah / John K
Show: Danny Jones Podcast
Date: 2022-05-23
URL: https://youtu.be/xeL0QGTHOho
Duration: 58:00

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[00:01] so i picked them up the airport four o'clock in the morning we went straight to the office and i said here's the deal we think we found abu zubaydah he's like you've got to be kidding me i said i know right i mean we we've narrowed it down but he knows we're on his trail and so we're like 24 hours behind him we'll bust into a safe house and all of his stuff is there but he's gone we went into one safe house and he had poured himself a cup of tea and it was still hot

[00:31] but we couldn't quite get him so i said you got to help us narrow it down i i just don't know what else to do so he took this piece of butcher block paper about the size of this table about the size of a small american billboard right and he wrote abu zubair in the center and he circled it and then around the name of his beta he wrote all of the all of the locational information that we had

[01:04] for people in touch with abuza beta so around the name of zubaida were phone numbers addresses and email addresses and then around that he made a tertiary level of all the information of people in touch with the people who were in touch with abu zubeda at the end of the week it looked like a spider web it was actually very pretty like a like an artwork and he came to me and he said i just cannot get it to any fewer than

[01:36] 14 sites i said 14 sites we've never hit more than two in a night before we can't hit 14 sites simultaneously i said i got to get a big team in here so i cabled headquarters and i said i need 36 people i need a plane load of guns and ammunition i need two million dollars in cash i made this whole list of all this stuff

[02:06] why two million dollars in cash because i'm gonna start throwing lots of money at lots of people bribing people i'll bribe everybody in the country that i need to bribe and we needed to start buying safe houses right if we knew that he was in lahore faisal abad karachi islamabad we can't be seen like leaving the embassy driving to pakistani intelligence we we need to be discreet we all grew these long bushy

[02:37] beards in the embassy they called me the archbishop because mine came in all gray right it was really long and um we dressed as pakistanis pakistani the big balloon pants and the flat pancake hats so um just two days later this completely unmarked 737 lands at the airport and 36 guys get off half cia half fbi and then pallets and pallets of equipment it

[03:10] took us hours to unload this plane and um and i went to introduce myself to the [ __ ] pakistani intelligence officer in charge in faisalabad and he said what do you need for me to help you with and i said i need a real estate agent so he got us a real estate agent we bought two houses we bought a 10 bedroom 10 bath house in lahore figuring we could use

[03:40] the bedrooms to interrogate prisoners and then we bought a seven bedroom seven bath house in faisal abad it was a doctor's house i remember and um and then we started briefing the team you know here's what we're gonna do here's what the plan is we got 14 sites we're gonna have to hit every one of them simultaneously and i said it's never been done before and the risk is high right i mean it's like really high like

[04:12] not all of us may make it back so um on the night of the raid my colleague who i was closest to he and i i'm skipping a lot of this story because it's so long he and i were walking back to the safe house and he said what do you think you think we're going to get him and i said no i think we're going to get somebody

[04:42] but i don't think we're going to get him he's too smart he's outsmarted us at every step of the way so far so that day we decided to drive it was my colleague and me the pakistani colonel and the targeting analyst the targeting analyst dropped off and went back to the safe house but we started going to every one of the 14 sites just to make sure we weren't being set up uh there was ingress in egress we

[05:13] weren't going to be ambushed like what happens if everything turns to [ __ ] are they going to be able to shoot at us from the roofs how high are these buildings so the first one we went to we realized was a mistake it was a it was a shish kebab stand with a pay phone and clearly there was al qaeda living in the neighborhood whenever they needed to make a call they'd go to the pay phone but the shish kabob stand closed at midnight there's nobody there you can't raid this shish kebab stand you got to

[05:43] get anything so we cut it off the list so we have 13 left and most of these places were just you know one room mud huts concrete block little poor people's houses with corrugated tin roofs um and then we came upon this huge house it was bright yellow and just as we're coming up to it the targeting analyst calls me and he says

[06:15] i just got a call from a friendly western intelligence service and they said that they had a a walk-in this morning a walk-in is somebody who literally walks in off the street and says i have intelligence information but i want you to pay me for it 99 of the time they're lunatics or potential terrorists or probes like from the iranians or the russians or the north koreans just to see where are the cameras

[06:46] are the windows bulletproof how thick are the doors who's armed we all do this to each other wow yeah just in case they want to attack our embassy spooky yeah it happens all the time it's very dangerous so he said that this friendly intelligence service said that there is a large congregation of al-qaeda fighters and they're in a big yellow house and i said holy [ __ ] i said i'm right in

[07:16] front of the yellow house it's it's site number 12. and he said uh well then that that has to be it i said i want to talk to the source i want to talk to the walk-in and he said i already asked and they said no which made me think that there wasn't a walk-in that it was an intercept but they didn't want us to know that they were intercepting al-qaeda's communications why wouldn't they want you to know because we would try to take it okay take over their tap and you know there's there are a lot of pissing matches

[07:48] in intelligence not just between the cia and the fbi but then between the cia and all of its allies and friends it's so funny it's awful the politics involved is ridiculous so then i said i said to the pakistani colonel i said we're gonna have to put a big team on this one and um he said i can tell you that something bad is going on in that house i said how do you figure he said it has to be 110 degrees right now

[08:21] and all of their shutters are closed he said it has to be broiling in there they have something to hide so i said okay we'll put a bigger team on that one so that night at 10 o'clock i stood on the coffee table in the safe house and it was all 36 of our guys plus the original 10 that you know those of us who were there already plus all the pakistanis right so we've got i don't know 60 guys

[08:52] and i said at the risk of sounding melodramatic we're gonna have to synchronize our watches like in the movies so we synchronized our watches ten o'clock i still remember and i said look here's what we're gonna do um we actually chartered a bus to put everybody on this bus and take them to faisal abad because that's where most of the targets were three of the targets were in in lahore and the other ten targets were in faisalabad

[09:22] and faisalabad is just one of the most horrible places on earth and believe me i've been i've been to 68 countries with the cia there aren't many worse places on earth than pakistan wow yeah it's bad and i've been to yemen and somalia and i've been to some of the most horrible places on the planet and pakistan's worse so anyway um i said here's the plan oh 130 we leave the safe house

[09:52] oh 145 be in the target neighborhood oh 150 be parked in your spot 0155 make sure that not only do you have line of sight of the target but make sure that you're not being surveilled oh 158 get out of the car and exactly at o200 break down the door separate all the women and children from the men and make sure all of the men are cuffed and i said because this is an open criminal

[10:24] investigation our friends from the fbi are going to begin collecting evidence which was total horseshit let me tell you the difference between the ci and the fbi is the fbi goes in and they put little sticky notes on the four walls wall one wall two wall three wall four then they open all the drawers and they take pictures of what's inside the drawers then they look for papers and they collect all the papers okay because

[10:55] they're going to build a case cia you go in you bust down the door you grab all the guys and you send them to guantanamo oh it's [ __ ] hilarious so we were on the roof my colleague and i we were on the roof of the safe house at o200 and i said to him i looked at my watch and i said oh 200 here we go and just as i said it we heard this sound in the distance boink boink boink like metal on metal

[11:28] and i said that's not good it's two o'clock in the morning right nobody in the country is awake and then we hear shots fired and i said oh man that's really not good so i got on the walkie talkie we knew that that that big yellow house was the nearest physically nearest to us so i said um site 12 come in what's going on over there and the guy's like you know shots fired shots fired well we knew that

[12:00] also rule number one in intelligence operations is the the walkie-talkies always die right they never ever work we used to i actually went to nsa when i got back they wanted you to do this lessons learned thing because this was the first successful major capture post 911 and i said please i said you guys are all geniuses here right you build these computers these super computers we don't even know what they do you put satellites you can't make a battery that doesn't die after an hour come on

[12:30] like seriously it's funny the most obvious things the things that suck the most yeah so we run downstairs we jump in the car we speed over to the yellow house and it's chaos one of the things i told the i told the pakistanis just before we kicked off i said we have to take him alive right my orders were very specific we have to take him alive so don't shoot unless you're being shot at

[13:01] it was clear to everybody so we get there chaos one guy is dead laying dead in the street i i i can show you some pictures i have on my phone another guy looks like if he's not dead he's going to be dead in five minutes another guy is screaming bloody murder and has he's completely soaked in blood and these are their guys or your guys their guys okay i said what the [ __ ] happened and this pakistani um policeman um

[13:34] says to me we got him we got your man i said why'd you shoot them he said that they were jumping from the roof of the house to the roof of the other house to escape and so he shot them so the first one to jump first of all the boink point boink we heard was the door was reinforced with steel and it should have just splintered with the first hit this they were working on you know the whole time

[14:06] abu zubaydah a syrian bomb maker and his and absorbed his bodyguard were on the second floor on the first floor there were i'm not still not allowed to say the number there were several dozen fighters al-qaeda fighters on the first floor why wouldn't you be allowed to say the number they still will not allow me to say the number of people captured wow yeah it was many dozens so the guys on the first floor didn't know who was on the second floor they knew it

[14:37] was a vip because there was a kid they called him a tiwala this kid would he was working for them and every day he would go to the market and buy food and he would cook for them and he would make tea and they were cut off from everybody in the first floors they knew that somebody important was upstairs and they wondered if it was bin laden yeah so when we started breaking down the door abu zubaydah and the other two went to the roof tried to jump to the roof of

[15:07] the next door house and this idiot pakistani policeman just starts picking him off with an ak-47 the first the first guy that jumped was the syrian bomber and this was a bad guy when we got onto the second floor of that house he had all of his bomb making stuff on the table explosives and everything the soldering iron was still hot because he was making the bomb and he had the plans to the british school on the table he was going to blow up the school this is how bad these people were

[15:37] so um he jumped the pakistani guy shot him killed him instantly he was dead before he hit the ground the second one to jump was abu zubaydah and the guy shot him in the thigh the groin and the stomach and he was bleeding out the third guy the pakistani policeman told me he shot him through the leg right through the center of his femur so

[16:07] i said so which one's my guy this one the middle one who was bleeding out i said that that doesn't look anything like abu zubair we had a six-year-old passport photo of abu's beta he was a young thin good looking you know short bearded mustache closely trimmed how old he was 24 maybe okay in this picture okay 22 okay i said this guy he doesn't look anything

[16:38] like the picture this guy was fat clean shaven crazy albert einstein hair going all every direction so i called the targeting analyst and i said listen it's chaos here the pakistanis shot a bunch of guys they say we got him but this guy doesn't look anything like abu zabeda and i don't know what to do and he said uh do a retinal scan right take a picture of his of his eye email it to me and i'll uh i'll run a

[17:10] retinal scan so i i knelt down over him and i shouted if hey nick open your eyes if the high eunuch but his eyes were rolled back in his head i could just see the whites of his eyes i couldn't see anything he was dying and i said his eyes are rolled back in his head i can't see anything and he said give me a picture of his ear i didn't know until that night that no two people on earth have the same ears they're like fingerprints huh yeah so i took a picture of his ear of course these are the days when phones didn't have cameras

[17:41] so i took a picture i plugged the camera into the phone i sent the picture to the analyst he sends it to cia headquarters then they respond it's him so i said to my colleague i said listen he's going to die we got to get him to a hospital so we threw him into the back of this filthy toyota pickup truck little tiny pickup truck called a toyota cherry there he is the the picture right there

[18:13] on the on the right in the center that one that one yeah that's the passport photo that we had okay and he was six years older than that when you captured him yes and 50 pounds heavier why's he get the eye patch in that photo yeah the eye patch is that toy is that a result of torture advanced interrogation enhanced interrogation when he was fighting the soviets uh he got a shrapnel wound in his eye and he was blinded in one eye okay and then

[18:43] as part of his torture uh we drugged him one day and we took his eyeball out which is a human rights violation it's a crime against humanity we didn't even ask him we didn't even tell him they just gassed him and then when he woke up he had no eyeball so they gave him up oh what he was under yeah holy [ __ ] so they gave him a prosthetic eyeball that he has steadfastly refused to wear because he said that we stole his eye and so he insists on wearing the patch

[19:13] the patch looks pretty cool though it does actually look pretty cool so you were standing over this guy right here yeah in the middle of the street at 2am while he was dying bleeding out yeah we rushed him to faisal about hospital the worst place i've ever been in my life this hospital the windows are open the doors are open there are like dogs and cats just walking up and down the halls there are clouds of mosquitoes feasting on people's open wounds it was disgusting

[19:45] and then they had this bar of irish spring soap with needles coming out of it and if you needed a shot they'd take one of the syringes they'd give you your shot and then stick it back in the bar soap so here we are there are like six americans dressed as pakistanis with an arab who's bleeding to death we take him into the emergency room and i said to the doctor i said you've got to patch him up my orders

[20:16] were to take him alive and the guy's like looking at me like what what's going on we were like come on let's go so they rush him into surgery and the rest of us just sat down to wait how long did the surgery take well that was kind of a problem word got around the al-qaeda community that we had gotten him and so they started driving by the hospital and just opening fire on the hospital and we're diving down on the

[20:47] ground while he's in the middle of surgery because they knew we were in there with him [ __ ] i said to the colonel if they realize how lightly armed we are we're dead can you get a helicopter in here and he said i i think so so he makes a couple of calls 20 minutes later this helicopter lands in the parking lot i put my shirt up over my mouth like this i walked into the operating room and i said doc wrap it up we got to go

[21:20] so they sew them closed we wheel them out onto the onto the parking lot and put them on the helicopter and we flew to a pakistani military base about 50 miles away now the base was kind of funny it had a it had a small it not really a hospital so much it was like a clinic like a surgical clinic it had eight beds it was in a circle and the nurse's station was the the hub of the wheel and then eight beds were

[21:50] the spokes right and i noticed there was a chart that had the each patient's name and why he was in there and every one of the patients was in there for an attempted suicide which was nuts to me but they had this bed open two beds open and um and so we took him in they took him straight into surgery so at one point the doctor came out and he said to me it was funny because he didn't know who the prisoner was he didn't know who i

[22:21] was but this intelligence colonel said these are vips you got to do what they say so he comes out and he's like look i don't know what this is about but i'm going to tell you i have never seen wounds so severe where the patient lived so you may want to tell your people that this is probably not going to be a good outcome so i called i called the targeting analyst and he called headquarters and they were like do what you can so

[22:51] while he was in surgery an ambulance arrived with the bodyguard who had been shot through the leg and he's screaming he's crying and so you know i've already been up 24 hours at this point and my orders and these were directly from george tenet the cia director 24 7 cia eyes on he said those were his exact words 24 7 cia's eyes on don't let the [ __ ] fbi sit there and take over he's our

[23:22] prisoner not the fbi's prisoner while he's in surgery i i'm so sleepy already i i'm i decide to walk around this little clinic and i get i hear the guy screaming and crying in the other room so i went over to him and i said uh kev how are you and he goes he's crying goes glory to god and i said yeah you don't look so good and he says are you american and i said

[23:52] yeah we captured you and he says the pakistanis the dogs they captured me and then they held me down and then they put an ak-47 on my leg and they shot me and i said that's not what i heard i heard you were jumping from the roof of the house to the roof of the next door house to escape and he stops crying and he says to me look at me i am 150 kilos i cannot jump from the

[24:23] roof it's like 330 pounds yeah and i pull the sheet back i'm gonna find the pictures and show you i pull the sheet back and he is not just soaked in blood but there is a perfect burn mark like the size of a dinner plate around his leg they held that ak right on his skin and pulled the trigger

[24:53] so the doctor told me we're gonna have to amputate the leg and i said well that's unfortunate they ended up saving the leg but the guy's never gonna walk normally again oh my yeah it was pretty it was pretty awful and it was the pakistani soldiers that did that yeah because the guy pissed him off you know he wouldn't give up so they shot him god it was bad it was bad so they didn't end up they did not amputate his leg they did not amputate his leg but i'm sure it completely shattered his femur oh my god the damage it was

[25:25] disgusting i'm looking for these pictures while i'm talking to you and i'm i'm amazing he didn't bleed out it was incredible well i mean well abu is a beta as well and speaking of abuse not bleeding out um when when he came out of surgery um okay here it's not a very good picture but that's the that's the bomb maker he's okay he's clearly dead yeah dead in that

[25:56] picture he's on a morgue table right in that picture and that's the bodyguard oh my god as you can tell there was some significant bleeding yeah and then that is brutal it was bad really bad i'm going to find out was a better for you and here's absolutely after we threw him in the back of the pickup truck as you can see he looks nothing like that

[26:27] picture no wow he looks totally different totally completely different and i'll tell you what i said was that by design was he doing yeah it was a disguise right uh-huh i saw my whole career just like go up in smoke i was like who the heck is that right so anyway they finally bring him out of surgery and i was really really tired and so i was afraid i was gonna fall

[26:59] asleep and i'm thinking is the doctor secretly al-qaeda maybe the doctor's gonna break him out or maybe he's not as badly wounded as i think he is and i'm gonna fall asleep and then he's gonna get up and run away so i tore i tore a sheet into strips and i tied him to the bed by the wrists and the ankles he was bleeding so profusely this was after surgery after surgery okay he was bleeding so profusely that it was actually

[27:30] pooling under the bed i've said before it was like a scene from a horror movie i've never seen anything like it in my life he was soaked in blood we had blood all over us it's in this giant puddle underneath the the bed so they had this pump i had never seen anything like this before you know how they have like blood just dripping into your arm well they attached a pump to it so it's forcing the blood into your arm like at this greatly accelerated rate because he was bleeding so badly that they had to

[28:02] replace the blood as quickly as possible to keep him alive yeah just to keep him alive and he was in a coma and the doctor's like i i don't think he's gonna make it so i sat there with my arms crossed at the foot of his bed and i just stared at him i just stared at him and i i put the ceiling fans on full blast to make it like slightly uncomfortable so that i wouldn't fall asleep and then during the night i called

[28:34] a buddy of mine at the safe house and i said i said man would you do me a favor i said i'm freaking starving first of all i said there's about to eat abu sabha i know right i'm starving and i said i'm really dirty i smell really bad i've got a clean shirt and a pair of underwear can you bring him to to the hospital from the safe house so a couple hours later he comes he's got like these you know those little cheese crackers and peanut butter crackers in that pack he had a couple of those he had a thing of orange juice and

[29:05] there was a red t-shirt that my kids had bought me for christmas with spongebob squarepants on it like the decal you know and uh and he gave me my clean underwear so i got changed and then the next day he started to stir just a little bit and so i stood up at the foot of his bed and i was looking down on him and i say in my i did it again sorry

[29:36] sorry i think you're good i say in my first book you could tell the exact instant that he realized oh my god the americans have me because he's hooked up to all these machines and his heart rate is 110 right and when he opens his eyes he doesn't look at my face he looks at spongebob and his heart rate went to 220. and the machine starts going b b b b b b

[30:08] and then you hear code blue code blue bay one code blue and then they rush in and they shock him you know clear i had never seen this before except on tv right clear they shock him and then they give him this shot of demerol that they that they put right into the drip and then he was out again that poor bastard woke up and saw spongebob for the first time after being blown away by an ak-47 yeah

[30:38] yeah it was too much for him so he was out for another six or eight hours he saw spongebob and he knew he was [ __ ] he knew he was [ __ ] it was over finally he opens his eyes and again i've got him tied to the bed by the wrists and the ankles so he's laying there like this and he opens his eyes and he goes like this like motioning for me to come near him so i go right next to him like i put my

[31:09] ear right next to his mouth and i moved his oxygen mask off to the side and i said what is your name and he shook his head so i said again and he said to me in english i will not speak to you in god's language and i said that's okay abu zubaydah we know who you are and he starts crying and he says please brother kill me take the pillow and kill me and i said nobody's going to kill you we've been looking for you for a long

[31:40] time he said what's going to happen to me and i said honestly i don't know but i'm gonna give you some advice i'm the nicest guy that you're gonna meet in this experience my colleagues they're not nice like i am so if there's one thing that you do it's that you have to cooperate and he said you seem like a nice man but you're the enemy and i'll never cooperate

[32:12] i said suit yourself so i sit back down he wants to talk what happened i said well you're jumping from the roof he remembered going to the roof i said you tried to jump and pakistani guys shot you and i said you're severely wounded it's going to take a long time for you to to recover but listen you should take this time to do the right thing

[32:43] a lot of people are going to ask you a lot of questions and you have to be honest and he said no that he didn't know anything about 911 that all he ever wanted to do was kill jews he said that he didn't want to attack the united states he wanted to attack israel and they outvoted him we talked you know one of the things that we that we captured that night was his diary and books have been written two books have

[33:14] been written about his diary one of the fbi psychologists said it was the rantings of a madman it's like well clearly you and i didn't read the same diary right because really what it was it was more of a doodle book than anything else he would doodle draw pictures and he would write poems he recited a lot of his poetry to me you read it oh yeah all of it oh yeah yeah okay uh-huh and then i consulted on one of the books so um one of the things that he did and this

[33:45] is weird he's a strange guy you know he's not a guy that you're going to want to go out and have a beer with sorry interrupt how old was he at this time 30 29 or 30 30. he had this weird thing that he would do where he would write letters to himself as a young man or as a teenager so it's the 30 year old abzu beta writing to the 14 year old that was a beta and giving himself advice to his past self to his past self listen you should have done it this way

[34:18] oh you shouldn't have gone out with uh those guys they were bad guys you know you should have been kinder to your mother on this day stuff like that it was weird but it was expressive he's he's a very artistic kind of person so you draw these pictures and he would write poems and he would write a scene from a play and then he would write a letter to himself and the fbi is like clearly he's insane it's like no he's not freaking insane it's a doodle book so anyway

[34:48] oh my god how we we fought about that for years really yeah yeah because they said he was insane anyway um well he was just a kid yeah he was a kid right where i don't know how old you are but now i mean in my mind i'm still 20 but but i'm actually 57 and i have to remind myself you're not 20 anymore right i wish i was and i think back on things that i would have done differently i've never actually written it down anywhere but

[41:33] we bust down the door we grabbed this old man and his sons and they were scared shitless right so there was this idiot working for me he brings them to the safe house he's got his three prisoners cuffed behind their backs and they have these black hoods on and i said why are they hooded he goes why are they hooded we don't want them to see our faces and i said

[42:03] are you seriously [ __ ] telling me that you have never read the geneva convention it is a war crime to hood your prisoners take the hoods off and he goes dude if you take those hoods off i'm reporting you to headquarters i said i'm reporting you to headquarters for committing a war crime now take the hoods off so i pulled the hoods off turns out these three guys were completely innocent of anything they just happened to have the only phone in the

[42:35] neighborhood so i said to the pakistanis what can i do to make it right for these people because this is going to be a pr disaster this is like the most secret thing we've done in 20 years and these guys are you know they're going to tell everybody the americans broke down the door my house they took me they put hoods on me and my kids and you know it was awful and he said he said give him a hundred dollars each so i said to the old man i said sir

[43:05] we've made a terrible mistake and on behalf of the president of the united states i apologize to you and to your family and i hope that you will take this money to repair the damage that we've done to your home and he said that he accepted my apology the very next day there he is on the news the pakistani news standing in front of the destroyed door and he said it was the americans they broke down the door of my house they took my sons and me we don't know where

[43:37] we were but they were very polite and they bought us new shoes so it kind of went away it was a one-day story wow yeah oh so i get back to headquarters and they ream me out because i took the hoods off and i said it's a war crime why does nobody understand this you know there are rules for these kinds of things that we're doing if we're really the good guys then let's be the good guys and these are all

[44:07] pakistani guys you're talking to no they're americans they're all our people okay yeah and you didn't think it was weird that you were the only guy that was like really worried about i just figured they were all retards okay you were the only one that was worried about the hood like no one else hadn't even batted an eye at it yeah no they're like yeah who cares huh there are prisoners they're terrorists we're the good guys don't you think it's weird i always thought it was super strange how um like just after you tell that story about

[44:38] about um abu what's his name abu zubeda um that bin laden when they captured bin laden they killed him instantly right yeah they never had any intention of taking him alive is it is it weird to you that they never like brought his body back to the u.s no no i i i would have expected that they would destroy the body i i was hoping a lot of my colleagues and i hoped that they would bring him back alive because i mean talk about the triumph of of law and order

[45:08] right talk about the triumph of a constitutional democracy ah we just blew him away which is fine too i mean the guy committed horrible crimes and killed thousands of americans but i i was hoping that we could set an example for the rest of the world by putting him on trial finding him guilty and executing him i thought i just thought i mean i could be wrong but i thought it was like standard practice to even if we do get get and kill we kill those high value targets that we bring their bodies back to give them to autopsy and do like dna

[45:40] normally yes well the dna we took dna see his his family the bin laden family is one of the most important merchant families in saudi arabia right they're worth many billions of dollars and they're the they have the biggest construction company in in the kingdom they do the big stuff like airports and and ports and you know is it currently like that too they're still still the biggest fans oh yeah oh wow yeah um i know his was his sister or his daughter or something lives in

[46:11] uh israel or something there's one that lives here in uh in orlando really there's one that lives in beverly hills there's one that lives in are these children of his uh-huh okay not not of osama of the old man oh of his dad okay yeah yeah he had like 65 sons and 40-something daughters jesus yeah right a whole bunch of wives um and you know this osama's the one that went he went bad

[46:41] so you know as soon as it was clear that it was that it was al qaeda that did 9 11 his family just volunteered like we want to give you dna so when you kill him you can be sure that it's him we said great because you know when you get hit with one of these drone rockets there's going to be a shoulder over there and a foot over there and some scalp over there it's not like you can look at the body and say oh that's osama bin laden he's

[47:12] in pieces normally right so we had the dna but what they the reason why they threw the body overboard is that what they did they threw it off a ship yeah yeah they flew it out to a ship why the [ __ ] would they do that because they didn't want it to become a source of reverence they didn't want it to be you know a mecca for terrorists or inspirational for terrorists so they figured if they destroyed it there'd be no place for anybody to go to to revere it how would it inspire terrorists if we

[47:43] did an autopsy on them well it's the same reason that that you know hitler was the soviets cremated hitler and threw his ashes in a river you just don't want people you don't want a rallying point for people and we didn't didn't really need the autopsy because we had the dna okay you could just sort of do a pseudo-autopsy later right yeah they they had a muslim cleric on board a naval chaplain who's a muslim and uh he did all the funeral prayers

[48:14] they wrapped him up in a shroud and they threw him over the side wow the pictures are video of it or anything no in fact the president was very very specific about that really oh yeah but even though we showed video of uh hussein being hung yeah well that slipped out one of the executioners uh did it on his phone okay that wasn't official that was also pretty brutal yeah yeah hey oh sorry to his right okay

[48:46] okay yeah weird stuff it's crazy um what were you just talking about um the body going overboard oh yeah yeah the body so okay so where where is uh abu zubat well i right now so in 2006 uh after four years going from secret site to secret site right okay six years he was going from black side to black site yeah so we sent him to guantanamo in 2006 and he's been there ever since there was a very interesting article in

[49:16] the new york times two weeks ago i guess it was carol rosenbloom is the only reporter anywhere that covers these issues nobody cares anymore about abzu beta i mean this is ancient history it happened 20 years ago a little bit more than 20 years ago he doesn't have any actionable intelligence anymore the information's a generation old so nobody cares except for her and she broke this story two weeks ago

[49:47] that there are negotiations underway by abu zubaydah's attorneys khalid sheikh muhammad's attorney policing a little bit closer under you this one yeah just pull it pull it right under you it's a little bit oh sorry you scooted and that thing didn't oh that's right um absolutely attorneys khalid sheikh mohammed's attorneys ramsey beneshib um omar baloch and maybe one other to negotiate a guilty plea uh you know only khalid sheikh muhammad has ever been charged with a crime abuse

[50:18] bait has never been charged with a crime any crime there's a ton of guys there that haven't been charged with crimes right well almost none of them have yeah only khalid sheikh muhammad so the deal is they will agree to plead guilty to terrorism and conspiracy to commit terrorism and in exchange will give them life without parole but will allow them to remain at guantanamo for the rest of their lives what they're worried about they now realize after 20 plus years they're not getting out

[50:50] so what they want is they don't want to go to um to the super max in florence colorado the weather's terrible it's cold they don't like the cold they want to stay in cuba so that's what the deal is going to end up being wow wow have you heard have you ever heard the story have you ever been to guantanamo once what when was that summer of 2002 after we had caught up azerbaija before we had caught khalid sheikh muhammad but

[51:21] before abzu beta arrived there yeah wow packed was it really packed yeah that's so good and you know what's funny i i have some like regular contacts now who were prisoners there like i'm friendly with muhammad ultslahi from mauritania that poor guy i mean there were so many innocent people i heard a story about a guy named latif nasir there was like another guy in canada with the same exact name he did this like long podcast story about the
