Speaker 1: Army training exercise lasting for two months across seven states
Speaker 1: called jade Helm fifteen is underway.
Speaker 2: So what is jade Helm fifteen. It's realistic military training
Speaker 2: taking place simultaneously in seven states from southern California to Texas.
Speaker 2: Over eight weeks, the nation's elite special forces will practice
Speaker 2: unconventional warfare. Now to a Texas sized conspiracy theory that
Speaker 2: an upcoming Pentagon training exercise is actually part of a
Speaker 2: plan to impose martial.
Speaker 1: Law, I do not trust the government that is in
Speaker 1: power right now.
Speaker 3: Conspiracy theorists went crazy, fearing the entire thing was actually
Speaker 3: a guys to impose martial law, take guns and rights away.
Speaker 1: I'm John Ceipher and I'm Jerry O'Shea. I served in
Speaker 1: the CIA's Clandestine Service for twenty eight years, living undercover
Speaker 1: all around the world.
Speaker 3: And in my thirty three years with the CIA, I
Speaker 3: served in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.
Speaker 1: And we don't usually look at it this way. We
Speaker 1: created conspiracies.
Speaker 3: In our operations. We got people to believe things that
Speaker 3: weren't true.
Speaker 1: Now we're investigating the conspiracy theories we see in the
Speaker 1: news almost every day.
Speaker 3: Will break them down for you. To determine whether they
Speaker 3: could be real or whether we're being manipulated.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Mission implausible.
Speaker 4: John was saying, you have a story about a congressman.
Speaker 1: The one thing I can say is that all CIA
Speaker 1: people who worked overseas have lots of stories about lots
Speaker 1: of congressman senators. But this is a good one.
Speaker 3: A congressman shows up. It's in a big European country,
Speaker 3: and director's CIA gets a call from him and he's
Speaker 3: really angry and he's like, how come you guys aren't
Speaker 3: briefing me, and like, we don't even know he was
Speaker 3: in country. So it turns out he was in another
Speaker 3: city and his wife had to go for some sort
Speaker 3: of medical procedure that he couldn't get in the US
Speaker 3: experimental thing. I don't know. So in any case, this
Speaker 3: guy had figured out that if he did a certain
Speaker 3: amount of time every day, let's say a one hour,
Speaker 3: if he was brief for one hour, he could write
Speaker 3: off the whole trip and have the taxpayer pay for it,
Speaker 3: because then it was official. And so he scheduled a
Speaker 3: series of briefings on everything from soybeans to green energy
Speaker 3: to everything, and eventually he gets around to well, I
Speaker 3: need an intelligence brief because he wants to get at
Speaker 3: least sixty minutes in. So he complains to the director
Speaker 3: that how come I'm not getting an intelligence brief. We
Speaker 3: didn't know he's there. So I jump on an airplane.
Speaker 3: I fly off to this other city. I see him,
Speaker 3: and just before we go into the bubble, right this
Speaker 3: secure area where they tell the story, we're shaking hands,
Speaker 3: he's talking. It's me and another agency guy, and we
Speaker 3: walk into the bubble. We close the door and I
Speaker 3: turn around and I'm about to like say, well, you know, sorry, sir.
Speaker 3: I came down to his kirt because I could. He
Speaker 3: sticks his finger under my nose and says, who the
Speaker 3: fuck do you think you are? Nobody voted for you?
Speaker 3: How dare you? And this is a guy who regularly
Speaker 3: talked about easting government money, fraud and abuse, and this
Speaker 3: guy's committing fraud and abuse right. He's only there so
Speaker 3: he gets a free hotel and free flight and free
Speaker 3: food while he's there. And so I sit him down.
Speaker 3: We talk about the terrorism stuff, and I'm twenty minutes
Speaker 3: into my one hour briefing and I won't name the country,
Speaker 3: but he says, so is there any Nazi architecture around
Speaker 3: here that I could go look at at, Like, yeah,
Speaker 3: there is, so I told him, like some places he
Speaker 3: could go to visit Nazi architecture, you know, from Albert
Speaker 3: Spear in the in this particular city, and he like
Speaker 3: throws me out after like thirty minutes.
Speaker 1: I've had lots of briefing with congressman and centers were
Speaker 1: clearly that they were there to shop or they were there, yeah,
Speaker 1: for some other reason, and they came for their briefing.
Speaker 1: They're not the slightest bit interested. Sometimes they even know
Speaker 1: what country they're in. I don't want to suggest that
Speaker 1: for all of them, because sometimes some centers and congressmen
Speaker 1: coming in they're very engaged.
Speaker 3: Well most of them, I think are really well clued died.
Speaker 1: So today we're going to talk about a conspiracy that
Speaker 1: has the name jade Helm, about folks in Texas believing
Speaker 1: that the federal government in the US Army and US
Speaker 1: military might be involved in trying to essentially overthrow the
Speaker 1: state government in Texas. And in fact, John Stewart did
Speaker 1: a segment on this jade Helm military exercise while it
Speaker 1: was happening.
Speaker 2: Well, the military says, it's just training soldiers for the
Speaker 2: realities of war. Critics say the army is preparing for
Speaker 2: modern day martial law.
Speaker 5: Some are calling it a Texas takeover.
Speaker 6: You know who's calling it a Texas takeover?
Speaker 4: Lone star lunatics.
Speaker 6: There's no Texas takeover. The United States government already control
Speaker 6: since like the eighteen forties, it's not like this is
Speaker 6: being taken seriously by anyone who holds actual power.
Speaker 7: On Tuesday, Governor Greg Abbott ordered the Texas State Guard
Speaker 7: to monitor military personnel movements and training exercise schedules.
Speaker 6: Oh dear lord, yet in other ways to Texas funds
Speaker 6: that could have been spent on actual threats like your
Speaker 6: infamous Chainsaw massacres.
Speaker 3: And not only is the US military going to invade
Speaker 3: Texas and parts of the Southwest, they're going to also
Speaker 3: go around and collect everybody's guns. They were going to
Speaker 3: create huge concentration camps. Yeah, basically all conspiratorial hell was
Speaker 3: going to break loose.
Speaker 1: I don't think there's a list of who has guns.
Speaker 1: I think that's actually a law in the United States
Speaker 1: and certainly in Texas. So right, like go to everyone's.
Speaker 8: House, Although in Texas isn't the list just everyone in Texas.
Speaker 3: No, not just people, but like the friggin governor of
Speaker 3: Texas and the Texas State legislature was buying into this.
Speaker 1: Apparently there was a town hall meeting and bass drop
Speaker 1: in which they shouted down an army colonel. They just
Speaker 1: refused to believe anything he said. Here's a clip of that.
Speaker 9: Well, Jaye Helm is simply just a challenging eight week
Speaker 9: training exercise for unconventional warfare, and it's an exercise that
Speaker 9: will be conducted throughout Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and Newahaw.
Speaker 9: Jade Helm is United States Special Operations Command. It's a
Speaker 9: sponsored exercise to improve Special Operations Forces unconventional warfare capability
Speaker 9: as part of the national security strategy.
Speaker 10: Right are the people's overwhelming opposition to this? Ours a
Speaker 10: law program with the Commissioner's Court considered reversing their invitation
Speaker 10: to these guys, and would.
Speaker 2: The court be offended?
Speaker 1: I told the colonel that I didn't believe.
Speaker 10: In the single word that he just said.
Speaker 3: Thank you for your question.
Speaker 9: This institution right here has been around for over two
Speaker 9: hundred and forty years. I've transitioned in this uniform, various
Speaker 9: shades of it under five presidents, all of it peacefully.
Speaker 9: You may have issues with the federal government, you may
Speaker 9: have issues with the administration, so be it okay. But
Speaker 9: this institution right here has been with you for over
Speaker 9: two hundred and forty year period.
Speaker 3: So let's get into it with Dan the Moth from
Speaker 3: the Washington Post. You are a distinguished journalist from the
Speaker 3: Washington Post. You've reported from over thirty countries. You spent
Speaker 3: a lot of time in one of my favorite places, Afghanistan,
Speaker 3: embedded with the Marines. And I see you've also won
Speaker 3: a Pulitzer as part of the team that did January sixth.
Speaker 11: Yeah, I'm going on about closing on sixteen years of
Speaker 11: covering the US military. I've been at the Post since
Speaker 11: twenty fourteen, so I guess I'm going on almost ten there.
Speaker 1: So Dan, can you just give us a quick overview
Speaker 1: about the Jade Helm exercise and the conspiracy that came
Speaker 1: out of that exercise.
Speaker 11: It was a joint special operations exercise that would have
Speaker 11: included forces for multiple services, was run by Army Special
Speaker 11: Operations Command, twelve hundred people spread out of earned the
Speaker 11: span of six seven eight states. So you're not talking
Speaker 11: about an invasion force. Here, you're talking about a relatively
Speaker 11: small force that gets spun around into preparation for martial law,
Speaker 11: and this idea the President Obama was trying to take
Speaker 11: over Texas or not leave the office.
Speaker 3: But it also got wider than that, didn't it. I Mean,
Speaker 3: we look at a lot of conspiracy theories on this podcast,
Speaker 3: but this one particularly also got into serious political discussions
Speaker 3: with the Texas State Legislature, the Texas governor saying he
Speaker 3: was going to use the Texas State Militia to like
Speaker 3: shadow or cover the US military to make sure they
Speaker 3: didn't take over the country or take over Texas. You've
Speaker 3: got people in Congress Louis Gohmer talking about this as
Speaker 3: though it was serious. So what is your sense of
Speaker 3: I'll say, people who should know better getting involved in
Speaker 3: this and pandering or playing or believing it.
Speaker 11: I think the discussion got broad enough where officials like
Speaker 11: Governor Abbott chose the way in, and I think weighing
Speaker 11: in would not have been a surprise. More the way
Speaker 11: that he weighed in, raising eyebrows.
Speaker 4: By directing the State Guard to monitor the operations.
Speaker 12: Don't mess with Texas. Is Republican Governor Greg Gabbott's message
Speaker 12: to the Pentagon. Abbott called out his state Guard to
Speaker 12: keep an eye on US special operations sports is. The
Speaker 12: governor says he wants to make sure Texans constitutional rights,
Speaker 12: private property rights, and civil liberties will not be infringed
Speaker 12: during an upcoming military war game called jade Helm fifteen.
Speaker 1: You know, it's an American thing that's been long held
Speaker 1: that there's this sort of fear of big government. But
Speaker 1: in this case, it was some bad actors like Alex
Speaker 1: Jones and others who pushed theories that this was a
Speaker 1: psychological operation. It was to force citizens into internment camps,
Speaker 1: to seize people's guns, to round up political dissidents. When
Speaker 1: I think even other bad actors saw what was happening
Speaker 1: in Texas and how this blew up into something really big.
Speaker 1: Sort of the stupidity and damage that someone like Alex
Speaker 1: Jones could create with these conspiracies. It seems to me
Speaker 1: that in many ways it could have been a roadmap
Speaker 1: for others like the Russians and foreign opportunities. This is
Speaker 1: in twenty fift I think the Russians even created a
Speaker 1: Facebook page.
Speaker 8: Remember all those Facebook posts about jade Helm a few
Speaker 8: years ago, it turns out some of them might have
Speaker 8: been planted by Russia and.
Speaker 4: The former ahead of the CIA things.
Speaker 8: A Texas reaction may have been the green light for
Speaker 8: Russia to wrap up campaigns in America.
Speaker 13: That Russian bots in the American alt right media convinced
Speaker 13: most many Texans was an Obama plan to round up
Speaker 13: political dissidents. I'm figuring the Russians to saying we can
Speaker 13: go big time. At that point, I think they made
Speaker 13: the decision we're going to play in the electoral process.
Speaker 1: Let's take a break, we'll be right back.
Speaker 3: And Rebecca So I did a simple back of the
Speaker 3: envelope calculation. It's like fifteen different conspiracy theories that compete
Speaker 3: and conflict. But one of the ones that seemed to
Speaker 3: be really neuralgic was that foreign troops were being brought in, right,
Speaker 3: And there were ten thousand Chinese troops working with the
Speaker 3: American Special Forces hiding in abandoned Walmart And what they
Speaker 3: intended to do was to start taking people's guns, right.
Speaker 3: And I think Alex Jones said famously that HELM stood
Speaker 3: for homeland eradication of local militias. And I did the calculation,
Speaker 3: how many just in Texas. How many households are there?
Speaker 3: There are eleven million. And if you've got ten thousand
Speaker 3: Chinese troops and it takes you know, you've been with
Speaker 3: the military lot. It takes five guys three hours to
Speaker 3: clear a house looking for weapons. It would take thirty
Speaker 3: years the Chinese troops that don't speak English, and the
Speaker 3: US force is working somehow with these guys thirty years
Speaker 3: to do this, and so on the face of it,
Speaker 3: after like three minutes of thinking about it, this was
Speaker 3: clearly ridiculous, and yet it had traction.
Speaker 11: Yeah, I mean, I think in this case there was
Speaker 11: a thought that President Obama was not worthy and not
Speaker 11: just not trustworthy on oh hey, what are we going
Speaker 11: to do with health care, but untrustworthy on whether or
Speaker 11: not he's going to leave office, whether or not he's
Speaker 11: a threat of democracy. And I think some of this
Speaker 11: was underpin by Race.
Speaker 1: Dane.
Speaker 3: You've spent a lot of time embedded with the US military,
Speaker 3: especially the Marines. And I spent a lot of time
Speaker 3: in Afghanistan too, up in the North and Kunar Province
Speaker 3: and Nuristan, and then in Massari Shreef, and I got
Speaker 3: to know a lot of Jasak guys So I want
Speaker 3: to throw a thought experiment at chif. So you're a
Speaker 3: Jasak guy and you're a very professional military and you're
Speaker 3: in the United States and you're doing one of these things,
Speaker 3: and senior officer comes to you and says, Okay, here's
Speaker 3: your mission. We're going to sneak in ten thousand Chinese
Speaker 3: military guys who you're training to fight your entire life.
Speaker 3: We're going to stick him in a Walmart. And your
Speaker 3: job is to take these guys and attack your fellow citizens.
Speaker 3: So the thought experiment is, how would a group of
Speaker 3: Jaysak guys react to something like that? Beyond you're fucking
Speaker 3: shitting me right, You're going to be taking weapons away
Speaker 3: from Americans citizens and going after militias with these Chinese
Speaker 3: soldiers who you can't speak because nobody speaks a common language.
Speaker 3: How would that work?
Speaker 11: So then you take that and this isn't just the military.
Speaker 11: This is Marine raiders, Navy seals, Army Green Beret soldiers,
Speaker 11: and all of a sudden, they're now going to be
Speaker 11: the ones that are undermining the American experience. There's a
Speaker 11: disconnect there. I never understood how the same group of
Speaker 11: people who would mostly hold this group of people up
Speaker 11: as an American hero and as an ideal would now
Speaker 11: also say, oh, they're totally going to push us on
Speaker 11: the train cars with shackles and send us off to wherever.
Speaker 3: There's no way they would follow those illegal orders. And
Speaker 3: yet people seem to now, people who were very pro
Speaker 3: military before are now entertaining thought that their heroes are
Speaker 3: actually bad guys and militias are good guys.
Speaker 11: You know, I think as time has progressed, you go
Speaker 11: through the Trump administration and him very vocally calling out
Speaker 11: general officers in terms that we don't typically hear in
Speaker 11: polite company that I think was a shock to the system.
Speaker 11: So I think you play that out now forward and
Speaker 11: even something like the more recent hold on military promotions
Speaker 11: that Senator Tupperville has. You know, these are death jockey generals.
Speaker 11: I'm for the military, I'm just not for these death
Speaker 11: jockey generals.
Speaker 3: So concurrent with Jade Helm in twenty fifteen, there was
Speaker 3: also another watershed wherein then presidential candidate Donald Trump said
Speaker 3: of John McCain that he was a loser for being
Speaker 3: shot down over North Vietnam and being tortured and being
Speaker 3: held by the North Vietnamese.
Speaker 11: But Frank, Frank, let me get to it. He hit me.
Speaker 8: He's not a war hero, war euro, he's a war
Speaker 8: He's a war hero because he was captured.
Speaker 4: I like people that weren't captured.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 4: I hate to tell.
Speaker 1: You, do you a ward that here's a war hero
Speaker 1: because he was capture.
Speaker 3: Okay. Enormous respect for John McCain, a genuine war hero
Speaker 3: who suffered the rest of his life. He couldn't raise
Speaker 3: his arms over his head, that he could be vilified,
Speaker 3: that his military record could be trashed and discarded by
Speaker 3: somebody who avoided the draft, which was another harbinger for
Speaker 3: a change in way certain part of the electorate is
Speaker 3: looking at the military. There's two elements of this. One
Speaker 3: is you have to basically dehumanize and demonize the US military,
Speaker 3: and you know there's two point eight million people work
Speaker 3: for the federal government that somehow they are evil. I
Speaker 3: think this was something that former NSA and CIA director
Speaker 3: Hayden has talked about, that the Russians using jade helm
Speaker 3: and other things as a way not so much to
Speaker 3: push one particular conspiracy, but to question the very fact
Speaker 3: of truth. What is true that you can't believe the
Speaker 3: Washington Post. Right. See, Dan, you don't sit around with
Speaker 3: your colleagues to write lies, right, You're trying to come
Speaker 3: up with the truth, and you don't always get it
Speaker 3: exactly right. And same inside of the intelligence community were
Speaker 3: made up of people who are flawed. But there is
Speaker 3: objective truth out there that there's a chipping away at
Speaker 3: the trust, the cement that keeps our democracy function because
Speaker 3: in it's atalitarian government, Putin doesn't need people to trust him.
Speaker 3: They don't. They just fear him.
Speaker 1: One of the things that was basis to the Jade
Speaker 1: Helm conspiracy is that this was the government coming to
Speaker 1: seize your guns. And literally just in the years prior
Speaker 1: to this, it was a Republican talking point that Obama's
Speaker 1: going to take your guns. What if he gets elected,
Speaker 1: He's going to take your guns and take your guns.
Speaker 1: And he went through his whole first term and there
Speaker 1: was nothing related to taking anybody's guns. And then in
Speaker 1: the lead up to the second term, is he's going
Speaker 1: to take your guns. He's going to take your guns.
Speaker 1: Not thinking that, you know, the first time that didn't happen,
Speaker 1: and people bought into it again, Oh yeah, my god,
Speaker 1: they're going to take our guns. And of course they
Speaker 1: never took anybody's guns, and then jade Helm happens, are
Speaker 1: they're going to take our guns and nobody takes your guns.
Speaker 1: You know, some of these things are so ingrained it
Speaker 1: seems that there is almost no way to talk people
Speaker 1: out of them, or to reason in a rational way
Speaker 1: and say this hasn't happened, it's not likely to happen.
Speaker 11: I guess I would say this. It seems to me
Speaker 11: that there are certain purveyors, those who perpetuate these kinds
Speaker 11: of theories. Certain people just want to see these because
Speaker 11: they're entertained by them, but they pass them on. And
Speaker 11: when you keep passing them on, it's like, well, he
Speaker 11: passed it on, he must believe it, even if they
Speaker 11: were just kind of like causing mayhem for the heck
Speaker 11: of it. Yeah, And I also think it probably depends
Speaker 11: issue by issue, conspiracy theory by conspiracy theory, one might
Speaker 11: sound crazy to you, the next one doesn't. I was
Speaker 11: on a college campus when the envision of a rock
Speaker 11: capen on a liberal campus, and I remember the conspiracy
Speaker 11: theories on the other side, because sure WMD was. That
Speaker 11: discussion was very real, very pointed, and then it became okay,
Speaker 11: So what was the real motivation.
Speaker 1: Take the oil? You know, there are military exercises all
Speaker 1: the time in the United States, which begs the question
Speaker 1: why this one? And I think the answer has to
Speaker 1: do with your reporting, is that some exercise maps somehow
Speaker 1: were leaked into the public. And it's funny for me
Speaker 1: because having been in the CIA going through our training program,
Speaker 1: we do the same thing. We put people into exercises
Speaker 1: as they prepare to go overseas, and we create maps
Speaker 1: of false places that you pretend you're recruiting citizens of
Speaker 1: and all this type of thing. And so why did
Speaker 1: this one become the conspiracy when the other fifty didn't.
Speaker 11: This is a new thing with a weird name that
Speaker 11: kind of was immediately weird because of the maps that
Speaker 11: leaked out.
Speaker 1: The name is cool. Jadehill is a cool name.
Speaker 11: Let's say this was a West Coast exercise with the
Speaker 11: military landing in California, which was labeled hostile. Has a
Speaker 11: whole different feel at that point. If they're landing in
Speaker 11: some liberal community off the coast there, it's kind of
Speaker 11: hard to say they're trying to take your guns if
Speaker 11: it's in a place where guns are not all that
Speaker 11: popular in the first place, All right, right, right.
Speaker 3: So Governor Abbitt famously said he's going to employ the
Speaker 3: Texas National Guard to keep tabs on the US.
Speaker 11: Yeah, okay, his guard, if he will, his guard. They
Speaker 11: used the State Guard largely as liaisons, but I.
Speaker 1: Would suspect that there was a liaison already set up
Speaker 1: and the military does this. Yeah, you know, for Abbott
Speaker 1: to say that he needed to do it was probably
Speaker 1: giving some oxygen to the fire that didn't need to
Speaker 1: be given.
Speaker 3: And then I just got to go back one last
Speaker 3: time to logistics. Bring it. So you've been to Afghanistan,
Speaker 3: Hellman Province. Right. I don't know how many Marines were
Speaker 3: out there, but when we went to the military bases
Speaker 3: up in Kunar, a couple hundred guys. The logistics of
Speaker 3: like feeding them and watering them is like enormous. If
Speaker 3: you've got ten thousand Chinese soldiers hidden in a walmart,
Speaker 3: how are you feeding these guys? What do you do
Speaker 3: with a poop? What do you do with linguistics? What
Speaker 3: do you do when somebody like gets away and goes
Speaker 3: off to a bar and gets drunk in understanding what
Speaker 3: it takes to move fifty guys and their gear and
Speaker 3: equipment and keeping them safe. Moving thousands of Chinese is
Speaker 3: just so beyond the pale. I would just wish that
Speaker 3: people would use their critical thinking to sit down and say,
Speaker 3: what does it take to move like a baseball team
Speaker 3: across the county for a week to play? And then
Speaker 3: multiply that times ten thousand?
Speaker 11: Right? Can you even hold the neighborhood let alone? A
Speaker 11: state let alone? Eight states, ten thousand, Chinese troops ten thousand,
Speaker 11: and any kind of troop maybe would a hold part
Speaker 11: of the city maybe for.
Speaker 3: A little while.
Speaker 11: You're like just thinking about our own operations in you know,
Speaker 11: various urban areas, like you need a whole lot of manpower.
Speaker 1: I get a kick out of the fact that the
Speaker 1: concern here was that the government was going to try
Speaker 1: to take over Texas? Like has no one told them
Speaker 1: that the government already has Texas?
Speaker 5: Right, Let's take a breather and back in a moment,
Speaker 5: and we're back.
Speaker 3: The conspiracy theory made a lot of predictions. None of
Speaker 3: those came true. So how did they explain that?
Speaker 11: One was? All the attention had prevented it? You know,
Speaker 11: the idea that this discussion had burst out into the
Speaker 11: open and been exposed more or less taking credit for
Speaker 11: the fact that it didn't happen. Another was that it
Speaker 11: was never really supposed to be an effort in that
Speaker 11: moment to perpetuate martial law. It was sort of a
Speaker 11: more squishy, softer, smaller effort to do it someday in
Speaker 11: the future, you know, rather than the big thing now.
Speaker 11: It's preparing for the big thing two, five, ten years
Speaker 11: down the road.
Speaker 3: What would it take for the US military to take
Speaker 3: over Texas or to actually do these things?
Speaker 11: You know? The way these briefing slides read, it was
Speaker 11: twelve hundred troops, give or take, and granted some number
Speaker 11: of them would have been the elite, the best of
Speaker 11: the best, but twelve hundred troops doesn't get you very
Speaker 11: far in reality, no matter who they are. Think about
Speaker 11: some of the American operations over the last ten, fifteen,
Speaker 11: twenty years. I was embedded in a specific province in Afghanistan.
Speaker 11: It's sort of the height of the surge there, or
Speaker 11: twenty thousand marines in one province. So what are you
Speaker 11: going to do with twelve hundred spread across eight states.
Speaker 3: There's been a lot of spinoff conspiracy theories coming out
Speaker 3: of jade Helm's what's your favorite flavor of jade Helm?
Speaker 11: I think the one that caught me the coldest with
Speaker 11: the idea that there were trains I think FEMA trained
Speaker 11: FEMA somehow being a part of this with shackles on it,
Speaker 11: and that you would just guide away American citizens who disagreed.
Speaker 11: But just the idea that FEMA, the idea that they
Speaker 11: would be pulled in and citizens would just be hurted away.
Speaker 3: They could take those people and bring them some awful
Speaker 3: place like New Jersey.
Speaker 1: Thank you very much for doing this and before you
Speaker 1: continued reporting on this, and I think it's very important
Speaker 1: for Americans to understand what the military and what has
Speaker 1: become called the deep state, what they do, and so
Speaker 1: thanks for the reporting you do on that.
Speaker 8: All right, guys, it's hard to think of them any ways,
Speaker 8: that this is a particularly absurd conspiracy.
Speaker 4: But what stands out for you, well.
Speaker 1: You know it hurts me sometimes. You know, was a
Speaker 1: history major and a policize major and worked in the
Speaker 1: government for years. So there's an assumption that the American
Speaker 1: people understand how their system works, and how the military works,
Speaker 1: and how our government functions. But you got to remind
Speaker 1: yourself from time to time that people can be fooled
Speaker 1: by things, and it seems to be that that's the
Speaker 1: case here. Like anybody who's been anywhere around national security
Speaker 1: issueser or followed them in any way, would realize the
Speaker 1: silliness of this.
Speaker 3: As somebody who's never served in the military but served
Speaker 3: a lot with the military. I'm trying to imagine, you know,
Speaker 3: a scenario whereby they bring in all the colonels, who
Speaker 3: then later talk to the majors, who talk to lieutenants,
Speaker 3: who talk to the actual troops, and they start the
Speaker 3: meeting by saying, Okay, we're going to invade the United States,
Speaker 3: and they all look at each other and go like,
Speaker 3: that's not a legal order. I'm from New Mexico. I'm
Speaker 3: not going to invade my own country. So this is
Speaker 3: not just silly, but it's also speaks almost dangerously to
Speaker 3: what some people think. Our young men and women in
Speaker 3: the US military would be willing to do. That they'd
Speaker 3: follow orders.
Speaker 4: But when you do think of countries where they do.
Speaker 8: I think of what Syriah's done against Yes, China, Russia, Syria,
Speaker 8: Iraq under Saddam. Why are those armies able.
Speaker 3: To what is propaganda that the troops are intoxrinated with fear,
Speaker 3: and maybe some of them believe it. But the other
Speaker 3: thing too is we do know that Russian troops in
Speaker 3: Ukraine that they've got the really professional troops behind the
Speaker 3: new guys going in to be cannon fodder, and if
Speaker 3: anybody looks to retreat, they shoot them. So I think
Speaker 3: that a lot of the troops are just simply afraid
Speaker 3: not to carry out their orders. And that's not the
Speaker 3: way it works in the United States. The worst that
Speaker 3: can happen to you is you could be like court
Speaker 3: martials and they send you out.
Speaker 1: So I lived in Indonesia, which is like I don't know,
Speaker 1: seven twenty thousand all islands essentially, and they have a
Speaker 1: massive army and almost no navy, and you're like, there's
Speaker 1: no borders with any other country, Like what's the point here?
Speaker 8: But I guess like Indonesia is a good example of
Speaker 8: a place where you have an Iraq is as well
Speaker 8: Syria to some degree, where people have more of a
Speaker 8: regional or ethnic group identity than a national identity. I mean,
Speaker 8: I was there before the war, and you just felt
Speaker 8: different in Aleppo than you did in Damascus. Damascus was
Speaker 8: much more loyal to the regime, or at least playing
Speaker 8: So you could imagine you just make sure to get
Speaker 8: troops from different places, which maybe could work here. Actually
Speaker 8: I would believe a bunch of Texas guys coming to
Speaker 8: New York and reaking havoc. But that's because I'm from
Speaker 8: New York.
Speaker 3: But it depends too on how you train your military.
Speaker 3: You know, those militaries that we're mentioning here are all
Speaker 3: trained on internal descent. They make lousy armies fighting any
Speaker 3: place else, right, I mean, right from day one there
Speaker 3: it's about the internal enemy, right, right, Right? Does El
Speaker 3: sever to Guatemala have an army in Costa Rica? Doesn't, right,
Speaker 3: because it's all about internal stuff.
Speaker 8: So I did witness a micro version of something like this.
Speaker 8: So in the run up to the Irock War in
Speaker 8: two thousand and three, one of the sensitive political issues,
Speaker 8: you know, the US invasion was mostly coming up from
Speaker 8: Kuwait in the south, and then a bit coming from the.
Speaker 4: North from the Kurdish region.
Speaker 8: But there was a lot of talk that maybe parts
Speaker 8: of the US military, especially special ops, would come in
Speaker 8: from Jordan across the western Iraqi Desert, and the official
Speaker 8: story was absolutely not that's not happening, And in fact,
Speaker 8: King Abdullah of Jordan said there are no US troops
Speaker 8: on the Jordan side of the border, and basically the
Speaker 8: entire Jordan based Foreign press Corps, which included me at
Speaker 8: the time, drove to the border just because that was
Speaker 8: our stage in ground, because we were if the US
Speaker 8: military wasn't going to invade the Western Desert, it was
Speaker 8: our plan to invade the Western Desert.
Speaker 4: There were US.
Speaker 8: Troops all over. We saw their helicopters, we saw them
Speaker 8: in shops buying stuff. It was a very transparent fact
Speaker 8: that there were US troops exactly on the border who
Speaker 8: look like Special Forces guys.
Speaker 1: I mean like they had tattoos and stuff.
Speaker 8: Well actually no beards, so that actually is a sign
Speaker 8: that maybe they weren't special ops. But that has always
Speaker 8: stuck with me is like the level of secrecy. We
Speaker 8: just say it's not true, and you will never find
Speaker 8: out unless you happen to go to a shop that
Speaker 8: sells sodas and potato chips and then you'll see like
Speaker 8: four guys standing around.
Speaker 1: Politicians have learned that if you just say something, most
Speaker 1: people don't have any other way to prove it's not true,
Speaker 1: so they'll.
Speaker 4: Lot they'll believe it.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 8: By the way, that was another moment where there was
Speaker 8: a fairly transparent lie, which was when George W. Bush
Speaker 8: sent a US aircraft carrier to help with tsunami relief
Speaker 8: in Indonesia. A very important moment that no US troops
Speaker 8: will spend the night on Indonesian soil because that would
Speaker 8: would somehow turn it into a different thing. So they
Speaker 8: were supposed to fly in every morning whatever they were doing,
Speaker 8: bringing food and fixing bridges, and then fly out every night.
Speaker 8: And I went to the airport and I was interviewing
Speaker 8: a bunch of the Marines. The American Marines are like, yeah,
Speaker 8: we're spending the night. We're not going to like fly
Speaker 8: back and forth.
Speaker 1: And I mean, it wouldn't have mattered. And they know
Speaker 1: we're not invading them, and they understand that we were helping.
Speaker 1: That A chasers horrible and it was unbelievable.
Speaker 8: I don't want it myself now be a conspiracy theorist,
Speaker 8: But do you think that there is a you know,
Speaker 8: posse comitatus, like if there was a true rebellion in
Speaker 8: the US, like a true armed like Americans truly taking
Speaker 8: up arms in a very serious way with real military might.
Speaker 8: Are there plans in the Pentagon somewhere for how the
Speaker 8: US military will deal with it?
Speaker 4: Or is that going to just be police action?
Speaker 1: It's a good question. I mean, we were in intelligence.
Speaker 1: That issue is never anything as part of our you know.
Speaker 4: You couldn't look domestically at all.
Speaker 1: No, but and it's hard to imagine, but of course
Speaker 1: we see it in our political discussion now talking about
Speaker 1: the protesters. Would would a Trump adminstration call in the
Speaker 1: National Guard? You know, at what point would you call
Speaker 1: in the military. So these are issues that they're not
Speaker 1: completely crazy. People are talking about them, but I don't
Speaker 1: know anything about how that's planned.
Speaker 3: But let's look at how far we've gotten. I mean,
Speaker 3: Trump did, as a fact, talk to his military leaders
Speaker 3: about calling out martial law on protesters back when he
Speaker 3: was still president, and he mentioned to the generals, can't
Speaker 3: you just shoot them in the leg, which is often
Speaker 3: a fatal wound. And the leadership basically thought he was nuts.
Speaker 3: And they're saying so now, like you know, his secretaries
Speaker 3: of Defense and the people around and who were doing
Speaker 3: military stuff. So one of the problems may be that
Speaker 3: civilians ordering it may not know what's legal and what
Speaker 3: they're allowed to do.
Speaker 1: I think the military people know what's legal not to do.
Speaker 1: Were there politicians who come in from the outside understand.
Speaker 3: No, that's exactly what I meant that Trump doesn't understand
Speaker 3: or the people the civilians around understanding. I think the
Speaker 3: US military understood perfectly well what they were allowed to
Speaker 3: do and not to do.
Speaker 1: And they're very well trained and they're very well led.
Speaker 3: It's also part of their duties to disobey orders that
Speaker 3: are unlawful. In that case, depending on the circumstances, a
Speaker 3: lot of people not doing that. But on civil unrest,
Speaker 3: the first thing was would be to call in the
Speaker 3: National Guard. That would be the first. The US military
Speaker 3: would be much much later. First they they'd have police
Speaker 3: and then the National Guard. And you know, the military.
Speaker 3: When you bring in helicopters and tanks against guys with
Speaker 3: clocks and shotguns, it's not going to be a very
Speaker 3: fair fight. I'll bet you that there are not such
Speaker 3: plans because even making them, should they ever leak, it
Speaker 3: would be so difficult, so awkward.
Speaker 1: Jade Helm might be a good example. They saw that
Speaker 1: when they weren't even doing anything related to this concern.
Speaker 1: People went off on it and thought that the US
Speaker 1: right military was attacking civilians and taking their guns. So, yes,
Speaker 1: I think they're going to be very very careful about
Speaker 1: making these kind of quote unquote plans.
Speaker 3: Because reporters, journalists like you, Adam, would love to get
Speaker 3: a hold of those plans, right, well, or good journalists
Speaker 3: more good, Yeah, good journalists would.
Speaker 4: Oh, there's lots of good journalists. Yeah.
Speaker 7: Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'sha, John Cipher,
Speaker 7: and Jonathan Sterner. The associate producer is Chill Harner. This
Speaker 7: has been a production of abominable Pictures, an honorable mention
Speaker 7: for iHeart Podcasts.