Title: CIA Veterans & Deep State (w/ Barry Eisler)
Show: American Exception
Date: 2025-11-20
URL: https://youtu.be/Z-qsocM6Khc
Duration: 34:00

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[00:03] [music] Something beside me. A light to the kerosene. [music] And the places aren't real anymore. And the faces don't say anything. In [music] the silent light of the mind blown sphere.

[00:34] It's a game. [music] Devil's chess club. Devil's chess club. [music] Welcome to American Exception. I'm Aaron Good. This is the excerpted first portion of a full episode of the American Exception podcast. If you would like to view or listen to the rest of the episode, subscribe to the American

[01:04] Exception podcast on Patreon. We have hundreds of episodes available for subscribers. If you want to better understand the deep politics and history of the US Empire, American Exception is the best place to go. The URL is patreon.com/ameanexception. Subscribe if you can and either way, please kindly like this video and subscribe to this American Exception channel. All right, I am happy to be here today with two former CIA officers, John Keryaku. How are you doing?

[01:37] >> Hey, doing well, thanks. Good to see you, Aaron. >> Yeah, great to have you here. And Barry Ecler, it's great to have you back as well. >> Always good to spend some time with you guys. Uh I'm excited that we're going to be able to talk about some of the crazy things going on in the world and sort of historical political significant uh very significant things today or yesterday. Uh there's this is really a series of articles over at dropsite about Jeffrey Epstein and new revelations. Uh some of

[02:07] them show uh that Epstein was uh that an Israeli spy stayed for weeks at a time with Epstein in Manhattan. that is significant and more of a direct tie to uh between Epstein and Israeli, you know, intelligence. And we also have uh more emails released about Trump and Epstein and that he was, you know, more aware of the let's say controversy and criminality surrounding Epstein than has been admitted up to now. And we also

[02:39] have the swearing in of a Congress person whose name I I can't recall right now. Uh but she was >> Yeah. Yes. Yes. There you go. Um and she had been kept out by the speaker of the house from being sworn in because she was to be the deciding vote about about Epstein. Uh and so you know to take I guess she would have forced a vote. Her vote would have forced a vote on Epstein disclosure. So that seems to be happening. Now, this gets into the realm of intelligence and we were talking about this a little bit beforehand, but

[03:11] uh what is blackmail and in the intelligence agencies? I've read Secret Agenda. You know, people know about Jay Garoover. If you've read Secret Agenda, you know about uh James Angleton and the Office of Security, Paul Gainor, blackmailing people all the time. Uh sexual blackmail. we know about George Hunter White and MK Ultra, you know, LSD and weird sexual black male, you know, implicated experiments and operations out there to unwitting people using prostitutes and all sorts of craziness.

[03:41] What was your experience at the at the agency when it comes to blackmail? How do you think it's a common practice? Do you think it's sort of an inner sanctum kind of practice like it was with Angleton where probably most of the agency doesn't know about it but it still goes on or do we outsource it? What's what's the deal with Epstein and what what's the significance of these latest revelations? >> You want to I I know less about this I know less about this than John because I was only at the agency for three years and almost all of it was only training.

[04:14] But we were talking about this just a little while ago and John and I both had the same experience as career trainees, which is that we were told explicitly in these training sessions that the CIA does not use blackmail. They did once upon a time, but no longer because they found that it was just an unreliable and too high-risk tool for managing assets. So, is that true is a secondary question. But I can tell you, I mean, you don't have to believe me on this, but why would I make it up? This is what I was told. I had no ex I had no direct experience that would either corroborate

[04:45] or contradict uh what they were telling me at the time. What I would say is this. We we're also talking about this that you know it's more of a guideline than a rule because it probably is true. John, again, you you'd know more about this than I would, but if what you're looking for is long-term cooperation, you don't know what it's going to consist of exactly. you're looking for intelligence about from a government asset who's got insight into the behavior, the policies, etc., the inner workings of that foreign government,

[05:16] it's got to be a pretty cooperative relationship if you're going to get the good stuff. But if all you need, and this gets into Jed Garoover, Quintel Pro, and all that stuff, but if all you need is someone to not do something, you just want them to behave in a certain way, like don't ever go to the press with X. If you've got incriminating information about that person, present the incriminating person and they won't do X and you're done. It's not some complicated long-term uh operation that you need a lot of things. You just need them to not do X. Blackmail would be perfect for that. So, it probably

[05:46] depends on the tool, depends on the organization, the objectives, that sort of thing. What do you think, John? >> I think you're exactly right, Barry. In in my training, uh I was told the same thing. When you're trying to recruit an asset, you want that recruitment to be over the long term. And in order to have a successful long-term recruitment, you need to be able to trust each other. Even if you don't like each other, you have to at least be able to trust each other. And my instructors were very clear in saying that

[06:19] we cannot get long-term working relationships going on the right track if we start with blackmail. It's just not something that we would do. Now, certainly they did it in the past prechurch committee. >> Um, in the event that, as you said, you just need for a target to not do something. Yeah, sure. Blackmail threats. Um, maybe even you

[06:49] outsource it to another intelligence service, another friendly intelligence service, uh, who might not be as friendly as you are. Sure. But as a matter of of day-to-day, you know, policy, we were told that blackmail wasn't wasn't going to be done, >> which totally makes sense for the stated reasons that they and say we don't do it because of X. It makes sense. It's just that X isn't the whole story. And then in terms of outsourcing, this is a thing

[07:19] I think a lot of people miss when they're analyzing both organizations and also entire governments. They don't realize that it's not a monolith. So it it's easy but a little bit lazy to just think about well what does the CIA do? And this is to your point Aaron where it's like well the CIA is one thing James Jesus Angleton in in his counterintel uh thieftdom that is another story. The left hand doesn't always know what the right hand is doing. Sometimes the right hand doesn't want to know. People talk about um like

[07:49] the economists don't get me started on the economist. They do this all the time when they're talking about Russia and the Russian. There's never a Russian government. There's never a Russia. It's Putin. They make it this singular person. If you can just understand what the one person wants or is going to do or anything like that, then you've solved the whole problem. But any society is going to have a lot of different factions all jockeying for position and power. And if you don't have a if you don't have an appreciation of that, I don't think you have a good appreciation of reality. So for the CIA to tell its career trainees like John and me, hey, this is our official

[08:20] policy. I'm sure it's true. I'm sure that is their why would they lie to us? That is their official policy. What happens when the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing or when someone is going off on his or her own recgnissance? That's just a completely different story and you have to be aware of that too. Otherwise, you won't understand what's really going on >> 100%. I would I would uh I think that the evolution of the way that these things has been handled is important and it's of course going to be very hard to ever

[08:50] really discern completely because we don't there's just key parts of our history we don't know but when Angleton back under JFK when they were doing operation mongoose and so on and they were all these assassination plots that the president and the director of the CIA were not aware of The liaison between them was between the island and the operatives there and Angleton and Harvey was an Israeli officer, an intelligence officer. And that did not come out until 2024

[09:21] or 25. I wrote about it. And I mean to me it was very significant. And then they deleted a page from that testimony even that you can find it that I found elsewhere, but you can't find it in these new releases under Trump that says, "Yeah, I didn't even really tell the CIA director Mccon because why would I want to bother him with a thing like that?" So you think about what he was doing there and then you and with no oversight from anyone. I mean, I guess Helms knew about it >> and because he was the director of plans under Dulles and Dulles had known about

[09:52] it about arrangements like this with Angleton in Israel. But this is, I think, key to understanding some of the opacity about the the JFK assassination and the fact that the CIA may not have >> a a lot of records on the on them to begin with because it was it was handled by Angleton and the whole way that he constructed that apparatus was so there would be no oversight. The excuse was that we're penetrated all the time and were compromised. >> So, >> that's a great excuse. It's great. Really app superficially appealing.

[10:22] Terrific. >> He needed that. He needed the Soviets to be able to pursue the foreign policy that he wanted. He and the people behind him, Angleton. Um, but then you fast forward to the late 80s and you had a a schism between the right-wing in America, between pro-Israel people, neocons, and then Bush and Reagan. And Reagan recognizes the PLO at the end of his presidency. And George W. Bush right at the beginning says, "We got to put aside this madness." or it's James Baker, his secretary of state says, "We got to put aside the idea of a of a greater pal of a greater Israel, sorry,

[10:54] once and for all." I mean, he was thrown down the gauntlet. And look at how many exposees of deep state things come out in that little time period. You had this documentary on the Franklin scandal, which was sexual blackmail, and it did trace back to CIA figures. William Kby was brought in to clean up some of that mess. You had the you had Israel which helped to find an Israeli intelligence agent Arnon Milchon who helped Oliver Stone public uh get JFK the movie made which had a big impact on the CIA and

[11:26] the national security state. Um, you had that Craig, those Craig Spence articles on sexual blackmail in Washington that was by the Washington Times, which is a far right-wing, you know, paper where Angleton went on to write, you know, later in his life before he died. And they exposed Craig Spence and he seemed to be CIA connected and involved in sexual blackmail as well. You had the BBC Gladadio documentary, which is amazing that that came out on BBC. >> Imagine the Gladadio stuff came out when it was like early 90s, I think. >> It was under HW Bush. was in that little

[11:57] time period where there's all these exposees. You had the people whoever was feeding Danny Costilo all that material. >> This was the octopus movie. Yeah. So, >> so is this is all as a way of undercutting what Bush Senior, James Baker were trying to do with regard to Israeli settlements in the West Bank and um >> close. Yeah. >> Okay. Well, here's what here's my here's my working theory on all of this based on Peter D. Scott's writings and conversations with him and a lot of other research. The they wanted to

[12:28] weaken Bush and really put that whole American establishment on, you know, on their back foot and afraid of more exposures and that this was part of it, including that George W. George Bush, the CIA and the mob book that was written and published in 1991 by 1992. No, it's not. but he also was backed by a super pro-Zionist guy. So, there's something about them going after the old Bush family. >> But the uh the Brutin book was published in 1992 and it really was he was a

[13:00] reporter at a newspaper and it's a wellressearched book. It's a valuable book honestly. It's useful but it was published by a super Zionist publishing outfit uh that al that had connections to Richard Pearl I found later and published all these things by you know unhinged Zionists. So what I think happened is part of the reason that Bush HW Bush loses or a big part of it is because of Israel and not just not only does he lose but they wage a kind of war a clandestine war on the clandestine state and I think that what happened

[13:30] >> is that they begin essentially they're like we're not going to allow the CIA to do the blackest of black bag jobs anymore. We're going to keep exposing them using our media assets and our people in the government and everything else and we're going to make them essentially hand over the most ex you know dangerous dirtiest jobs to to Israel. So that's why you get Epstein who seems to be Israeli handling sexual blackmail and such and you also have when they want to assassinate Assange they go to the SNS casino which is

[14:01] Israel it's Aden's I mean it's the you know their joint I guess USIsraeli citizens but it's literally a Lansky joint >> presumably laundering lots of drug money like it did back when it was in Vegas now it's in Macau but I think that they took over the the the clandestine apex of like dirty tricks and such that seems to be the explanation that tracks to me after after the n after the early 90s after HW Bush >> you said Assange Aaron you're not talking about the Mike Pompeo Julian Assange is that you are okay yeah Mike

[14:32] >> because I didn't know about any of this the the Myansky the Sands Casino Shad Sheldon Adlesen I didn't know about any of this okay >> yeah they that was this is a gray zone article 2020 and it says Israel was uh or Sheldon Adlesen was the person that they hired to surveil him illegally this came out in court proceedings in Spain in Madrid And not only that, but there were assassination plots as part of that operation, too. And it was all handed out to the Sands Casino Security Organization. There's another name for the company, but it's really SN. It's like a subsidiary of SANS, which is

[15:02] >> Ad. Yeah. >> So, this is who handles, you know, America's the dirty tricks of the the deep state. You So, when you guys were told this, >> that may have been halfway true, that that it wasn't something the CIA officers were doing directly. and then they would just omit the other [ __ ] >> See, that is so interesting. It's funny. This is where being a trained lawyer sometimes helps me because you get at drafting and negotiating contracts, you pay really careful attention to the way

[15:33] language is used and what it's going to mean. And so I I I didn't think of that one and I should have. But when people say, for example, like, well, we don't do blackmail. We Who's we? Very important question. You can even get into definitional things like, well, what do you what is blackmail? How are you defining blackmail? But I remember when Dick Cheney in justifying torture, sorry, enhanced interrogation techniques, he said um he said, "We got actionable intel from uh detainees we subject terrorists we subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques." And immediately that old lawyer part of my

[16:05] brain fired up and said, "Wait a minute, what was the what was the chronological sequence?" Because if they gave you some actionable actionable intel and then you tortured them after that, then technically you did get actionable intel from people you tortured. It's just that there was no causal relationship. You tortured them afterward. They were already giving you what you needed. I need a little more precision before I can uh before I can sign up for even just what you're describing. So anyway, I usually notice things like that. But yeah, good point. We who is we in the case of the CIA, we only outsource. They don't, you know, maybe they didn't

[16:35] torture either. They just send people to Syria, for example, or Egypt or wherever. >> Yeah. >> Exactly. >> How much of that was how much of that was done by actual CIA officers, John, when you were I mean, you know that more about that program than I do, and I don't recall that detail, but was it usually it wasn't carried out by CIA officers? >> Yeah. >> Or was it? >> No, it just about none of it was. They were all They were all CIA contractors. >> Super interesting. >> Yeah. And then you get into other definitional terms too where one thing they did was just say it's not torture.

[17:08] Those were all the U memos. >> Yeah. >> Uh things that had traditionally been we were talking earlier about the Azov battalion which were Nazis until Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 and suddenly Azoff wasn't Nazis anymore and waterboarding was always torture. Always. when we were prosecuting other countries for doing it or describing the behavior of other countries, it was always torture until we found it might be useful for us and then suddenly it was just an enhanced >> interrogation technique. So, you know, the defined terms really matter. >> Yeah. I mean, this is the the

[17:40] bastardization or the, you know, of language in many ways to obscure what's going on is obviously Orwellian and really sinister, but that fits with the themes of the of the days that we're living through. I got to ask John because you're a Middle East specialist. What do you think about Galani now? He's playing basketball. I think he got good at playing basketball because he used to just take severed heads and throw them into a well or something, right? From further and further away. They play horse like that, right? Maybe that's what's going on. But what do you make of him posing with with the president in

[18:10] the White House? It's the craziest [ __ ] I've ever seen. >> Yeah. Honored guest. Uh, listen, I don't mean to I don't mean to be cynical, but the only conclusion I can draw [laughter] is that this guy had to be a long-term CIA asset. He had to be with his resume. He should be, you know, buried under the jail, as as the saying goes. >> The guy was a member of al-Qaeda. He was a co-founder of ISIS. He allegedly, you

[18:43] know, took up arms against the United States. Everything about this guy shouts Osama bin Laden light and then instead we essentially usher him into Damascus over the course of a week or two weeks. The president off the top of his head just says, "Oh, by the way, I'm lifting sanctions on Syria effective immediately." Leading to people literally dancing in the streets in Damascus.

[19:14] Uh Barbara Leaf, an old friend of mine who's now the assistant secretary of state for for the near east, jets off to Damascus with the uh special envoy for hostage negotiations to make peace and bring gifts and then uh and then he's invited to the White House for for you know uh to be fetted by all the Washington swells. The only thing that I can think of because we don't change our minds about people quickly

[19:45] like this. We don't look at US relations with Cuba. We're still fighting fighting Fidel Castro and he's been dead for years now. >> So why all of a sudden do we just bend over? >> We're still pissed about the revolution in Russia in 1917 and communism. >> We are. We're still pissed. >> Why Why he Why do he never forgets? That's sort of what I think of these guys. Well, we never forget as long as it's useful not to forget. >> If it's useful to forget, then it gets memory hold or we've always been at war

[20:17] with East Asia or whatever. >> And then when the when the Central Americans say they don't forget about what the United States did to them, we just call them communists. >> Yeah. I mean, you call them communists, you can kill them. Or you call them narotists. That seems to be >> Yeah. Even better now. And then you can do a kinetic action against them. That's right. more euphemism. >> You know, part of what interests me about uh what's going on with Galani right now, Twitter's been pretty useful about it, I think, at least in my feed.

[20:49] I mean, there is a fair amount of shock in uh at least among people on Twitter. How much does that really count uh about the fact that this former al Qaeda ISIS guy is now uh uh like a most valued player welcomed into the White House, right? The the big lesson for me from all of this, and I to the extent it's a useful and accurate lesson, and I think it is, I wish more people could appreciate it, the wars don't mean anything. They don't mean anything. If you go back to Vietnam, 10 years of

[21:20] America's war in Vietnam, we killed as many as 3 million people in Southeast Asia, 58,000 Americans. Those are just the numbers of dead. We don't really count the brain damaged and blinded and burned and the amputees and the orphans and all that. We just don't. The suffering that we meed out on the other side of the war, other side of the world in that war is incalculable. And it just didn't really matter. In 1975, the country was reunified. The communists took over and the world kept spinning. We went into Afghanistan 20 years to

[21:51] kick out the Taliban. The day we left, 20 years later, the Taliban were right back in power. And they've been back in power ever since Al Qaeda. We upended the entire world and shredded the Constitution because al Qaeda was an existential threat. By the way, you might have noticed all threats are existential now. They're not threats. It's just existential threats. It makes me crazy. I'm like, surely there are some threats that aren't existential. Anyway, al-Qaeda is an existential threat, and we had to shred the Constitution and and kill millions of people and displace millions of others all around the world to fight the existential threat. Now, excuse me while

[22:22] I welcome an al Qaeda leader into the White House because we've installed him as the president of of Syria. It's crazy. And I wish people could just see all this and take a step back and say maybe all the wars and all the existential threats and [ __ ] maybe it's at least a little bit a scam, you know, racket. Maybe a little bit. It's severely neurotic people with a lot of insecurities like Lindsey Graham and others who are working out their insecurities by playing the game of geopolitics. And they should actually be kept as far away from the game of

[22:52] geopolitics as possible. They should be put into therapy where they can work out their issues safely. Anyway, nobody really sees that. It's always the ne Yeah, this time it's true. Uh, but all the others, sure, it was a scam and a racket and it didn't matter anyway. But this time it's true. Makes me crazy that people can't so many people can't seem to connect. It's not even connect the dots, just draw a simple lesson. Like, not sorry to wrap this up. I didn't mean to go on so long, but obviously it does make me crazy. If you have someone in your life who lies to you repeatedly and is repeatedly caught lying to you and

[23:24] now they tell you a thing, isn't there at least a part of you that's like, they have a record of bullshitting me. Why am I assuming this time it's true? But when it comes to people in their government, we just instantly forget about the last round of [ __ ] and believe this this one can't be [ __ ] It must be true. >> It's unfortunate. >> Yeah. I have a line in American Exception where I I just point out that it's it's a legal truism that if a witness is caught lying to you that you can disregard the rest of their testimony. But if you would apply that to the United States who are just lying

[23:55] constantly day in day out about especially when it comes to the covert operations which are all illegal by the UN charter. I mean most of them are illegal by the UN charter which is the supreme law of the land according to the US constitution because we ratified that treaty. we just operate in a state in a in a state of exception. We just do whatever uh that is expedient for imperialism. And this is what I I do think that people realize that a little bit more is you even see it on the right, the analysis of Tucker Carlson,

[24:27] which is strangely critical of empire. And you know, I don't I'm not going to try to put a white hat on anybody. I know he has other views and a history and different angles that I would, you know, wonder about. But the truth is like there are more people on the left and the right that realize this is a disaster and the cratering of support for Israel I think is the most clearcut uh thing about that and um this is so this gets into John I I saw it was funny I saw a Jimmy door segment a video and

[24:57] they had both of you in it. They had Barry being interviewed I think by Chank uh Jen Uger and >> Oh this is ages ago. Yeah. Yeah. And then John, they were interviewing you and they were asking you about whether you thought we created al Qaeda and you said that you didn't think that we did, but do you think that a sort of western coalition of people could have done this? Because when you look back at 1991 and that coup in Azerban that that used al-Qaeda types, although it seemed to be against HW Bush's general foreign

[25:29] policy, but it see there were Western actors involved and that was the beginning of the post mujaheden 1990s Mcjihad era we could call it and it took it was installed in Azerban and the group that did it was called Mega Oil which also happens to be the name of that 1990s super Israel oligarch network of like uh Wexler and Aden and um the Crown Lester Crown and all these guys who were maybe trying to influence

[26:00] policy in the US, right? They were a group of super pro-Israel guys. So, I'm wondering if that's a coincidence or not. But either way, you had Iran Contra guys like Richard Cord and Ed Dearborn setting up this airline like an Air America in 1991 in Azerban. And you also had CIA people arranging the visas for people like the blind shake and so on, you know, for the Bosnian jihad at the time and they were going into the US. So I would I think that it the origins of al Qaeda are

[26:30] quite mysterious, but they there's a lot of reason to believe if the US wasn't directly involved that the um that Western intelligence andor people aligned with Israel may have been. Looking at Galani now, do you does it make you reconsider the origins of this whole era or or what do you think? >> Bad bad US foreign policy decisions indirectly led to the creation of uh of al-Qaeda. But no, a bunch of a bunch of

[27:02] white guys sitting in a room saying, "Hey, let's create a terrorist organization so we can attack ourselves and give ourselves a reason to attack Muslims." No, >> I I agree. need a reason. We don't need a provocation. If we want to kill people, we just go out and kill them. We don't have to kill ourselves first and say, "Oh my god, we've been attacked. We need to go kill Muslims now." I mean, like I say, I don't want to be cynical, but no, if we want to kill people, we're just going to go out and kill them. >> I agree with all that with a with just a

[27:33] slight nuance twist, I would say, and it's this. I notice there are certain phenomena where the solution to an alleged problem then becomes a problem requiring more of the solution. And what I mean in this context is during the cold war the obsession was with destroying the Soviet Union. And uh and so if that's your imperative then anything becomes subordinate anything becomes okay uh as a tool in service of that imperative

[28:05] goal. And one of those tools was I a a critical tool was after 1979 when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, the covert war, the Charlie Wilson's war kind of stuff. And that meant arming Afghans and foreigners who came to Afghan to fight the Soviets, arming them, trading training them. We called them the mujaheden at the time, but it doesn't really matter what we called them. There there must have been concern, again, John, you would know more about this than I would, but there must have been concern about potential blowback. people must have said, you know, these people

[28:36] aren't like exactly our type. They're not secular. They're not western. And we're arming and training them. We're going to have Stinger missiles maybe floating around there afterwards. It could become a problem. And I would imagine that the overall bureaucratic institutional ethos was we'll worry about that later. If it's a problem, we'll worry about it later. Right now, we got to destroy the Soviet Union. And part of the reason that they didn't worry about it enough, I think, is because then if the blowback happens, ah, you sort of benefit from that, too. Now, we got a new war. You know what? But it's like, hey, you were right, Jim. Uh, they did turn against us and um,

[29:07] well, what are we going to do now except increase military budgets and uh, and go fight them. Actually, this was that famous or infamous depending on how you look at it. James Woolly Woolsey uh, testimony to Congress where and kudos for the propaganda because I I I study marketing and I really appreciate good marketing, good propaganda just as on a tactical level. He said, this is right after the Cold War ends and the Soviet Union disintegrates. He says, "We have slain a mighty dragon and now we find ourselves in a jungle filled with poisonous snakes." And I just I thought

[29:37] we cannot recover from that. That was, you know, well played really. It was like we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom crowd that's conda rice. And again, I was like, "Oh god, that's really good. That's going to be tough to counter." So anyway, so the military-industrial complex benefits either way. It's like we've uh we've destroyed the Soviet Union. So you may think that we won't need this gigantic military anymore. But I actually what just happened? It got even the world is even more dangerous than it was when it was bipolar and so we need to do something. One last thing about this I'm sorry because I just saw this in last week's economist and it was like I meant

[30:08] to put it on social media and never got around to it because it's just so the economist economist thing. the uh the article was about Ukraine, the war in Ukraine. And what they said is what we need is Europe needs to all the European countries need to increase their defense budgets, their military spending to I don't know 5% or whatever it is their targets. And we're it's an extraordinary amount of money that's not going to be spent on bridges, hospitals, education, ordinary people's benefits, all that kind of stuff. And then they said, and even if the war is settled, we're going to still need to keep spending all this money because of the threat Russia

[30:39] poses. And again, I just come back to just ordinary people. Like, how can you not recognize a scam when the economist says we need to increase military spending because of X, but also we need to increase it because of the opposite of X? I'm like, then we just need to then your goal is increasing military spending. That's not a means to an end. It's actually your goal. Just say so. But then the responsible, well, we can't say so. Then people would know it's a scam. We have to pretend. Anyway, so I think all these these this is how I would explain like did America did American leadership or intelligence

[31:10] agencies or whatever deliberately set out and say like we're going to create al Qaeda and they will attack America and then we'll have an excuse. You know, you could write a thriller with something like that. I wouldn't find it particularly realistic to your point, John. But the sort of background incentives and disincentives, how much of a problem would it be if there's blowback? Ah, we'll worry about it then because it's another opportunity for us. I think that's a human nature kind of thing we need to take into account. >> Yeah. >> I think that's

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