“If It Walks Like A Terrorist and Talks Like A Terrorist… Then It Must Be A Terrorist” -The CIA

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – Just imagine the government and the agencies that have the attitude that if they have guns they’re up to no good and they have to be taken out.  What if a drone is flying over some airspace in the middle of Montana and there’s a couple rancher dudes out there shooting cans off a log?  They’ve got guns, too. “Hey, guns spotted out in a field in Montana.  Get over here.”  Why is it different?  What would the material difference be?  Once you make the determination that if someone is armed that they’re up to no good, do you think that’s going to be limited — I don’t want to sound conspiratorial here but we have a little evidence of this. Check out the rest in today’s transcript…

 

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  “The increased use of drone strikes has led to an increase in the number of Al Qaeda operatives overseas.”  That’s impossible.  Everything we do in the Middle East negates Al Qaeda.  That’s why we have to have 200,000 men and $1 trillion or so worth of hardware over there.  This has to happen.  [mocking] “If we leave them to their own devices, can you imagine what they’d do?”  I don’t know, can’t you?

[reading]

Not surprisingly, as the number of drone strikes increased so too have accusations of civilian casualties. Brennan has repeatedly pushed back against these claims as well as reports that Al Qaeda is gaining recruits as a result of attacks that kill men the United States identifies as militants, but are often seen locally as mere tribesmen with guns.

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Mike:  Can you fathom for just a moment that all we have in many instances, as I understand it anyways, are aerial or satellite photographs of certain individuals meandering about Yemen, Afghanistan, Iraq, wherever, Libya, Egypt, Oman, the Sudan, Somalia, meandering about the countryside and they’re armed.  We determine, [mocking] “Do you think they’re a terrorist?  They look like terrorists.  We can’t get down there and see eye to eye.  Do they walk like terrorists?  They kind of walk like terrorists.  Do they quack like terrorists?  I don’t know, but I bet if they could quack they would.”  This is a conversation going on in the Central Intelligence Agency.  [mocking] “Well, if they walk and quack like terrorists, and they look like it, and we have satellites that say they could be, take them out.  They have guns after all.  They could be up to no good.  They have guns.”

Just imagine the government and the agencies that have the attitude that if they have guns they’re up to no good and they have to be taken out.  What if a drone is flying over some airspace in the middle of Montana and there’s a couple rancher dudes out there shooting cans off a log?  They’ve got guns, too.  [mocking] “Hey, guns spotted out in a field in Montana.  Get over here.”  Why is it different?  What would the material difference be?  Once you make the determination that if someone is armed that they’re up to no good, do you think that’s going to be limited — I don’t want to sound conspiratorial here but we have a little evidence of this.  Do you think that’s going to be limited to just foreigners that have guns?  Besides, why are we the only ones that are allowed to have guns?  [mocking] “Yeah, but they live in the Middle East.”  So?  Where’s that written at?  This whole thing just drives you nuts, drives me nuts.

[reading]

In a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations in August 2012, Brennan said he saw “little evidence that these actions are generating widespread anti-American sentiment or recruits for A.Q.A.P. [Mike: That’s Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, A.Q.A.P. If you ever see that in print, that’s what that means.] This may be the view from Washington and its fortified compound in Yemen’s capital, but outside of official U.S. territory the rhetoric breaks down, and it is in the country’s rural regions where Al Qaeda is growing in leaps and bounds. When the Obama administration began its bombing campaign in Yemen, the local Al Qaeda branch numbered between 200 and 300 fighters. Three years later, the group has more than tripled to well over 1,000 fighters and appears more determined than ever to strike at the United States.

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Mike:  So for all you that are gung ho about going [singing] Over there, over there, there are some terrorists, gotta kill them, over there [end singing], we are assisting in recruiting.  This is not to be conflated or confounded with actual, human, hardcore, verifiable intelligence that there is a group (A) located in the geographical area, (B) latitude and longitude, and our intelligence tells us — and we’re very secure in this intelligence — (C) that they are plotting to strike, and (D) here’s their target.  Of course, in the interest of common defense, you have to act on that.

This is another one of these instances here where we believe we ought to trade that authority and the president ought to be able to act carte blanche.  Many of you will cite Thomas Jefferson and his actions against the Barbary Coast pirates.  You better go back and read that historical record again because it’s not what you have been told.  In every instance, every time, no exception, every single solitary time that Jefferson was briefed and told by military commanders that this was happening in this location with the Barbary pirates, there was not an order that issued immediately from the White House dispatching Marines or countermeasures over into what is modern-day Libya.  Instead, Jefferson furnished that information to Congress and asked them: What do you want me to do?  Tell me what it is you want me to do and I will execute your wishes.

Go back and read the record.  Tom Woods has written volumes about this.  If you read the writings of Jefferson, this becomes immediately clear.  He did not act unilaterally.  He acted with the advice and consent of Congress.  He always shared that with Congress.  Yes, there were votes on it.  Congress actually said — of course, today we have this fictitious belief that the Constitution somehow grants foreign policy supremacy to the president.  That is not the case and it never was the case.  The president can suggest.  He can instigate treaties.  He can’t ratify them.  That takes a vote in the Senate.  Why in the Senate?  Because the framers of the Constitution wanted to provide the states a check against senators ratifying treaties that might be good for one state and not good for another.

[reading]

Instead of disrupting, dismantling, and defeating Al Qaeda, Brennan’s plan is actually exacerbating the threat and expanding Al Qaeda in places like Yemen.  Brennan’s nomination should open a long-overdue debate on the effectiveness of current U.S. counterterrorism strategy.

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Mike:  Then there’s this from The New Yorker from Amy Davidson, “John Brennan’s Kill List.”  How does a guy in the American government get a kill list?

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What does John Brennan consider to be a “legal framework” within which the American government [Mike: I cannot tell you how vehemently I despise the use of the term “American government.” It is not the American government, it is the government of the Union of the United States. To say it’s the American government, you might as well as it’s the North American government. Does it represent Canadians? They’re in North America, too. Does it represent Mexicans? They’re in North America, aren’t they? Does it represent the French? They have a foothold.] can decide whom to torture or to assassinate? Brennan is President Obama’s nominee for Director of Central Intelligence; the last time his name came up for the job, after Obama won in 2008, he didn’t get it because he seemed so close to the torture program perpetrated while he was a senior official at the C.I.A. If he has greater distance now, it is only because more time has passed, not because there has been any true accounting; if anything, we have slid into an odd state of complacency about the torture in the Bush years, watching it in movies and wondering whether it worked, rather than asking who might be culpable. Brennan, instead of answering hard questions about those years, became the President’s counterterrorism adviser. That job includes many duties. One of them is crafting the President’s “kill list” and then taking it to him for final approval.

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Mike:  This is just macabre and sick.  So now the anointed king of these United States — this is well-known.  We’ve talked about this for two years, since the New York Times broke the story that Obama did have a kill list.  Those of you that are so worried about Obama foisting socialism and communism on your head, why aren’t you worried about the president having a kill list.  How long before American citizens — wait, that’s already happened — make it onto the kill list?  This is what we have a government for?  Really?

End Mike Church Show Transcript