Title: John Kiriakou Podcast: Aaron Good on the Hidden Power of the Deep State
Show: The JK Report
Date: 2026-07-06
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VWV_de0Z6g
Duration: 2519

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[00:00] We we are approaching the end of the empire, and what it means for the deep state is that it the deep state needs to be brought into the light. I think that the the democratizing the US and making it transparent is actually in the interest of these people, but will they ever accept it? And that is the big question. Uh I would hope that they that there are some disclosures coming. Maybe things like Tucker Carlson's 9/11 documentary are a good sign that we're going to be headed in that

[00:30] kind of direction, and that they're trying to roll it out in weird ways. I I don't know. It's It's just the This is the strangest time to be alive. >> I am John Kiriakou, and welcome back to Deep Focus. >> [music] >> You know, a lot is made of the so-called deep state. Uh a lot of people, especially on the left, think that the deep state is just a right-wing trope to complain about government. I can tell you, coming from the left, that the deep state is absolutely real.

[01:00] It's real, and it's ugly, and I know because I was a part of it when I spent 15 years at the CIA, and frankly, another couple of years on Capitol Hill on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff. Listen, you don't have to call it the deep state. You can call it whatever you want. You can call it the state. You can call it the federal bureaucracy. But the truth of the matter is that it is there. It's there to stay. It's not going anywhere. Well, we're going to talk about this with Dr. Aaron Good. He's one of the country's leading experts on the assassinations of prominent political

[01:32] leaders, on the deep state, and on the role of the CIA in subterfuge around the world. The reason why we're talking about him today, or talking with him today, specifically, is that his outstanding book, American Exception, Empire and the Deep State, is being made into a three-part documentary mini-series. Aaron, welcome back. Good to see you. >> Hey, thank you, John. It's great to have It's good to be with you again. I was going to interview you, and then we we switched it around, so I got to adjust to being the interview subject, but thank you for the introduction. >> Oh, I I appreciate it. You really are

[02:04] one of the country's leading experts on the deep state. Uh and we're talking about everything from the Kennedy assassinations, uh Martin Luther King, uh the CIA, the overthrow of governments. Tell us about the origins of the deep state and how it happened right under the nose of the American people without anybody really paying much attention. >> Well, the US has never been fully a democracy. It's always been an oligarchy. Going back [clears throat] to before the war for independence, uh there was always an oligarchy of

[02:35] private wealth and the US was always a a capitalist nation which was whose politics was dominated by wealthy uh individuals, an oligarchy. Now, without rehashing all of of US history, uh if we go to World War II, the US made the decision the US establishment made the decision to go for uh hegemony over capitalism, over global capitalism, and to be the lead the leader of the free world >> [clears throat] >> was how they presented it. And in order to do that, they were going to have to create a new kind of uh

[03:06] regime, a new kind of political regime. And a political regime, the word regime is a key here because in political science it doesn't mean just the state or the government, it means all those institutions which determine who has access to control of the state, who is able to control the state. And we are told that we have a democratic state uh with, you know, laws and transparent government and um elections and so on. But it's much more top-down than that in practice. And when you find out how

[03:38] top-down it is when an elected official tries to move the the policy of the US in a way that the oligarchy doesn't want. And since the elite of America, the wealthiest people decided that they wanted global empire, you know, a dollarized system that the US would would dominate and police uh globally after World War II, um this so the oligarchy wanted this and John Kennedy attempted to change this to by and essentially by calling for an end to the Cold War uh

[04:09] among other policies that he had that upset the establishment at the time and the established powers. And so we get this uh apparatus of the set of in this network and institutions, parties, uh organizations that affect the assassination of President Kennedy. And there we see something that can't really be described by reference to democratic or liberal understandings of how the government works. And that's why it gets denied up to this day, even though pretty much anyone who looks at these things objectively realizes that

[04:40] the regime in the biggest sense killed JFK. So the deep state is top-down governance in a nominal democracy. It's uh it's not like you needed a deep state exactly. I mean, you would you probably had some kind of power structure behind the scene, you certainly did in Nazi Germany, but you didn't quite have the deep state in the same way because you had the Führer principle and there wasn't it was known that whatever the Führer had to do in this emergency was acceptable because it was protecting the state against existential threats. That's the idea.

[05:11] The deep state operates similarly saying with the logic that everything it does is for the, you know, preservation of the state, however, it is uh not allowed to say that it is the Führer. It is not allowed to say that we can kill anyone we want anytime, anywhere and so it uses covert operations as like you were a part of when you were in the clandestine service. And this uh gives rise to a different form of of governance where you really can't change policies by elections. Um and it's it's it goes beyond just the

[05:43] bureaucracies. You're talking about oligarchic control over media and political parties and and what's a manipulation of the culture in ways that we probably don't even have any clue of. Uh it's a system of top-down governance in a in a nominal democracy. That's what the deep state is and it's it's bent on empire and US global dominance especially in the 21st century and it's so imperialistic and uh irrational in many ways that it's brought it's brought the era centuries of of Western

[06:15] imperialism up to the brink of destruction which is probably a good thing for human history for the this era of white Western people just telling the rest of the world how it's going to be. It probably needs to come to an end. Um and but because the deep state essentially was it's a very dark kind of lawless milieu of people who are going to control the foreign policy apparatus and the right to kill people with impunity and so on. Well, it got taken over by very ruthless people in a sense. And I think that this is tied to Zionism

[06:46] and neo the neo-conservative push for global dominance and Zionism has been a big part of that and so that's why the deep state in the 21st century has a very Zionist flavor to it and I think that that has brought us to the disaster that we're experiencing now. >> So tell us a little bit about the differences between the deep state of the 1950s and 60s. Think the the Dulles brothers, the Kennedy assassination versus the deep state that we see today where you've got secret prisons, you've got a torture program, you've got renditions.

[07:18] >> Okay, the the deep state I believe in the 50s and and originally as it was conceived at the Council on Foreign Relations, the US empire was conceived at the Council on Foreign Relations with doing the State Department study called the War and Peace Studies Project and it was going to plan the US response to World War II and then what they would do afterwards to win the to win the peace. And this was a WASPier sort of Eastern establishment, you know, corporate power, uh old money and power formation in the US more or

[07:49] less at this time. And it was centered around Standard Oil especially was uh the the biggest force behind Eisenhower. So, Rockefellers are would be a a part of this. They ran the Council on Foreign Relations. Henry Kissinger was a Rockefeller man. Uh Eisenhower came to the White House on a on a tidal wave of Standard Oil cash. Um and so back then it had a slightly in the '50s had a slightly different cast to it because of this. Um he the Rockefeller and Eisenhower, they were not really neocons and they weren't super Zionists

[08:22] uh in the way that other presidents would be. And the way that you can see this most clearly is how in 1956 when the Israelis tried another, you know, land grab uh with the Suez Crisis and they were backed by the British and the French in this. Um the the Eisenhower opposed it and put the stop put a stop to it and that really marked the end of the British Empire and the and the British Empire's attempt to tie its fortunes to a an aggressive sort of Zionism that would get them the Suez Canal back and so on. So, you see there a battle line or a a

[08:56] cleavage in the US establishment that some people wanted Israel to be able to do this, but Eisenhower, the president, didn't want to him them to be able to do this. And JFK also approaches Israel with uh he he wants them to not interfere with what he thinks would be a better policy, which is for the US to have good relations with people like Nasser and dissolve the Palestinian refugee crisis and to stop nuclear weapons from proliferating in the Middle East cuz Israel was pursuing the bomb and JFK was

[09:26] completely opposed to that. So, they get rid of JFK and I believe that I believe that ultimately this had to have been sanctioned by the the upper by the apex of the military intelligence apparatus. However, I believe they had to rely on Zionist assets essentially in and things connected to the syndicate the national crime syndicate which was because of Meyer Lansky essentially an Israeli an Israeli asset. The national crime syndicate was an Israeli asset functionally during these decades.

[09:57] Meyer Lansky was given the presidential Medal of Freedom in 1945. He established a big drug connection in Mexico the same year this guy named Harold Meltzer and this was to deal with the fact that drug trafficking routes had been disrupted by the war. He establishes the city of Las Vegas. I think this is in like 1946. And he has his guy Bugsy Siegel running it. Also Bugsy Siegel had to >> Yeah, that's right. >> he like to be called Benny.

[10:28] >> [laughter] >> Yeah. >> You don't want to call him Bugsy to his face. >> Yeah, he was he had a temper. That's supposedly that's made him a good assassin for a time. And and so this is but but this this is a key event in the formation of the deep state because it's not just government bureaucracies it's the it's the fix. It's the fix for the national crime syndicate and what it did was because the drug traffickers have to corrupt the law enforcement to be able to function, right? It's really having the fix is what guarantees you or well it makes it very likely that you're

[10:59] going to be successful and make a lot of money. It's not because you're the the best businessman it's because you have the fix with the the law enforcement. And for the national crime syndicate they had the fix on a national level with J. Edgar Hoover the head of the FBI as well as the head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics Harry Anslinger and James Angleton in counterintelligence was also going to protect Lansky from being investigated. And the only administration that attempted really to investigate Vegas and the casinos and all of this is the reason that Vegas is founded is to launder drug money. That was the reason it was set up in the first place.

[11:30] But this and the syndicate gets control of Teamster the Teamsters and their pension funds and they make they make loans to Las Vegas they build up the strip and it attracts a whole lot of people to come and gamble and see all the crazy shows they have there. But I come to think it's almost it's like a mirage or illusion in the desert and that what's really going on is the is massive amounts of drug money laundering and that that's a big part of what makes these casinos very profitable because it's the perfect business with which to launder money because it has massive amounts of cash going through people that want to report it on their

[12:00] income taxes. It's just a way that it's it's as that was the reason it was set up in the first place and I think that this had an effect on the US economy and the and the structure of the oligarchy in the US because there's so much money in drugs. It's one of the three most lucrative commodities internationally along with weapons and oil. So here you have a source of liquid capital that gets laundered and you know made legitimate in Las Vegas and elsewhere and then it creates a whole

[12:32] sort of constellation of financial interests and and corporate interests in the legitimate you know legitimate economy that are tied to sort of criminal elements and that are and and the and the bigger criminal element is itself tied closely to Israel because of Lansky. Lansky in 1948 along with Jimmy Hoffa of the Teamsters they worked to funnel arms to the state of Israel and they did other you know this people around Vegas people like Hank Greenspan were huge Zionists and they looked to help the the cause of Israel in any way

[13:03] that they could. So it was there was more going on with the syndicate had powerful friends corrupt politicians but also the Zionism. The only time they really go after Lansky is in under Nixon and that's sort of building on the RFK investigations that he had begun into Vegas and all of this and then Meyer Lansky flees to Israel and and there what happens in the US is basically Watergate and that there's a change of power, and it it seems that what happens with Lansky what happens with Lansky, what happens with Nixon are connected. Lansky is

[13:34] forced to stay he stays in Israel, but he goes back in late 1972 after Nixon's lost, but the Watergate burglars are already in jail. And some of the money trail that they have left traces right back to Mexican banks, you know, in that Lansky CIA milieu, because, you know, the CIA and the government worked with Lansky in back in World War II, and people like Angleton continued to work with Lansky uh in the in the CIA. So, Watergate traced back to this relationship between the the security services and the drug trade, and if it

[14:05] was investigated, it would have exposed all these things. And this is a part of how they're able to get rid of Nixon is because it just can't be investigated. You would it would expose too many things. It would it would discredit the US. So, these are this is I'm trying to explain how the deep state kind of becomes this relationship with organized crime creates a a foreign policy imperial the imperialist political the apex that is that is where the crime and the criminal elements are too big to fail. The empire is too big to fail. So, they can they

[14:35] can blackmail each other. They can use the leverage on each on different parties, and this determines political outcomes. Like you they can't investigate this the Kennedy assassination, even though Jack Ruby is the most suspicious uh it's and sinister character you can imagine in terms of what he connects to. A network of tolerated drug traffic that's a part of the US political system uh in effect. >> So, man, you you've led me to so many different questions. I'll start with this one. >> I'm I'm sorry that's I know that's that's a lot to say, and it's so

[15:06] different from the way these things are usually discussed. So, I'm sorry if that's a crazy answer, but it's it's all in my head and my mind all the time these days. >> Oh, yeah. I I'm as fascinated by Meyer Lansky as you are. So, I'll ask the the shorter question first then. Lansky went to Israel. He did it to avoid prosecution here in the United States. But then Golda Meir expelled him back to the United States. Why did that happen? And then once Lansky returned, what happened to him? Nixon was gone, Ford was president, and then what?

[15:37] >> Then they he's indicted, but he doesn't he's never convicted of anything serious. He retires in Florida, and he writes this letter that he writes in 1975. I found it it was auctioned somewhere. And I found the letter online, and it said it's written to his friend back in Israel, I believe, and he's saying, um, "Boy, that Nixon, he really thought he could take over, didn't he?" So it's like he's saying that that Nixon that he's he seems to be relating Nixon's like what is he saying Nixon tried to take over? I mean, he's I think

[16:08] he's pointing to the fact that by going after Lansky they were seeking to either restructure or just destroy the the crime syndicate. I don't think they wanted to destroy it. I think they knew it was too ingrained, but they tried to They had different, you know, elements of the Teamsters connected to the Republican Party instead of the Democrats. Like and they had a Republican governor in Nevada. You had the whole Howard Hughes debacle, which is connected to this. And the Mormons around him, by the way, and the the Mormons seem to be tied to Israel on some level like in through

[16:38] Lansky like they there's some seems to be some Zionist neo-conservative syndicate connection there. And when you think about Howard Hughes and the Mormon mafia and all that and then people were that were taking Nixon down are them like Jack Anderson, he was a Mormon, and his office mate was Irving Davidson, who was this huge Zionist guy who was connected to Hoffa and and he only approached Hoffa and became Hoffa's lawyer and PR man because Israel requested him, at least that's what some FBI documents have have stated. Jonathan Marshall cites that in his book. So it's What happens in '72? There seems

[17:12] to be this big conflict over it, and eventually it it so bad for Israel that I that I and I think that they're also sorting things out in in in the US. That by the time they've got this bomb sort of planted for Nixon, I I think that they know it's okay it's safe to send to send Lansky back. I think that he sort of takes one for the team and he's willing to risk going to jail. But also people know that the situation in in the US is precarious because of the Watergate issue, which is a very strange issue where you have these guys in jail who are with the CIA, but they

[17:44] they don't want to just allow the CIA to be blamed for the crime, especially Jim McCord or James McCord yeah, James McCord. So it was I think that he was sent back. He sort of takes one for the team and takes a risk by coming back to the US, but it's in the service of Israel to make Israel not look tainted by organized crime. And also they're likely aware that he that nothing is going to come of it because they know that Nixon is actually in big trouble and that they have powerful political allies in the US and they have lots of blackmail over the US including the JFK assassination.

[18:15] >> So this is >> [clears throat] >> this is more than just the conventional wisdom that that Israel's ultimate goal was to acquire a nuclear weapon. It's deeper than that. It's to exert influence, maybe even control in aspects of the of the American government. >> Yeah, especially to affect greater Israel and to be able to have this pipe dream come to life of a greater Israel. Seems to be the obsession. I mean, that's the when you look back at all of their actions and all the ways that they've all managed to avoid ever having

[18:46] peace with the Palestinians and sabotaging every all these peace talks, murdering people that are supposed to do negotiations. I think that this has been the obsession for these elements. Um I mean, I don't they there's a reason that Israel's never declared its borders, let's just say. >> Yeah, that's a good point. Is there a difference, Aaron, between between the deep state of that area and the deep state today? And secondarily, is there a difference in the way the Israelis approach the deep state from the era

[19:18] around the founding of the state of Israel and today? >> I believe that earlier their position was not as strong and it took the consolidation of a lot of power and money in the US, you know, the the the forces of capitalism unleashed after World War II allowed a lot of allowed corporate power to make a lot of money and the drug trade, the oligarchs who benefited from it. They became very powerful and they invested in military companies, they

[19:48] profited from the Vietnam War, uh just different aspects of US capitalism. I think these elements were able to to profit from and become part of the integrated into the regular economy and so [clears throat] this was something that it's their power grew over time and the the people that did Nixon challenged it. Well, let's look at the the people who challenged it. Nixon did challenge it, but before him JFK. JFK challenged the war machine and it's not merely um I'm not trying to put the entire blame

[20:19] on Zionism specifically. It's alliances with Zionists and military contractors, different people in the oil industry, especially the the in the west and southwest, so not so much Standard Oil, but people like uh you know, KBR, Bechtel, uh the Halliburton, the things we associate more with uh people around Dick Cheney later in later decades and this sort of south the south of the US, the southwest, uh not so much the eastern establishment. It changes the the the

[20:50] structure of the US economy. And so JFK goes against Israel and also the war machine calling for, you know, nuclear inspections in Israel and for re-examining the Cold War and for withdrawing from Vietnam. And so he gets assassinated. And his brother uh immediately or a week later, Robert Kennedy sends an emissary to what to Russia to say, "Hey, we know that you didn't kill our the Jack. It was a domestic right-wing conspiracy. Lyndon Johnson's too close to big business. He's not going to be a partner for peace, but Robert plans to make a

[21:20] run for the White House and then we can resume JFK's policies of you know, peace essentially. And they obviously assassinate RFK in 1968 and a Palestinian patsy is used in that case. Which is interesting. Now, not Nixon didn't really take a hard stance against Israel, but he um but he he didn't directly by virtue of the going after Lansky, for example. I don't know everything that works out in that era, but something crucial happens

[21:51] in 1973 with the the end of Bretton Woods and then this big shock. So, there's the the Bretton Woods ends in 1971, which is the US gold-backed dollar system because of Vietnam war spending. And so, for a time they're negotiating, how are they going to how are we going to have a new system that's more fair since the US is no longer honoring its obligations to give us gold for the dollars that it spends everywhere. >> [clears throat] >> But, the US was really stalling in all of these. They weren't sincere about coming up with something more fair.

[22:22] What ends up happening is while they're in the midst of these negotiations, war breaks out in the Middle East and between you know, Egypt and Israel and I think others are on the side like Syria is on the side of the Yom Kippur War. >> Yep. >> And this leads to a huge spike in oil prices. And this is seen to was encouraged by the Kissinger. Kissinger went around and and told the Shah, I believe it was the he told the Shah that they wanted these oil price hikes.

[22:53] And then the Saudi foreign minister um asked about like was talking about the oil and how they should if they should raise oil prices and the this I believe the response from the Shah was look the Americans want this Henry Kissinger asked us for this. Because by raising oil prices like that because of the war, you are able to take all those dollars that are in foreign governments and they all go to oil producing countries because people have to buy oil in dollars. And that those all and those countries are under the thumb of the US. So

[23:24] they're not going to cause them problems. They're going to reinvest them in Western banks and in Western treasuries to fund the US debt. And this is how this new dollar system was created and Israel was a part of that. They bled for this in 1973 with this war that was really a war of all US proxies at this point because Egypt was run by Sadat at this point who seems to be a CIA asset of some kind and then Indonesia is an oil producer, Iran is run by a US puppet, the Saudis are US puppet. All of the big oil producers in

[23:55] the world are US puppets and of course Israel is close to the US as well and what does the war really do? It's a it benefits the US enormously. They're the real winner. It's a stalemate over in in the Middle East but the US is the big winner because it saves the dollar system. So I think something in that plays out with the way that Watergate shook out that Israel actually did something useful we could say for the US during that time period by fighting in these in this war and the US had been arming that it's the other countries to the benefit of these

[24:28] other countries not Israel for a time. So they could have been very angry with the US at that point but they're also so dependent on the US that what can they do? So what ends up happening Nixon resigns and you know Lansky is back in the US he doesn't get prosecuted the oil situation is there to help uh shore up the dollar but there's the water because Watergate had so many leaks and because there were still political conflicts you get the intelligence committee investigations in the 70s and I and you know the Church

[24:58] Committee and the Pike Committee. And I believe that some of what happens there in is that that you that they wanted to expose things the CIA was doing in order to get leverage over the CIA. I think that happens in 1967 also right before the war because these more Standard Oil friendly, you know, oil man friendly elements of the CIA were not really as close to Israel. They were sort of anti-Israel. They were Arabists. And they could get jobs in Aramco later in life. So they needed to damage the CIA in 1967 so you had these exposés

[25:30] like a Ramparts article on the student association, you know, for example. You had the the Rosselli story about JFK and the CIA working with the mob. That comes out in the spring of '67. Um you also had Jim Garrison's investigation which was undertaken uh at the at the behest of Russell Long, Louisiana Senator, who was one of the most Teamster corrupted, you know, close to the syndicate figures in the US Senate, very powerful person. But so there's a it's there's this sort of blackmail going on and

[26:02] they're all during this time. And and Nixon Nixon is is removed for what he tried to do to the syndicate which was indirectly doing something to Israel. You have all these investigations and leaks uh in the years after and you have the House Select Committee on Assassinations as well. And it it's so bizarre because one of the people behind getting the House Select Committee on Assassinations, the 7 1976 investigation into the JFK assassination and some other assassinations of the '60s. The main person behind this was this was a guy

[26:33] who was also uh James McCord's lawyer. Uh when when James McCord wanted to go after Nixon in 1972, uh this guy his name is his name always is is hard for me to remember for some reason. But he's a former Office of Naval Intelligence. Bernard Fensterwald, that's what it was. That was his name. And he was James McCord's lawyer once McCord decided that they really wanted to try to take down Nixon. But he's a guy who in the past was connected to Teamster corruption and had been in Office of Naval Intelligence, you know, and why is he representing

[27:03] James McCord, but he's also really interested in the Kennedy assassination. And I think it's partly to get leverage over the US for perhaps for Israel or perhaps for the syndicate or or both. Um and so you have these investigations in the '70s and they sort of they they play out and there's a sort of more right-wing establishment in the US at the end of this. Like they the however these negotiations are done behind the scenes or however it plays out the JFK wing of liberal reformism, you know, that's more for peace, that is

[27:33] gone from the political spectrum after after Watergate and after the '70s. Um and also the the more nationalistic Richard Nixon side of things was was was that much badly weakened. You had people more conservative after that. You have the Reagan revolution. However, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush were became to be more critical of Israel and saw it as a detriment to the US in certain ways. So >> of Bahrain told me one time that George H.W. Bush was the last US

[28:05] president to give the Arabs a fair shake. Those were his exact words. >> Yeah. >> other president would he would >> James Baker in May of 1989, so a couple months in his presidency, he went to AIPAC and he said, "It is time to put aside once and for all the unrealistic vision of greater Israel." Okay? This is he's getting right to the heart of it. People say, "Oh, pal they always say this and that." But this is actually

[28:36] very serious and he forced Bush forced the Israelis into negotiations with the Palestinians and was going to withhold uh loan guarantees if they didn't do it. And so they did, but they really resented this. And I believe that they affected the defeat of George H.W. Bush. I believe that Ross Perot was likely some sort of asset or was manipulated to do this. I suspected this before and then a couple of a couple of years ago I found that there was a company essentially stealing Kurdish, you know,

[29:06] Iraqi oil and Syrian oil using the Kurds and then taking that oil, shipping that oil through Turkey and then to Israel. And that company was run by Ross Perot Jr. which was such a shock to me, but then I was like, well, it's that's that's about what I thought. But additionally, you under Bush you have this BCCI investigation. And the person behind that was Robert Morgenthau. Okay? And his family is a huge Zionist family. Like his his his father, I believe it's his father, was the person who wanted who was the

[29:36] Treasury Secretary for FDR. And he also was one of the main people behind the Israeli acquisition of the bomb. >> Wow. He's also the man who coined the term >> And Uh and it it on Say that again. >> Yeah, he's also the man who coined the term genocide. It it wasn't a word until one night he was on a British ship in the port of Izmir watching the Turks massacre the Greeks and the Armenians and he came up with the word genocide.

[30:07] The murder of a people. >> Yeah, I I think I I think I vaguely heard that part, but I didn't when I heard that years ago, maybe I read Samantha Power's book or something like that. But I didn't I didn't trace it back to that. So that's that's all that's wild. Um So this family is a very Zionist family and they're going after uh with a pedigree like this and they're going after BCCI and I think it's to expose Bush and to make them afraid that the that there's going to be more exposure of US secrets. There's also people feeding Danny Casolaro

[30:37] information at this time that traces back to to elements. Uh you even the Iran-Contra scandal may [clears throat] have been related to this because it's in the mid-80s, there's this scandal with John Tower and the PROMIS software, Los Alamos. It involves uh, Ghislaine Maxwell's father, Robert Maxwell. >> An Israeli agent. >> They essentially sold Yeah, they they essentially sold, uh, booby-trapped or backdoored PROMIS software to Los Alamos, which would give the Israelis

[31:08] access to US nuclear secrets. And this this I believe was a scandal and it may have really out it it probably outraged the more Amer- pro-American people in the US establishment. And they, uh, and so it around this time Iran-Contra becomes this huge scandal. And it's so strange when you think about it, why was Congress so invested in in in in looking into this? They just don't These are things that go on all the time and for some reason they're just against CIA lawbreaking all of the sudden?

[31:39] And what what do you mean what political interest would have been behind this? And also some of the stories that come out are One of the big ones is Lebanon. Uh, it comes from a Lebanon newspaper and that's pretty that does it's not hard to imagine why that could how that could trace back to Israel. Uh, Peter Peter Dale Scott, who's really the expert on these things, suspects this that it was that Israel was behind that part of it. So, these are scandals. These I think that these scandals of the late '80s, you know, Iran-Contra and the investigations into it and the the BCCI

[32:09] scandal, I think that it's likely that this was really a the the the political warfare. It was like another sort of mini Watergate of leaks and scandals and it was done in order to keep the US in on the side of Israel uh, and the idea of greater and not doing anything that would end the chances for greater Israel. And I think that they're able to defeat George H.W. Bush and under Clinton you have a reversal of those kinds of policies. There's just a number of things that come out in that era that the late Reagan years and George H.W.

[32:42] Bush's presidency. There's like a BBC documentary on Gladio, for example. There's a sexual blackmail ring with Craig Spence in the Franklin scandal that gets exposed at this time and threatens to become a big story. There was even a Discovery Channel documentary made on it that never aired, but still it would have been shocking if it did. And why would a you know, a corporate entity like that do a documentary on these kind of scandals? They just don't go there typically. You even had Oliver Stone's JFK, which I think is a great and important film, but it was financed that when the executive

[33:12] producer was a Israeli agent Arnon Milchan, who was one of the key people responsible or he was one of the key people behind the getting the bomb for Israel as well, you know, along with Morgenthau and other prominent Zionists. So, there's there's a story there that just hasn't been covered in by in detail, but it's like another kind of Watergate. And I think that that the outcome is that George H.W. Bush does not get a second term, even though he won the Cold War by getting the Soviet Union to dissolve and he won the Gulf War against Saddam

[33:43] Hussein. You would expect he would have been by historical comparisons, he should have been a shoe-in for a second term, and yet he wasn't. And you get a reversal on some of these policies like NATO expansion, which Bush was against, and also using jihadi operations all around Central Asia, uh middle in the Middle East and the Balkans. Um these are reversals and I think what happened was the sort of super Zionist neoconservative elements got rid of the more rational imperialism of somebody like George H.W. Bush.

[34:14] >> Is there any way, do you think, to bring the deep state under some sort of a control, or is it such a an important and well-developed state within a state that despite the rhetoric from Donald Trump about reining in the deep state and draining the swamp and expelling the swamp creatures, it's just too late. >> I think that they have to be either defeated decisively militarily and economically, which is on the we're

[34:46] we're on the brink of seeing that, or it has to be so clear that that's going to happen that some rational actors will intervene. I think that disclosures of some of the crimes of the deep state would be very beneficial for US democracy and even for the people who the oligarchs in the US that want to continue to have a functional society over which they're going to have a lot of, you know, power and prestige. I think that the game is kind of up. This way of doing business the US is not able

[35:19] to even compete anymore unless we can kill our competition. Like this is and this is what we've tried to do. It's like we take it as a truism that okay, capitalism is just the best system. Look at all the other systems. But then if you look deeper, you see that well, all these other systems that people have tried to attempt, they had the most powerful countries in the world putting all of the unlimited resources essentially into destroying them. So how do we if it's really the best system, I mean, look at it. It's monument is all around us.

[35:51] And it's it's this is a quite sick society in in serious decline in every measurable way pretty much. And so I think they've lost. They've got they're going to go the way of all empires and then at that point the question is do you want to keep this big surveillance apparatus and have this dysfunctional society when there's not even a global empire anymore? I mean, I I just feel the the rational thing to do, the sensible thing to do is going to be kind of undeniable. It's either going to be

[36:21] nuclear war or you're going to reform. >> Well, let let Let ask you about that, Aaron. My own personal view is that the United States is on the backside of its empire. Um I think that we have overused sanctions as a weapon to the point where we've made sanctions irrelevant. I have a a close friend who goes to Iran regularly and who tells me that the Iranians lack for literally nothing. Everything they want and need, they can get from China, India, or Russia, or

[36:53] they can manufacture themselves. They they want for nothing. With the advent of BRICS and preliminary conversations about a unified BRICS currency, that could spell the end of dollar dominance in the oil industry, for example. So, then what happens to the deep state? I can't imagine a scenario where it just dies quietly as the American empire ends. I can see certainly I can see certainly the the deep state going out with a terrible terrible bang.

[37:26] What's your view of this? What Are Are we at the end of the empire or are we approaching the end of the empire? And if so, what does that mean for the deep state? >> I believe we are approaching the end of the empire and what it means for the deep state is that the deep state needs to be brought into the light. I think that the the democratizing the US and making it transparent is actually in the interest of these people, but will they ever accept it? And that is the big question. Uh I would

[37:56] hope that they that there are some disclosures coming. Maybe things like Tucker Carlson's 9/11 documentary are a good sign that we're going to be headed in that kind of a direction and that they're trying to roll it out in weird ways. I I don't know. It's It's this This is the strangest time to be alive. >> Aaron, um tell us about the making of your book into a uh documentary series. >> We started filming in the spring of 2023 and it was it was difficult for me

[38:28] because my younger sister had just died of an overdose and it was really a difficult time. But we'd rented this place and hired a a cinematographer videographer and so we we set about recording a bunch of interviews where I went over different parts of my my dissertation which became the book American Exception Empire in the Deep State and the person making it um has his his name is Scott Noble and he's made a bunch of films on on YouTube with really low

[38:59] budget that but with but with good results. He made he used stock footage and different narration times kinds of narration and the interviewed people to make these very good documentaries on subjects pertaining to US imperialism like psy war is one of them the power principle is a documentary series. And and we had a little bit of help from some other individuals who would give provide you know technical expertise you know graphical they could do graphics or sound got a lot of people chip in and it tells the story of the US Empire

[39:31] and the US Deep State in a different in a way that's more critical than any other documentary that I know of. I think you could compare it a little bit to Oliver Stone's Untold History of the United States but we go in more specifically into the deep state itself. Now some of the things that I was talking about today especially the how Zionism came to be be the driving force behind neoconservatism that's not covered as much in the film because it's not in the book. It's only something that really came into focus for me after when under the Gaza genocide it made me and conversations

[40:02] that I'd had with Peter Dale Scott where I came to discover that he had left a lot of this information out in his his suspicions about an Israeli role in a lot of these things. So the film but the film is I think the the explanation that I put out about the deep state is the best explanation that I can come up with for the way the US government actually functions. Not as a democracy, but as a lawless regime bent on global dominance and and pursuing it in a lawless way and in

[40:33] a way that's not really explained to the American public. So, I'm hoping that this film is going to be coming where we need to find distribution for it and that's a challenge, but I'm hoping that it strikes a chord with people because we need a bigger and deeper more insightful explanation as to why we got to this point. And that was what I tried to do with my dissertation and that's what the film attempts to do. It attempts to explain the deep state in a serious and scholarly way, not like a sort of tabloid conspiracy mongering

[41:04] sort of way. It attempts to connect it to the history of the US and to capitalism as a system in general and I think capitalism really can't it's never really been totally a lawful thing. It's always had this sort of dark force propelling it at the top, which is just the pursuit of more money and more power. And we built a civilization around the pursuit of money and power and I think that there are better ways to organize society and I think that we're going to have to do that. I hope that the film

[41:35] can help people better understand the system that we have because that is a prerequisite to changing things in any sort of serious way. So, I'm I'm I really excited for people to be able to see the film and I'm hoping that we're able to find a distribution deal for it soon. >> Oh, I hope so, too. Listen, just knowing you, not having seen the film of course, but just knowing you, I know how important this film is going to be. So,
