#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare

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Speaker 2 All right, guys. It's

Speaker 2 been a minute since I've seen you. And so here we are.
We're going to talk about Syria, Afghanistan, where the funding is, where the bills are and stuff with the federal government to,

Speaker 2 I guess, what do we call it, defund the Taliban for the 40 to 87 million we're sending them a week through various NGOs. And,

Speaker 2 you know, talk about, you know, I think the big thing we want to talk about today on top of all that are what can communities do. You know,

Speaker 2 it's at the top level and there's only so much we can do. But what one of the things that we can do is

Speaker 2 talk to communities and down at the local level and just get them thinking about this, having the conversations and coming up with some plans and stuff that they can do. But

Speaker 2 you guys don't need any introduction.

Speaker 2 All of you have been on the show. Scott several times, Sarah several times, legend.

Speaker 2 But just a quick intro, legend, can't reveal your face because you're still doing the secret squirrel stuff and you're back and forth in and out of CONUS. So we will reveal your identity.

Speaker 2 But Afghan American.

Speaker 2 Former Army intelligence, Sarah, former CIA analyst, former CIA targeter, Scott, former Green Beret, and all of you guys have a very extensive Intel-type network.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 they all seem to be pretty different networks. It's not like you guys are just all

Speaker 2 getting your information from the same sources. And so

Speaker 2 that's kind of what we're going to cover today. And I just want to say thank you for coming back.
I love,

Speaker 2 even though the conversations are heavy, I just love seeing you guys. So thanks for making it back.

Speaker 2 But so let's kind of start with some of the intel stuff. Sarah, I know you have some info on this.
Right now, media is blown up. Christians are being massacred in Syria.
And

Speaker 2 so give us some insight there. How is this happening? Why it's happening? You know, give us what you know about the situation going on in Syria.

Speaker 3 Sure. I'm going to have to go back in time just a little bit.
So if we go back to November 2021, that is the time basically the planning started for the Syrian blitzkrieg.

Speaker 3 How it all came together, actually, is one of our Benghazi plotters, the one I talk about all the time, Musa bin Ali, him and Abu Muhammad al-Jalani, the current president of Syria,

Speaker 3 were running a lot of terror line facilitation networks in the Syria. They've been doing this for well over a decade.
They run a really big terrorist camp in Libya, south of Misrata.

Speaker 3 And so they got together and

Speaker 3 basically decided, let's, you know, pull in Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. You know, let's do in Syria what happened in Afghanistan, right?

Speaker 3 So it was November of 2021 when Abu Jalani came to Afghanistan and he sat down with Musa Sirajuddin Haqqani, who is the Minister of Interior of Afghanistan, and Mullah Yaqub, who is the Minister of Defense of Afghanistan, right?

Speaker 3 And they came up with this plot and planning to do the Syrian blitzkrieg. So as you can imagine,

Speaker 3 Julani didn't have enough fighters to take all of Syria by himself. So, the plan they came up with is the Taliban said, Okay, we'll give you training camps in Nangahar province, right?

Speaker 3 You can come here and safely train. Because at the time, Julani's camps were outside of an al-Tamf military base in Syria and they were being bombed and they couldn't safely train there.

Speaker 3 So, they moved a lot of their training to Afghanistan, but it wasn't enough. So, Al-Qaeda, and specifically Hamza bin Laden, said, Hey, we'll train a certain number of fighters for you.

Speaker 3 What do you need? And Julani said, I need 10,000 fighters. So, for those couple years, Al-Qaeda then trained an additional 10,000 fighters inside of Afghanistan on top of what Julani was sending.

Speaker 3 Okay, so then they all go to Syria. And as we saw two years later, three years later, right, November 2024, the Syrian Blitz Creek happened and Julani took over.

Speaker 3 Now, when Julani took over, oddly the press and the American diplomats, and we saw the EU and the UN all leaned in and they're like, oh, this is bringing democracy to Syria.

Speaker 3 Oh, he's going to have an inclusive government. Same language we heard in Afghanistan.
Well, the intention is to make Syria just like Afghanistan, to make it an Islamic caliphate.

Speaker 3 So Julani plans to ethnically cleanse the Christians, the Alawites, the Kurds, etc.,

Speaker 3 because that is the plan to bring in the Islamic Caliphate, just like the Taliban has been ethnically cleansing.

Speaker 3 You know, obviously people from Panchir, the Hazaras in Afghanistan, it's the exact same playbook, the exact same model, and a lot of the exact same people.

Speaker 3 So if we're not honest about the roots of how Julani took Syria, then we're not going to be able to understand what's going on. But one understand what's going on makes perfect sense.

Speaker 2 How many Christians have been executed?

Speaker 3 I don't really know the number of Christians because they've also hit these Alawite neighborhoods.

Speaker 2 What is that? What's an Alawite neighborhood?

Speaker 3 Well, it's just another minority in the country. We mostly know the Kurds because we fought with the Kurds and they're going to move on, obviously, and do the Kurds.

Speaker 3 So the reporting come under Syria, as you can imagine, is very limited, right? Because the government, like Afghanistan, is not run by terrorists, right? So we're maybe seeing 10% of the numbers.

Speaker 3 So we're hearing like in the thousands, but we just honestly don't know the number.

Speaker 3 And even all the years there was the Syrian civil war, it was so hard to get the numbers of people being killed like during the syrian civil war when assad was basically killing his own people he's also a bad guy right you don't want assad in the country you don't want julani in the country over 500 000 syrians died right like we ignored all this our press didn't put it out and now they act like they're caring about something when These atrocities have been going on for a long time in Syria.

Speaker 3 Now it's just a terrorist doing them, right? A terrorist that the U.S. government now has an official relationship with.
They share intelligence with him and the U.S.

Speaker 3 Department of Defense has for the last month been taking out Julani's rivals. So we've been consolidating power for this terrorist who's now ethnically cleansing in his country.

Speaker 2 Wow. How are they,

Speaker 2 how

Speaker 2 just go over the caliphate again? Sure. So a lot of the listeners don't understand what that is.
So can you just give us a definition of that?

Speaker 3 Yeah, sure. And I mean, I bet legend could do a much better job of explaining like the history.
But over time, there's basically five Islamic caliphates.

Speaker 3 The last one, I believe, ended like the 1940s, right? When the Ottoman Empire fell. So the terrorists want to recreate and reinvent the caliphate.

Speaker 3 The person actually leading this is Hamza bin Laden because his father said, I don't care if it takes 100 years, right? We're going to reestablish the caliphate.

Speaker 3 Well, Hamz is like, I'm going to do it in my lifetime to honor my father.

Speaker 3 So he's been, as you can imagine, connecting with a lot of the groups, Sunni, Shia, it doesn't matter, and saying, we got to do this as a team and we have to work together.

Speaker 3 So basically, the first country in the caliphate is Iran, even though that came in a long time ago. So they view that as already in the caliphate.
So now in this present generation, Afghanistan's one,

Speaker 3 Syria's two, and then their next move looks like, I thought it was going to be Mali, but now it looks like Somalia first.

Speaker 3 So they're going to try to either drop, get Mali or Somalia next to be the next country that falls to the terrorist and becomes a piece of this caliphate.

Speaker 3 And then over time, they just want want to keep, they want to do Iraq, Burkina Faso, Libya, right?

Speaker 3 So they have a plan over time to keep doing what they did in, what they think they did in Afghanistan and what they definitely did in Syria.

Speaker 2 Wow. So basically,

Speaker 2 if I'm hearing this right, they are going through

Speaker 2 back to just Syria. They're going through demographic group by group by group.
So they haven't reached the courage yet.

Speaker 3 Correct. Well, the interesting part is they tried to get, so the sad part is when Julani took over, he did kind of one of those, you got to turn your weapons in, you got to register.

Speaker 3 Sadly, a lot of the Christians and all the whites turned the weapons in, right? The West was pushing this. The Kurds are like, we're not giving up our weapons.

Speaker 3 A lot of people even think tanks in the U.S. government is like, Kurds, turn in your weapons, be a part of this new, this new democracy, this new inclusive government.
So the Kurds luckily didn't.

Speaker 3 The Kurds are still being attacked, you know, by the Turkish government. So it's not like there's there's nothing going on there.

Speaker 3 But of course, it's going to end up being some sort of larger war because the Kurds are not going to obviously give their weapons over the terrorists.

Speaker 2 What do you think about, I mean, from my understanding, we're leaving Syria, correct? So I got a really good friend. He's Green Beret, just served over there.

Speaker 2 Sounds like it's going to be one of the last deployments over there. And the Kurds are

Speaker 2 really,

Speaker 2 I mean, they're obviously very worried about what happens to them when we pull out. Should we be,

Speaker 2 what's your opinion? Should we be pulling out of there? Should we stay there?

Speaker 3 Well, I at least know when they planned the Syrian blitz, Grig, there's basically two key parts of it, right? So they planned it because the U.S. is about to pull out.

Speaker 3 It was even going to try to push some out faster, right?

Speaker 3 But also, a part of the planning,

Speaker 3 so there are these camps in Syria, right? It's mostly known where the the ISIS women and children are, but there's some fighters in them, too.

Speaker 3 Um, I think, gosh, there's like over 40,000 ISIS members in these camps. Some are children, though, you know what I mean? And so, that's one of the big pieces of this push.
So, when the U.S.

Speaker 3 leaves, we're going to hand those camps over to Julani and his exclusive government. And he's already made a promise.

Speaker 3 This was part of the whole deal that they're going to release the women and children in those camps.

Speaker 3 So, the real deal here is when we leave, basically, it helps to reestablish ISIS, the next generation of ISIS.

Speaker 3 And even Al-Qaeda and the Taliban have offered to take 10,000 of those women and children, bring them to Afghanistan, give them sustenance, make sure the women can get remarried into jihadi families, and build that next generation of terrorists too.

Speaker 3 So this is going to be a huge win for ISIS when we leave Syria. But I do think we're going to leave Syria.
I mean, it's not my choice if we leave or stay, but I'm just saying

Speaker 3 basically the tumbling effect of that's going to be a major resurgence of ISIS.

Speaker 2 We spent 20 years at war. This is for everybody.
We spent 20 years at war.

Speaker 2 The terrorism just seems to be the snowball effect that gets bigger and bigger and bigger.

Speaker 2 Then U.S. goes to war.
It shrinks, it shrinks, it shrinks. As soon as we leave, I mean, it seems like it's growing.
It seems like every time we leave, it gets bigger faster.

Speaker 2 And so how for the, do you have something?

Speaker 3 Yeah, well, I want to point out: so, we fight terrorists, but we have no end games for them, okay? So, so basically, all the terrorists I know that we captured in Pakistan got freed, right?

Speaker 3 Because they didn't go through the Pakistani judicial system, we didn't extradite them to the United States beside a couple of really high-level, like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, right?

Speaker 3 So, after like five years, the Pakistani prisons are getting full, and they're like, What do you want to do with them, U.S.? Okay, release them. The detainees we picked up in Iraq, re-release them.

Speaker 3 These ones in Syria are going to get released. The Gitmo detainees, we release what, 80% of them plus.
So we have no end game for these terrorists.

Speaker 3 So then we put them back out on the street and then they build the next generation. So we're not actually defeating them.

Speaker 3 We're just holding them five to seven years and then restarting the entire process again. There is no end game for terrorists.

Speaker 2 Is this

Speaker 2 on purpose? Is this because U.S. wants to be at war because it's a big money-making machine?

Speaker 4 Why, why don't we end it?

Speaker 3 The problem is, in my opinion, the U.S. plans in two to four-year cycles, how they're funded, nobody is in it for the long term.

Speaker 3 One is because of how we elect politicians, but the funding cycles in the Department of Defense, right? It's like, let's get this money this time. Here's our mission.

Speaker 3 We don't have long-term strategic plans. You know, I mean, everyone talks about it, but it is the greatest example, right?

Speaker 3 The end of Charlie Wilson's war when he says, hey, we put all this money into these weapons, right? Let's put money into education. And no one wanted to think of it long term.

Speaker 3 And then, you know, we got, unfortunately, the problems we had with 9-11. So we are horrible at the long-term planning.
There is no long-term end game for terrorists. They know it.

Speaker 3 They all know they're going to get released. They all know they're going to get back in the battlefield.
And so if you have no repercussions, it gives you a confidence.

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Speaker 2 Interesting. Do you guys have anything to add on that?

Speaker 4 I mean, I would love to hear Legends take on

Speaker 4 the long game that these individuals play with the Caliphate. And I think it starts with that.

Speaker 4 This is me looking back on 20 years of war. I think we have a very Western way of thinking about things and a preferred way of war.

Speaker 4 You know, look at how we took counterinsurgency and we literally lifted it over from Vietnam and applied it into Afghanistan, into that rural insurgency.

Speaker 4 So we applied a counterinsurgency model and fought it for 20 years and mixed in with a CT strategy where we were essentially mowing the grass,

Speaker 4 cutting the heads off, but then new ones grew.

Speaker 4 But I do think that when you we really have to look carefully at how do these individuals think about their endgame. They're fighting a, if necessary, a multi-century narrative.

Speaker 4 You know, they're prepared to stay with this thing

Speaker 4 to the end. And,

Speaker 4 you know, they love, it's often said,

Speaker 4 they love death as much as we love life in order to achieve that. So I just don't think we're even in the same arena in terms of mindset.

Speaker 4 And we don't fully appreciate the level of persistence that they have to meet their strategic goals. And that they have no intention,

Speaker 4 they being the small percentage of Islamist radicals who are hijacking this religion, they have no intention of coexisting with the West. See, you know,

Speaker 2 everybody seems to be, all of our adversaries seem to be such long-term thinkers. China has a 200-year plan,

Speaker 2 terrorists have a long-game plan. I mean,

Speaker 2 what do you guys think about what we're seeing in Europe through their immigration

Speaker 2 policies? I mean, you go over there now, you go to Paris, you know, the kind of the tourism district seems fine. You leave, and it's these Islamist extremist neighborhoods.

Speaker 2 And same thing's going on in London, same thing's going on in Belgium.

Speaker 2 When me and you were at the inauguration, we spoke with the oncoming ambassador to Belgium. He was talking to us about this.
I'm hoping to... interview him.

Speaker 2 Germany, it's happening there. And, you know, I saw my friend Joe Lonsdale put out a tweet not too long ago, and he was kind of,

Speaker 2 how do I say this? He was kind of, he was just broaching the idea, hey, what happens when Europe gets completely flipped from Christian nations who are run by Christians to

Speaker 2 Islamist extremists? And

Speaker 2 what does that look like, not just for Europe, but for the entire world? I mean,

Speaker 2 there goes our allies. You know and so I mean what do you what do you think about that legend?

Speaker 5 Well first of all thank you very much for having me. You're welcome.
It's an honor to be here on your show again with Lieutenant Colonel Mann and Miss Adams. I brought you a gift.

Speaker 5 It's a Pakol from Afghanistan.

Speaker 2 Oh, thank you.

Speaker 2 Thank you. You're welcome.
Well, I have, since we're on gifts, I have gifts for you guys too. It's probably the only reason you keep coming back.

Speaker 3 Well, now that I saw that Palmer ate them during the episode, I'm like, good, I'm just going to start eating them now. I'm not even going to bring them home.

Speaker 2 We can use them during the episode? Yeah. Absolutely.
It's going to be like a pre-brief.

Speaker 2 These come in ranch flavor.

Speaker 2 They will work on that. Yeah.
I know you love them.

Speaker 2 We'll work on that.

Speaker 5 I'm still addicted to ranch.

Speaker 2 And one other gift, legend.

Speaker 2 You familiar with the unplugged phone? I am, yes. Perfect.
I gave Sarah one. I've given Scott one.
And so that was developed by Eric Prince.

Speaker 2 I met with their team, lots of veterans, tech people, entrepreneurs. And basically what that is, that's a it's it's a way to get around big tech

Speaker 2 spying on us, basically, take stealing our data. And they've put a lot of a lot of

Speaker 2 It's just a great phone. There's a lot of developments that they put into that phone.
There's a kill switch, so nobody can listen to you. It actually separates the battery from

Speaker 2 the actual device so nobody can listen in.

Speaker 2 Instagram, X, Google, none of those can suck your advertising data out of that phone. And so it's just a everybody's worried about big tech censorship.
And so I thought you should have one too.

Speaker 5 That's a great gift. Thank you.
And I thank Eric Prince as well. I recently met him

Speaker 5 somewhere in the East Coast. He's a very smart man.

Speaker 2 Great guy. Yes.
Great guy.

Speaker 5 Great guy, gentlemen, and very smart man. But thank you very much.

Speaker 3 And that Eric Prince line is going to probably start a lot of rumors.

Speaker 2 Good point.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 what do you think about what I just said about Europe?

Speaker 5 I would like to, if you let me, go back to

Speaker 5 your first question about Syria.

Speaker 5 I don't follow Syria a lot. I'm mostly focused on Afghanistan, but it's all connected.

Speaker 5 And so what I've been hearing is that there are Taliban fighters in Syria. There are Taliban members that supported Al-Jiolani during his takeover of Syria just a few months ago.

Speaker 5 And that there are Taliban fighters in Syria right now, currently at the moment. So that is one.

Speaker 5 Two, the second thing I've heard is that they're killing a lot of religious minorities and many, many Christians. They're being slaughtered on a daily basis.

Speaker 5 Al-Jiolani, I'm not too familiar with him, but I've read some and based on the intelligence that I've seen from that part of the world, Al-Jiolani is a terrorist, he was a terrorist, he was a jihadi, and he's still a jihadi.

Speaker 5 The only thing is he has dropped his turban and worn a suit and a necktie, but he's still a terrorist. And so what is really disturbing is the fact that the U.S.

Speaker 5 State Department dropped $10 million bounty on his head.

Speaker 5 And all of a sudden, the Justice Rewards Program, State Department website, completely just the page that showed the bounty on him completely disappeared in a matter of minutes.

Speaker 5 So he was a terrorist on Monday, Monday evening. He was no longer a terrorist.
Now he's a state official and he's traveling everywhere.

Speaker 5 And under his command, his army is actually slaughtering Christians. They're slaughtering Muslims and other religious minorities in Syria.

Speaker 2 So they aren't just targeting Christians. No.

Speaker 5 They are killing lots of Christians right now. And this is unfortunately something, if unless the U.S.
President Trump takes action, this is something that will continue very rapidly.

Speaker 5 Remember, Al-Jiwalani was a member of ISIS. You saw what ISIS did to Christians, the Christian minority community in Iraq.

Speaker 2 What did they do?

Speaker 5 They slaughtered them. They beheaded them.
They executed them. Dumped their bodies in the river.

Speaker 5 They're doing the same thing in Syria right now.

Speaker 4 Levels of horror that were just unimaginable.

Speaker 2 Like all the videos we saw burning them alive, putting them in cages, drowning them, putting kids in cages, dropping them in the river, that kind of stuff.

Speaker 5 They take the women as slaves, as sex slaves.

Speaker 5 So this is something that President Trump can... This is unfortunately the

Speaker 5 Giolani's reward. His status as terrorist was removed by Mr.
Joe Biden, the last administration during, that's one of the final things they did. And so now we have a new administration.

Speaker 5 I wish President Trump re-imposes those,

Speaker 5 re lists him as a terrorist, which he is.

Speaker 5 And so once a jihadi, you're always a jihadi. You don't change overnight.

Speaker 5 That man is killing Christians. He is killing other religious minorities.
And my fear is that this is going to worsen.

Speaker 5 It's going to increase, especially now that he has Taliban members with them and he's getting support from the leadership of the Taliban.

Speaker 2 What about Europe?

Speaker 5 What about Europe? The immigration?

Speaker 2 The immigration. Look, Sean.
What happens if it switches?

Speaker 5 Brother, let me tell you this.

Speaker 5 I was telling this earlier.

Speaker 5 If we look at this as, hey, all Muslims are terrorists, you have 1.6 billion Muslims in the world. If they were terrorists, you would see it.
You would see the problem.

Speaker 5 That's not the case. These individuals, they, and I'm not saying at the same time that there is not a terrorism problem in Islam.
There is.

Speaker 5 And it's unfortunately true and it's happening in Muslim countries are not taking the lead, taking action against it. Why is it that America should be the one to go and fix all of this stuff?

Speaker 5 Why isn't Saudi Arabia taking action? Or Qatar or UAE?

Speaker 5 I'll go back to the European stuff, the immigration. It is, Europe has a open border policy.
They allow everyone and anyone in. They don't vet.
And then all of a sudden you see stabbings.

Speaker 5 I recently saw that some,

Speaker 5 unfortunately, an Afghan immigrant stabbed, I think, a four-year-old child

Speaker 5 and his parent.

Speaker 5 And then when the cops arrested him, he was just laughing.

Speaker 5 You will see that laughter in America, here, in our our own communities unless that border is closed, the southern border, and unless you start vetting, unless you start paying attention to who you are allowing into this country, Europe opened its borders.

Speaker 5 All of these migrants came in, and now they're dealing with it.

Speaker 2 I mean,

Speaker 2 the other fear, too, is not just street crime. I mean, when I'm talking about our allies, and we're talking about a no-immigration policy.
I mean, these are nuclear powers as well.

Speaker 2 And, you know, we bat back and forth with Iran. Well, what happens when UK gets

Speaker 2 when the UK government gets overturned and it is all Islamic extremist?

Speaker 3 Go ahead, sir. Well, I think one of the things, too, we focus on like the immigration coming into a country, which we could flip

Speaker 3 something politically, but it's not the immigration. It's first off corruption in countries.
There's a lot of corruption in Europe.

Speaker 3 And what happens with that corruption is people take advantage of it. Obviously, the one group that's taken the most advantage of it is the Muslim Brotherhood, right?

Speaker 3 I mean, that's why Switzerland is the number one country in Europe with terrorists in it, especially high-level terrorists, is because of the Muslim Brotherhood influence.

Speaker 3 Also, Qatar has a lot of influence and money in Europe, and they're a big piece of this. Turkey obviously can't

Speaker 3 seem to choose sides, and they do a lot of enabling for different terrorist groups, especially ISIS, right? And allow all these terrorists to flow through their borders.

Speaker 3 They provide them passports, etc.

Speaker 3 So if you don't deal with the Muslim Brotherhood, ban them, the influence of Qatar, and then you allow Turkey to stay in NATO with their actions, and they have a big play in Syria,

Speaker 3 then that's the problem, right?

Speaker 3 It's they're the ones causing the influence, putting the money into politics, and making those shifts. So I think we need to be honest about them because that happens here too.

Speaker 3 Qatar has a huge influence in our universities, and we saw that kind of play out, right, with so much support of Hamas.

Speaker 3 The Muslim Brotherhood, we can't even get the Muslim Brotherhood is banned in multiple countries, right? Like Saudi Arabia, like the Emirates.

Speaker 3 We can't ban them in the United States because they give so much money to both political parties, right? That's scary.

Speaker 3 So we need to deal with kind of the heads of the snake here.

Speaker 2 Interesting. Interesting.
Can I add something? Absolutely.

Speaker 5 Look,

Speaker 5 9-11 hijackers, right?

Speaker 5 Those 19 attackers and their supporters entered the U.S. legally.
The State Department gave them visas.

Speaker 5 Nasser Ahmad Tawhidi in Oklahoma, who wanted to kill Americans on Election Day last year, and he was apprehended. He was evacuated from Afghanistan by who? By the agency.
By the U.S. government.

Speaker 5 The open borders. The U.S.
government keeps the southern border open or for whatever reason they kept that border open for four years.

Speaker 5 And we know for a fact that jihadists who want to kill Americans in the name of Islam entered the United States these criminal organizations these terrorists they have hijacked Islam and Islamic symbols they're not Muslim they want to kill Americans in the name of Islam and the US government allows it they allow these people to enter the country and in the case of 9-11 like I said they even gave them visas now look I am an American Muslim I've been warning the U.S.

Speaker 5 government the resistance that is fighting the terrorists on the ground for the past four years, they have been warning that these terrorists will attack you again. They're in your communities.

Speaker 5 The U.S. government ignores me.
The U.S. government ignores Colonel Mann, Sarah Adams, the resistance, everyone.
And then sadly, God forbid, the next terrorist attack will occur, as it did on 9-11.

Speaker 5 Then what happens? It's the same politicians in DC that ignore us now, that will turn around and say, all Muslims are terrorists.

Speaker 5 This is something we need to take care of right away.

Speaker 2 I just, I don't understand. I mean, there's a lot I don't understand, but

Speaker 2 why?

Speaker 2 Is this just

Speaker 2 that's why I'm asking, do they want us to get attacked so that we can go

Speaker 2 and do another war?

Speaker 4 I just don't see that level of coherence at our federal government level. And this is not administration specific.

Speaker 4 I just, just based on, for example, Sean, what happened with the withdrawal in Afghanistan, you know, that was,

Speaker 4 I think the National Security Council put out its evacuation memo on 14 August.

Speaker 4 Right. And, and, and, you know, I have it on good authority that that thing was one hell of an afterthought.
Like they were scrambling to get that.

Speaker 4 And this was just, this was like who was to prioritize for evacuation. Kabul fell on the 15th.
This thing came out on the 14th.

Speaker 4 So there's nothing, at least that I've seen, that tells me that there's like a coherent approach to this of keeping it going.

Speaker 4 I think it, from, from my perspective, it's more of a, just an inability to, to really, it's hubris.

Speaker 4 I mean, it's arrogance at an institutional level to think that we, we really comprehend and appreciate just the persistence, will, and capacity of this threat.

Speaker 4 You know, I mean, even if you just look at like

Speaker 4 where we are today is so reminiscent of pre-911.

Speaker 4 You know, I went in, I think I was telling you guys yesterday when we did the briefing, you know, I went into a, I'll just say it, I mean, a Carolina Duke game at Chapel Hill this past weekend, you know, to see a storied basketball rivalry, right?

Speaker 4 21,000 seat capacity in the Dean Smith Center, not one metal detector in Maine primary entry points. The only search that happened was if you had a bag, like if you declared a bag.

Speaker 4 So there were no metal detectors of a 21,000-seat venue.

Speaker 4 And I mean, anyone I would hope watching or hearing this like sits up at that because that's new, you know, and I, and I got to believe that's not isolated to Chapel Hill.

Speaker 4 And that is what I worry about more than anything else is that humans are just ridiculously short memory, you know, and we tend to forget and dismiss.

Speaker 4 And then we tell ourselves narratives that this isn't going to happen. You tell ourselves that the ocean is going to protect us and we just need to focus on things that are at home.

Speaker 4 But the reality is this one has followed us home.

Speaker 2 Let's move into, we'll get to that, we'll get to what we're seeing and what we can do, you know, at the local community here at the end.

Speaker 2 But let's do, let's move back into what we're here to talk about today. So you guys have any Intel updates since the last time we spoke?

Speaker 2 I mean, Scott, me and you talk on a pretty regular basis, but it's been about a month, I think, since we've spoken.

Speaker 2 sarah it's been a couple months since you've been here a legend it's been several months and so i'm just what are the updates that you're seeing out from afghanistan and these terrorist networks

Speaker 5 well i can go first

Speaker 5 the well the resistance is still fighting the taliban al-qaeda isis i skp and the rest of the terrorist organizations that are there The intelligence networks that America helped build in Afghanistan, they're still operational.

Speaker 5 I'm not talking about the GDI, the Taliban. I'm talking about the ones that are under the control of the resistance.
They're not.

Speaker 2 When you bring up acronyms like the GDI, you have to understand the audience doesn't understand what that is. So the GDI is the Taliban's intelligence service, correct? Correct.

Speaker 5 General Directorate of Intelligence. The head of GDI is Abdulhaq Wasik, a man who was a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay,

Speaker 5 and America released him and now he is leading Taliban's intelligence.

Speaker 5 And so there is other intelligence networks operational in Afghanistan. The most active ones are led by President Saleh, Amrullah Saleh.
He runs an organization called Afghanistan Green Trend.

Speaker 5 And there are many other intelligent networks, but by far the ones most reliable intelligence that I've seen comes from AGT,

Speaker 5 which is Afghanistan green trend

Speaker 5 what I've heard and what I've seen the documents that I've seen shows that

Speaker 5 pertaining to America that there are over a thousand Taliban and ISKP operatives in the United States

Speaker 5 and this 1,000 are not the individuals that were emboldened after the United States abandoned Afghanistan and withdrew.

Speaker 5 These are not the individuals in the Afghan-American community, in the diaspora, or those we brought in, 120,000 that were evacuated.

Speaker 5 They're not members of those communities who are now sympathetic towards the Taliban.

Speaker 5 The thousand or so that I mentioned, these are deep cover operatives that report to Sirajuddin Aqani and then the leadership of the Taliban and ISKP.

Speaker 2 And where's this intel coming from?

Speaker 5 The anti-Taliban resistance.

Speaker 2 Who's running that?

Speaker 5 There are several resistance fronts. You met Commander Ahmed Massoud, the leader of the National Resistance Front.
There's also President Amrullah Saleh, who's leading Afghanistan Green Trend.

Speaker 2 And can you talk about him? That's where I was going with this.

Speaker 5 President Saleh? Yes. Of course, yes.
Well, the man needs no introduction, but

Speaker 5 I'll do my best.

Speaker 5 He has been fighting in the resistance one way or another since I think he was 15 or 16, from what I've seen.

Speaker 5 He did liaison, intelligence, liaison work under the leadership of Commander Ahmad Shah Massoud, who used to lead, who led the resistance against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and then also then against the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

Speaker 5 President Mr. Saleh at that point did liaison work.

Speaker 5 For him, he led intelligence. And then after the United States went into Afghanistan in 2001, he became the head of Afghanistan's intelligence, the National Directorate of Security.

Speaker 2 So that's the Afghan version of the Central Intelligence Agency. Correct.

Speaker 5 America helped build it in Afghanistan. The head of that intelligence unit, NDS, was Mr.
Saleh. He literally built that

Speaker 5 NDS in Afghanistan. I don't think there's any American intelligence official that is unfamiliar with Mr.
Saleh.

Speaker 5 He was, and I believe he still is, our ally. And so after that,

Speaker 5 he became the Minister of Interior in Afghanistan.

Speaker 5 And then after that, he started AGT in 2011, which is Afghanistan

Speaker 5 Green Trend, which is one of the main political parties in Afghanistan,

Speaker 5 grassroots movement,

Speaker 5 had millions of members inside Afghanistan.

Speaker 5 In, I believe it was 2019, Mr. Saleh

Speaker 5 won the elections and became the first vice president of Afghanistan under the Ghani administration. Ashraf Ghani was the president.
Mr. Saleh was his vice president.

Speaker 5 And so in August 15, 2021, when Mr. Ghani, the former president, fled Afghanistan to Dubai and abandoned everything.
Mr. Saleh, Vice President Saleh, did not flee Afghanistan.

Speaker 5 He instead went to Pancher Valley, which was the only province that had not fallen to the Taliban. And he declared a national resistance against the Taliban.
And because Mr.

Speaker 5 Ghani had fled, according to Article 60 and 67 of the Constitution of Afghanistan, Mr. Saleh became the acting president of Afghanistan.
Mr. Saleh, President Saleh, now

Speaker 5 his time in office ended in July of 2024, just a few months ago. And so he being a spy, I think spies never quit.
And so he went back to his, just like Sarah Adams doesn't quit, spies don't quit.

Speaker 5 He went back to leading intelligence in Afghanistan and his network is operational in Afghanistan. And I don't think anyone has

Speaker 5 as much sources under his control as Mr. Saleh in that region.

Speaker 2 So that's where a lot of the Senfo is coming from.

Speaker 5 Correct. He runs, he's correct.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 5 Yes.

Speaker 4 And I think it's important to note here, too, because a lot of folks, to your question, you know,

Speaker 4 they're watching this and they're like, okay, well, these are veterans getting this.

Speaker 4 Like, why aren't we getting this from the intelligence community or why aren't we getting this from the formal institutions?

Speaker 4 And one thing I'll just give as an example, Legend won't talk about it, but Mr. Saleh was abandoned, just like a whole bunch of other Afghan assets were abandoned on August 15th.

Speaker 4 We're talking 98 to 99%

Speaker 4 of the human intelligence assets in Afghanistan that took 20 years to build were left behind. And this is coming from the former CENTCOM commander, right?

Speaker 4 What happened was a lot of veterans like Legend, who had preexisting relationships, found ways to do humanitarian outreach in those moments to fill the gap because no one else is picking up the phone and also also had the foresight as an intelligence guy to say, well, it's probably not a good idea to leave Mr.

Speaker 4 Saleh, you know, out there on his own. And so over these last several years, you know, legend has cultivated a relationship, you know, and really done the job.

Speaker 4 And I just don't know any other way to say it, right? Done the job

Speaker 4 of

Speaker 4 what a formal intelligence agency would normally do with a massive asset like that.

Speaker 4 So now you've got literally literally the guy who is regarded as the father of Afghanistan intelligence talking primarily to an Afghan-American Army, U.S. Army NCO.

Speaker 4 And that's where that primary relationship took place. Now, multiply that, Sean, at scale.

Speaker 4 You have Sarah Adams doing her version of that, me doing my version of that with Afghan special forces and commandos.

Speaker 4 And that's what's evolved over the last four years is by the virtue of abandoning 98 to 99% of our intelligence capability and our commandos and our special ops, the veteran community stepped into the breach and took over those relationships for primarily humanitarian reasons.

Speaker 4 But here we are four years later, and what you have is high-veracity intelligence and reporting coming through these channels instead of formal channels.

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Speaker 2 You say we've lost 98 to 99%

Speaker 2 of all intelligence coming from Afghanistan.

Speaker 4 Human intelligence.

Speaker 2 Human intelligence. So why would we just

Speaker 2 U.S. intelligence agencies, why aren't they,

Speaker 2 why aren't they keeping in communication with them if this is such a big threat?

Speaker 3 They have communication. They are bringing intelligence, but it's from the Taliban.
So we lost

Speaker 3 98 to 90.9% of our collection and our assets we developed over 20 years. We're now bringing in reporting,

Speaker 3 but it's from the Taliban. The Taliban is now the source of the U.S.
government and the source of counter-terrorism information in Afghanistan

Speaker 2 to change the source of the GDI.

Speaker 3 Yes. So that's who we get intelligence from and from Sharaj Shuddin Haqqani.

Speaker 4 And there was a political calculus too. When we left Afghanistan in 2021, you saw it happen where the former administration made a conscious decision to not engage members of the resistance.

Speaker 4 And legend can speak very specifically to that. But there were overt

Speaker 4 actions by the State Department and others to essentially block or impede or just not conduct any kind of outreach with resistance forces.

Speaker 4 And so a lot of these high veracity assets that you would normally, that we cultivated for 20 years, they were talking to veterans.

Speaker 4 They were talking to intelligence alumni, and there was no formal relationship. So

Speaker 4 guys like legend maintained and cultivated this relationship over four years, knowing that at some point, you know,

Speaker 4 maybe adults come back in the room. We're going to, we're going to want those We're going to need those relationships.
We're going to need those members of the resistance, right?

Speaker 4 And so I think that's where we are today. We're at like this strategic crossroads where we are looking at a new administration.

Speaker 4 Our veteran population from the Global War on Terror, in my assessment, has done an amazing job of recognizing an institutional shortfall, and they have kept it going somehow, cashing in their pension funds and their kids' college accounts to keep these individuals alive, but they've done it.

Speaker 4 But, you know, how much more and how much longer are we going to ask that of these veterans to do that?

Speaker 2 Sean, it's not even

Speaker 5 only

Speaker 5 the intelligence that the U.S. intelligence that deals with the Taliban.
It's even the State Department. Like take, for example, Ms.
Karen Decker, Ambassador

Speaker 5 Karen Decker, U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan.
She was appointed by the previous administration, by Mr. Joe Biden.
She's still the U.S. Ambassador under the Trump administration.

Speaker 5 Ambassador Karen Decker is is literally acting as the unofficial first lady of the Taliban. She's in direct communication with every Taliban governor all over Afghanistan.

Speaker 5 She has denounced an armed resistance against the Taliban, against ISKP and al-Qaeda. She has not met with leadership of the resistance.
She does not even speak with the resistance.

Speaker 5 She has denounced the resistance.

Speaker 5 So diplomatically,

Speaker 5 we're dealing with the Taliban as well, not we. These folks, these certain individuals within the U.S.
government are very,

Speaker 5 I don't know how to say it. They do not want to deal with the resistance.
They only want to deal with the Taliban.

Speaker 5 Whenever the resistance, the anti-Taliban resistance hosts events, political, diplomatic events, conferences in order to unite the Afghan communities in this war against the Taliban, whenever they meet up in Vienna or Dushambe or anywhere else, the State Department under the leadership of Ambassador Karen Decker dispatches individuals and says to the host countries to not allow it to happen.

Speaker 2 Wow.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I mean, even our State Department basically went to the government of Tajikistan, right?

Speaker 3 The leadership and the heads, the intelligence leadership, and said, don't have relationships with the resistance or it's going to affect your relationship with the U.S. government.

Speaker 3 Like, that's at the level it's at. And, you know, we need to be honest.
We have Taliban sympathizers in our government, right? We have them in the State Department.

Speaker 3 You know, we likely have them in the NSC. We definitely have them in the CIA, right? This is a problem unless we root them out.

Speaker 3 It's just like if when you had communists in the government, which we still do, right? When you have these influences in the government, they're the ones making these deals.

Speaker 3 They're the ones making sure the money keeps going to the Taliban and to the terrorists. And so you're up against those types as well.
And it is a lot of money involved in this.

Speaker 3 There's corruption involved in supporting terrorism as well.

Speaker 5 Do you think Taliban are professionals and technocrats?

Speaker 2 Do I think they're what?

Speaker 5 Professionals and technocrats.

Speaker 2 They are now.

Speaker 5 Well, Ambassador Thomas West believes Taliban are professionals, insincere, and technocrats.

Speaker 3 And the crazy part of Thomas West, they've moved him to another role in the State Department, but what he's in charge of is sanctions, right?

Speaker 3 So we got now a Taliban sympathizer in charge of sanctions. So how often do you think he's sanctioning the Taliban?

Speaker 4 So So what you're really, you know, if you step back and just look at it, Sean, you think about this, you have, you know, you have a point of view that is an institutional point of view that started to form, I don't know, certainly when Afghanistan collapsed in 2021, this emerging point of view in our government from the previous administration that the Taliban are actually someone we could deal with, someone we could normalize relations with, someone who

Speaker 4 really offers a better solution, not just in Afghanistan, but, you know, global stability, right?

Speaker 4 And then you see that because you start to see humanitarian aid money going there, CT dollars going there, all the stuff that you all have talked about.

Speaker 4 But that's just that's a reflection of an institutional way of thinking, right? Like this is who we're going to deal with now. And then you also saw just the omission of any engagement.

Speaker 4 with any of the commandos and special forces and others that we had trained for 20 years who then went to resist completely on their own, not even tacit political support.

Speaker 4 And so I say all that because that is such a divergent point of view from the veteran population who fought this war for 20 years and who has been on the phone nonstop.

Speaker 4 So, you know, you're talking about individuals who dealt with this threat up close and personal, who understood it, who most of us said never again after 9-11.

Speaker 4 And we, you know, we gave away our youth and our and our life to not life, but our, you know, just everything about our life to fight this.

Speaker 4 A lot of people gave it. A lot of people did.

Speaker 4 But, but, you know, the larger point here is that the people that have been on the phone working this side of it that have that divergent point of view they're the ones that fought this war you know they're the ones that know this enemy better than anybody and they know what's at stake and they know what's coming you know that's the part that just baffles me is it would be one thing if this were all you know just a bunch of volunteers who jumped into the fray because they're looking for something to do but these are people who honestly really

Speaker 4 want to put this behind them. They've moved on with their lives.
I know I feel that way, you know, but they're doing this out of a duty to warn because we've dealt with this enemy for a lot of years.

Speaker 4 We know what they're capable of. We know they followed us home and we feel a duty to warn.
But it is a divergent point of view, unfortunately, that we have

Speaker 4 about what the Taliban are about, al-Qaeda, than the current institutional point of view.

Speaker 4 And we're hoping that we can bring those together and figure this out, kind of a private, public gathering of comparing notes over the last four years and start to sort this out.

Speaker 2 Sarah, do you have any updates?

Speaker 3 Well, you know,

Speaker 3 legend kind of brought up a bit, right? He talked a little bit about Siraj Huddin Haqqani and ISKP. I think what a lot of people don't understand

Speaker 3 is how Al-Qaeda fits into that and why it matters, right? So Al-Qaeda is planning an attack on the U.S. homeland, but who are they using, right, to be involved in that attack?

Speaker 3 Siraj Huddin Haqqani, right? He's the Minister of Interior in Afghanistan. He allows basically the terrorists to come into Afghanistan.
His

Speaker 3 now

Speaker 3 kind of like cousin runs the refugee services, right? So his name is Hafiz Akani. He was involved in Abbey Gate.
He's also involved in the U.S. homeland plot.

Speaker 3 He's the one that basically takes our humanitarian dollars and gives it to the foreign jihadists saying, oh, they're refugees coming back into the country, et cetera, right?

Speaker 3 So there's a whole pipeline of our money going into these foreign fighters, enabled by the Haqqanis. Okay.

Speaker 3 Then we have the whole ISKP problem, right? So our counter-terrorism dollars go to the Taliban to fight ISKP. It's a huge farce.

Speaker 3 We did a whole last month, we did nine days on Twitter just showing operations the Taliban said they did against ISKP and they weren't, right? There is a joint training camp.

Speaker 3 You know where we dropped the big,

Speaker 3 the big mother of all bombs?

Speaker 3 There is a joint training camp there. It's named after Siraj Hedin's father, the Jalaluddin Haqqani Training Center.

Speaker 3 It has al-Qaeda terrorists there, ISKP terrorists there, and Haqqani network terrorists there, right?

Speaker 3 So when we talk about Al-Qaeda's homeland plot, they're using the Haqqanis to leverage in the plot. They're using ISIS to leverage in the plot.
And then, of course, Al-Qaeda's leading the plot.

Speaker 3 Like, think of how dangerous this is when he says there's a thousand just under the bucket of ISKP and the Haqqanis, right? Then we talk about all the groups Al-Qaeda is aligned with.

Speaker 3 How many of those are in the country? Because Al-Qaeda is saying that's another thousand, right?

Speaker 3 So these numbers start to get really big when you bring all these groups under one umbrella to fight a common enemy. us, right? We impacted them.
We impacted them in Afghanistan.

Speaker 3 We impacted them in Iraq. And we impacted them in Syria, which is kind of the most recent open wound, right? And so they want our warfighters who did that in those countries to feel it here.

Speaker 3 They want you to feel it in your neighborhood, at your home. They don't want you to feel safe where you live now.
And that's something we really need to understand understand and listen to, right?

Speaker 3 Because I do think, as Scott said, Israel had a little hubris, right? There were reports going in. Israel got information.

Speaker 3 I saw some of the stuff passed to Israel about the Hamas guys training in Afghanistan. And, you know, they did have some belief something's going to happen.

Speaker 3 They never thought it was going to be the scale it was. Now, the U.S.
government is getting the same type of information. Israel's getting probably a lot more.

Speaker 3 And they're now like, oh, that's not going to happen here at that level, right? We're not going to see that happen here.

Speaker 3 And that's that's very, very dangerous, especially when we're talking about just the numbers that came in illegally.

Speaker 3 But remember, our State Department has been issuing passports and visas to Haqqani network guys. Plenty of former CIA officers have provided tips to the government over the last four years.

Speaker 3 They haven't picked them up. They live in our communities.
They know Haqqanis are here, right? So that's not just the terrorist who came here under fake IDs and are undercover, right? So to understand

Speaker 3 just how many are in our country is really scary. And yes, we're starting to close the border, but we now need to go back and revet everybody we went in the last four years.

Speaker 3 And I've heard no discussions about that happening yet, but like that needs to happen. And I

Speaker 2 revet who we gave passports and visas to, or re-vet everybody that crossed the border and crossed the border, especially.

Speaker 2 I think we're kind of doing that. Isn't Tom Holmes?

Speaker 3 It was 14 million people.

Speaker 3 So we're not doing it.

Speaker 3 And what I was saying to an intel agency just a week ago, I said, we need to be running against this threat. Like this needs to be fast forward, the toughest thing we ever did.

Speaker 3 We need to basically take,

Speaker 3 almost like it's a crisis, right? And, you know, you take a bunch of people and you throw them at the hurricane to help, right? We need to pull in.

Speaker 3 I don't care if it's retired people, we need to put 10,000 people re-vetting all these. I'm serious.
Like, we're at that point.

Speaker 3 We let too many people in this country that we don't even know who's here. Like, we're not picking up and deporting fast enough.
And Trump says that himself. Like he understands, right?

Speaker 3 The magnitude of when you're talking 14 million, but I don't think people are understanding. There's a chunk in that that are the terrorists.

Speaker 3 And we have to go just as fast at the terrorists as we're doing against Venezuelan gangs. Like this is super important.

Speaker 2 I mean, I know it seemed, I mean,

Speaker 2 it seems like Holman, Border Patrol, ICE all seem to be very busy to me. So you don't, but you don't think they're moving fast enough.
I mean, how, how would they move faster?

Speaker 3 It's only been what well, they're moving fast enough, right, on like Venezuelan gangs, but who's doing the vetting to identify the terrorists, right? That's not Tom Homan's job, um, right?

Speaker 3 He needs that from the intelligence community. Like, you know, that FBI needs to be stepping up and doing that.
DHS needs to be playing a role, right?

Speaker 3 Like, we need to see, honestly, probably some sort of task force come together to do that.

Speaker 2 You know,

Speaker 2 I got a question.

Speaker 5 Let's say the secretary

Speaker 5 of ICE, homeland security, they arrest,

Speaker 5 they locate this one individual. Say he's Afghan

Speaker 5 and they suspect he's a terrorist. Who do they corroborate that information with?

Speaker 5 They call the Taliban and say, hey, do you know Mr. Abdullah that is here?

Speaker 5 And if that person is one of those deep cover Taliban operatives or ISKP operatives, do you think the Taliban will admit to it?

Speaker 3 No, they'll say we have no record on him.

Speaker 4 I think the thing that has to be walked back to, and this is the part that really is contentious, and I think we got to do something, is that there is such a difference between

Speaker 4 what

Speaker 4 the government says the terror problem looks like and what,

Speaker 4 frankly, members of the Global War on Terror community say it looks like after having been on the phone for four years with these individuals.

Speaker 4 But what I will tell you is, like, for example, and my only thing that I would just add to what they've said on the Intel front is, you know, i've i have the opportunity to run the seams with these different you know on signal and these different groups and and just listen you know and that's what i try to do i try to just listen i'm not an intel analyst i'm not a targeter but i am pretty good at relationships and just listening and what i am hearing consistently across multiple groups is a thousand i'm hearing the number a thousand a lot and it's and it's coming up in different i mean radically different uh uh verticals that there's no way there's no way you know and so that really, that, that really concerns me a lot, that that number

Speaker 4 is popping up, you know, all of the time, you know, conversationally.

Speaker 4 And then the other thing that really bothers me is that no one is engaging any elements at all of the resistance

Speaker 4 just on the Intel side. I mean, when they've made clear and overt

Speaker 4 offerings to help with that and to just give a competing perspective. Zero.
And so that to corroborate what Sarah's saying in that front, at least like there, there is no competing threat picture.

Speaker 2 Well, let me ask you this. I mean, we used to,

Speaker 2 did we just lose all the information? I mean, we used to have the hide cameras, you know, that would scan the retina and then there would be, why are you laughing?

Speaker 3 Well, we left the hide behind. So Taliban has the hide systems.

Speaker 2 Do we still have access to that system at all?

Speaker 3 We have the old data of the system, so we have access to.

Speaker 2 We do have something to bounce it off of.

Speaker 3 Well,

Speaker 2 some thoughts were lost from it.

Speaker 3 We have some, but we don't have the false that. I don't want to say what's missing because I don't want the Taliban to know.
But we don't have 100%.

Speaker 5 But there are new terrorists emerging.

Speaker 2 I'm not saying that. I'm just saying, do we have any database to bounce when they pick somebody up? Do we have any data to bounce that off of?

Speaker 3 Yes, but it's not complete. Even dated isn't complete.

Speaker 5 Here's another problem that, I mean, we have this terrorism problem. The ones that are already in the United States and the ones that the administration is arresting and deporting right now.

Speaker 5 We have that. At the same time, no one is discussing the fact that there are new ones coming to Europe, to America.
I mean, Sarajuddin Haqqani, he needs no introduction. He's the wanted terrorist.

Speaker 5 He's the man issuing passports, Afghan passports and travel documents. 7 million Afghan passports were printed in Europe after 2021 and shipped to Afghanistan.

Speaker 2 7 million.

Speaker 5 7 million with the permission granted by the United States State Department.

Speaker 5 We are still giving, they're probably going to print a million more passports this year, more than a million. The permission to whether print or not comes from the United States State Department.

Speaker 5 They're granting permissions. We all know where the passports go.
Two Sarajuddina Khani because Afghanistan cannot produce its own passport booklets, just like it cannot produce its own currency.

Speaker 4 This was the father of suicide bombing in Afghanistan.

Speaker 5 Yes, killed over a thousand American service members in Afghanistan.

Speaker 5 Still wanted by the FBI and the State Department. In fact, I don't think the State Department, because Ambassador Karen Decker was recently on

Speaker 5 a...

Speaker 5 episode, news cover, Afghan news show, Amu TV. My friend, Same Madi, he asked her, he said, Is Sarajuddin Haqqani still a terrorist? Is the State Department still looking for him?

Speaker 5 She says she cannot answer these questions. She refuses to call Haqqani a wanted terrorist.

Speaker 3 Wow. And the worst part is, right, they're issuing these passports to terrorists.
And that's not just words. I have seen Algerians' faces on Afghan passports.

Speaker 3 I've obviously seen Libyan faces on Afghan passports. Iranians.

Speaker 3 Syrian faces on Afghan passports. We're also not treating these passports as compromised, which is insane, right?

Speaker 3 So they don't even act like

Speaker 3 the Afghan passports compromise, even though any terrorist can travel to Afghanistan and get their name changed and their face put on one of these passports.

Speaker 4 When we were in Vienna and we interviewed Massoud, right? You know, one of the things that he said both on and off camera

Speaker 4 was to really, really pay attention to surrogates, to really pay attention to, you said, you know, al-Qaeda and the Taliban have learned a lot.

Speaker 4 They are not going to allow themselves to be at the forefront. And then he even said, ISIS is more than happy to do that.
You know, he said this back in June.

Speaker 4 I've had conversations. Sally has said the same thing.
I mean, very, very well-placed individuals who are cautioning us about this role of surrogates and that what you see is not exactly what you get.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 these warnings are coming from the same people who warned us pre-9-11, you know, and we ignored it. You know, we ignored it and we look at the strategic surprise and how our world changed.

Speaker 4 And I think that's what, at least for me, that's where I'm coming from. I mean,

Speaker 4 honest to God, I don't even maintain a clearance anymore. You know, I don't.
I left the military in 2013. I retired and was happy to do so.
Had a good run and pursuing other things.

Speaker 4 But a whole bunch of veterans have been drawn back into this thing and the stuff that we're talking about is not even on the high side security stock like it's not it is not even in it's as sarah said it's not in the ic channels this is these are these are conversations that are happening in real time between veterans and abandoned assets that

Speaker 4 for the best i can tell this has not been consolidated with the intelligence community in a meaningful way since the abandonment.

Speaker 4 And so if we don't do that, how in the world world are we going to actually have any kind of a responsible threat picture on what's coming our way? And how can we say with certainty that we do?

Speaker 4 That's my point. You know, because until

Speaker 4 that reckoning happens,

Speaker 4 you've got literally two different worlds here.

Speaker 3 Yeah, and there's one other piece a lot of people don't talk about. It's the fact that the U.S.
government,

Speaker 3 let's say if it's a CIA, the State Department, doesn't really matter, that official relationship is with the Taliban, right?

Speaker 3 So if you're a volunteer and you're talking to a former CIA source and he's giving you valid information, you're trying to pass that to the U.S.

Speaker 3 government, they want his identity to then give to the Taliban, right? He ends up dead. So, there isn't even a safe way for our former sources to get information to the U.S.

Speaker 3 government due to the compromise relationship with the Taliban, particularly with Sirajuddin Haqqani.

Speaker 5 Let's say that

Speaker 5 I don't know, I don't believe this, but let's assume for a second that the Taliban will

Speaker 5 remain a proxy of the United States, and the United States will continue to work with them.

Speaker 5 Well, as the sole superpower of the world, shouldn't the United States government have a plan B and Plan C collect from multiple sources? You know, the resistance is that alternative.

Speaker 5 And knowing the leadership of multiple resistance fronts, I can tell you that there is zero connections. They're not communicating.

Speaker 2 Where are we with the funding? You're the one that broke $40 million a week. Then we brought on Sarah that said $40 to $87 million a week.

Speaker 3 Right, but we actually did, like the third week of January, we did a really good deep dive into the money coming in that week. And that week, the third week of January was $105 million US dollars.

Speaker 3 Wow. That week.
So I even think saying 87 is low at this point.

Speaker 3 And that doesn't count the money we also ship to Qatar because remember, we also fund the Taliban's office in Doha, and that's $10 million more a month.

Speaker 3 So even the money we talk about that comes on the airplane is not all of it. And that's another thing our government needs to be honest about.
There are a lot of pockets of money going to the Taliban.

Speaker 2 Wow.

Speaker 2 I mean,

Speaker 2 we really started a conversation here. with the three of you guys about that.
Tim Burch got involved. Eli Crane got involved.

Speaker 2 Marjorie Taylor Greene was at the last press conference, from what I understand. I talked to Tim Sheehee, the senator out of Montana.
He's aware of it. He was introducing it into the Senate.

Speaker 2 What's the headway on this?

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 5 first of all, thank you very much for taking that initiative.

Speaker 5 I'm telling you, Sean, without you and your supporters who made calls and wrote letters to Congress,

Speaker 5 we would not have had this much movement. This would not have gotten anywhere because, you know, initially they denied sending money to the Taliban and they attacked us.
They said we were lying.

Speaker 5 And then this continued all the way until

Speaker 5 Secretary, the former Secretary of State, Mr. Blinken, was testifying and he finally admitted that, yes, we gave a few million dollars to the Taliban.

Speaker 5 And then,

Speaker 5 anyways,

Speaker 2 the

Speaker 2 I mean, it's been everywhere. I mean, everybody's aware of it.

Speaker 5 Oh, at this point, there is no denying it. There's no denying it.
Everyone admits, even President Trump said that, yes, the money does end up going to the Taliban and is going to the Taliban.

Speaker 2 I brought it up in his interview.

Speaker 3 Yes, you did. And Elon Musk has now repeated it too.
So, I mean, and that's all came out of this show.

Speaker 5 I have so much to thank you for. And officially, on behalf of the entire resistance, on behalf of President Saleh, Commander Massoud, let me thank you once again for taking that cause.
It means a lot.

Speaker 5 It's very troubling that U.S. taxpayer money goes to the very individuals who killed not only Afghans, but American soldiers as well.
The bill is H.R. 260, No Tax Dollars for Terrorists Act.

Speaker 5 Congressman Tim Burchett, we could not have done this without him. He's an amazing human being.

Speaker 5 He's become a very good friend.

Speaker 5 I have to say this as well. His entire office I've been professional and very helpful, whether it be his district office in Knoxville or D.C.

Speaker 5 office, John, Kelsey, Pruitt, everyone was super helpful in this legislation. It is waiting for

Speaker 5 the speaker of the house to put it on the house floor so member of members of congress could vote on it for some reason uh it's being delayed and i don't know why no one knows why

Speaker 5 the bill is ready it's a great bill it covers not only the fact that the money is going to the taliban but i'll add another thing Do you remember when Secretary Blinken was testifying and Congressman Tim Burchett asked him, you're giving money to the Taliban.

Speaker 5 He said, oh no,

Speaker 5 we're not giving money to the Taliban. We're giving money to the NGOs.
Well, he wasn't lying, but at the same time, he wasn't being truthful. He did not say that those NGOs are all Taliban fronts.

Speaker 5 That they give aid, they distribute, and that's a whole different story. Congressman Tim Burch's bill, this new bill that he has introduced, no tax dollars for terrorists act, it includes the NGOs.

Speaker 5 It includes the Afghan fund that is being managed by Afghan Americans who are pro-Taliban and Taliban supporters. And it covers the 40 million.
We need this bill to pass.

Speaker 5 All Speaker Johnson has to do is

Speaker 5 put it up for a vote on the House floor so members could vote on it.

Speaker 2 Well, I mean, I did, I talked to Tim a couple of weeks ago, and he said that

Speaker 2 the holdup seemed to be, and that Mike Johnson was on board with this, is that they didn't want to attach anything else to the bill so that

Speaker 2 to give somebody a reason to vote against it. Because

Speaker 2 Tim had said,

Speaker 2 we have to get this bill in as a single bill without all the other stuff attached to it so that so that he nor anybody who's against this has to vote against the bill, then rewrite it up and bring it out again.

Speaker 2 And he had told me that

Speaker 2 Mike Johnson seemed to be on board with that and that that that was maybe kind of the holdup is that they they need to introduce it as a single bill so that everybody can vote against it, and they can hold people accountable that don't vote against it and get it out there without giving them the excuse of, oh, well, this other thing that was attached to the bill,

Speaker 2 we're not for that, so we had to vote against it. Otherwise, this other thing would have happened.
Does it not?

Speaker 5 All I know is the bill is ready. It's a very good bill, and Senator Tim Sheehy also introduced a carbon copy of this bill at the Senate.
So, both bills are ready.

Speaker 5 It's just waiting for Senator John Thune and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson to put it up for a vote.

Speaker 4 And I hope they do.

Speaker 2 Is that the latest?

Speaker 5 That's the latest.

Speaker 2 That's the latest.

Speaker 5 But a lot of members of Congress supported it. Congressman Eli Crane was very helpful.
I was in D.C. with him not too long ago.
He was very helpful. Chairwoman Marjorie Taylor Greene was very helpful.

Speaker 5 Anna Paulina Luna was helpful and a few others. But

Speaker 5 once again, I want to thank you and Congressman Tim Burchis for this initiative.

Speaker 3 Bring it for a vote.

Speaker 2 Hashtag it. Yeah,

Speaker 2 hashtag it.

Speaker 2 Let's take a quick break. When we get back, let's talk about, you know,

Speaker 2 what communities can do. It's obviously, it's at the top level.
We've done, in my opinion, we've done everything we can do to get it at the top level. It is all the way to the top.

Speaker 2 It's in every agency.

Speaker 2 It's everywhere. Everybody's aware.
And so it's kind of, you know,

Speaker 2 it's out of our hands. You know, we've done everything we can do.
And

Speaker 2 unless you guys have something that I'm not thinking of.

Speaker 4 I mean, there's members of the administration that have reached out wanting our perspective. And, I mean, I find that encouraging.
And I think there'll be an opportunity to do that.

Speaker 4 And then we'll see what happens.

Speaker 3 Yeah, but really, you know, at least the last month or two, my main focus has been helping communities, right?

Speaker 3 That's why we're here also briefing your community because it's more than a duty to warn, right? We want to get Americans prepared. If nothing comes down from the federal government, we don't care.

Speaker 3 As long as you are aware and you know and you're preparing your community, that's what we need to be doing right now.

Speaker 4 It's like a duty to warn up and a duty to prepare down.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 3 So we're on the prepare piece. Yeah.

Speaker 2 All right. Let's take a quick break.

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Speaker 2 I know everybody out there has to be

Speaker 2 just as frustrated as I am when it comes to the BS and the rhetoric that the mainstream media continuously tries to force feed us.

Speaker 2 And I also know how frustrating it can be to try to find some type of a reliable news source. It's getting really hard to find the truth and what's going on in the country and in the world.

Speaker 2 And so, one thing we've done here at Sean Ryan Show is we are developing our newsletter.

Speaker 2 And the first contributor to the newsletter that we have is a woman, former CIA Targeter. Some of you may know her as Sarah Adams, call sign super bad.

Speaker 2 She's made two different appearances here on the Sean Ryan Show.

Speaker 2 And some of the stuff that she has uncovered and

Speaker 2 broke on this show is just absolutely mind-blowing. And so I've asked her if she would contribute to the newsletter and give us a weekly intelligence brief.

Speaker 2 So it's going to be all things terrorists, how terrorists are coming up through the southern border, how they're entering the country, how they're traveling, what these different terrorist organizations throughout the world are up to.

Speaker 2 And here's the best part. The newsletter is actually free.
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Speaker 2 It's about one newsletter a week, maybe two if we release two shows. The only other thing that's going to be in there besides the Intel brief is if we have a new product or something like that.
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Speaker 2 All right, we're back from the break. We were just talking about the funding.
Is it stopping? Where is it at?

Speaker 2 What are they using this funding for?

Speaker 5 A lot of things. Well, let me first tell you how the Taliban profits from this money.
Philemi.

Speaker 5 The money basically goes from the U.S.,

Speaker 5 cash, $40 million a week, to Soleimania and Iraq. Cash is loaded on charter planes and it arrives at Kabul International Airport, which is under the control of Sarajuddin Aqani.

Speaker 5 From there, a convoy arranged by Aqani takes the $40 $40 million,

Speaker 5 takes it to the Afghanistan International Bank, which is not a Taliban bank, it's just a normal bank. But they don't have the authorization to convert the US dollars to Afghanis.

Speaker 5 So what AIB, Afghanistan International Bank, does is they give the money to the Taliban-controlled Central Bank of Afghanistan, which is like our Federal Reserve.

Speaker 5 The Central Bank of Afghanistan is currently managed and run by

Speaker 5 Nur Ahmad Aho,

Speaker 5 a sanctioned terrorist who was sanctioned by the United States for financing bomb attacks against American soldiers, which killed many American soldiers. He's still sanctioned and he gets $40 million

Speaker 5 at this point. He has monopoly over Afghanistan's

Speaker 5 money market rates.

Speaker 5 And so during the conversion, he invites members that are companies that are affiliated with the Akani network and senior leadership of the Taliban, money exchangers, and they come and they all bid on who wants to buy each dollar and for how much.

Speaker 5 And so the winners every week are individuals associated with the Haqqani network. And because they control the money market, they basically take a cut right there.

Speaker 5 And then the Afghanis are given back to the Afghanistan International Bank, which then deposits the money into the bank accounts of these NGOs.

Speaker 5 Now, there are about 2,500 or so Afghan NGOs and about 300 international NGOs, including American NGOs. Now, these Afghan ones,

Speaker 5 every last one of them, their licenses and permits to operate were given to them by the Taliban. And I've said this to you previously.

Speaker 5 If you go and you open an NGO in Afghanistan, the Taliban will not give you a license because you're anti-Taliban.

Speaker 5 So all of those NGOs are pro-Taliban, they're sympathetic towards the Taliban, and they get their licenses. Now at this point these NGOs, they have to order

Speaker 5 goods and services, right? So what they do is they,

Speaker 5 let's say 50% of the material that they need comes from abroad and 50% they purchase from Afghanistan. Rice, wheat, flour, oil, medicine.

Speaker 5 They can only purchase from a pre-approved,

Speaker 5 a list of vendors that are giving to these NGOs by the Taliban. So the NGOs cannot buy from Mullah Shon Ryan's Afghan store.

Speaker 5 They can only buy from that particular store that is operated by the Taliban.

Speaker 5 Now the other rest of the materials that they need usually come from Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Dubai, but you cannot buy those in Afghanis.

Speaker 5 You can only buy those in dollars. So these NGOs, they reconvert the money through the Afghan to the Central Bank of Afghanistan and during the second conversion the Taliban take another cut.

Speaker 5 Then the money is deposited to move to UAE, to Dubai.

Speaker 5 The bank that moves this money is called Azizi Bank. It's not even a bank, it's a Panzi scheme.
It's a bank that is managed by the Taliban. Money arrives in Dubai and then these NGOs order bulk, like

Speaker 5 several tons of rice and wheat and medicine, medical equipment, and they transfer those materials in bulk to Kabul International Airport.

Speaker 5 The company that brings these for these NGOs is Habib Yar Group. Habib Yar Group is owned partially by the brother of the current foreign minister of Taliban.

Speaker 5 And so he takes a cut. He charges for his services.
The moment

Speaker 5 this material, the aid, lands at Kabul International Airport,

Speaker 5 the Taliban charge customs and taxes and fees.

Speaker 5 Right? So that's where they take another cut. And then the aid arrives at the offices of the NGOs, which then they distribute.
Now, who do they distribute the aid to?

Speaker 5 To a list of hungry and poor Afghans provided to the NGOs by the Taliban.

Speaker 5 So the list will have five poor and hungry Afghans, and then it will have 95 Taliban fighters, families of suicide bombers receive aid. This is all from U.S.
tax dollars.

Speaker 2 I'm just curious,

Speaker 2 is this coming through U.S. aid?

Speaker 5 Yes, yes.

Speaker 2 And so is it a matter...

Speaker 2 I mean, we've seen Doge is pretty much dismantling U.S. aid.

Speaker 2 And they're uncovering all these things, you know, spreading the LBGTQ agenda, the Sesame Street stuff. I mean, it's just

Speaker 2 ridiculous thing, ridiculous thing. Probably some type of a front

Speaker 2 or

Speaker 2 code name or whatever you want to call it. But I mean,

Speaker 2 is it just a matter of time before they reach this, before Doge reaches this?

Speaker 5 You will see a lot of stuff coming out about this related to Afghanistan and USAID, Sean. See, in Bamiyan province,

Speaker 5 which does not have a lot of Taliban support historically, USAID would go and distribute the aid. You will see the logo of USAID all over.
And Mr. Saleh exposed this.
His intelligence exposed this.

Speaker 5 So these NGOs affiliated with USAID, they would distribute the aid to the people there alongside the leader of the Taliban, one of the commanders for the Lok for Bamiya province.

Speaker 5 And they would distribute the aid not in the name of the generosity of the American people or in the name of Joe Biden. They would distribute the aid in honor of Mullah Batullah and the Taliban.

Speaker 5 And Pancur, they're still doing that. And Pancher province, which as you know, has zero Taliban.
They are pro-resistant, they're sympathetic towards the resistance.

Speaker 5 What the Taliban does is they go with this NGO called Ansar, which operates in Panchir province and Andarab province, Andarab Valley.

Speaker 5 They will go to this house and there's a lineup of Afghans and widows.

Speaker 5 And they have envelopes with $200 cash per family, per poor family, and they will tell them, hey, Mr.

Speaker 5 Panchiri, during the days of the Republic, did those infidel republics that were puppets of America did they ever come and give you aid you know unlike them see the leader of the Taliban loves you so much he's giving you aid he's sending you money

Speaker 5 the US aid US cash in Afghanistan is distributed in honor of Mullah Batullah not in the name of the generosity of the American people

Speaker 5 Even US aid packages that go to Afghanistan

Speaker 5 the US flag is missing from it. See, in Latin America, in Africa, and elsewhere around the world, when U.S.

Speaker 5 aid is distributed, aid packages, there's always an American flag with a message from the American people.

Speaker 5 Not in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. They do not want people to know that this aid comes from the American people.
They say this aid comes from Mullah Batollah.

Speaker 2 Well, I think what I'm kind of... alluding to here is maybe if we get doge's attention, then they focus on this.

Speaker 3 Well, not exactly, because so even if you dismantle USAID, they move key programs then to the State Department, and it's managed and run by the State Department.

Speaker 3 So, unless the State Department is told to stop funding the Taliban, that money will not stop. Doge will not stop that money because now it's under the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio.

Speaker 3 And again, that's going to take congressional action. Doge is not going to stop this money we're talking about.

Speaker 2 How do they stop the other stuff then?

Speaker 3 The other stuff is more like small grants and stuff.

Speaker 2 I don't know if it's small.

Speaker 3 Well, no, but I know, but

Speaker 3 this is a systematic deal set into place that Congress has to demand. And that's why Burtchett's doing it.
Congress has to stop this money.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 3 Period. I mean, you know, maybe they'll stop.
There's a few little projects. USID has this hemp project in Afghanistan.
Stopping that will be great. And hopefully Doge finds that one, et cetera.

Speaker 5 But it's not going to curb this and then you know then we have the counterterrorism dollars which i'll explain when he finishes the humanitarian dollars because that's a whole nother pocket gotcha and they were sending money usaid was sending money to afghanistan to teach women i mean i think they paid 60 million to teach afghan women farming The Taliban don't even allow Afghan women to leave their homes.

Speaker 3 That was the Department of Defense that did the 60 million. That wasn't even USAID.

Speaker 5 Under Operation Sentinel.

Speaker 3 So the Department of Defense is also giving the Taliban money that nobody discusses. But like he said, last year, they said they gave $60 million for women's education when women can't go to school.

Speaker 5 They gave $11 million for the Taliban to register their broken arms.

Speaker 3 So we don't just have a problem with USID. We don't just have a problem with the State Department.
We have a problem with the money the Department of Defense is giving to the Taliban.

Speaker 3 We have a problem with money CIA is giving to the Taliban. And we have to be honest about all these pockets of money because you can't stop them if you don't discuss all of them.

Speaker 5 As we say, Sean, this particular, this has to be an act of Congress.

Speaker 5 This has to be no tax dollars for terrorists act, which I once again call on His Excellency Speaker Mike Johnson to put it up for a vote. Let members vote on it.
This needs to stop.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 3 Now, when we take it a step further, like I told you, some of the humanitarian dollars goes to these foreign fighters, but the counter-terrorism dollars come in as U.S.

Speaker 3 cash, and they go all over the place. And we've discussed it before, but they go into a number of these plots to include the Homeland plot, and then they do shady stuff.

Speaker 3 Like Legend said, they bring it to the Aziz Bank, and there's a lot of money laundering to support the plot in the United States.

Speaker 3 But the money also goes to other plots against Americans, just not in the United States. So some of them go, they have multiple embassy plots that we've talked about previously.

Speaker 3 So they'll take physical US dollars cash from Afghanistan, bring it to Africa. So they're funding two plots right now with U.S.
dollars against U.S. embassies in Africa.

Speaker 3 It's against our US Embassy in Bamako and Mali. And then the biggest concern right now is

Speaker 3 some plotting against the US Embassy and our personnel in Mogadishu, Somalia, because that's one of the next pushes of the caliphate plan is to push the US government out of Somalia and Somalia fall to al-Shabaab or ISIS, but it's really part of al-Qaeda's caliphate plan, just like Syria was.

Speaker 3 So we are actually funding with these dollars we sent to fight ISIS plots against us in Africa of all places besides here in the homeland. I mean, it's insane that we're funding these

Speaker 3 incidents that are going to kill Americans because think of how that's going to come back, right?

Speaker 3 We have some Americans die, let's say Mogadishu, we have a bombing go off in Virginia, and then when you track the money down, the money came from the U.S. government.

Speaker 3 Think of how Americans are going to handle this.

Speaker 3 And that's what the terrorists terrorists want.

Speaker 3 They want you to blame your government.

Speaker 3 And that's why Congress needs to act immediately because they're complicit. Every day they allow it, they're going to be complicit.

Speaker 2 Scott,

Speaker 2 I want to go into communities. What can communities do?

Speaker 4 But

Speaker 2 right before we get there, I know you and Sarah have been working on this book, The Gathering Storm, to warn local communities to kind of give them some insight on on what's coming in

Speaker 2 and what they can do at the local level.

Speaker 2 But it sounds like some of the other stuff that you guys covered in that book is dissecting some of the other acts of terrorism that we've seen throughout the globe, Mumbai, the Russian Mall,

Speaker 2 October 7th. What are, I mean, when you dissected those with your counterparts, I mean, what are some of the commonalities and some of the things that you found?

Speaker 4 Well, you know, it started when you and I were talking about, I think, I don't know, you asked a question about, okay, so what do communities do?

Speaker 4 And that, you know,

Speaker 4 you and I went back and forth on it a little bit, but what it really opened up was a really broad conversation that's still ongoing where individuals and communities, I know they started hitting you up, they started hitting me up, they started hitting Sarah up.

Speaker 4 What do we do in our community? How do we defend our synagogue or our church or our place of worship? Is this something we should be thinking about? And we talked about it.

Speaker 4 And just the way I look at it is we're kind of, I believe we're at a crossroads right now.

Speaker 4 You know, when we think about everything that we talked about here today, you look at, you look at the threat picture that the government has on terrorism.

Speaker 4 You look at what the global war on terror veterans are saying, and it's different. And we're at a crossroads.
And you either believe at this point that there is a viable threat against the homeland.

Speaker 4 that is complex, local, distributed, looks more like October 7 than it does 9-11, that is very likely in the next year or two, or you don't.

Speaker 4 And if you don't, okay, like Godspeed. But if you do, where we were, okay, then perhaps in addition to the analysis, we should start

Speaker 4 until we do bring this together with our government, which we've really got to have that, that private-public relationship on an unprecedented scale.

Speaker 4 What could we, you know, what could, if it's a duty to warn up, you know, maybe it's a duty to prepare. down and in and how could we help that conversation.

Speaker 4 So we started looking at what if we just self-published a book that really just looked at not just the threat analysis, but scenarios that have happened in the past of where we get hit or other places get hit where they live, work, and play.

Speaker 4 And so we put together this small book and, you know, borrowing from Winston Churchill when he tried to warn of the gathering storm in World War II, that's what we named this project, the gathering storm.

Speaker 4 And we just looked at, and so from, you know, for my part in it and a couple other contributors, we looked at case studies. So a lot like how U.S.

Speaker 4 Army Special Ops Command and others do case studies, and

Speaker 4 they'll migrate those practical lessons learned into operators modern times. That's what we did.
And we just looked at unclassified. We looked at the DC sniper.

Speaker 4 We looked at the Bedlin school siege with the Chechens, where they moved children, over a thousand, into a gymnasium and threw explosives up on the basketball goals and held terrain and held the Russian special ops at bay.

Speaker 4 We looked at Mumbai, which is a very compelling version of what Sarah and others have warned about in 2008, where, you know, roughly 10, no, it was 10 terrorists locked down a city of 19 million doing complex attacks, holding terrain, killing well over 100 people.

Speaker 4 And it was almost a foreshadowing. of what we think we could expect here in the homeland.
And we just, October 7, New Orleans.

Speaker 4 So we looked at all these, and what we did was we started started to pull out a lot of the commonalities that individuals and communities should be thinking about. And

Speaker 4 I'll kind of throw it back to you there. And we can, you know, we can go deeper on any of those things that you want because there were a lot of lessons learned, I think, that are super helpful.

Speaker 4 But one of the things that we came out of it with Sean that surprised me was one,

Speaker 4 the relative ease of finding people who were on the ground or who responded to those events.

Speaker 4 I mean, even Mumbai, October 7, just doing peer-to-peer discussions on lessons learned was super eye-opening.

Speaker 4 And I think something that's available to law enforcement, emergency operations centers across the country. That's number one.

Speaker 4 And number two, I think the thing that surprised me was we came up with a lot more questions than we did answers.

Speaker 4 And just like yesterday when we were talking to the Sheriff's Department in your county, it's different in every county. It's different in every municipality because context is everything.

Speaker 4 But if these attacks are going to be locally manifested, then that's where the conversations need to start because that's going to be the real resilience in that.

Speaker 4 So we came away with a lot of questions and where we didn't have the answers, we just put the questions in there. You know, here's what communities should be asking themselves.

Speaker 4 And hopefully more books will be written that are, you know, technically specific on those questions. And we just keep it going.

Speaker 4 So that's the project. And happy to jump into any parts about it.
Because like I said, between the Intel contributors and the operators that a lot of good stuff came out of it, a lot of lessons.

Speaker 2 What are some of the top lessons? Without dissecting all of it, what are some of the top lessons?

Speaker 4 You know, I would say probably at an individual level, the first thing is, you know, to do your own research, to not let fear dominate, but to question things, you know, to question what we're saying, you know, to look at a lot of these case studies, to look at a lot of the examples on your own.

Speaker 4 I think that for you and your family,

Speaker 4 this is not just terrorism, this is any crisis, but for certainly for terrorism, I think

Speaker 4 you should look at the threat itself, and then you should look at scenarios that have been similar to that.

Speaker 4 And between those two things, you can derive a lot of insights on kind of what you should be doing.

Speaker 4 You know,

Speaker 4 some of the preparation things that came out of it were thinking about how would these scenarios unfold? Like, look at your daily pattern of life. You know, what are the local cafes that you go to?

Speaker 4 Where is your local movie theater? Where's your daycare? Where do your kids go to school?

Speaker 4 What are the gatherings that you typically go to throughout the year? Do you go to a lot of concerts? Do you go to ball games?

Speaker 4 And I think starting to just look at those with intention and starting to ask yourself hard questions about, okay, if I looked at, for example, you know, the Nova Music Festival, I look at the Croca City Music Hall where ICIS hit, what are things that I can derive from that that I could look at the places that I go to in my, is there actually a security plan here?

Speaker 4 If not, who should I be talking to about this? Can we get the community together to talk about this? Should I go engage local law enforcement and call a community meeting?

Speaker 4 So I think my big takeaway for individuals is look at the scenarios that have already happened, you know, because that takes the fear away, I think, and really puts agency back in ourselves to just look pragmatically at things that have happened in the past.

Speaker 2 Well, you know,

Speaker 2 thank you guys for the briefing yesterday. I mean, we went to my local sheriff.

Speaker 2 Very receptive. I was really happy with how that went.
I want to do everything I can to protect the community that I live in and all the kids and the people who live here.

Speaker 2 And, you know, they seem very receptive. There was my county's police or my city's police department, the county sheriff's office,

Speaker 2 neighboring PDs. And then we even had quite a different federal agencies and state agencies in there.
Department of Higher Education was in there. And,

Speaker 2 you know, I think,

Speaker 2 you know,

Speaker 2 back to you. What are the questions? I mean, I think that's how you start the discussion is you come up, at least that's how we did it in Special Operations.
100%. You have to put yourself

Speaker 2 in the terrorist mindset of

Speaker 2 how would they do this?

Speaker 2 If I wanted to strike terrorists, hit multiple targets.

Speaker 2 kill as many people as possible. How would I do it? Yeah.
And

Speaker 2 so what are some of the questions that communities should be asking?

Speaker 4 Right. So here's a couple.
You know, and again, what I found to be extremely useful was bringing in, you know, just in special forces, and I know you guys did this in the teams as well.

Speaker 4 So before you go down range, and this is both post and pre-9-11, but before you go downrange, you would usually go over and meet with, you know, the team or the platoon that just got back.

Speaker 4 You'd sit down with them. You know, our engineer sergeant would sit with the engineer sergeant.
I would sit with the detachment commander. The intel guys would sit together.

Speaker 4 They would do, you know, one-on-one debriefs of what they saw, and the incoming guys would take that, take notes, and then we'd do kind of a collective thing. And it just was what you did.

Speaker 4 But I think you can migrate that same thing. You can bring in, for example,

Speaker 4 Duran Kaidar, an Israeli Special Forces NCO from the IDF, is traveling around the U.S. right now talking to churches about his lessons learned from responding October 7th.
7th.

Speaker 4 He was at the Nova Music Festival. He went into those neighborhoods that were slaughtered.

Speaker 4 And so he can give you really, really insights into, if you subscribe to the notion that that could happen here and is somewhat imminent, then he can tell you the things that he saw.

Speaker 4 Then you derive questions such as, how would we handle in this county

Speaker 4 an incident where groups of eight to 10 well-trained terror operatives donned first responder uniforms?

Speaker 4 How would we handle that as a community? How would we communicate that to a community? How would first responders actually talk to themselves on the fact that that was happening?

Speaker 4 And is there a way that they could overcome that with a different uniform or something? Like, I don't know the answer, but that is a legitimate question, right?

Speaker 4 Another question that came up a lot that I think is really powerful is

Speaker 4 how would our community respond if the terror attack happened in such a way that there was complete paralysis across all first responders?

Speaker 4 If you had systemic paralysis for, in all of my case study interviews, you had systemic paralysis for at least 24 to 48 hours where there was no real response.

Speaker 2 So how why was that?

Speaker 4 Well, because they were just overwhelmed. You know, in some cases, they were targeted.
In October 7, first responders, they ran right at them and they took them out.

Speaker 4 And so they, they were not, and then you had reinforcements coming. There was so much confusion.
Plus, you had the terror groups actually in first responder uniforms, right?

Speaker 4 So it was just complete chaos. And so it, and then some areas were cut off where they held terrain, you know, like in Mumbai, they held terrain.

Speaker 4 In Bedlin school, they put basketball goals with explosives on them and the children in the middle. How are you going to assault that?

Speaker 4 So these are the things that just by looking at the scenarios, it's just, you know what it is?

Speaker 4 It's so hard to look at

Speaker 4 in my assessment. I mean, I was sitting across from this special forces soldier who responded to October 7th, and he could barely form a coherent sentence.
He was so upset.

Speaker 4 And this is a guy that's been operating for decades, you know, and he couldn't even speak because of what he had seen. It's so hard to look at.

Speaker 4 But honestly, I don't know how we can avoid that, you know, and, but if we can,

Speaker 4 we can start to derive some really, really poignant questions. And we put a ton of them in the book.
But, but those are some of the ones that came up.

Speaker 3 Yeah, and some other really interesting points is, right, we know at least from the training in Afghanistan what pieces of it'll look like right so there's one piece kind of also pull from mumbai is the the the idea of these like attackers who fight to the death right because it's not like in israel you'll go and do an attack you can grab like kidnap someone and leave and go back into gaza when they come in united states they're here to do the attack and they're here to die right there's no exit plan right so now we need to talk to law enforcement like what's it like to fight someone who wants to fight to the death and how do we learn that okay we go into our community we talk to people who fought in Ramadi, in Fallujah, bring them in, have them talk,

Speaker 3 be a consultants, advisors. Tell us what it was like to fight that enemy.
We can do that. Another really big piece is suicide bombers, right? That they plan to do suicide bombings here.

Speaker 3 Well, what do we need to learn about suicide bombings? Because we don't have suicide bombings in our community, even simple things. What kind of standoff should we just have from a metal detector?

Speaker 3 We should start those standoffs now, right? Because then if the bomber gets freaked out, blows up, you save lives just by putting a standoff going up to the metal detector.

Speaker 3 So if we start understanding these things, we can put little things in place that do save lives.

Speaker 4 And I interviewed several intelligence analysts from the IDF, and I just asked them, you know, at the end, I said, what would you say to American analysts, law enforcement? And

Speaker 4 four separate ones that I interviewed, they all, first of all, they sat there for like an uncomfortable period of time.

Speaker 4 Like you could tell they were wanting to say something and then finally they were just like fuck it I'm gonna say it and what they said was essentially

Speaker 4 we live this every day like we live this in in our communities we're always facing this imminent threat it's something that we're you know we've kind of come to terms with and we were completely caught off guard like we were not ready for this we were not ready for what came our way um and they come up they came across you know got you know they came across the border and then they went back

Speaker 4 They said to me, you all have not even allowed yourself to even even think about this. They have been among you for four years.
It is going to be 10x what they did to us on October 7th.

Speaker 4 To the man and the woman, they said that.

Speaker 4 And they all were separate interviews.

Speaker 2 Wow.

Speaker 3 And when Al-Qaeda planned this, remember, the Hamas attacks they were involved in planning, they planned the U.S. Homeland attack to be 10 times the size of the Hamas attack.

Speaker 3 To them, the Hamas attacks was the dress rehearsal. So we have to remember the attack on us is going to be a lot larger.

Speaker 4 And again, I mean, I hope I'm wrong. I really do, but it's just all of the different points.

Speaker 4 It's the different points of interviews that I've conducted,

Speaker 4 including with these case studies. And if you even just consider the fact that

Speaker 4 one law enforcement officer that does a lot of tactical training around the country,

Speaker 4 he watches your show diligently and he contacted me and he said, Scott, I train all over the country. I train SWAT teams, you know, advanced tactics.

Speaker 4 He said, I'm telling you right now, we're we're not ready for this in terms of response, you know, primarily because the typical scenario that we deal with are single shooters.

Speaker 3 Yep. One out of shooters.

Speaker 4 We do not deal with teams of eight to 10 that are prepared to fight to the death. In Mumbai, for example, in 2008, there were 35 candidates that tried out that were initially groomed for the

Speaker 4 role. 10 were selected.
Nine of the 10 fought to the death. They knew that they were not coming out, right? And so we've just never faced anything with that.

Speaker 4 And then if you look at, for example, the Crocus City Music Hall or the Crocus Music Hall just recently where ISIS hit in Russia, that was a complex attack where

Speaker 4 they had incendiary devices.

Speaker 4 They set the place ablaze.

Speaker 4 They were extremely well armed with long guns and short guns, grenades, and they were taking the time to cut throats as they went, you know, and making sure that it was covered and amplified.

Speaker 4 You know, so you're talking about extremely well-trained individuals who are prepared to die and who frankly know what they're doing. And we just, we don't think about that.
We don't train that way.

Speaker 4 And again, I'm not saying that to create panic.

Speaker 4 I'm saying that that's just a pragmatic responsibility that in this day and age that we live in, particularly considering our border has been open for four years, how could we assume that has not happened?

Speaker 4 I mean, even if you didn't have the GWAT veteran reporting that you have, you know, knowing the mandate that groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda have against our, you know, demise, like,

Speaker 4 why would we not assume that that number of people are here prepared to do that?

Speaker 2 I mean, well, I mean, we've seen how effective the training is. I mean, last time Sarah was on, she gave us a clip.
We'll roll it again right now.

Speaker 2 But, I mean, in my 14 years of being over there, I've never seen a combatant move like that or shoot like that. And

Speaker 3 go ahead. Yeah, no, and then another really interesting thing when he brings up the ISIS-Russia attack.
So they trained multiple teams for that attack.

Speaker 3 And like the first team essentially got thwarted and wrapped up. So the Russians thought they stopped the plot.
And then those guys came in and basically did that attack, which is very smart.

Speaker 3 And we're not used to those kind of tactics.

Speaker 3 back up teams for these plots like that's a new thing so we can even have people in the government and we do have people like you know they picked up like eight isis guys last year and think they thwarted the homeland plot so the terrorists are also doing things to make you think, okay, you're ahead of the game, you stop this.

Speaker 3 And then they had a whole backup team that went in and successfully did that attack.

Speaker 4 And I think you have to think about, sorry, like, I'll just say this real quick.

Speaker 4 We have to assume, I think, another thing is strategic surprise.

Speaker 4 You know, if you look at, you know, if you just study these groups, they are very good at not just tactical surprise, but strategic surprise, where they surprise the nation.

Speaker 4 They surprise the larger body at scale. And when that happens, what follows is a level of institutional paralysis.
Everything's locked, everything's paralyzed, you know? And so

Speaker 4 when that happens, you've got these groups that are capable of what my buddy Dave at the agency calls not terrorism, but horrorism.

Speaker 4 Like they're able to bring a level of just unmitigated horror at an interpersonal level, and then they'll even amplify it with body camps.

Speaker 4 You know, so you're not the strategic surprise, strategic paralysis, hold ground, mass casualties, that kind of event. We've just never dealt with that here, you know, and, and I think we're due.

Speaker 4 I just do, I don't think that you're going to see one law enforcement officer that I interviewed told me, he said, I was in DC

Speaker 4 for the 9-11 attack. I was, he said, I was like two blocks from the Pentagon, right? And he said, you know, that attack happened, explosion, F-16s flying supersonic just above the treetops.

Speaker 4 And right over here, the McDonald's was still open.

Speaker 4 People are still getting food, you know, but yet when the DC sniper, two dudes in the back of a car for three weeks, he was there for that too, the entire city was paralyzed and locked down.

Speaker 4 People on a knee getting gas, you know, kids not going outside to play.

Speaker 4 And he said, that's the difference. You know, that's the difference is when there's the spectacular thing that's over there, but then there's where you live and you work and you play.

Speaker 4 And they have figured that out. If you look at their attacks over the last what 10 years every time every single time it's local complex attacks right where we live work and play

Speaker 5 that while you guys were talking you mentioned the

Speaker 5 video of the Taliban fighters who are on the range showing their tactics showing off their tactics

Speaker 5 A few things you should know about them, Sean. They were trained, most of them were trained by the U.S.

Speaker 5 Special Operations Community while we were there some were evacuated to the United States by the Biden administration and then they decided to go back

Speaker 5 they decided to go back and join the Taliban so some of those guys you see they're the returnees

Speaker 5 some of them they go they get debriefed They get briefed all over again by the Taliban, by Haqqani, and are sent back to the United States.

Speaker 5 So don't think that that individual you see in the range is only in Afghanistan. No, they're going back and forth.

Speaker 5 There are Afghan Americans from California, from Tennessee, from Florida, from New Jersey, New York,

Speaker 5 that have went back and joined the Taliban, that are serving with the Taliban right now. And these folks go back and forth.

Speaker 2 You know, you guys have, I know you briefed a couple of governors, you briefed local PDs, sheriff's offices.

Speaker 2 I don't know who else, but you know, one of the things, and I don't know if this came out of this or not, what you guys are doing, but it's like Florida seems to be kind of leading the way with this.

Speaker 2 They've set up the, what is it, the National Guard Special Missions Unit where they've, where they've utilized a lot of special operations veterans is kind of like a volunteer special unit task force, special missions unit task force.

Speaker 2 And so I'm hoping they do that here.

Speaker 2 Are you guys getting any, I mean, that just seems like a great way because even yesterday during the briefing, it was, you know, allocation of resources seemed to be like the primary concern. Right.

Speaker 2 And how are they going to, I mean, and that's something that all these communities need to be thinking about is, you know, I mean, look, Police are already understaffed because of the last four years, the defund the police thing.

Speaker 2 And so you really, you know, PDs, sheriff's offices, even at the federal state levels, you know, they need to be thinking about allocation of resources and how fast those resources are going to be used up.

Speaker 2 And so you need to be thinking about neighboring PDs, neighboring sheriff's offices, state assets, federal assets, and

Speaker 2 how we can help each other. Yeah.
You know, yeah.

Speaker 4 You can even look at, you know, so for example, some of the things that we looked at were like Western North Carolina hurricane,

Speaker 4 the chemical spill in East Palestine, Ohio.

Speaker 4 Like they're no, those are not terror events, but what they were were situations where a crisis expended the capability of the organic response force in minutes.

Speaker 2 Like that, you know,

Speaker 4 you couldn't, they couldn't respond. They could not, they were not effective.
And so what you saw were individuals and communities that were on their own.

Speaker 4 And then you also saw, and this is what I call the GWAT X factor, right?

Speaker 4 You saw these global war on terror individuals responding, you know, either from the local area or even trucking in and responding.

Speaker 4 And it started with the Afghanistan collapse, but it's been happening, the fires in West Maui, the Western North Carolina hurricanes. So there's kind of some new stuff that's happening.

Speaker 4 And I guess where I'm going with that, Sean, is that I think We have to look at this level of threat. And it's kind of like I said, you either believe it's real or you don't.

Speaker 4 If you do, then you have to give it its credit and give the enemy a vote that this is a, this is, this thing will massively exceed our organic capabilities within minutes.

Speaker 4 And if that's the case, then I think we have to have a paradigm shift in our private-public partnership.

Speaker 4 The government and the communities, the government at all levels and the communities have to work together on a scale we've never done before and that we usually only do after bang.

Speaker 4 I'm saying, and this is why I think Sarah's sense of urgency is so compelling. There's just not a lot of time.

Speaker 4 I think we have to assume that the four years of an open border, eye off the ball, like there's

Speaker 4 such an advance to us of where we are. So a lot of this is how do we plan together? How do we work together? How do we look at global war on terror veterans being a part of this?

Speaker 4 You talked about the Florida piece, and I don't think you'll mind me sharing this. Like, you know, Sheriff Naco is in Pasco County, is really good at engaging local veterans.

Speaker 4 And not just for their analytical skills on the Intel side, but also their operational skills. Like Sarah said, they fought in Ramadi.
They fought in Fallujah.

Speaker 4 They know how to do a threat vulnerability assessment of schools. So I just think it's kind of all hands on deck, man, honestly.

Speaker 4 But the asset that we have that we are not properly utilizing, our communities. Our communities have a lot of potential.

Speaker 4 The top-down government has got to figure that out. They've got to include them in the discussion.
And I think it's the best last chance we have.

Speaker 2 I mean,

Speaker 2 GUI veterans are, I mean, you've already covered this several times just on this specific show, but

Speaker 2 very

Speaker 2 open to help. They want to help.
And so yesterday in the briefing, you had brought up, expect blockades, expect not to be able to reach

Speaker 2 the venues. And so, you know, and I had brought up, hey, like, you know, I understand you guys, you know, you don't have all the resources that you need, but you can utilize local community.

Speaker 2 I mean, I brought it up, you know, when I was in the SIAL teams in 2004, we

Speaker 2 16 guys, you know, 16 guys went into Athens and we

Speaker 2 developed five routes into every Olympic venue in Athens, outside of Athens, how we would get there. And not only that, I mean,

Speaker 2 guys that have done the the job, you know,

Speaker 2 I mean, how many times were you infilling a target and it was blocked and then you had to deviate, find another route in? I mean, we're really good at this type of stuff.

Speaker 2 And so even if you can't allegate your officers to develop that plan, you can reach out to the community, have your community find the qualified people within the community. They're out there.

Speaker 2 There's a ton of them here, you know, to develop just the routes, just the routes. And I mean, and I know you're saying like, we don't have time, we don't have time.
It's going to take time. It will.

Speaker 2 And you have to start somewhere. So

Speaker 2 I don't want it to seem like it's an impossible task. I mean, I think the important thing is just start.
I think it's just a start utilizing the community. Develop the routes.

Speaker 2 You had talked about the communication piece and that it would be very likely there would be no comms.

Speaker 2 Well, immediately I brought up, hey, you can get comms, order some mini starlinks, and at least, at least you have communication from on-site where the attack happened to headquarters, to the sheriff's department, to the PD, to whatever, you know, and that's right there.

Speaker 2 You have open comms.

Speaker 4 And this is why we did the Gathering Stormbook the way we did is because like exactly what you're doing is the way we present it.

Speaker 4 So we like pose these questions and like, how can your community come together and start addressing these? I mean, look at how you arrived at that solution based on tactical experience where?

Speaker 2 In Athens.

Speaker 4 But that's all over the country. I mean, look again, look at what the GWAT guys and girls did in the response to Western North Carolina.

Speaker 4 I was just up there interviewing a lady named Pastor Glenda, and she ministers to two congregations way up in the mountains where my family's from. And we went up there and we were going around.

Speaker 4 And I asked her, I said, what was support like in the first two weeks of the, and it was devastating.

Speaker 4 She said, had it not been for the veterans, we wouldn't even have had food resupply in the first two weeks. It was the only people we saw from the outside were veterans.
And somehow they got to us.

Speaker 4 And my point is, that is going to happen no matter what.

Speaker 4 These GUI veterans, they have spent 20 years of their life doing this kind of work in a distributed, connected kind of way, and they're going to do it no matter what.

Speaker 4 If there's institutional paralysis, if there's a gap, they're going to fill it. So why not on your table exercises exercises at a community level in the EOC,

Speaker 4 invite them in,

Speaker 4 huddle around the table and make it a true private, public conversation around a community problem? You know, and I just think that nothing but goodness is going to come out of that.

Speaker 4 Like what you facilitated yesterday in my assessment is exactly the model of what we need.

Speaker 2 Well, it gets people thinking. And so I want to go, I kind of just want to go over everything that we talked about there yesterday, like not only

Speaker 2 not only allocation of actual personnel but but resources medical supplies yeah i mean

Speaker 2 sarah and boone just did a big event at a local church here where

Speaker 2 sounds like not even just local churches in within this county were here, but all throughout the state came to listen to them speak.

Speaker 2 And so a lot, there are a lot of people that are taking this seriously that, and they just, you know, they might not know the questions questions to ask.

Speaker 2 I mean, you go to a church down here, everybody's packing heat. I mean, everybody's armed, everybody's packing heat.
But, you know,

Speaker 2 do they understand basic medical skills?

Speaker 2 Even just slapping a tourniquet on, you know, and so maybe PDs,

Speaker 2 I don't know who would fund it. I don't know who would fund it.

Speaker 2 But instead of, I mean, EMS is probably going to have even a tougher time doing, getting there to triage and treat victims and casualties.

Speaker 2 And so that being.

Speaker 3 They won't be able to. Remember, they have to wait till the scene is clear of a threat.

Speaker 2 Even after that, even after, though, there's going to be traffic jams, roads are going to be blocked. Even if they didn't block the attack,

Speaker 2 there's going to be traffic jams where you can't move because everybody's going to be in paralysis. And so

Speaker 2 even if it's just, hey, let's get 100 pernicates and stash them in different churches. Let's get 100,

Speaker 2 you know, or chest seals or

Speaker 2 bandages, all that kind of stuff. Because even if EMS doesn't arrive, guess what? There's going to be medical professionals there that are survivors that will be able to treat.
And

Speaker 2 if that communication can even just come out, you know, because it's not 100% the comms are going to be shut down, but

Speaker 2 if the department, you know, if they get a call and they say, hey, by the way,

Speaker 2 there's an entire

Speaker 2 medical cachet of supplies stashed

Speaker 2 in the janitor closet at a mall or

Speaker 2 maybe you make it just open, just like they do with AEDs and that type of equipment. Hey, here's the medical supplies.

Speaker 2 We can't get there. Roads are blocked.
You guys,

Speaker 2 we set up for this.

Speaker 4 Yeah, absolutely. And it's not that hard to do because you can actually have these conversations.

Speaker 4 And I've sat in and participated in quite a few of them. And you don't see people in there panicking or wringing their hands.

Speaker 4 You see empowered neighbors just having a pragmatic conversation about a potential threat. But guess what?

Speaker 4 The worst thing that's going to happen probably if you go through that exercise is A, you're going to be connected more to your neighbor.

Speaker 4 And B, you're probably going to be ready for other contingencies that might happen. And I'll give you a case in point.
I was interviewing some EOC representatives who responded to a flood in Ohio.

Speaker 4 They never saw it coming. It crested over its banks more than it had ever flooded, little bitty town, like 20,000 people.

Speaker 4 And one of the EOC, the Emergency Operations Center members, was telling me that it was flooding so bad that they brought in firefighters from all over the surrounding counties, right, to come help.

Speaker 4 Well, they were doing boat rescue. So they all brought their boats, but none of their radios communicated to each other.

Speaker 4 So they had to put one fire department guy from the the town in each boat so that they had a radio that worked.

Speaker 4 And it took them a long time to figure that out, but that was the solution they came up with.

Speaker 4 The point was, had you just done an exercise ahead of time where you brought those folks together, you would have already sorted that out, right? And those are the kinds of things that when you add to

Speaker 4 the paralysis, just the horrorism that could be brought by this, trying to solve a problem like that.

Speaker 4 could take you days because of the trauma and just the, you know, the inability to function and move so i just think that the more that a lot of it is the communities coming together again private public it's got to be private sector too it's got to be those g watt veterans it's got to be members of the community that normally maybe wouldn't be in there and finding ways to talk left of bang

Speaker 4 that's the critical part because right of bang everybody's going to be willing well intended and coming together but zero capability you build trust when risk is low you leverage it when the stakes are high i mean and then in even just training, and I'm not talking about high tactics, clearing rooms, that kind of stuff.

Speaker 2 I mean, if you're a community leader,

Speaker 2 if you're a minister, if you're a pastor, if you're a teacher, if you're a principal, if you're a manager of a Publix, a grocery store, you know, I mean,

Speaker 2 a little bit of medical training can go a very,

Speaker 4 very long way.

Speaker 2 And there's always people that are interested in doing this. I mean, especially churches here, very involved in this stuff.
I mean, I mean, covenant shooting not too long ago just happened.

Speaker 2 There was another one in Antioch, just happened a couple months ago, you know, and

Speaker 2 people are tuned in right now.

Speaker 2 And so use that.

Speaker 2 Get your people trained up. You know, at least

Speaker 2 it's...

Speaker 2 It's that that can mean life or death for

Speaker 2 a whole number of people.

Speaker 3 There's actually an amazing case study.

Speaker 3 If you actually look at the Las Vegas shooting where we lost, you know, of course, hundreds of lives, they say 70% of the people who survived survived because the people in their vicinity had first aid training and a lot of it was former military members.

Speaker 3 But those citizens stepped up and did the initial triage and the initial aid and it saved 70%

Speaker 3 of those people. I mean, that's a huge number and that alone should just get get communities involved.
Hey, if we know how to do this, look at the number of lives you save.

Speaker 4 And again, to that, just a couple other lessons learned from that same event, right?

Speaker 4 A concert, the Route 19 Harvest Festival or Route 91 Harvest Festival, tens of thousands of people.

Speaker 4 Single shooter from the Mandalay Hotel, right? I forget however many weapons he had. It was more than 10 with bump stocks.

Speaker 4 But while he was doing that, it took police over an hour to get into his room and he was already dead. An hour.
Single shooter.

Speaker 4 So again, if you just look at the level of paralysis that happens from that, you know, I mean, you add to that seven to eight, 10 well-trained operatives like you saw in that video, right?

Speaker 4 Who then hit multiple nodes at one time and who have a pre-existing mandate to hold terrain with explosives and children out of school.

Speaker 4 If you're not tabletopping that, you know, if we're not laying that out on a tabletop exercise and SWAT teams talking through that with others, and what would we do if there were two locations that were locked down with hostages?

Speaker 4 And you've exceeded scoping capacity immediately. So, you know, how are you calling for? What does that look like? So, I just think that, and these are just, you need

Speaker 4 the other thing that came out of this, Sean, we talked about yesterday. I believe every emergency operations center, county sheriff, should have a red cell.

Speaker 4 They should have a red cell that looks at threat-based scenario work because both exist. And start looking at that and unpacking these different scenarios.
Unpack October 7.

Speaker 4 Bring someone over from the IDF and let them give you a leadership professional development on what happened that day. And then ask yourself, what should our red cell be looking at?

Speaker 4 And then the last thing I'll say on this,

Speaker 4 state and local leaders, we don't have to wait on the federal government to authorize resources. Yes, you need it for reporting and things like that for agents to look at.

Speaker 4 But in terms terms of resources and just training allocation, after I was on with you and we talked about this, there was a law enforcement officer from the greater New Orleans area who reached out

Speaker 4 and petitioned his leadership for immediate counterterror training. It was denied.
This was one month before the January 1 attack.

Speaker 2 You know, and just I want to expound on the red cell stuff because I think a lot of people don't understand what red cell. Red cell is basically penetration testing for whatever.

Speaker 2 Could be venues, events, whatever. And so you're basically penetration testing, finding weaknesses within that venue.

Speaker 2 And even that, you know, we brought up, hey, you don't have to send, you don't have to allocate a bunch of on-duty officers to do penetration testing to different venues. You could have...

Speaker 2 off-duty guys do it. You could have, you know, deputize, whoever just, hey, I just want to let you know, my guy walked in, had a gun, had a knife, had this, had that.
Nobody checked me.

Speaker 2 I'm an off-duty cop. I'm allowed to carry anywhere.

Speaker 2 And I just want you to

Speaker 2 hold the venues accountable.

Speaker 2 Stuff like that. Like you were just talking about the basketball game at Chapel Hill.
And,

Speaker 2 you know, I'd like to kind of wrap this up here, but I think, you know, another thing,

Speaker 2 the most important thing is open the discussion within the community. And when I say that, it doesn't mean you have to have a podcast and scare the living shit out of everybody.

Speaker 2 Like, this is going to scare a lot of people. You know, it's also going to create a lot of discussion.
And I'm not trying to say, hey, cause mass hysteria, but open the discussion.

Speaker 2 in your communities. And even if it's just, hey, we're aware of the potential terrorism threat and we're working on ways to mitigate that and to minimize it as much as possible.

Speaker 2 You don't have to talk about what you're doing. You don't have to be extremely descriptive of what may come like what we just did, but it opens the discussion.
It gets out on

Speaker 2 different channels. It gets out on the media.
It gets out on social.

Speaker 2 One thing that we can, I think we can all agree on is these guys, they look for soft targets. And so if you harden your community, then guess what?

Speaker 2 They see that because these guys always surveil before they hit. They always do surveillance before they hit.
That's surveillance on the internet. That's surveillance in person, of venues, of people.

Speaker 2 And so,

Speaker 2 if you create that discussion, however you do it,

Speaker 2 it gives the appearance that

Speaker 2 let's not hit this community. They're getting their shit together.
It's a discussion. They're preparing for it.
It pushes it over to the next county, pushes it over to the next state.

Speaker 2 If all the states do it, maybe we stay in Europe. I don't know.
But, you know, my concern, my biggest concern is obviously my community.

Speaker 2 And I think everybody listening, that's their biggest concern too. And so open the discussion,

Speaker 2 get your citizens aware of it. And that also, it also, you know, gives off the appearance, not not just the appearance, that you're actually doing something to combat this.

Speaker 2 And you become a harder target. They want to use you targets.

Speaker 3 Yeah, and there's precedence for this. So remember, the Pulse nightclub shooter, him and his wife did their surveillance on, you know, Disney Springs, the downtown Disney area.

Speaker 3 They chose it as the target. When he went to do the attack, right, he had the gun in his stroller, and then there was too much Disney security that day.

Speaker 3 He got back in the car, drove around, thought of another venue, and then picked Pulse later on, right? Horrible thing happened.

Speaker 3 But Disney, having their security and upping their posture from the time he surveilled and said, I'm going to do it, to going back and having more security, he said, okay, this isn't worth it for me.

Speaker 3 I'm not going to be able to do what I want to do, right? That is a case study of how it happens. Now, we all harden, right? We make all these targets more difficult.

Speaker 3 We keep thwarting them in that way. And remember, when people have to change the venue of their target, it might not be the same day like he did.
They might have to do a week later.

Speaker 3 That gives law enforcement one more week to maybe identify him and thwart him, right? Because we want to thwart this plot. We want to stop it from happening.

Speaker 3 Buying time and making the terrorists have to hide out longer, spend more money, that helps us get them faster.

Speaker 4 But if you're waiting for something from the top down, I don't think thwarting is an option.

Speaker 4 I think thwarting, just like throughout our history, it is usually community solutions that deal with a crisis.

Speaker 4 And certainly, you know, getting left of bang, I think has got to start at a grassroots level. And we're capable of it.
I mean, it's already happening.

Speaker 4 I think now it's just a matter of kind of, you know, sharing, you know, the, just kind of sharing the news on it.

Speaker 4 And one other thing that we're doing that seems to be working pretty well is we're putting people in the task force pineapple signal room

Speaker 4 on signal that started with the Afghanistan withdrawal. But now, you know, you got sheriff deputies from Williamson County and.

Speaker 4 Pasco County and EOC responders from Chicago, and they're networked on this signal app, and they can talk and get to know each other now.

Speaker 4 We can broadcast training opportunities that are out there, things that are coming out.

Speaker 4 It's pretty cool. And again, a lot of it started from these Global War on Terror veterans that just know how to stay connected and they move fast.

Speaker 2 You know, I think bottom line is these guys want to succeed. They want to succeed.
And so if you harden your community, harden your school, harden your church, harden your household.

Speaker 2 I mean, I know I have a whole team of security now. I know you guys do too.
And, you know, when you do that, it's, yeah,

Speaker 2 let's go somewhere where we're guaranteed success. That's how they think.
That's how, that's just how they think.

Speaker 2 And so harden up the community, harden up the churches, harden up the schools, harden up the venues, harden up your households, you know, and

Speaker 2 set that tone so that they see that and they will

Speaker 2 likely move on. And model what right looks like.

Speaker 4 That's doing the right thing. I think that models what right looks like to the federal government and to decision makers at the higher levels, right?

Speaker 4 I mean, we have a history of doing that in this country.

Speaker 4 So, and this is no different.

Speaker 5 Can I say something, Sean?

Speaker 5 This was an amazing conversation, by the way. I was listening, but

Speaker 5 you know, in 2025, Americans should not have to live in fear of IDs and suicide bombings in America. And this is unfortunate, but it doesn't have to happen if everyone does their part.

Speaker 5 I mean, you guys are talking about how to protect these communities here, all the right things. But everyone else need to do their part as well.

Speaker 5 And what I mean by that is there's no kind of hiding it anymore. These guys are claiming to do this in the name of Islam.

Speaker 5 I'm a Muslim, and I know for a fact that their actions has nothing to do with Islam. These guys have hijacked Islam and Islamic symbols, as I said earlier.

Speaker 5 Why is Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Oman, Egypt, these Muslim-majority countries, why are they not taking the lead and stopping these guys there?

Speaker 5 I mean, we're doing everything we can to try to stop it here, but these guys are killing Christians in the name of Islam. They're killing Jews in the name of Islam.

Speaker 5 You know, Saudi Arabia, the crown prince there, Muhammad bin Salman, he has this project, this vision, vision 2030.

Speaker 5 Basically, he's trying to show this moderate face of Islam and to show that what these individuals, these groups are doing has nothing to do with Islam.

Speaker 5 But at the same time, he's not taking any action, and I hope he does,

Speaker 5 against Qatar when they give offices to Hamas, the Taliban. UAE, you know, claims, UAE

Speaker 5 opened up a church in Dubai, and they claim they're so moderates. And

Speaker 5 I know the people in UAE are, but at the same time, you know, just opening up one church doesn't mean that everything is good

Speaker 5 and everything is fine.

Speaker 5 UAE leadership is meeting with the leader of the Haqqani network. You know, this hypocrisy is being noticed.

Speaker 5 And they're not, these leaders are not going to get away with it unless they take action now. Again, all of these terrorist networks are doing this in the name of Islam.

Speaker 5 So if it is not, and I'm saying it's not, I'm speaking out against it. These leaders, and I'm not a leader of a Muslim country, you know, I'm an American Muslim.
Those individuals are. They need to.

Speaker 5 And I hope Crown Prince Muhammad Salman takes action against all of his little neighbors.

Speaker 3 You know, and the other thing we have to be honest about, we're asking communities, prepare yourself, protect yourselves.

Speaker 3 But if we went after the senior leaders of these plots, where they're living in Afghanistan, where they're training these fighters in Afghanistan and dealing with it there, it wouldn't be here, right?

Speaker 3 So, the fact that we're not striking in Afghanistan right now is a problem. The fact that we are acting like the terrorism fight is only in Syria, only in Somalia, is a lie.

Speaker 3 It is in Afghanistan, and we need to be striking these senior leaders who are plotting against us now. That's how you thwart the plot.

Speaker 5 And one other thing, in America, don't come and tell us, the Muslims here, that, no, these are goodbuns.

Speaker 5 Don't Don't tell us that when we come and tell you these are terrorists who are killing in the name of Islam, but they have nothing to do with us. Don't tell us this is our culture.

Speaker 5 Don't tell us the Taliban are part of us and that's our culture. Treating women like cattle is part of our culture.

Speaker 2 It's not that.

Speaker 4 One thing I'd like to just close with is

Speaker 4 You know, you see what went on today with this discussion and what we did yesterday.

Speaker 4 And most of the people that are taking this discussion on are veterans or intelligence alumni who served in the Global War on Terror, 20-year war, right?

Speaker 2 And you know a lot of them. I know a lot of them.

Speaker 4 We lost a lot of friends over there, but it was less than, what, 1% of the American population that fought that war, deployed multiple times, lots of wounded, lots of killed.

Speaker 4 And then even those of us that didn't, you know, necessarily sustain wounds or whatever.

Speaker 4 You know, you gave up a lot to fight that war and to do what our country asked us to do.

Speaker 4 Most of us came back from the war and made a concerted effort to put the war behind us and move on.

Speaker 4 And then it was just a few years later that we were sucked back in because our buddy who was a commando was being targeted.

Speaker 4 Or as the country fell, like the people we cared about, many of us are alive because of some of these guys and girls. Like we stepped in when the government didn't.

Speaker 4 But one of the things I just want to leave with is

Speaker 4 I get a sense sometimes that like the people, the veterans that are talking about this actually even want to be doing this. I mean,

Speaker 4 there's a way that we were brought into this that I think most people, even supporters, don't understand. You know, you had Ben Owen on your show, right? And he and Jess, and they

Speaker 4 helped a young girl named Arizo get to the United States, one among many. She's the daughter of a commando who'd been a commando from the very beginning, right? And so they made a decision.

Speaker 4 Ben and Jess have expended their kids' college funds, like so many other folks, to help.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 4 this is what

Speaker 4 Jess heard that made her decide to do this action.

Speaker 4 And what I just want to, I just want people to understand: this is what was impacting veterans from 2021 and what they've been listening to and watching for the last four years.

Speaker 4 After all that they did in combat, after all that we've asked of them, this is what they're inundated with even now, every day.

Speaker 4 That's Arizo's mom as her dad is being tortured out in the alley.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 4 put our veterans through that for four straight years.

Speaker 4 They did what we asked them to do.

Speaker 4 They answered the call. And,

Speaker 4 you know, it's time, man.

Speaker 4 It's time that we bring the government and the veteran population together on this and that we reconcile this and we get this into the hands of the government the way it's supposed to be and it gets handled, but it is not right now.

Speaker 4 And we've got to, this is hurting a lot of people. It is hurting a lot of veterans.

Speaker 4 They don't know how to hang up the phone. They don't know how to stop doing this and they won't.
And it's killing them. You know, it's killing them.
And it's not a fair thing to put at their feet.

Speaker 4 They've done enough. We need to find a way, bring the two worlds together, and let's fix it.
But right now,

Speaker 4 you're the only voice that's even putting it out there.

Speaker 4 And that's got to change.

Speaker 2 Legendary, we want to close with a thing. What do you got? Yes.
So this, thank you.

Speaker 5 This is part of a letter written by an Afghan commando, a general.

Speaker 5 His name is Khaled Amiri. He is leading the resistance in Afghanistan right now, since 2021.
I'll read part of his letter. It says,

Speaker 5 The strength of any military force relies on six principles, leadership, discipline, institution building, technology and weaponry, strategy and support systems.

Speaker 5 Taliban factions and militias are not only unfamiliar with these principles, but the equipment and weapon left behind by Afghan armed forces are inadequate to meet the group's long-term needs.

Speaker 5 At best, the Taliban remain an insurgent group lacking the capacity for institution building and governance.

Speaker 5 The armed struggle of Afghanistan's freedom fighters over the past three years and the significant casualties they have inflicted on Taliban militias demonstrate the group's vulnerability in military and intelligence terms.

Speaker 5 A powerful and united anti-Taliban front could bring the Taliban to their knees.

Speaker 5 Taliban leaders and militias are unfamiliar with the diverse languages and cultures of Afghan society and will never gain national or popular legitimacy.

Speaker 5 The people of Afghanistan, both in cities and rural areas, view them as occupiers.

Speaker 5 The populace is fed up with the repressive anti-woman and anti-freedom rule of the Taliban, and it will not be long before our people's uprising will drive them out of our land.

Speaker 5 This is written by General Khaled Namiri, and he is, as I said, leading the resistance against the Taliban. This is not, he's in the fight.
He tells you that the Taliban are very much defeatable.

Speaker 5 President Saleh says the Taliban are very much defeatable. I hope somebody in the administration, in the new administration, listens to this letter that I just read and takes action.

Speaker 5 This is something that we can't solve.

Speaker 5 It will be a tragedy, a very sad tragedy, if the guys that we

Speaker 5 trained in Afghanistan to fight terrorists,

Speaker 5 we end up fighting those guys here in America.

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 Legend, Sarah, Scott, I really appreciate you guys coming. And what I appreciate more is what happened yesterday where you guys briefed up my community.
And

Speaker 2 I just want to say thank you for that. And in closing,

Speaker 2 for everybody that's planning at home, you know, community leaders, sheriffs, chief of police,

Speaker 2 anybody. You know, I remember Eric Prince said this on my show.
Professionals think about logistics, amateurs think about tactics. You have to think about logistics first.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 with that being said, thank you again for coming and

Speaker 2 see you soon.

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