Title: DeProgram Show with Ted Ra
Show: DeProgram Show with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas
Date: 2025-09-05
URL: https://youtu.be/MnwI7RsEqlk
Duration: 71:00

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[00:02] Good to see you. Hey, good to see you, man. Welcome to DeProgram. I'm Ted Rall, and that's John Kiriakou. It is Thursday, September 4, and we're here as promised at 5 PM Eastern Time, as we are Monday through Friday, every single weekday unless we're not. Normally, we are. Okay, so today we've got a lot to talk about, John. As usual, we're always responsive to your questions and comments. Yes, indeed. We love those. A big cyber attack by China, revealed last year and codenamed Salt Typhoon, targeted over 80 countries, infiltrated all the telephone companies, and stole data from nearly every single American citizen, according to experts. That's why the headline today is "China's Got Your Number." We'll talk a little bit about that. I was fascinated by this. War games models using AI models like GPT-4 tend to escalate conflicts, much like in the movie WarGames from the 1980s. Why is that? We'll discuss that. There's also a story out of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict where both sides are using Telegram, which is very popular in that part of the world, to recruit and exploit naive teenagers and children. They ask them to participate in sabotage operations, usually not for patriotic reasons but for money. They use blackmail and deception to do so, ruining their lives. Over 175 child dupes from Ukraine faced charges for attempted, often poorly executed, sabotage in Russia. Finally, we know, courtesy of the New York Post and others, what exactly the feds got out of John Bolton's house. So, what first? What shall we talk about? There's so much to say. I'll add something about this sabotage thing. There was a piece, I think in the New York Times, about three, four, or five months ago, saying that non-state actors, like terrorist groups, are targeting disaffected teenagers on platforms like Discord or Twitch. For 50 bucks or a hundred bucks, they're getting them to throw a Molotov cocktail or place a small explosive device in front of a store or a bank. This is a thing now. It's not just the Russians and Ukrainians. Bad people are convincing disaffected teenagers to do bad things, and more often than not, they get caught, as you'd expect because they're hardly professionals. Reading from the New York Times today, this is how it works: An anonymous user contacts kids over Telegram, WhatsApp, or a video game chat with an offer of money. Once contact is made, handlers provide instructions. Sometimes the instructions are disguised as a geolocation game. "Yes, we pay for photos here," says one ad, asking for location-stamped pictures of police cars and ambulances. This is a quote from the ad: "It's like Pokémon Go, but for money." Sometimes the methods can be darker than deceit. A 14-year-old Ukrainian girl was harassed by her Russian recruiters. They gained access to her intimate photos and threatened to post them online. She became a saboteur. Kids have committed suicide because of that. Aside from the war, it's rampant. When this started, my kid was of that age. He was a high school kid, and I had to sit down with him and say, "Listen, if anything like that ever happens, you have to know I'll be there for you. Don't be embarrassed. I won't care except that I'll want to kill the people who are doing that." I'm not going to be upset with you. Parents really need to talk to their kids about this. Amen to that. Shame on both Russia and Ukraine for doing something like this. Kids are so easily exploited; their brains aren't fully formed. They think a couple of bucks is a lot of money, and they don't process the notion that they're probably going to get caught. If they're caught, it's going to cause no end of legal problems. This is a real shame. In the interest of fairness, I think there's a difference, but John, during World War II, resistance organizations in Greece and France, our native lands, used a lot of teenagers to conduct resistance activities. A bunch of them were caught by the Nazis, tortured, and executed. I guess the question that the Russian and Ukrainian intelligence services might ask is, how is this any different? I think it's different. If your survival is on the line, that's one thing. If you volunteer, I think it's different. I don't think the French or Greek resistance were running around blackmailing kids with nude photos to say, "Hey, join the fight against the Nazis or else." These were patriotic young people who hated the Germans and the invaders and just wanted to kick them out no matter what. That's exactly right. They were just patriots. As long as you go in with your eyes open. You told this story yesterday about your grandfather. My grandmother did something similar and was caught and imprisoned by the Quisling government in Athens at the time. My grandfather bribed a prison guard with American magazines to let her go, and they escaped to the United States. But yeah, kids can't process this kind of thing. They can't really consider what might happen to them if they get caught. I think it's very, very dangerous. Over on YouTube, Uout Definitive says "brio" is a great word. It's verve. Last year, mostly Bulgarians were caught in Paris doing pro-Russian actions, like smearing tags on monuments, and they were recruited on Telegram. Wow, you see there? At least that's just graffiti. It's not planting a bomb in front of a police station or what have you. Still, maybe what we need is an international convention. I do think we need an international convention against mines. Not everybody adheres to it, but it reduces their use enormously. The U.S. is one of the worst offenders because we didn't sign that treaty. That's right. I think we need one against drone warfare. I don't know how you feel about that. My God, amen. What makes that even more important and immediate is the fact that drone warfare is the future. It's the present in Somalia. We drone the [ __ ] out of people in Somalia, and it doesn't even make the papers. I interviewed Bernie Sanders for my biography of him, and I asked him about this. I was really surprised. I said, "How do you feel about it?" He said, "Yeah, killing's killing. Who cares if you use a drone or shoot the person in the head?" I was like, "The difference is that it's frictionless. You don't even risk a single one of your citizens to do this. You just literally push a button and sit in a trailer in Nevada and watch someone blow up." I think it's too easy. Speaking of sitting in a trailer in Nevada, I hope that our viewers and listeners know the name Daniel Hale. I think Daniel Hale is an especially heroic whistleblower who went to prison for four and a half years after blowing the whistle on the drone program. He tells a terrible story that is worthy of repeating here. He was in a trailer on an air base in Nevada, operating like a video game toggle for a drone over Afghanistan, and his boss was at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida. They were both looking at the screen, saw the target, and his boss said, "Fire." Daniel said, "I can't fire. There are two little kids with him." His boss said, "Those aren't kids. Those are goats." He said, "I'm telling you, I'm looking at them, and they're kids." The guy said, "Fire, or be court-martialed." So he fired and killed a nine-year-old girl and a twelve-year-old girl. He said that he went home that night and told his roommate, "I became a child killer today." That's when he decided to blow the whistle. Of course, what happened to him? He was arrested and charged with multiple counts of espionage,what a joke. He went through the whole process. He was extraordinarily brave by refusing to take a plea deal and went to trial. I happened to be at his sentencing with Tom Drake. Daniel, if you ask him about it, will say, "Oh, I'm weak. I'm soft. I buckled." This guy's a hero, a bona fide American hero who sacrificed literally everything in his life so that the American people could have the truth about the drone program. I said to him afterward, when he was suicidal, "It's not as bad as you think it is. You're going to get 15% off for good behavior. You'll get six to twelve months of home confinement. If you tell them you're an alcoholic or a drug addict, they'll put you in something called RDAP, the Residential Drug and Alcohol Program, and you get twelve months off your sentence just for going to the classes." He got out of prison about a year or a year and a half ago. He was on Twitter for a minute, and I was like, "Oh my God, Daniel Hale, welcome home, American hero." A week later, he had shut down his Twitter account and disappeared. All of my friends are like, "Have you heard from Daniel?" No, nobody's heard from Daniel. I don't know what happened to him. Anyway, a long way of saying, if you kill people by drone, it's the same as walking up to them and shooting them in the head. It doesn't make it easier. In fact, it makes it worse. Rebellious Rainbow Unicorn says shooting others in person risks PTSD. That's why the Nazis made gas chambers. Too many Nazis went nuts from killing people in person. That's true. They did have problems with Germans losing their minds when they were shooting people in those pits in Poland and Western Russia. They tried to get them drunk on schnapps. I think they came up with the gas chambers because it was more efficient. They wanted bigger numbers. The problem with drone warfare is, even if you accept the idea that we should be assassinating people on the other side of the world,which I don't,but let's say you accept that. At least if you send a sniper or someone out there to get an eye on the target, the story you told, John, illustrates the point. There's no way a pilot at 10,000 feet, no matter how high-resolution their lens is, or a drone, no matter if you can read the data on a penny on the ground, can see what's going on. It's just too far away. The angle is not right. Drones [ __ ] up over and over. There was some study during the wars in Waziristan, after 9/11, and it's hard to get good numbers, but the guesstimate was that 49 out of 50 victims of drone attacks in Western Pakistan were innocent victims, either mistargeted or just in the wrong place at the wrong time when the Hellfire missile blew up someone else. Ted, I had coffee an hour ago with a British human rights attorney, Clive Smith. He is representing Aafia Siddiqui, which is a different story, but we had the same conversation you're talking about right now. When he raised the issue of using drones in Afghanistan, I said, "You don't have any idea how many weddings we droned just because there was a tall guy wearing white." That was the criteria, or a black turban. A lot of other people wore black turbans. Then we would have to send a million dollars and ask the government to spread it around to the family. We would do it again and again and again. Sometimes we would blow up a wedding on purpose because there was some senior Taliban member there. Then we would blow up his funeral and kill everybody who went to the funeral. The double-tap strike,99% plus of those people were just innocent civilians, local villagers, relatives. If I had a relative involved in crime or whatever, and he dies, I'm going to go to his funeral. Does that mean I deserve to be blown up too? Of course not. It's outrageous. Hey, John, a question for you from Gerasimos Cuts: Off topic, but can you give Greeks your honest opinion on Kimberly Guilfoyle as U.S. ambassador to Greece? See, now you've put me on the spot. Before these comments pass us, I want to say thank you very much, VM, Sodon, Angela, and Marvel. Honestly, we couldn't do this without you. So true. We'll come back to your questions in a second. Kimberly Guilfoyle. I don't even know what to say. You could just say pass. No, I want to be honest. I've never been a Kimberly Guilfoyle fan. The reason she got an ambassadorship,any ambassadorship,is because Donald Trump Jr. broke up with her, and they didn't want her around to cause trouble in his next relationship. It's the sad truth. They decided, "Oh, we'll give her an ambassadorship, and she'll be out for the next three years." Saddam Hussein used to do this. If anyone was particularly popular, especially a military officer who made real wins on the battlefield against the Iranians, Saddam would be afraid they'd try to overthrow him and make themselves president. So he made them ambassador to the Philippines to get them out of the way. It's what the military does. My father was in the Air Force. He would say, "If you're a pain in the ass, they just promote you to the other side of the world or the country." They gave Kimberly Guilfoyle this job just to get her out. It just happened to be in Greece. As a Greek-American and a Greek citizen, I thought, "This is not going to be good." Greece has had a long string of popular ambassadors, going back to, but not including, Nicholas Burns. Everybody who worked for Nick Burns hated him. But there have been a lot of really good American ambassadors. George Tsunis, a very important Greek-American businessman, was the most recent. It's a pretty sweet assignment. The ambassador's residence is magnificent. I've watched Kimberly Guilfoyle very closely as she has gone through the process, not just her Senate hearings, which I watched, but every interview she has given. I have to give her credit; she has tried so hard to come across positively in the eyes of the Greeks. She has said all the right things. I subscribe to Kathimerini, the daily newspaper, and also to Ethnikos Kirix, the English version, the National Herald, the big English-language Greek-American newspaper. People are [ __ ] all over her, saying this is a terrible appointment, that she only got it because she was close to Trump. But the truth is, she's an attorney, a former assistant U.S. attorney. She does have the ear of the president, whether she's in the inner circle or not anymore,and she's not. But she's not an idiot. She's very much a political animal. Before she started dating Donald Trump Jr., she was married to Gavin Newsom. It's so weird. She's had too much work done, and I think that's a big part of the problem. I agree with you, but she's not stupid. She's very politically savvy. It's only going to be three years. We could have done worse. We could have had Nick Burns come back, God forbid. As an aside, there used to be,maybe still is,a newspaper called Pontiki, which means "little mouse." It was a left-wing satirical newspaper, like Charlie Hebdo in France. They might be sister papers. They had a photoshopped picture once of a nude Ambassador Burns on his hands and knees with a dog collar on. How come I don't get to work for publications like that? If I ever go into exile in France, I'm going straight to Charlie Hebdo. The Minister of Education, Vaso Papandreou, whom I never liked, was depicted with a whip, beating him on his naked butt while holding him by the dog collar. He was so angry he lodged an official protest. It's like, dude, it's a satirical newspaper. Have you never heard of freedom of speech and freedom of the press? So we all went out and bought these newspapers. It was the back cover of the paper that day, and we all taped them up in front of our desks. He didn't have access to the station because he was the ambassador, not a station employee, so he never saw it. I'm not confirming or denying the existence of a station in Athens. That's where I put up my thing. We've got some questions to answer from people who have kindly paid. VM, thank you so much for the 50 euros. Avid fan, I don't miss a day. I’d like your thoughts on Belgian intelligence at some point, if you have any. You know what? I could make jokes about how Belgian intelligence is an oxymoron, but I do have to tell you a Belgian story. It's not about intelligence, but it reminds me of this. I love stories about incredibly stupid people. My ex-wife and I were on a bullet train from Paris to Amsterdam, which goes through Brussels and the Netherlands. These two douchebag bros, about 22 or 23 years old, got on with big duffels and left them in the middle of the aisle where people were trying to walk. Several times, the conductor came by and told them, in Flemish or whatever, to get that [ __ ] out of there. Each time, they pulled them out, and as soon as the guy was gone, they put them back in the aisle. This happened a number of times. The conductor was getting more and more angry. Finally, he’d had enough. The train stopped, and some policemen came on with the conductor. He pointed to the two guys, the cops confronted them, opened the bags, and they were full of weapons,big guns. I’m like, you couldn’t keep them on your lap? They were guns! [ __ ] Belgians. What do you think about Belgian intelligence? This is one of those small-world stories. When I was a senior in high school, we had a foreign exchange student from Brussels, Pete Jambon. Pete and I are still close buddies. He comes back to the States just about every year. We’re in each other’s weddings and godfathers to each other’s kids. Pete and my three other closest friends,Pete went into private business and became very wealthy. His brother went into government and became the director of the Belgian intelligence service. The last time he was here in the States, we met up in Atlanta to go to another one of our best friends’ son’s wedding. I said, “So how’s your brother doing in this intel director slot?” He said, “Oh, they made him intel director and deputy prime minister. It’s the craziest thing.” I said, “Oh my God, how’s he fitting in with intelligence?” He said, “I never realized my brother had a hatred for Arabs.” I’m like, “What? You guys don’t hate anybody.” He says, “Every time I call him on it, he says, ‘Oh, you don’t see what I see. If you could see what I see,’” I said, “Oh, Pete, I hear that all the time. ‘If you had access to what I have access to, you’d want to kill everybody.’ Well, no, I used to have access to what you had access to, and I never wanted to kill anybody.” But the Belgians are very good when it comes to Arabs, and they pretty much ignore everything else. They’re panicked at the idea that Palestinian refugees, for example,there are a lot of Palestinian refugees in Belgium,might be terrorists. France had that spate of PLO bombings and other Islamic Jihad bombings. They got rid of all the trash cans and mailboxes, just like we did. Did Belgium have the same issue? Yes. Reed makes a great point. I totally forgot about that. Fauda Season 4 was filmed in Belgium. That’s exactly right. Reed, I remember this too. She’s asking,I assume she’s a she,wasn’t Guilfoyle accused of sexually harassing a male intern when she worked at Fox? I seem to remember that. I think I do too. I don’t remember what the final result was, but yeah. Saucy. Spicy. Sodon, thanks for the 20 bucks. Hey, John and Ted, can you please give us some insight as to why the Brits allowed China to build a huge embassy near the financial district with sub-level fiber optics? Should the UK and the U.S. be concerned? It’s a huge complex. Well, you know the story about the American embassy in Moscow and the Russian embassy in Washington. They were both built around the same time. The deal was struck in the 1970s that both countries would build new embassies. We told the Russians, “Go ahead and find a plot of land and pick what you want.” So they went to literally the highest point in Washington. I wonder why,they just wanted to get Channel 2 and Channel 7. Good reception. Oh, by the way, you can also see the White House and the Pentagon from up there, and signals intelligence is wonderful. The Russians allowed us to purchase a dry riverbed in Moscow that was in this culvert in the middle of Russia. We ended up having to tear the new embassy down because the Russians had put listening devices in literally every beam and every two-by-four in the entire embassy. Just pulling the wires out would have made the building collapse. So we would not allow them to occupy their new embassy, which is way up at the top of Wisconsin Avenue, just immediately south of the National Cathedral. You can see the Russian embassy from everywhere in Washington. I love these shenanigans, though. I had a college girlfriend who was a diplomatic brat. She grew up at the American Embassy in Moscow during the 1970s and 1980s. She said there were always shenanigans. All the cleaning staff were KGB, no question about it. There were constantly fires, so everyone had to leave. You knew the firefighters were all KGB, and they were going in there planting bugs. Everything had to be swept over and over. They knew they weren’t catching them all. They were also really concerned about cancer because the Russians were beaming microwaves at the embassy, and people were getting cancer. My understanding is that if you talk inside a room, you can pick up the vibration off the glass in the window. The microwaves allow you to hear what’s going on inside. Ted, when I was living in Bahrain, which is joined at the hip with the United States defense and foreign policy-wise, I was the human rights officer. One night, I’m lying in bed with my wife, reading a book. It was really hot, so I had no shirt on. This thing falls onto my chest. I’m like, “What the [ __ ] is this?” I look up, and the air conditioning vent is directly above me. I pick this thing up,it’s clearly a bug with wires sticking out and a little watch battery on it. I put it in a Ziploc bag. The next day, I took it to the embassy and showed it to my chief. He holds it up and says, “Yep, it’s a bug.” I said, “Well, now what am I supposed to do?” My wife almost never leaves the house, but she must have gone grocery shopping or taken our son to the park, and they immediately went in and planted this bug in the bedroom, no less. In the bedroom. That’s bad. My wife was a ballet teacher, not a CIA officer. I would never discuss anything with her because she wasn’t cleared. He said, “It’s because you’re writing that damn human rights report. They don’t like you one bit.” The Bahrainis used to do this: whenever your tour was up, we’re not allowed to accept any gift worth more than $25. So they would send everybody a Rolex. You had to report it to the Treasury Department, and you could either turn it over or bid on it and buy it back. I was the only one in the entire embassy who didn’t get a Rolex when I left. I didn’t even get a “thank you, come again.” They hated me. I would go into the Minister of Interior’s office and say, “Your Highness, you cannot just pick up a 15-year-old kid off the street for marching in a pro-democracy demonstration, beat him to death, and then call his parents to come pick up the body. You can’t do that. I have to report that to Congress, and it’s going to jeopardize the sale of weapons to Bahrain. Back off.” Angela, thanks for the donation. Marble, I love this question: Can someone please explain how Laura Loomer is so influential? Seriously. I don’t know. If someone has the answer, I honestly don’t know. Listen, Laura Loomer. We have a mutual friend, and I said to the mutual friend, “Why do you even associate with somebody like Laura Loomer?” First of all, she’s the only person I’ve ever heard of who’s banned by Uber, Lyft, and Target for hate speech. She can’t go to Target. I was like, “How can you be friends with somebody like that?” “Oh, no, she’s misunderstood.” No, she’s very well understood. That’s the problem here. She ran for Congress in either 2020 or 2022,I can’t remember,in Donald Trump’s home district of Palm Beach and got 24%. Even Republicans realize she’s nuts and so far to the right as to be unhinged. She has this inexplicable influence over the president of the United States. I don’t understand it. Maybe she made some appearance on Fox that impressed him one time or something like that. It’s often like that. John, Star-Lions is asking, “I thought you were really connected with Bahraini royalty. If that’s true, why would the security service still treat you like crap?” The Crown Prince and I still text each other jokes. I heard from him on Saturday, as a matter of fact. But when I was in Bahrain, the director of the Bahraini intelligence service was General Ian Henderson. General Ian Henderson was the British colonialist who put down the Mau Mau rebellion in Rhodesia and did everything he could to keep black Rhodesians out of power until he had to flee. He went to Bahrain, and they said, “Hey, can you set up an intelligence service for us?” Ian Henderson was the worst kind of colonial Brit, to the point where even the Bahrainis were afraid of him. I’ll tell you another thing. George H.W. Bush came to Bahrain when I was there, and the emir had a gigantic dinner for him. The crown prince asked that I be seated at his table. We’re sitting there, laughing. I was young at the time,I was 29. We’re laughing and joking, and I said, “Who’s the corpse over at this other table?” He turns and says, “Seriously?” I said, “Yeah, it’s this 80-year-old man wearing a brown leisure suit with a loud flower shirt underneath and big wide collar with wide lapels from the seventies.” I said, “Who’s the stiff?” He says, “That’s General Henderson.” I go, “That’s Ian Henderson?” I said, “He looks like he crawled right out of the seventies.” He’s like, “Yeah, you know what? We don’t talk about General Henderson.” Even the heir presumptive, whose grandfather was the emir and whose father was the crown prince, was afraid of Ian Henderson to the point where he didn’t even want to speak the man’s name. I’m dying to get your thoughts about this war games thing. There’s an article in Politico about the AI doomsday machine. The argument is that autonomous warfare,self-autonomous weapons that choose their own targets using AI,is the future. There’s no way to ignore it. If we don’t do it, the Chinese will. The Russians will. We have to keep up. DARPA, the big research arm of the Pentagon, is keeping up. The problem they’re finding is that ChatGPT and other AI models, when faced with a military dilemma, situation, or crisis, tend to escalate rather than de-escalate. You don’t have to have seen The Terminator a million times like I have to know how this works out. I have a theory as to why this is true, John, but I want to hear yours first. Ted, this is Black Mirror come to life. It really is the future. I hate to say it, and it scares the hell out of me. Those robot dogs from that Black Mirror episode are real. They look exactly like that. If DARPA can perfect a battery with a long enough life to attach to a robot to fight our wars, everything changes. We’re quickly getting to a point where the ultimate goal is not to send human beings into battle on our side. It’s to send robots, robot dogs, drones, all powered by AI, to fight our wars without expending a single life. Let me add one thing. Many of you know I’m a huge fan of really bad 60s and 70s television. I’m addicted to it right now. I’ve got Dragnet, Adam-12, and Star Trek,only the original Star Trek,in my queue. There’s a Star Trek episode apropos of this conversation. Kirk and Spock go to this planet where they hate the people on the next planet. These planets are really close together. One planet, Planet A, calls Planet B and says, “Listen, we’re launching an attack on you guys. Here it comes.” It impacted at such-and-such a coordinate. Planet B says, “Oh crap, you killed 3,500 people.” But they didn’t really,what they were doing was computer exercises. If the computer said it was a direct hit that killed 35 people, they would send 35 people to death chambers to be put to death so they didn’t have to keep rebuilding buildings. They’d launch a counterattack: “We killed 10,000 people in the counterattack.” So now you have to send 10,000 people. It’s a simulation, but you really do kill the people after the fact. In ancient history, I don’t remember if it was the Assyrians or the Hittites or both, they got tired of destroying each other’s cities. They would line up the armies side by side, and a military CPA would count all the men, weapons, and assess their training. They’d negotiate and say, “In this battle, the Hittites would have won.” So nobody’s going to kill anyone; we’re all going home to our wives and kids. But we’ll cede this amount of territory or money. That’s how they used to do it. It sounds civilized, I guess. My theory is that ChatGPT, Grok, Google AI,they’re all trained by illegally scraping everything they can from the internet with spiders and bots. They’re getting basically the entire internet. What’s the internet? It’s the expression of our political and cultural discourse. Our culture is always escalatory, whether in war or in relationships. If someone says, “My husband forgot my anniversary,” the response is, “Divorce him!” Everything goes to 11 in our culture. Think about a military or foreign crisis. When’s the last time you watched CNN or MSNBC and saw a single panel member say, “Maybe the U.S. shouldn’t be involved. It’s not our business,” or, “We should try to negotiate peace”? I’m 62 years old. In tens of thousands of hours of cable news, I’ve never heard a single person say, “This is not our business,” or, “We should de-escalate this situation.” So I think what’s happening is that the bots are trained on an escalatory culture. Of course, they escalate everything. Why haven’t we put together intellectually that they are automatically escalatory, convincing teenagers to kill themselves, and that’s a problem? In combination, it’s going to be a very big problem. I say all the time, only half-jokingly, Ted, I saw I, Robot. I saw what happened when the blue light turns red, and I’m not looking forward to it. That’s where we’re headed. You wonder why we have so much mental illness in our society. Every single day, even if you’re doing everything right, you’ll get a notice like, “Disconnection notice: if you don’t send your payment right away, we’ll turn off your power,” instead of, “Hey, you’re running a little late, dude. Don’t forget to send it in.” That’s never how it is. In America, you’re a hammer, and everything looks like a nail. The people who run the country are no different. I’m glad you like my theory. I was pretty proud of it. Let’s talk about your good friend, the walrus. I am the walrus. Mr. Bolton. He got raided a couple of weeks ago, August 22. Now we know what it was all about. The feds grabbed three computers, two iPhones, and a bunch of old documents. It turns out he was apparently sending a lot of classified information to family members. That’s what this investigation is about. He’s in trouble, right? It sounds like he legitimately did some illegal stuff. That’s literally the definition of espionage in the Espionage Act. The definition of espionage was mainstreamed in my case. It set a precedent: providing national defense information to any person not entitled to receive it. The feds raided Bolton’s Bethesda home and Washington, D.C. office as part of an investigation into allegations that he snuck national security files out of the White House during President Trump’s first term by emailing them to family members on a private server. Is John Bolton stupid? I know he’s not very smart when it comes to foreign policy. He’s arrogant,that’s what it is. Edward Snowden used thumb drives. That’s a lot faster. You can find out if data has been taken that way, but if you’re doing it by email, it’s going to go through a server. It’s going to be known, right? It’s impossible that it won’t be known soon. The FBI is saying they took all his electronics, which they normally do. On the back of my computer that I’m talking to you through, I still have an FBI sticker that says “evidence” on it. At first, I couldn’t get it off, and now I keep it as a souvenir. The FBI also confiscated two USB drives, a hard drive, four boxes marked “printed daily activities,” typed documents in folders labeled “Trump one through four,” and a white binder labeled “statements and reflections to allied strikes.” The warrant specifically accuses him of violating two different sections of the Espionage Act. So yeah, this is real. He’s in real trouble. Do you think he sent the stuff to his family to brag or just to get it to himself, thinking he wouldn’t get caught? This is for his memoirs. I think he probably did it to make it easier for him to access later. This is not advice to anyone, but if I were going to do this, I would take screenshots with my phone of the computer screen. That’s what I would do. Then I could toss the phone. Although that’s how they caught the FBI whistleblower from Minneapolis,his name escapes me. But couldn’t you use a phone not attached to the internet? Turn it off, use it as a camera. Hell, bring a camera,old school. But this is the arrogance we’d expect from someone like John Bolton. He’s old and not looking good at all. He looks really worn out. I guess you probably have some sense of what that’s like when you go through something like that. Starline’s asking if you ever got a chance to work with John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the EFF, the Electronic Frontier Foundation. No, I’ve spoken to him a couple of times, but I never had a chance to work with him. I’ve been told, for whatever reason, I’m not the most popular person at the EFF. I don’t know why, because I always liked and respected them. That’s how it was for me. I found out the same thing about me. I had every First Amendment organization in the United States on my side, sending amicus briefs against the LA Times, which is something because they’re a newspaper, and normally they’d be on their side. The two big exceptions were the EFF, who said, “You’re not popular here,” and the ACLU of Southern California, because they had a deal with the LA Times. The ACLU national would have been on my side, but the ACLU makes decisions regionally. A member of the board of the ACLU resigned in protest of the ACLU not making a statement in support of me during my trial. I got a letter. They’re [ __ ]. Not as big a bunch of [ __ ] as Amnesty International. Amnesty International refused to say a single word in support of me in my darkest days of 2012. This was Amnesty International London, the headquarters. The head of Amnesty International United States, a guy named Zeke, I think his last name was Johnson, an awesome guy, wrote me a letter when I was in prison apologizing for his bosses in London. Then he bought me a subscription to The New Yorker to dull the pain, I guess. It was only later, when I was getting out of prison, that Ai Weiwei, the Chinese artist, wanted to do my portrait for a show at Alcatraz. He made 178 portraits out of Legos of 178 political prisoners around the world. He wanted to clear the names with Amnesty International first. Amnesty said, “We don’t believe Kiriakou is a political prisoner.” He said, “I know Kiriakou. I’m telling you, he is a political prisoner.” They finally agreed, and the week I got out of prison, Amnesty International finally said, “Okay, you were a political prisoner.” But they had to be pulled kicking and screaming to that point of view. They were real jerks about it. Sometimes it is like that when you’re fighting for your life and making calls to these groups. It’s amazing. I ended up with eight amicus briefs, but some of them came through better than others. You’re literally like, “Are you [ __ ] serious? You’re not going to side with me? Really? You know what they did?” They’re like, “Yeah, but...” That’s what you’re for. That’s why you get donations. I used to donate to the ACLU. They had a cartoon auction every year, and I always used to bid on a cartoon. I’m like, “Thanks a lot, [ __ ]. No more cartoons from me.” Unbelievable, these people. Somebody told me the other day there’s a very prominent attorney here in Washington. A mutual friend told me, “He doesn’t think you’re a whistleblower.” I said, “Isn’t it wonderful to be at a point in my life where I don’t give a [ __ ] what he thinks about me?” That is nice. When you interview me, I’ll get into all the nuts and bolts. By the way, for people watching, we’re now dropping our interview with John for Rumble Premium. It’s great. We’re going to do probably two more hours and then do mine. When we do mine, when you hear how this all went down, it was proven by science. But there were still some people,like a cartoonist, who shall remain nameless, except he was the cartoonist at the Salt Lake City paper for many years and probably still is. He was telling my friend Scott Stantis, “I don’t know. I think Ted faked that evidence.” It’s like, what do you think? Do you think I have the power of a major espionage agency to break into the LAPD vault, alter their evidence, and use it to exonerate myself? If I had that power, I wouldn’t be here doing podcasts and drawing cartoons. It’s absurd, but people believe what they want to believe. That’s depressing. It is nice to get to the point where you just don’t care. Reed’s a dude, by the way. My apologies. Fetterman is going through a serious mental health crisis, still, and I guess it’s getting worse. I can’t believe that guy’s still in the Senate. John, you’re from Pennsylvania. How do you feel about that? I think it’s [ __ ] atrocious. It’s a travesty, and I’m furious about it. Although, I’ll tell you why he’s still in the Senate: he has maintained the strong support of organized labor. He hasn’t budged on his support for organized labor. He has become what Republicans are now calling Donald Trump’s favorite Democrat. In a state like Pennsylvania, which goes back and forth between the two parties, that’s the position you want to be in. People like you and I have zero respect for the guy, but they don’t care what people like you and I think. The union members are going to vote for him, and Republicans are going to vote for him. That’s why he’s able to do this. With that said, the question you just put up on the screen,why is John Fetterman still in the Senate? That’s the question. If he is mentally and emotionally unable to serve, and apparently physically, because he literally doesn’t show up to votes and doesn’t interact with constituents, his staff can’t keep any staff members because he’s crazy, and they run away. He’s mean. I told you I saw him at that Ohio State football game. He was ten rows in front of me, and I kept shouting, “Fetterman, I want my 50 bucks back.” He could hear his name, but because of the crowd, he couldn’t really hear what I was saying. So he would just turn around and go. Ugh, that guy. He’s such a dick. The funny part is that he’s become even more maniacally pro-Zionist. It’s irrational. Maybe nowadays, to be Zionist, you literally have to be insane. Yes, indeed. Matthew Blair Rains has a good question. Thank you for the 10 pounds, Matthew. Why did the UK and France have such different approaches to their former colonies and empire, both with regards to military and intelligence actions? That’s a great question. I’ll say that the only thing the French really care about is not being attacked by people who are from what used to be colonies. They’re happy to go to the Sahel and try to fight Al-Qaeda, but otherwise, they’re willing to just get up and walk away. The French approach to post-colonialization has been, “If there’s a fire, we’ll come in with the French Foreign Legion and put it out, then go home.” The Brits don’t want to do that. They had the Commonwealth. The illusion is that, technically speaking, the king’s face is still on the money in Canada, Australia, Belize, the Bahamas, and all these ostensibly independent places. The Brits have trouble letting go. They want to think they’re still a colonial power. I think that’s part of the Brexit mentality, ironically, even though the people who voted for it probably weren’t thinking like that at all. It’s cultural. The French think they have majesty because they’re France and that they bestowed some of their majesty on their colonies. The Brits think their majesty comes from having colonies. That’s a good point. That makes sense to me. Big Boss Bob Ross has a good question here: Why did the French help the genocidal Hutu government during the Rwanda genocide? I never understood a single aspect of that genocide. There were Hutus and Tutsis married into each other’s families, living next door to each other for generations, and then, like flipping a switch, they all started killing each other. I just didn’t understand it. Can you make heads or tails of this? Yeah, it was a classic divide-and-conquer strategy. The whole idea that there’s even such a thing as Hutus and Tutsis was invented by the colonial powers. It was a traditional approach to take a favored minority group and put them in charge, kind of like the model the Brits pursued in Iraq. Support the minority; they’ll fight hard to oppress the majority, but the majority will be resentful and seething, and they’ll fight each other. It’s like Stalin when he drew the borders of the Central Asian Republics. Forty percent of Uzbekistan was Tajik, forty percent of Tajikistan was Uzbek, on purpose, because he thought the Fergana Valley Muslims were crazy and would rebel against the Soviet Union. He wasn’t really wrong about that. We don’t have all the time in the world to teach a class on post-colonialism, but that’s the short version. What do we think of Ibrahim Traoré? I know him. He’s a young military officer in Burkina Faso who took power two, three, or four years ago. Yeah, from the French. He overthrew the government and took power. He’s become, in my view, increasingly irrational over the last couple of months. First, he took power, and it’s been at least three years now with no transition back to democracy, which he promised at the outset. Didn’t happen. He’s the military dictator. That’s what they always do. They say, “We’ll have an election as soon as things settle down.” Just recently, he outlawed homosexuality, so if you’re gay, you risk ten years in prison. He also did away with the country’s Electoral Commission in Burkina Faso. I don’t even know why I know this much about Burkina Faso, but they have this permanent Electoral Commission whose job is to plan each election every four years. He scrapped it, fired everybody, got rid of everybody. He took a Trump approach: fire everyone. There aren’t going to be any elections. Also recently, I don’t remember where I saw this, but he started to expel foreigners,a program to expel all foreigners from Burkina Faso. Burkina Faso was never a garden spot, but man, it’s getting worse and worse. Military dictatorship, always fun. So, do we want to talk about Salt Typhoon, or should we call it a night? Let’s say something quickly about Salt Typhoon. The Chinese are really good at computer attacks. They’ve got this unit within the Chinese intelligence service that only does cyber warfare. They hit the jackpot with this thing, Salt Typhoon, where they hacked the information of literally every American. A couple of outlets today and yesterday were saying the real targets were Donald Trump and JD Vance, but then they thought, “Let’s cast a wide net and see how much success we can have.” They had complete success, collecting data from every single American. They’re good, and our defenses are not so good. It seems like every few months or weeks, we wake up to some data breach: Target lost all their credit card data, or everyone’s social security numbers are on the dark web. China has everything. You use a password somewhere, and you’re warned, “Change your password; it exists on the dark web.” Most people, I don’t think I’m alone, just throw up their hands and say, “[ __ ] it. There’s no way to safeguard my data anyway. I can’t be bothered. If people want to steal my identity, they can have it.” It seems like there’s no resources, nothing you can even do about it. John, I can’t remember a single politician giving a speech saying, “This is a major concern, and we probably ought to have some committees and talk about this stuff and do something about it.” It just happens in the paper, you read it, and you’re like, “Oh, okay,” and there’s no leadership whatsoever. You’re absolutely right. Marble, thanks again. Marble’s got one other question: John and Ted, why did Russia recognize the Taliban government? I’ve got a theory. They did it for a couple of reasons: one, to put Afghanistan finally behind them. The real reason is because the United States hasn’t, and this is another opportunity for Russia or China to move in where the U.S. has been too reluctant, maybe negotiate a sweetheart deal on rare earth metals or establish new trade relations. It couldn’t hurt with BRICS. If you want trade relations between Russia and India, it’s the Silk Road. The Taliban are very good at providing security on the ground. Trucks can make it across into Uzbekistan or Turkmenistan and then on to Russia, and vice versa. Pipelines. I wrote an entire book about the Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline Project that Bill Clinton and Unocal tried to start in the mid-90s. That could be revived now. The problem was you could never run a pipeline across such a restive place where tribesmen would constantly threaten to blow it up. I think it’s a good thing. Honestly, I don’t think diplomatic recognition should be a reward or something. Every country should have diplomatic relations with every other country, period. Let the diplomats do what they’re paid to do,carry out diplomacy. We should have relations with everybody that wants relations with us. The truth is, when we need to talk to people, we end up talking to them anyway. When I needed a visa to go to Iran, we don’t have diplomatic relations, but Iran had an interest section in the Pakistani embassy in Washington. That’s what my fixer went through to get it. The lack of diplomatic relations just makes it harder for them to do their jobs. I’m proud to say,I’ve not said this publicly, but I’m going to say it now,I’m one of six people invited to meet with Iranian President Pezeshkian in New York when he arrives for the UN General Assembly. I said yes without even asking what he wanted to talk about. That’s great. I’m excited about it. See if they’ll do an interview. The worst that could happen is he says no. Why not? I heard back from them today. They don’t yet have a date or time, but there are six of us he wants to talk to. Medea Benjamin is one, Max Blumenthal is one, Andy Shalal is one, me, and I don’t know who the other two are. That’s awesome. Iala wants to know what Afghanistan has in terms of natural resources, raw materials. I can answer this. In the north, there’s oil,not a lot, but a decent amount worth having. In the east, there are rare earth minerals and gemstones, particularly rubies, as you and I both know. That’s basically it. During the first Taliban period from 1996 to 2001, they were so poor that their number one official export was pomegranates. You’re right about all the other stuff. They have twenty-three trillion dollars’ worth of rare earth metals. We learned that just as U.S. forces were pulling out and Chinese miners were moving in. Their rubies are some of the best in the world. It’s pretty impressive. At the very least, we should have an embassy open there, even if it’s just two or three people, and we should be carrying out diplomacy constantly. Not to mention, we still have some Americans trapped there who have no consular representation. We abandoned them. I don’t understand why President Trump hasn’t restored those relationships. I agree with you. He should do it. All right, guys, thank you so much for joining us. It’s always appreciated. We’ll be back tomorrow at 5 o’clock Eastern Time. We’re here Monday through Friday. You’re watching DeProgram with Ted Rall and John Kiriakou. Please like, follow, and share the show. We’ll see you tomorrow at 5. Bye, everybody.
