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[SPEAKER_04]: Welcome to another edition of the Spy Talk podcast, our special guest today is Janet Wrightman, who's got a new book out called The Inheritance and American Tragedy in Five Acts, which is a portrait of America and Americans whose lives have been dramatically changed in the decades since 911 at the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.

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[SPEAKER_04]: and the war on terror.

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[SPEAKER_04]: But first we have few things to bring up.

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[SPEAKER_04]: There's this bizarre incident of excess people trying to get Eisenhower's globe moved in the Pentagon.

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[SPEAKER_03]: This is the perfect metaphor for American national security policy under Donald Trump and

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[SPEAKER_03]: wanted to have, he learned that there was one of two globes that Eisenhower used during World War II to plot World War, our strategy against the Nazis and he wanted it in his office.

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[SPEAKER_03]: So he dispatches his own team.

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[SPEAKER_03]: to retrieve the globe.

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[SPEAKER_03]: And I want to read from this absolutely delicious Washington Post.

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[SPEAKER_03]: Peace about this ordinarily moving historical items within the building is by trained is a, a deliberate process overseen by trained curators.

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[SPEAKER_03]: Instead, hexess,

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[SPEAKER_03]: Texas staff dispatched its own team to relocate andize in our globe they lost control of the artifact and dropped it sending the globe crashing onto its base and impaling the fragile shell near Antarctica according to those familiar with the incident.

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[SPEAKER_03]: the resulting gash appears to be several inches wide.

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[SPEAKER_03]: So, bring everything that comes to the world.

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[SPEAKER_03]: I can't think of anything.

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[SPEAKER_04]: A metaphor.

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[SPEAKER_03]: Simbolizes our what do you think that we're moving.

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[SPEAKER_04]: Moving Eisenhower's globe into his office would make him into George Marshall.

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[SPEAKER_03]: Oh yeah, or I can sell for Eisenhower.

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[SPEAKER_03]: We'd launch D-Day and Manly Man's shall be around war.

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[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.

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[SPEAKER_04]: Great.

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[SPEAKER_04]: Right.

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[SPEAKER_04]: So we wake up this morning to sort of a Moscow on the Pinchomik with Trump's envoy to Moscow, Steve Whitkoff calling Vladimir Putin a great humanitarian for releasing a prisoner, an American prisoner.

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[SPEAKER_04]: And this comes as, you know,

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[SPEAKER_04]: Western European governments are all reporting massive sabotage attacks.

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[SPEAKER_04]: Hydro hybrid warfare campaigns against them.

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[SPEAKER_04]: Russia stepped up its missile and drone attacks on Ukraine.

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[SPEAKER_04]: And here we have Trump's guy calling Putin.

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[SPEAKER_04]: a great humanitarian, but I'm really confused by what's going on with our intelligence sharing.

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[SPEAKER_04]: This seems to me a lot of thinker pointing going on between Elon Musk and the White House over who was responsible for turning off the star-link system which allows Ukraine to better defend itself against incoming Russian missiles.

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[SPEAKER_04]: What's the state of play there?

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[SPEAKER_04]: I can't figure it out.

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[SPEAKER_03]: I don't think anybody can.

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[SPEAKER_01]: Just figure out if they made a, I mean, my guess is that Trump and Musk talk to each other, and they wanted to make it look like there was confusion.

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[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I don't, it feels to me that that's make sense.

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[SPEAKER_01]: Why should anybody take responsibility for it?

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[SPEAKER_01]: Why should the president take responsibility if he hasn't?

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[SPEAKER_01]: That doesn't mean he wasn't responsible.

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[SPEAKER_03]: Look, I mean, two quick points here, you know, the idea, I mean, Rubio has been quite forceful saying, we didn't order the star shield.

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[SPEAKER_03]: to be turned off and can take him out as word, but the idea to believe that Musk would have done this on his own without consulting with good or Trump or somebody else, you know, is a bit far-fetched, but either way, the idea that a private individual,

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[SPEAKER_03]: who is not in the government, who has not been elected to any position, who has not been appointed to any position at this moment, can use his own private company to disrupt American national security policy as a bit bonkers on its

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[SPEAKER_01]: Right.

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[SPEAKER_01]: And it really raises the question when we get to the point as a country of how do we put in guardrails that will, you know, prevent this kind of thing from happening in the future, what kind of guardrails are going to be put in about who's allowed to do what within the government if they are not a confirmed official or an elected official or something of that ill.

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[SPEAKER_04]: all this in a word is distressing, if not disgusting, but the Russians aren't the only threat, at least we see to the United States and to Europe.

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[SPEAKER_04]: We've got the Iranians on the move.

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[SPEAKER_04]: Mike talk about the rest and UK of a few more people implicated and applaud against RAF bases.

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[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, this is the plot against the U.S. air base that caused us several weeks ago, who's caused the U.S. government to scramble and bring back B1 bombers from Britain to the United States.

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[SPEAKER_03]: Originally, the Brits had arrested six people, then they had to release them on bail, but said the investigation was ongoing.

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[SPEAKER_03]: Now, they've re-arrested two more.

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[SPEAKER_03]: And for the first time,

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[SPEAKER_03]: for a foreign intelligence service.

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[SPEAKER_03]: So that pretty much points the finger at the Iranians.

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[SPEAKER_03]: We know

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[SPEAKER_03]: That's who they're referring to.

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[SPEAKER_03]: And the MI5 head is said that they're what 50 attacks have been 50 arrests of Iranians or operatives or suspected Iranian operatives over the last year, which is a pretty high amount.

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[SPEAKER_04]: Are we going to see some trials of these people?

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[SPEAKER_03]: Well, the British system takes a while.

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[SPEAKER_04]: Well, I also would just want to mention that New York Times Charlie Savage wrote a fascinating story about the release of more CIA files on torture.

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[SPEAKER_04]: One of the things that it seems to be implied by this story is that the special prosecutor I'm not sure exactly what his title is.

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[SPEAKER_04]: Special counsel.

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[SPEAKER_03]: It was John Durham.

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[SPEAKER_03]: This was his first iteration as a special counsel under the Obama administration appointed by Eric Holder, not to be confused with his later iteration as special counsel looking into.

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[SPEAKER_03]: the 2016 election and what the Democrats did.

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[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, the story didn't say, but I inferred from it that Durham sort of got in the way of the Senate's own investigation of the torture practices, they wanted to interview people at the CIA, and they were blocked from doing so because of Durham's parallel investigation going on,

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[SPEAKER_04]: going to be protected.

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[SPEAKER_03]: So that's, but that's pretty standard operating procedure for these matters.

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[SPEAKER_03]: The Justice Department always takes primacy and insists that, you know, it has to interview these people first.

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[SPEAKER_03]: The only time it didn't

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[SPEAKER_03]: was January 6 when Congress drove the process and caused them to scramble and catch up.

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[SPEAKER_01]: But traditionally, yeah, but there's also the deeper thing here, which is that there's been across government, a kind of not wanting to deal with the torture issue, not wanting to get to the bottom of it, not wanting to release the names, the places, the dates, and who was responsible.

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[SPEAKER_01]: There's just been an overall across government sense that

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[SPEAKER_01]: we don't want to look into this too far and and the fact that they're releasing new documents even those documents look how heavily they've been reported Charlie Savage said how heavily we decked they were right and whole sections even so so we'll see what this there's going to be more how many currently let's remember the Senate Intelligence Committee report was written by Daniel Jones was pretty detailed hundreds of pages internal CIA

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[SPEAKER_01]: We learned a hell of a lot from that report, but we also learned that there are things that we, and you can talk to Dan Jones about this, but there are things that that still need to be found that doesn't mean we don't have a tremendous of detail, but there's still stuff coming out apparently.

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[SPEAKER_04]: Before we move along to a general rightman, I just want to mention I just saw a report this morning that the Iranians say, if the United States and Israel Jew, in fact, carry out another attack on them after the elections has been reported today, that they're going to attack undersea cables in the Persian Gulf.

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[SPEAKER_04]: I don't know if they really have the capability to do that, conduct such a sophisticated underwater operations, I mean the Russians can certainly do it.

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[SPEAKER_04]: They have the equipment to

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[SPEAKER_04]: go deep and just connect cables as a big threat as doing the Chinese.

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[SPEAKER_04]: I understand.

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[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, it does appear that something is looming on the Iran-Midies front.

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[SPEAKER_03]: Lots of reports of the U.S. and Israelis, both

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[SPEAKER_03]: ramping up forces, training exercises, the Israelis just did a power or exercise with aircraft on the Iranian border the other day, so, you know, either it's before the elections and remember there's two elections, the Israeli elections October 27th and our elections, remember

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[SPEAKER_04]: votes or immediately after does seem to be in carts here and you know where that goes we shall see lots of storms on their rise and let's move along to Janet Wrightman our guest today she's in award winning investigative journalist contributing writer for the New York Times Sunday magazine author of the 2011 book Inside Scientology the story of America's most secretive religion she's known for in-depth often high stakes investigations

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[SPEAKER_04]: New York Times work as covered subjects such as U.S. military suicide crises, far-right extremism, FBI counterterrorism failures, and the death of a Muslim Marine recruiter.

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[SPEAKER_04]: Of course, she's wanted multiple awards for her reporting.

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[SPEAKER_04]: So without further delay, let's bring Janet aboard.

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[SPEAKER_04]: Janet Reivin, welcome to Spy Talk.

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[SPEAKER_04]: Your new book, The Inheritance, is a portrait of how the United States has changed, especially since the 9-11 terrorist attacks is told through your gripping profiles of individual Americans.

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[SPEAKER_04]: It's not an altogether pretty and sometimes heartbreaking picture.

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[SPEAKER_04]: Let's start where you start with one of those individuals.

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[SPEAKER_04]: Wally one chuck, a middle class kid from Lynn, Massachusetts, handsome young man, a high school athlete with a bright future, then came multiple crises, night eleven, the invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq, war on terror, what happened to him and his family?

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[SPEAKER_00]: So Walter Owen's check was everything you just said.

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[SPEAKER_00]: He was a classic sort of ever middle class suburban white guy who kind of embodied this mentality that a lot of people had at sort of the late.

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[SPEAKER_00]: 90s that the United States was basically the best country on earth, even if it was screwed up in all kinds of ways.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Wally is kind of an older gen Xer as M.I.

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[SPEAKER_00]: and, and he and I talked a lot of that sort of this mentality that for as many mistakes as our country made, like we weren't

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[SPEAKER_00]: You know, it's flawed, but it's shameless that we were a blameless nation, right?

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[SPEAKER_00]: But the idea was that for his bad as things were, and I think even Clinton may have said this at one point in the 90s.

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[SPEAKER_00]: You know, everything that's bad about America could be made up for which is good about America.

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[SPEAKER_00]: And, and.

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[SPEAKER_00]: It is astonishing to think, like when I bring this up to young people today, they can't envision this mentality.

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[SPEAKER_00]: But this is the way people thought that it was, you know, that we were, we were a nation that stood for something good and righteous.

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[SPEAKER_00]: And, and Walter had joined the U.S. military as a Navy pilot.

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[SPEAKER_00]: um to have a great time because you know because we were not at war and we were the we won the cold wars are to speak we know he went off to just you know spend eight or nine years flying helicopters in a peacetime military and you didn't have a great time.

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[SPEAKER_00]: But his life was defined by these certain kinds of values.

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[SPEAKER_00]: And in the aftermath of September 11, he goes looking for what he can do with his security clearance.

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[SPEAKER_00]: How can he sort of capitalize on he had been working in tech for a little while and then the bottom fell out after

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[SPEAKER_00]: you know sort of text stocks crashed around 2000 late 90s and early 2000s.

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[SPEAKER_00]: So he finds his way into military contracting and he becomes a he actually works for an outfit called MITR which is they do it's a government funded R&D outfit and they basically contract with

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[SPEAKER_00]: the large contractors like Raytheon or Bowing or whoever Lockheed Martin to look over the technology that they're developing.

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[SPEAKER_00]: So he basically, it's sort of we kind of managed the designs for some of the technology that built the national security state.

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[SPEAKER_00]: So we have like,

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[SPEAKER_04]: You know, we're talking ground zero of the middle theory industrial intelligence complex.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Indeed.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Indeed.

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[SPEAKER_00]: So what happens to him for the drone?

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[SPEAKER_00]: He oversaw programs for TSA screening, for, you know, other kinds of invasive technologies that, you know, that that were used starting in the early 2000s and sort of ballooned and ballooned and ballooned and he was involved in that for about 15 years.

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[SPEAKER_04]: Everything was going great.

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[SPEAKER_00]: And everything was going great.

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[SPEAKER_00]: They were making a lot of money.

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[SPEAKER_00]: And they were representational of a certain type of person that did very well in this era, living a very nice middle-class life and raising their kids.

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[SPEAKER_00]: But the kids are one of their kids who idolizes his father, who is by the way going off and doing a lot of trips to Afghanistan as part of his job.

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[SPEAKER_00]: He's helping to

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[SPEAKER_00]: helping to install communications equipment and stuff like that.

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[SPEAKER_00]: So he's constantly on the run and constantly sort of on the go to all these places in the world that are both dangerous but who is children kind of exciting and actually to Walter, they're kind of exciting to.

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[SPEAKER_00]: And his son, Andrew,

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[SPEAKER_00]: sort of hero worships him, but he also has this desire to be even cooler and more macho than the US military.

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[SPEAKER_00]: He has this view of the military that it's an interesting view that this is by this point sort of in the late 2000s or late 2010s when the US has is pulling out of a rack and when it's kind of clear that these wars that we've got ourselves involved in have not been great successes.

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[SPEAKER_00]: And so he thinks that the US military is weak.

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[SPEAKER_00]: and he wants to be strong.

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[SPEAKER_00]: And he's very interested in guns, he's very interested in sort of a militant outlook, and he finds his way online to people who share his outlook, and he becomes part of a far right, you know, Nazi group called the Adam Waffen Division.

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[SPEAKER_00]: And his involvement will lead to his death, actually.

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[SPEAKER_00]: It's a terrible situation.

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[SPEAKER_00]: He's murdered and it's actually how I got into this book was writing about this crime of this kid that he and his friend were both members of this group and another kid in the group killed them.

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[SPEAKER_00]: And so all of this is kind of a blowback.

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[SPEAKER_00]: In a way, it's a sort of blowback.

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[SPEAKER_00]: This is like the personal blowback of the war and terror is how I could frame it.

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[SPEAKER_00]: There's a lot of blowback that this book deals with.

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[SPEAKER_04]: It's quite a journey.

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[SPEAKER_00]: It's a, it is the frame of the book in a lot of ways.

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[SPEAKER_04]: It's, it's quite a journey from, yeah, you know, from these middle class, you know, striving

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[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, how do you how do you do that I mean that he must have had some real was he having problems adapting to American life is that we're drove them over the edge.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Well, Andrew this time was a, um, yes, he was not, he never, he was an unhappy boy from the get go.

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[SPEAKER_00]: He was a kid who had a hard time adjusting to social life.

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[SPEAKER_00]: He was he never had very many friends.

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[SPEAKER_00]: It was very cute is a very good athlete in terms of like being able to sort of physically do things like he'd like to climb.

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[SPEAKER_00]: He loved to ski.

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[SPEAKER_00]: He was bad.

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[SPEAKER_00]: He didn't like team sports.

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[SPEAKER_00]: He didn't he was not good at any kind of team endeavor.

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[SPEAKER_04]: So he found a, he found friends and company online.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things to understand about any online, any, any, any extremist.

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[SPEAKER_00]: group, particularly the ones that met online.

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[SPEAKER_00]: A lot of the, and this is not just going the far right.

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[SPEAKER_00]: It's also on the far left, it's also in within the Muslim extremist sort of network.

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[SPEAKER_00]: These were the, the Americans that get drawn to this stuff are generally the young kids that are extremely isolated on some level, socially or some other way.

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[SPEAKER_00]: and who are very bright and very idealistic.

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[SPEAKER_00]: And they do not feel at home in the sort of main streamworld in which they live.

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[SPEAKER_00]: They're boarded school, they can't fit in with their friends at school, and they are looking for something that's more, both more exciting,

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[SPEAKER_00]: But, but it's sort of almost a utopian, um, they're looking for a utopian reality, you know, they, they want to live in, if they want to create a better world, they want to live in a better world, and these groups pitch that to them.

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[SPEAKER_00]: They don't pitch hatred to them.

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[SPEAKER_00]: They pitch community, friendship, they pitch your world as terrible right now, but our world is going to be better.

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[SPEAKER_00]: And all the, anything that we might associate with hatred or racism or anti-Semitism or, you know, or anything like violence, that's a byproduct to this central message, which is friendship, community, something positive.

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[SPEAKER_03]: So, just to follow up on this, I mean, it seems to me that this guy joins a neo-Nazi Waffen SS group, like hate is kind of core to their whole purpose for being.

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[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, how do you hide that or play that down when you're that far out there on the extreme, right?

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[SPEAKER_00]: So I don't think they play, they don't play that down.

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[SPEAKER_00]: It's getting into the far right, just like getting into ISIS, right, is a process.

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[SPEAKER_00]: And it starts with,

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[SPEAKER_00]: on both sides.

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[SPEAKER_00]: I write in the book is a series of sort of braided narratives of different people who go through this era and whose family is also goes through this era because it covers about 30 years of our history and so it really sort of traces

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[SPEAKER_00]: the long, long tale of September 11 and the reaction to September 11 by the US and how that will play out in the lives of people and sort of the emotional toll the psychological toll it took on this country.

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[SPEAKER_00]: And one of the ways that that it did that was in

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[SPEAKER_00]: creating a narrative that young people picked up on, that's something was emissing our country, that something was broken in our country, and that they wanted to figure out a way to fix that.

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[SPEAKER_00]: And there were particularly a sort of Islamic extremist and barraic groups that capitalized on that idea.

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[SPEAKER_00]: and we're able to attract these idealistic kids around the idea of, well, something is wrong with the country or something is wrong in your lives or in your schools or in your homes, and we're going to give you our community.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Once you get into that, it's very much like cult indoctrination, which I know about because we're supposed to read about that, but it's very much the way that any kind of cult frankly works is they find something that

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[SPEAKER_00]: and they attract you with something that's not all that controversial and make you feel very comfortable with that.

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[SPEAKER_00]: And once you do, they can kind of feed you the next step and the next step and the next step.

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[SPEAKER_00]: So when Andrew O'Neill's joke gets to Adam Waffen, he has been marinating in, and this is true for lots of kids on the far right.

22:24.542 --> 22:26.385
[SPEAKER_00]: He has been marinating in four chairs.

22:26.745 --> 22:32.954
[SPEAKER_00]: He has been marinating in other like far-right chat rooms and websites.

22:33.395 --> 22:39.924
[SPEAKER_00]: He has found his way to airsoft forms, airsoft is like a toy.

22:40.384 --> 23:03.974
[SPEAKER_00]: Rifles, they look just like AR-15's and they play games that are work games with these toy guns He finds his way into airsoft right up forums online He has involved in certain kinds of video game groups chat groups that are very far-right oriented and He ultimately finds his way to a site called Ironmarch which no longer exists

23:04.734 --> 23:12.640
[SPEAKER_00]: But it was the most extreme sort of fact, frankly, fascist website on the internet.

23:12.900 --> 23:13.701
[SPEAKER_00]: And it was global.

23:14.041 --> 23:18.864
[SPEAKER_00]: It attracted people from all over the world that were involved with these different fascist and neo-fascist organizations.

23:19.585 --> 23:23.568
[SPEAKER_00]: And they ranged an age from teenagers to people in their 50s or older probably.

23:24.148 --> 23:25.449
[SPEAKER_00]: And he gets involved in that.

23:25.509 --> 23:27.691
[SPEAKER_00]: And that is where the Adam Waffen Division began.

23:27.771 --> 23:29.312
[SPEAKER_00]: It was born on that website.

23:34.256 --> 23:38.999
[SPEAKER_00]: very deeply ideologically by the time he joins at Waffen, but it's not how he began.

23:39.239 --> 23:52.289
[SPEAKER_00]: He began as just an unhappy boy who was looking for friends and couldn't find them at home and found his ideology or his, you know, his mentality was a little bit more conservative say than than some people.

23:52.769 --> 23:57.793
[SPEAKER_00]: He was a typical suburban white kid that spent a lot of time online

24:03.037 --> 24:05.978
[SPEAKER_00]: This is very important, right, that the Manus fear that we call it, right?

24:06.078 --> 24:17.261
[SPEAKER_00]: That is the narrative of the Manus fear is white men are being oppressed by schools, by the government, by women, by whoever it is you want to say.

24:17.381 --> 24:23.743
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's something that seeps into the teenage brain, I think, when you're 15 and you're having problems anyway in life.

24:24.263 --> 24:27.006
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, but not everybody who you deal with in your book is white.

24:27.467 --> 24:28.107
[SPEAKER_01]: No, Terry.

24:28.127 --> 24:29.169
[SPEAKER_01]: No, Terry.

24:29.469 --> 24:30.150
[SPEAKER_01]: No.

24:30.650 --> 24:36.797
[SPEAKER_01]: And also, I think you started this book as a project that was looking at white supremacists.

24:36.817 --> 24:36.957
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

24:37.057 --> 24:39.060
[SPEAKER_01]: I think we're thinking of that kind of extremism.

24:39.460 --> 24:40.942
[SPEAKER_01]: And the book is actually broader than that.

24:41.642 --> 24:55.874
[SPEAKER_01]: As you've mentioned, you know, whether it's, you know, ISIS, you know, sympathizers, whether it's left wing individuals, so I'm curious how that journey happened for you, like you thought you were writing about one thing and then all of a sudden you're in a much bigger universe.

24:56.474 --> 24:57.394
[SPEAKER_01]: talk about that a little bit.

24:57.794 --> 25:00.055
[SPEAKER_00]: So I did start the book that way.

25:00.115 --> 25:05.756
[SPEAKER_00]: I started actually started the book because I was reporting on Andrew and his family and Andrew's Andrew's death.

25:05.956 --> 25:08.377
[SPEAKER_00]: And I had been sitting in the living room with his family.

25:09.777 --> 25:11.818
[SPEAKER_00]: It was about three or four months after his death.

25:11.938 --> 25:18.239
[SPEAKER_00]: And they were they were searching for an answer to how this had happened.

25:18.699 --> 25:22.240
[SPEAKER_00]: But I also had this very specific kind of sense that they

25:26.501 --> 25:35.008
[SPEAKER_00]: you know, how is it that my kid, how is it that we a family who listens to MPR have a kid who's who's hanging up a neo-nazzi flag in his bedroom?

25:37.170 --> 25:40.453
[SPEAKER_00]: And what does it mean that we're not able to understand this?

25:40.553 --> 25:41.594
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, what's happened?

25:41.834 --> 25:51.663
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think at that point, this was through the latter part of 2017, after Charlottesville, the first year of Trump's number one presidency.

25:52.264 --> 25:54.926
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think a lot of us were asking that same question.

25:55.587 --> 25:59.330
[SPEAKER_00]: And I wanted to understand it myself.

25:59.370 --> 26:01.412
[SPEAKER_00]: I was like, there's something happening.

26:02.273 --> 26:07.362
[SPEAKER_00]: in our country that's making everybody feel very at a loss sort of a drift, right?

26:08.103 --> 26:10.147
[SPEAKER_00]: And and what is that?

26:10.247 --> 26:11.429
[SPEAKER_00]: And where's that coming from?

26:11.609 --> 26:13.833
[SPEAKER_00]: And as a reporter who'd covered

26:16.199 --> 26:25.345
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, just sort of 20 years of the aftermath of the war and of the war, you know, of 9-11 in our covered war and terror and sort of the aftermath of that.

26:25.806 --> 26:34.732
[SPEAKER_00]: I understood that something had broken in our society in the very early years after, after September 11, and that

26:37.943 --> 26:41.944
[SPEAKER_00]: everything I had been reporting on since then was kind of part of the peace.

26:42.605 --> 26:53.629
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I thought that the way to tell this larger story would be to, and as I understood, from interviewing some people who are experts in the field, that white supremacy is not something new.

26:53.689 --> 26:55.249
[SPEAKER_00]: It's been there for a very long time.

26:55.269 --> 26:56.770
[SPEAKER_00]: It's best yours under the surface.

26:57.230 --> 27:01.731
[SPEAKER_00]: And there are these moments of, it's like an opportunistic infection, right?

27:02.172 --> 27:05.873
[SPEAKER_00]: If during a moment of weakness, it will emerge.

27:06.907 --> 27:09.628
[SPEAKER_00]: And something had weakened our country.

27:09.668 --> 27:14.050
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that it weakened our sort of moral and social fabric in the aftermath of 911.

27:14.550 --> 27:17.331
[SPEAKER_00]: And all kinds of extremism had emerged.

27:17.512 --> 27:29.897
[SPEAKER_00]: Not just white supremacy, but you had Islamic extremism, not just amongst Al-Qaeda, but among many, many groups, many, many domestic.

27:31.577 --> 27:36.299
[SPEAKER_00]: American kids who were falling into the stuff and getting involved in the stuff.

27:36.319 --> 27:42.961
[SPEAKER_00]: So there was a lot of opportunities to brave, like some brave stories together, and that's what I could.

27:43.421 --> 27:46.702
[SPEAKER_04]: We have a lot of more questions, but we have to step away for just a minute, Jay.

27:50.384 --> 27:51.384
[SPEAKER_04]: Okay, we're back.

27:52.170 --> 27:57.874
[SPEAKER_01]: So one of the things one of the threads in the book is a sort of anti-government strain on the part of the individuals.

27:58.014 --> 28:07.100
[SPEAKER_01]: And yet when the government has to deal with these individuals in the justice system, they also sort of lose their way in some ways.

28:07.260 --> 28:17.386
[SPEAKER_01]: And when you're reading about the case themselves and how they get through the courts, it is somewhat astonishing in terms of the process in terms of the penalties, et cetera.

28:17.807 --> 28:19.508
[SPEAKER_01]: And since your book you've written about this,

28:19.828 --> 28:28.018
[SPEAKER_01]: And I just wondered if you could talk about it a little because also it's about, you know, antifa as opposed to the white supremacist that we've been talking about.

28:28.639 --> 28:28.859
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.

28:28.879 --> 28:38.651
[SPEAKER_00]: So the case you're talking about is the Prairie Land Case, which is the recent prosecution of a group of anti ice protesters in Dallas as antifa.

28:39.514 --> 28:53.701
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, so the thing about the prairie land cases, this was a material support for terrorism case, and was the first material support for terrorism case against, um, domestic protesters of either no matter what their ideology is, um, in, in, in U.S. history.

28:55.964 --> 29:17.188
[SPEAKER_00]: This is like, and I'm sure you all know this from your own experiences, but this is this has been to some degree like the fever dream of certain parts of our, of our, you know, of I think of the FBI, certain people within the DOJ, I mean not certainly not everyone there's plenty and plenty of people that.

29:17.608 --> 29:22.611
[SPEAKER_00]: have never ever wanted to go after activists that think that's actually like the bright line that you do not cross.

29:23.752 --> 29:35.919
[SPEAKER_00]: There's important point that because I've interviewed a lot of these people that have made this point to me over the years, but there have always been people within the system who have seen

29:37.280 --> 29:45.427
[SPEAKER_00]: left-wing activists as enemies of America, and this was the greatest fear of one of the characters I write about in the book.

29:45.447 --> 29:46.668
[SPEAKER_00]: This name is Terry Albery.

29:46.708 --> 30:00.939
[SPEAKER_00]: He was a former FBI who was in FBI Counterterrorism agent for about 15 years, and he wound up leaking a lot of documents, ultimately about FBI surveillance and this sort of FBI Counterterrorism powers

30:07.052 --> 30:09.134
[SPEAKER_00]: of the direction that things were going.

30:09.555 --> 30:15.261
[SPEAKER_00]: And so what happened is over this sort of 20 something years since 9'11.

30:16.062 --> 30:18.925
[SPEAKER_00]: FBI powers expanded and expanded.

30:19.606 --> 30:21.548
[SPEAKER_00]: Their surveillance powers expanded and expanded.

30:21.588 --> 30:25.832
[SPEAKER_00]: The ability to open investigations on people based on just a feeling,

30:26.828 --> 30:33.400
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, it became extremely easy on the grounds that this was preventive counterterrorism.

30:33.480 --> 30:33.961
[SPEAKER_00]: Exactly.

30:34.021 --> 30:40.652
[SPEAKER_00]: It was all, yeah, FBI itself became a preventive agency and intelligence, sort of more focused in intelligence agency.

30:41.622 --> 30:56.171
[SPEAKER_00]: And but you still couldn't investigate, you could investigate the left, but you couldn't make a case against the left on for terrorism unless you figured out a way to go after them for specific actions.

31:07.920 --> 31:13.143
[SPEAKER_00]: on material support for terrorism charges is something could only do if it's an international organization.

31:13.964 --> 31:28.333
[SPEAKER_00]: So if you want to go after left-room protesters, they have to have committed an actual crime, and that would qualify as a terrorist act, which is subjective anyways.

31:28.813 --> 31:36.638
[SPEAKER_00]: You can damage a, you can vandalize a government building and that's just vandalism or if the government chooses, they can say that that is an act of terror.

31:37.622 --> 31:45.386
[SPEAKER_00]: And in the Prairie Land case, one of the activists brought a gun and shot at a police officer and injured the police officer.

31:45.786 --> 31:48.567
[SPEAKER_00]: And that is what started this whole case.

31:48.667 --> 31:59.592
[SPEAKER_00]: Because now you had a cop who was injured and then during the investigation, they found out that these people had anti-government and anti-corp anti-Trump anti-ice views.

32:00.452 --> 32:09.097
[SPEAKER_00]: And they had set off some fireworks that were very hot and the government could interpret that as explosives.

32:09.837 --> 32:16.201
[SPEAKER_00]: And it became a big, first of all, it became a conspiracy case, like a regular criminal conspiracy case.

32:16.961 --> 32:34.607
[SPEAKER_00]: And after the death of Charlie Kirk, when Trump signed the executive order designating in Tifa as a terrorist group and sort of directing federal law enforcement to go after left-wing groups and left-wing nonprofits, and you know, left-of-center nonprofits.

32:36.999 --> 32:44.042
[SPEAKER_00]: This became an opportunity to make an actual material sporter case based on these acts against activists.

32:44.102 --> 32:45.922
[SPEAKER_00]: And it succeeded.

32:47.443 --> 32:48.223
[SPEAKER_00]: It didn't surprise me.

32:48.283 --> 32:49.804
[SPEAKER_00]: I spent three weeks at the trial.

32:49.824 --> 32:51.465
[SPEAKER_00]: It did not surprise me that it succeeded.

32:52.145 --> 32:56.267
[SPEAKER_00]: But the length of these sentences was done to send a message.

32:56.287 --> 32:57.927
[SPEAKER_00]: And these are huge sentences.

32:57.968 --> 33:00.749
[SPEAKER_00]: There are anywhere from 30 years to 100 years.

33:01.189 --> 33:02.109
[SPEAKER_00]: Most of these people got 50 years.

33:04.182 --> 33:20.656
[SPEAKER_03]: So, Janet, we've spent a lot of time on this podcast talking about the overreach on during the Trump administration on Antifa designated against some sort of terrorist organization where it doesn't really exist as an organization itself.

33:22.418 --> 33:29.083
[SPEAKER_03]: And certainly the Prairie Land, the Prairie Land sentences seem excessive, you know,

33:31.085 --> 33:41.175
[SPEAKER_03]: But that said, reading your account, I have to say, I had a somewhat different view because these people weren't activists.

33:41.615 --> 33:43.217
[SPEAKER_03]: They were hardcore.

33:44.771 --> 34:12.360
[SPEAKER_03]: uh... pro radicals dedicated to a vandalism and you know the ringleader takes a assault rifle to a political protest designed to free people from a detention center in immigration and shoots a cop that's a pretty serious crime right there and then he flees the scene then they do investigations into the twenty so people who were there and they find a cash of military style gear

34:12.960 --> 34:18.506
[SPEAKER_03]: ballistic plates, helmets, high-capacity magazines, steel ammunition, cans, and fifty firearms.

34:19.066 --> 34:23.911
[SPEAKER_03]: This, this is, and the U.S. attorney quite rightly said, make no mistake.

34:23.971 --> 34:25.813
[SPEAKER_03]: This was not a peaceful protest.

34:26.533 --> 34:30.217
[SPEAKER_03]: So, I'm just, you know, I'm a little bit torn at this point.

34:30.357 --> 34:41.505
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, maybe they don't qualify as a, I'll kind of like terrorist organization, but these people are hardcore criminals and deserve to have the book thrown at them.

34:41.605 --> 34:45.928
[SPEAKER_03]: How do you differentiate them from say the proud boys.

34:46.593 --> 34:48.233
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh my god, no, no, no, no, no.

34:48.453 --> 34:53.354
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, one person in this group had a criminal real criminal record and was very problematic.

34:53.775 --> 34:54.515
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

34:54.775 --> 34:59.496
[SPEAKER_00]: Another person in this group that nobody knew was the vandalized list of the vandal.

34:59.596 --> 35:11.458
[SPEAKER_00]: He was the kid who showed up with spray paint in his backpack and took off on his own and began to spray paint in an ice guard shack.

35:11.478 --> 35:15.339
[SPEAKER_00]: So my severe calls and he was responsible for that vandalism.

35:16.145 --> 35:18.807
[SPEAKER_00]: The rest of them were activists.

35:19.067 --> 35:19.908
[SPEAKER_00]: They were activists.

35:20.028 --> 35:21.129
[SPEAKER_00]: They had no criminal records.

35:21.149 --> 35:25.672
[SPEAKER_03]: Excuse me, if you bring, if you bring guns to a political party.

35:25.712 --> 35:26.873
[SPEAKER_00]: No, no, no, no, no.

35:26.933 --> 35:28.294
[SPEAKER_00]: But what are you doing?

35:28.574 --> 35:29.375
[SPEAKER_03]: What's the purpose?

35:29.395 --> 35:30.596
[SPEAKER_00]: It's Texas, right?

35:30.796 --> 35:33.418
[SPEAKER_00]: Texas, people bring guns everywhere in Texas.

35:33.558 --> 35:34.298
[SPEAKER_00]: It's very common.

35:34.378 --> 35:44.606
[SPEAKER_03]: And the proud boys brought guns to Northern Virginia and the prosecutors aggressively push that point saying these people are not peaceful protests.

35:46.147 --> 35:53.176
[SPEAKER_00]: But in, I mean, we in the on the East Coast or the West Coast can make this argument.

35:53.276 --> 35:54.137
[SPEAKER_00]: We think it's crazy.

35:55.078 --> 35:57.921
[SPEAKER_00]: And it is not crazy there.

35:58.602 --> 36:04.750
[SPEAKER_00]: And right wing protesters, the the left began the armed left of which these people were part of.

36:05.973 --> 36:18.324
[SPEAKER_00]: organized largely in response to the armed or highly threatening right who would show up to events, particularly to LGBTQ events and harass people.

36:19.383 --> 36:24.025
[SPEAKER_00]: The police in Texas did nothing.

36:24.145 --> 36:28.806
[SPEAKER_00]: I've covered the far-right in Texas as well for a long time, and I know how this works.

36:28.826 --> 36:33.248
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, law enforcement in these places are not really friends of anyone on the left.

36:33.368 --> 36:38.190
[SPEAKER_00]: They're very friendly with people on the right, or they don't actually interfere in their free speech.

36:38.590 --> 36:40.551
[SPEAKER_00]: So if you are, you like to wish back.

36:40.591 --> 36:46.793
[SPEAKER_00]: You are a proud boy, and you want to harass some trans person, as long as you don't touch them, that's your right.

36:47.689 --> 36:51.610
[SPEAKER_00]: That's your right, according to, that's your civil liberties, right?

36:52.470 --> 36:58.192
[SPEAKER_00]: But those people feel extremely threatened, and they're harassed a lot.

36:58.872 --> 37:02.053
[SPEAKER_00]: So they are legally able to bear arms.

37:02.393 --> 37:02.773
[SPEAKER_00]: They do.

37:02.813 --> 37:04.074
[SPEAKER_00]: They don't fire the guns.

37:04.094 --> 37:05.534
[SPEAKER_00]: They never fired guns.

37:06.194 --> 37:08.035
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, well, you're the ringleader, did.

37:08.515 --> 37:09.215
[SPEAKER_03]: I shot a call.

37:09.355 --> 37:13.217
[SPEAKER_00]: But at this particular one of the first time, this was the first time.

37:13.237 --> 37:13.858
[SPEAKER_03]: Okay.

37:13.958 --> 37:15.338
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, but it was, it was the first time.

37:15.358 --> 37:16.319
[SPEAKER_00]: Pretty serious, correct.

37:16.339 --> 37:19.560
[SPEAKER_00]: For fact, let's just saying, if you can, right, it was, I'm not, I don't disagree.

37:20.080 --> 37:26.523
[SPEAKER_00]: But I think it's, you know, you cannot extrapolate and what the story definitely did not group them all into one.

37:26.964 --> 37:32.806
[SPEAKER_00]: This story pointed to this one guy as leading these other people down a very dark path.

37:33.267 --> 37:35.888
[SPEAKER_00]: And the question is, how did they get led down the dark path?

37:36.768 --> 37:41.149
[SPEAKER_00]: And what responsibility does this kid hold?

37:41.409 --> 37:45.030
[SPEAKER_00]: And I believe he holds a tremendous of responsibility for doing that to his friends.

37:45.050 --> 37:46.711
[SPEAKER_00]: I think he duped a lot of his friends.

37:47.411 --> 37:49.872
[SPEAKER_00]: And some of his friends were just naive.

37:50.432 --> 38:00.815
[SPEAKER_00]: But I don't think that the level of violence or violent intent or criminal intent or even hardcore radicalism if you want to call it that.

38:02.130 --> 38:05.615
[SPEAKER_00]: is not, you know, it's not a universal thing.

38:05.635 --> 38:07.718
[SPEAKER_00]: What was the purpose of the protection?

38:07.758 --> 38:09.360
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, what was the purpose of the protest?

38:09.560 --> 38:17.411
[SPEAKER_00]: They were from, for 99% of them, the purpose of the protest was to go and set off fireworks.

38:18.513 --> 38:20.715
[SPEAKER_00]: As a way, noise protests, it was a noise protest.

38:20.755 --> 38:31.727
[SPEAKER_00]: Noise protests are very common these days and it's a way to both show the people inside these eye facilities that you stand with them, that they're not alone, that people care about them on the outside.

38:32.167 --> 38:36.852
[SPEAKER_00]: And also it's a way to completely irritate and just rupt the operations of ice.

38:37.453 --> 38:59.126
[SPEAKER_01]: So the link between the book and this article just to kind of set the same here is that the use of the material support statute or the idea of material support, right, is that you can broaden this idea of what terrorism and whose responsible for it and that is also part of the prevention, you know, strategy.

38:59.586 --> 39:08.289
[SPEAKER_01]: And so the question is, you know, a lot of civil liberties people were saying during the early years of the war on terror, be careful how you do this because this is going to expand to other groups.

39:08.309 --> 39:11.011
[SPEAKER_01]: This is going to expand in ways that we can't control it.

39:11.311 --> 39:14.412
[SPEAKER_01]: Is that how you see what happened in this particular case?

39:15.052 --> 39:15.572
[SPEAKER_00]: 100%.

39:15.912 --> 39:16.433
[SPEAKER_00]: 100%.

39:16.473 --> 39:19.454
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that when you look back at the war on terror, you see

39:21.210 --> 39:37.897
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, a project that was started to go after people who might call this country harm to stop a future attack on this country and the number of people that might have been in some way through very, very, you know,

39:39.638 --> 39:50.485
[SPEAKER_00]: Friends of Friends of Friends are friends kind of way connected to someone out there in the ether who might do this country harm became like they became subjects of investigation.

39:50.505 --> 39:52.005
[SPEAKER_00]: They became targets of investigation.

39:52.486 --> 40:04.753
[SPEAKER_00]: The target the target You know lists, so to speak, expanded tremendously and so to the activities in which you could be involved in initially materials for for terror was funding terror was driving the getaway car

40:05.453 --> 40:10.275
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, it was, you know, it was not going, you know, protesting.

40:10.295 --> 40:24.102
[SPEAKER_00]: It was certainly not sending, you know, funding it, for example, I wrote a lot about the Holy Land Foundation case in this book, which is a very controversial case about a Muslim charity that was convicted of providing material support,

40:31.065 --> 40:33.890
[SPEAKER_00]: that was interpreted as in some way helping hummus.

40:33.930 --> 40:35.974
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a very, it wasn't directly funding hummus.

40:36.034 --> 40:41.204
[SPEAKER_00]: It was funding organizations that in some way could have been helpful to hummus.

40:41.684 --> 40:41.965
[SPEAKER_00]: Very,

40:42.913 --> 41:07.320
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, the layers of that case are too much to even get into here, but but the idea was you are a well respected business person in America who is just doing essentially what they believe the United Jewish appeal is doing for the Israelis is like helping people, you know, of your people, you know, the diaspora helping people live their live better lives, you know, support themselves.

41:08.425 --> 41:09.626
[SPEAKER_03]: It's going to a mosque.

41:09.646 --> 41:12.288
[SPEAKER_03]: You're not helping people lead by that.

41:12.308 --> 41:13.369
[SPEAKER_00]: But the question is, was it?

41:13.409 --> 41:15.590
[SPEAKER_00]: And it was not proven that it was going to a Hamas.

41:15.730 --> 41:17.131
[SPEAKER_00]: This is like a long thing.

41:17.171 --> 41:21.554
[SPEAKER_00]: But it was actually not, if you look at the case when you look at it, you look at actually what went down in that case.

41:21.975 --> 41:25.457
[SPEAKER_00]: It was not proven that they helped Hamas.

41:25.817 --> 41:30.821
[SPEAKER_00]: What was proven was that they helped these little committees in the Palestinian territories.

41:31.521 --> 41:42.346
[SPEAKER_00]: One or two of which were accused of potentially helping Hamas, and that right there had never been proven, and nobody was designated as a terrorist organization in those territories.

41:42.986 --> 41:45.207
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a hearts and minds argument that the government made.

41:45.227 --> 41:48.409
[SPEAKER_00]: And the Holy Land case was a very complicated case.

41:48.449 --> 41:51.410
[SPEAKER_00]: The began with direct allegations that they were helping Hamas.

41:51.750 --> 41:55.612
[SPEAKER_00]: By the time this case went to trial, which was many years later, the government had dropped that,

41:58.393 --> 42:00.135
[SPEAKER_00]: But the point is to get off of that.

42:00.215 --> 42:01.156
[SPEAKER_00]: The point is that

42:04.027 --> 42:10.833
[SPEAKER_00]: These kinds of narratives can be utilized to make cases against other people.

42:11.333 --> 42:23.344
[SPEAKER_00]: The Holy Land Case Narrative, for example, was recently used to make a try to make a case against propelistinian activist or Columbia University in a civil law, in Columbia and elsewhere.

42:23.364 --> 42:26.606
[SPEAKER_00]: There are a couple of other, I think UCLA and a couple of other universities.

42:26.987 --> 42:28.068
[SPEAKER_00]: These cases were dropped.

42:28.888 --> 42:33.650
[SPEAKER_00]: But they were civil lawsuits filed on behalf of October 7 victims.

42:34.290 --> 42:49.075
[SPEAKER_00]: That said, these protests were forms of support for Hamas, and they're connected to Muslim non-profits, who were connected inadvertently somehow to potentially the Muslim Brotherhood.

42:49.515 --> 42:56.725
[SPEAKER_00]: who could have potentially been connected to the Holy Land, it all goes back to this Holy Land case in certain documents that were brought forth in that case.

42:56.785 --> 43:00.210
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's a complicated road, but

43:01.710 --> 43:21.546
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, where the prairie land case fits into that, the prairie land cases in some ways the ultimate like payoff of this years-long strategy, where you have now activists who subscribe to a left-wing ideology that isn't even cohesive, is certainly not criminal,

43:28.966 --> 43:42.000
[SPEAKER_00]: are exercising their second amendment right to arm themselves in a state that is so pro-second amendment you don't even need to register you don't even need to like you can just have a gun right you don't there are no background checks

43:43.198 --> 43:44.679
[SPEAKER_00]: So this is Texas.

43:45.220 --> 43:50.144
[SPEAKER_00]: So these are people who are, this is a heavily armed state, it's a heavily pro-second amendment state.

43:50.744 --> 43:55.768
[SPEAKER_00]: And they went to a protest that went bad, very bad.

43:56.328 --> 44:03.374
[SPEAKER_00]: And one person shot at one officer who was injured, not critically, but was injured.

44:04.215 --> 44:07.778
[SPEAKER_00]: And that, one incident which was undisputably

44:10.040 --> 44:21.486
[SPEAKER_00]: was used to criminalize nine others, actually almost 20 others because there were all these other people that were drawn into this case that were not prosecuted, but put out, or etc.

44:21.546 --> 44:30.650
[SPEAKER_00]: But, you know, it was used to go after a large group of people under the idea that they were Antifa.

44:32.183 --> 44:42.115
[SPEAKER_00]: And it used this opportunity to create a definition of antifa that could be introduced into a federal document and to an indictment.

44:43.195 --> 44:46.818
[SPEAKER_00]: and unofficially designate them as a terrorist group.

44:47.218 --> 44:51.141
[SPEAKER_00]: And from this point on, I think activist should be careful.

44:52.001 --> 44:53.082
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a very slippery slope.

44:53.542 --> 44:55.864
[SPEAKER_01]: So you talk about the lawyers in the book.

44:56.224 --> 44:58.265
[SPEAKER_01]: And thank you for the Tom Durkin call out.

44:58.466 --> 45:02.488
[SPEAKER_01]: That was really, really well done, and it really mattered to me, and I'm sure to a lot of people.

45:02.548 --> 45:03.129
[SPEAKER_01]: So thank you.

45:03.769 --> 45:14.235
[SPEAKER_01]: But you also talk about being in touch with people who worked, say, in the Obama administration, or who were prosecutors, and how they're interpreting this new phase of what's going on.

45:14.655 --> 45:24.401
[SPEAKER_01]: Can you just, what is your sense of how these people who prosecuted the original terrorism cases that were really about Al Qaeda and trying to prevent another 9-11?

45:24.721 --> 45:31.085
[SPEAKER_01]: And how they're seeing this larger domestic terrorism, you know, cases in the courts?

45:32.046 --> 45:41.997
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I think that, first of all, every, I talk to justice department and FBI officials, right, who are not normally, by the way, sources for the press.

45:43.010 --> 45:54.984
[SPEAKER_00]: These are people that don't often talk to the press, but in this case, they were so compelled by their like disgust for this prosecution that they did.

45:55.564 --> 45:56.445
[SPEAKER_00]: And I learned a lot.

45:56.545 --> 46:03.233
[SPEAKER_00]: I talked to some, I also talked to some January six prosecutors, one of whom I quoted in the story, but I talked to a number of them.

46:03.413 --> 46:03.533
[SPEAKER_00]: And

46:04.774 --> 46:22.060
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, one of the things, so I learned a couple of things, one of the things I learned was that this was a genuine case that the government, this was not just overreach, this was a, this was, I mean, the sentences might be overreach, but that the, the case itself was brought because there was a real crime committed, somebody had shot a police officer and sort of from that moment on.

46:23.012 --> 46:24.313
[SPEAKER_00]: It's kind of game on, right?

46:24.333 --> 46:28.076
[SPEAKER_00]: And I heard that from a lot, you know, people across the government.

46:28.737 --> 46:38.806
[SPEAKER_00]: But what I also learned was that it was a such a break in the norms of how you go about bringing this kind of prosecution.

46:38.826 --> 46:47.173
[SPEAKER_00]: So usually, if you were to bring any material support for Terracase, and this is something, by the way, that comes out of the early years of those prosecutions.

46:48.694 --> 46:51.835
[SPEAKER_00]: According to my sources, right, and former T.O.J.

46:51.855 --> 46:55.317
[SPEAKER_00]: people, these were people in the national security division.

46:57.177 --> 47:02.579
[SPEAKER_00]: The feeling was that they learned over those years, that they may have bit a bit too aggressive.

47:02.599 --> 47:11.743
[SPEAKER_00]: They might have brought too many cases that weren't real cases, and they weren't resulting in much of a resulting in pleas, or they weren't really getting them anywhere.

47:12.003 --> 47:14.184
[SPEAKER_00]: And that they needed to need more discriminating.

47:14.864 --> 47:18.785
[SPEAKER_00]: And so over the years, you have seen them be more discriminating.

47:18.845 --> 47:35.529
[SPEAKER_00]: I wrote about one of those cases in the book about a teenage would be Isis Bride, who's attorney was able to get her probation instead of prosecuting her and who's older brother, who was another would be Isis for only got two years in prison and he got out actually in less time than that.

47:35.589 --> 47:40.470
[SPEAKER_00]: So they became a lot more sort of literally judicious and how they did this.

47:45.291 --> 48:03.502
[SPEAKER_00]: was seen as a hard one and what would have normally happened would have been that the local prosecutor would have taken this case to the National Security Division would have been cleared through main justice and they would have vetted it to make sure that it was a viable case and probably would have sent

48:04.322 --> 48:22.213
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, certainly would have overseen this prosecution, which they may or may not have done, we don't really know, but they did not send anybody to Texas to kind of sit there and show that the justice department in DC was fully behind this case.

48:22.993 --> 48:24.754
[SPEAKER_00]: That seems to not have happened.

48:25.415 --> 48:29.757
[SPEAKER_00]: And the reason it did not happen was because we, as a country, have never prosecuted people

48:32.899 --> 48:48.409
[SPEAKER_00]: And while, like I've said before, one person shot a police officer and committed this sort of undisputed crime, the level of criminality of everybody else was very dubious and boarded very closely to free speech.

48:49.149 --> 48:55.293
[SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, no one that I spoke to who had prosecuted these cases in the past thought that this was going to go any, that

48:55.593 --> 49:01.060
[SPEAKER_00]: that they would have actually have brought the case, had it not been at administration that wanted this case.

49:01.140 --> 49:08.108
[SPEAKER_00]: And so they just went around the, I think it probably went around the National Security Division to could directly to Toglatch if you wanted to bring the case.

49:08.208 --> 49:11.112
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, that's the theory that I was told to me.

49:12.375 --> 49:18.997
[SPEAKER_04]: I just want to say that the government overreach against political dissent is not new.

49:20.018 --> 49:24.379
[SPEAKER_04]: You can go back to the Wilson and Woodrow Wilson.

49:25.239 --> 49:26.920
[SPEAKER_04]: They were jailing protesters.

49:28.120 --> 49:33.902
[SPEAKER_04]: During the 1960s, the FBI went after the broke all sorts of laws going after the black

49:40.164 --> 49:41.625
[SPEAKER_04]: a splinter group.

49:41.885 --> 49:45.768
[SPEAKER_04]: They were, you know, breaking into their offices and stealing documents on.

49:45.808 --> 49:49.670
[SPEAKER_04]: So there's nothing new about this is why we need guard bills.

49:49.690 --> 50:00.597
[SPEAKER_04]: And I think what's different now seems to be that the government is not providing guard rails to these investigative, massive, powerful investigative forces.

50:00.617 --> 50:01.618
[SPEAKER_04]: They're not, they're not

50:02.238 --> 50:03.639
[SPEAKER_04]: you know, keeping an eye on them.

50:03.659 --> 50:05.360
[SPEAKER_04]: They're almost encouraged him.

50:05.380 --> 50:13.527
[SPEAKER_04]: And before we go, I wanted you to talk a little bit about a cog in that machine who became quite just a chanted with what the government was doing.

50:13.547 --> 50:20.792
[SPEAKER_04]: That's Terry Albury, who was his family came from Africa, their African immigrants.

50:21.092 --> 50:24.255
[SPEAKER_04]: He joined CFBI, very patriotic.

50:24.775 --> 50:33.297
[SPEAKER_04]: You know, seat for sees a great career in law enforcement and very proud of being an FBI agent and then suddenly he's not what happened.

50:33.838 --> 50:44.544
[SPEAKER_00]: So Terry is a guy who joined the FBI, as you said, he was a son of an Ethiopian immigrant whose parents were revolutionary, right?

50:44.725 --> 50:49.568
[SPEAKER_00]: He had been political prisoners, and he wanted to be a hero.

50:50.268 --> 50:53.970
[SPEAKER_00]: And he saw joining the FBI, he's first one, he saw the FBI as a,

50:55.850 --> 50:57.390
[SPEAKER_00]: and agencies that was all about justice.

50:57.410 --> 50:59.551
[SPEAKER_00]: And he wanted to be a warrior for justice, essentially.

50:59.591 --> 51:01.051
[SPEAKER_00]: And so that's why he joined the FBI.

51:01.071 --> 51:03.132
[SPEAKER_00]: And he wanted to save kids.

51:03.592 --> 51:15.915
[SPEAKER_00]: The FBI in the 90s was really big on famous for going after pedophiles and finding missing children and sort of exploited children.

51:15.935 --> 51:17.195
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's what he wanted to do.

51:17.555 --> 51:19.095
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's why he joined the FBI.

51:19.696 --> 51:23.937
[SPEAKER_00]: And immediately after he joined, or actually right before he showed up for his training

51:26.177 --> 51:35.020
[SPEAKER_00]: And so he then, as soon as he shows up for training, which was to be a surveillance expert, which is the lowest, you know, it's like an entry-level job before you can become an agent.

51:37.281 --> 51:42.723
[SPEAKER_00]: He was, they were all repurposed to the war entirely, were called foot soldiers of the war and terror.

51:43.503 --> 51:47.984
[SPEAKER_00]: and Terry gladly walked into that role.

51:48.064 --> 52:02.967
[SPEAKER_00]: But what happened over those years over the next 15 years during which time he goes from surveillance to becoming an agent in two different places in this country was he realized that he was spying on a lot of people who hadn't done anything.

52:03.087 --> 52:04.928
[SPEAKER_00]: And they was violating people's civil liberties.

52:05.068 --> 52:10.109
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's important to point out to, because you bring up how this has happened before,

52:10.770 --> 52:26.817
[SPEAKER_00]: When it happens, like, in the 70s with Cohen tell Pearl when we, after it was found out that the government had spied on the Black Panthers and Vietnam protesters and things like that, law, you know, new rules were cast, prevent the FBI from doing this, right?

52:26.897 --> 52:30.298
[SPEAKER_00]: So there was, the guard, there were new guard rules, so that we're set up.

52:30.658 --> 52:33.959
[SPEAKER_00]: Those guard rules were largely tossed out with a Patriot Act.

52:34.480 --> 52:37.001
[SPEAKER_00]: And so what Terry was able to do,

52:37.781 --> 52:52.172
[SPEAKER_00]: was something that FBI agents from only five or six years earlier could not have done, which was to open investigations on American citizens to easily get Pfizer, you know, warns from the Pfizer court to and to sort of

52:53.553 --> 53:00.636
[SPEAKER_00]: the build cases and investigations around a larger and larger network of people who were who probably hadn't done anything.

53:00.656 --> 53:03.077
[SPEAKER_00]: There was no really evidence to support that they had done anything.

53:03.898 --> 53:15.423
[SPEAKER_00]: And he did that using informants who had questionable motives and and he found the one of the things that I thought was really interesting about his story and one of the things I

53:17.704 --> 53:20.246
[SPEAKER_00]: was that these cases would go on forever.

53:20.746 --> 53:35.457
[SPEAKER_00]: So the government would open a case, FBI would open a real investigation of somebody, and they would have an informant, they would be paying that informant, who would be providing them information, sometimes for years, and it would never go anywhere beyond just the investigation.

53:35.897 --> 53:39.300
[SPEAKER_00]: But, by saying you have an open investigation,

53:40.732 --> 53:42.172
[SPEAKER_00]: That justifies your existence.

53:42.192 --> 53:48.834
[SPEAKER_00]: The FBI had many open investigations that it could bring to Congress and say, this is why we need this big giant budget.

53:49.574 --> 54:08.779
[SPEAKER_00]: And this justifies the analysts, it justifies an increase in agents, it justifies sophisticated surveillance and it justifies outside contractors who we can use to do things that the FBI agents cannot do because they are legally prevented from doing.

54:11.079 --> 54:34.382
[SPEAKER_04]: You know infiltrating chat rooms and things like that and and that's all of which drove Terry over the edge Yeah, I was just going to say let's get to that all which drives him to a great deep well of Disappointment just an achievement and he begins to take undertaking extraordinary a series of extraordinary acts of your science

54:35.292 --> 54:35.552
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

54:36.333 --> 54:47.823
[SPEAKER_00]: One of the things that I wanted to do in this book was to explore the, like I said, these four sort of the human impact of these policies.

54:47.863 --> 54:50.626
[SPEAKER_00]: Like the book is not about policy.

54:50.646 --> 54:51.667
[SPEAKER_00]: It's about people.

54:51.727 --> 54:52.968
[SPEAKER_00]: It's about stories.

54:54.409 --> 55:00.352
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, I just want to make that point because we're talking a lot about policy, of course, but it's not a policy book at all.

55:00.712 --> 55:07.975
[SPEAKER_01]: And no, in fact, it's it's kind of heartbreaking in lots of places where you're sort of like, oh my god, that's too hard.

55:08.095 --> 55:09.616
[SPEAKER_01]: I can't I can't deal with that.

55:09.656 --> 55:15.979
[SPEAKER_01]: But what I think one of the reasons that human part is really important is that you emphasize youth.

55:16.639 --> 55:37.101
[SPEAKER_01]: You emphasize how young some of these people are that are being right and what we're seeing more and more in the headlines is what what are called you know neolistic violent extremists right and what they're really talking about me more and more almost daily not just weekly young armed children who you know

55:37.721 --> 55:41.004
[SPEAKER_01]: who are attacking whether it's a school or something else.

55:41.044 --> 55:42.344
[SPEAKER_01]: And so there's a real worry about it.

55:42.364 --> 55:50.530
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think your book really cards out a lot of space for understanding how this is happening and what tools we do and don't have.

55:51.091 --> 55:52.932
[SPEAKER_04]: But let's get back to Terry.

55:53.352 --> 55:54.753
[SPEAKER_04]: What happened to Terry?

55:54.813 --> 55:55.254
[SPEAKER_04]: Terry.

55:55.334 --> 55:56.375
[SPEAKER_00]: So what happened to Terry?

55:56.395 --> 55:56.635
[SPEAKER_00]: Sorry.

55:57.588 --> 56:13.483
[SPEAKER_00]: I wanted to talk about that too, but what happened to Terry was that this, he, he had begun to sort of lose his soul and it doing this and he had, it particularly sort of all hit home for him when he became an agent in Minneapolis.

56:14.948 --> 56:26.217
[SPEAKER_00]: Minneapolis has had a long history as we can now see of racism and in Islamophobia, particularly towards the Somali community.

56:26.237 --> 56:30.620
[SPEAKER_00]: The Somali community have never been appreciated or liked by the FBI.

56:31.321 --> 56:37.766
[SPEAKER_00]: And during Terry's time in Minneapolis, they were, you know, he would hear FBI agents and officials

56:43.231 --> 56:47.403
[SPEAKER_00]: This small housing project, or we should, you know, one guy, one agent, one is

56:48.875 --> 57:14.344
[SPEAKER_00]: as a Somali woman on Halloween with a like a phone taped to her, his ear, to make fun of how Somali women dressed and how so it was very and a bit hurt and and there was this blood into the Black Lives Matter movement that when that began in Minneapolis, you had agents who were making openly talking about running down protesters, largely black people, but not just black people,

57:16.865 --> 57:20.947
[SPEAKER_00]: And this was actually, I think, before Charlottesville.

57:20.967 --> 57:27.810
[SPEAKER_00]: So he found a variety of issues coming to the floor there.

57:27.970 --> 57:31.592
[SPEAKER_00]: One that, you know, there was such overt

57:33.276 --> 58:01.882
[SPEAKER_00]: like Islamophobic rhetoric and and just bias within the FBI towards some always it was not hidden it was not sort of he had previously been in California where people were aware that it was very sort of unpc to talk this way in in the Minneapolis FBI not the case so there was a lot of open bias then there was a lot of open bias towards the left and towards black men in particular who had been killed by police

58:02.802 --> 58:09.285
[SPEAKER_00]: And these were kids that could have been Terry's own son, and he drives him over the edge.

58:09.385 --> 58:11.766
[SPEAKER_00]: And over the edge, and he begins to think, you know, this is not.

58:11.926 --> 58:14.647
[SPEAKER_00]: I've been suppressing racism in this bureau.

58:14.667 --> 58:19.509
[SPEAKER_00]: I have been suppressing my discomfort with what I'm doing for all these years.

58:19.529 --> 58:21.210
[SPEAKER_00]: I've been playing the game, right?

58:21.850 --> 58:22.671
[SPEAKER_00]: I can't do it anymore.

58:22.711 --> 58:26.192
[SPEAKER_00]: He had five more years left before he was eligible to retire.

58:26.212 --> 58:27.833
[SPEAKER_00]: He was a highly respected agent.

58:27.973 --> 58:29.334
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, really respected.

58:30.194 --> 58:39.463
[SPEAKER_00]: And in fact, so respected that a lot of people that were still in the FBI talked to me about him as a highly respect.

58:39.943 --> 58:41.725
[SPEAKER_00]: What happened was he wound up leaking documents.

58:41.765 --> 58:52.435
[SPEAKER_00]: He wound up going to the intercept and deciding that he was going to leak a lot of material to them, which they used to do this huge series called the FBI Secret Rules.

58:53.476 --> 59:13.306
[SPEAKER_04]: And Terry was, um, so he leaked all these, he leaked these documents, which to him were examples of vast FBI overreach and a kind of institutional racism as he experienced it in the Minneapolis office.

59:13.326 --> 59:20.029
[SPEAKER_04]: But then he got caught because I think you might, we could fairly say the intercept misplayed

59:22.970 --> 59:24.811
[SPEAKER_04]: to prosecution.

59:24.831 --> 59:25.411
[SPEAKER_00]: I think so.

59:25.572 --> 59:28.533
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I think the intercept has had a lot to answer for over the years.

59:30.054 --> 59:35.217
[SPEAKER_00]: In my colleagues at the New York Times, we're very upset that he didn't share the information with them, right?

59:35.297 --> 59:38.079
[SPEAKER_00]: I actually heard from a friend of mine saying, how could we didn't write to me?

59:38.599 --> 59:39.560
[SPEAKER_04]: and he was arrested.

59:40.021 --> 59:43.164
[SPEAKER_00]: He was arrested and he was charged under the S.V.

59:43.184 --> 59:50.571
[SPEAKER_00]: Anajat, which was a very popular thing to be charging leakers and whistleblowers with at that time.

59:50.711 --> 59:52.573
[SPEAKER_03]: What were the S.V.

59:52.653 --> 59:54.735
[SPEAKER_03]: Anajat charges about?

59:54.795 --> 59:58.559
[SPEAKER_03]: How did these are internal FBI documents related?

59:58.579 --> 59:58.659
[SPEAKER_03]: S.V.

59:59.240 --> 01:00:01.983
[SPEAKER_03]: Anajat is supposed to be about the national defense.

01:00:02.809 --> 01:00:03.270
[SPEAKER_00]: exactly.

01:00:03.330 --> 01:00:05.632
[SPEAKER_04]: These were not, but they've often been exploited.

01:00:05.652 --> 01:00:10.437
[SPEAKER_00]: These were secret, not top secret, and some of the more secret at all.

01:00:11.278 --> 01:00:18.986
[SPEAKER_00]: Documents that revealed, especially the ones that were published, that revealed the way that the FBI was prosecuting,

01:00:20.868 --> 01:00:48.113
[SPEAKER_00]: was doing surveillance, it was, you know, how they were reaching out to Muslim communities, trying to convince them to spy on their neighbors, how they were screening people at the airports who were coming in from overseas and the way in which they recruited people to become informants in this, I don't think, I don't know, people understand that when you were coming into the U.S. from overseas before you go through customs, you are not in America, you're in this legal network where like anything can happen to you and the FBI and and,

01:00:49.653 --> 01:01:00.017
[SPEAKER_00]: immigration authorities were taking advantage of that to take people aside and question them and try to turn them, use whatever information they had against them to try to convince them to be informants against whoever they were thinking.

01:01:00.037 --> 01:01:02.157
[SPEAKER_03]: So when was that prosecution brought?

01:01:02.538 --> 01:01:05.759
[SPEAKER_00]: That was, so the prosecutor, so he pled, Terry pled guilty.

01:01:05.799 --> 01:01:08.900
[SPEAKER_00]: That was in 2018.

01:01:08.920 --> 01:01:09.860
[SPEAKER_00]: I believe.

01:01:10.080 --> 01:01:10.861
[SPEAKER_00]: I met him.

01:01:10.881 --> 01:01:17.183
[SPEAKER_00]: I met him in a hotel room in Berkeley, California at five in the morning.

01:01:18.122 --> 01:01:30.725
[SPEAKER_00]: about two days before he went to prison and sat in this hotel room with a locked door and the shades down for seven hours while he told me this story about himself.

01:01:31.285 --> 01:01:36.846
[SPEAKER_00]: And then we talked for years after that in order for me to write this article I wrote about him for the

01:01:41.535 --> 01:01:45.800
[SPEAKER_00]: He was in prison for, so we went to prison in 2018 and he got out in 2020.

01:01:46.862 --> 01:01:49.044
[SPEAKER_00]: He was supposed to be in prison for, I think, five years.

01:01:49.825 --> 01:01:56.073
[SPEAKER_00]: But he got an early release because of COVID, and so he was home by Thanksgiving of 2020.

01:01:56.113 --> 01:01:56.774
[SPEAKER_00]: He was back home.

01:01:57.215 --> 01:01:58.076
[SPEAKER_04]: What's he doing now?

01:01:59.226 --> 01:02:04.830
[SPEAKER_00]: He is trying, I think, sort of still trying to figure out his plan.

01:02:05.371 --> 01:02:08.473
[SPEAKER_04]: He's never going to be in law enforcement.

01:02:08.493 --> 01:02:09.674
[SPEAKER_00]: He's never going to be in law enforcement.

01:02:09.714 --> 01:02:14.737
[SPEAKER_00]: He's thought about and talked about working for human rights organizations.

01:02:14.777 --> 01:02:20.562
[SPEAKER_00]: He's done a lot of volunteer work with Palestinian groups and other Muslim organizations.

01:02:21.062 --> 01:02:35.389
[SPEAKER_00]: He's spoken on whistleblower forums, he did this great talk to the Logan Symposium about a year to go, or you talked to journalists about how they should be covering the FBI, and I thought that was really great.

01:02:35.409 --> 01:02:36.689
[SPEAKER_00]: It was in the first, because it was in 2025.

01:02:38.290 --> 01:02:48.495
[SPEAKER_00]: And, and he's, you know, he's been a source to certain journalists, not everyone, it's very distrustful of the motives of a lot of people and understandably so.

01:02:49.216 --> 01:02:54.859
[SPEAKER_00]: So, but he's, I mean, he's a, you know, he's trying to make his life work, you know, it's not easy going to prison.

01:02:55.679 --> 01:02:56.540
[SPEAKER_00]: in any context.

01:02:57.240 --> 01:02:58.621
[SPEAKER_00]: And he was there for several years.

01:02:58.661 --> 01:03:01.343
[SPEAKER_00]: It has as a former law enforcement person.

01:03:01.383 --> 01:03:02.924
[SPEAKER_00]: It doesn't matter that you leak documents.

01:03:03.044 --> 01:03:06.186
[SPEAKER_00]: You're a former cop as far as inmates are concerned.

01:03:06.266 --> 01:03:07.627
[SPEAKER_00]: That's not a great situation.

01:03:07.747 --> 01:03:09.428
[SPEAKER_00]: So he's had a real struggle.

01:03:10.055 --> 01:03:14.577
[SPEAKER_04]: There's so many more fascinating cases in your books that we haven't talked about.

01:03:14.597 --> 01:03:16.957
[SPEAKER_04]: And we don't have time to talk about today.

01:03:17.538 --> 01:03:29.002
[SPEAKER_04]: But I hope people will just go out and get this book and delve into these fascinating portraits of people mired in the war of terror to one degree or another.

01:03:29.462 --> 01:03:30.922
[SPEAKER_04]: The book is the inheritance.

01:03:31.363 --> 01:03:33.783
[SPEAKER_04]: And American tragedy in five acts.

01:03:33.823 --> 01:03:36.284
[SPEAKER_04]: Thanks so much for coming on the show, Jan. That's a pleasure.

01:03:36.524 --> 01:03:38.065
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you so much for having me, guys.

01:03:40.146 --> 01:03:41.827
[SPEAKER_04]: And that's it for this week's by-talk.

01:03:41.887 --> 01:03:46.590
[SPEAKER_04]: Be sure to check out our complete podcast archive on Apple or wherever you get your podcast.

01:03:46.670 --> 01:04:01.520
[SPEAKER_04]: And if you haven't already, do check out thespitealk.co new site on Substack, where we offer steady diet of scopes and original analyses from the intersection of intelligence, form policy, and military operations.

01:04:01.560 --> 01:04:02.821
[SPEAKER_04]: Just Google Spitealk.

01:04:03.401 --> 01:04:05.082
[SPEAKER_04]: You'll quickly find your way there.

01:04:05.943 --> 01:04:15.032
[SPEAKER_04]: This edition of the Spy Talk podcast was smoothly produced, as always by Cani, and expertly edited by Molly Hawkey for MSW Media.

01:04:15.792 --> 01:04:17.334
[SPEAKER_04]: See you around, I'm Jeff Stein.

01:04:17.714 --> 01:04:18.515
[SPEAKER_04]: Am I close to Goff?

01:04:18.795 --> 01:04:19.656
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm Karen Greenberg.

01:04:20.157 --> 01:04:21.057
[SPEAKER_04]: Thanks for listening.

01:04:22.016 --> 01:04:30.418
[SPEAKER_02]: For more original reporting and insights like this, subscribe to SpyTalk.co on Substack and follow us on Twitter at Talk Under Score Spy.

01:04:30.898 --> 01:04:38.040
[SPEAKER_02]: If you enjoyed our podcast, subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

01:04:38.060 --> 01:04:45.922
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