Speaker 1: From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
Speaker 1: riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
Speaker 1: learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A
Speaker 1: production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
Speaker 2: my name is Noah.
Speaker 3: They call me Ben. We're joined as always with our
Speaker 3: super producer Dylan, the Tennessee pal Fagan. Most importantly, you
Speaker 3: are here. That makes this the stuff they don't want
Speaker 3: you to know. Friends, neighbors, Fellow conspiracy realist Matt Noel Dylan,
Speaker 3: I was thinking we keep this beginning part short because
Speaker 3: as we record right now, it's Friday, March twenty first,
Speaker 3: and drone strikes are continuing across the globe US, Russia, China, Ron,
Speaker 3: pretty much anybody who can build a combat drone is
Speaker 3: doing so. And they're doing so because, on the one hand,
Speaker 3: there are tremendous advantages. Right, you're not sending a manned
Speaker 3: F thirty five into enemy territory risking the life of
Speaker 3: a pilot, you know, or you're not sending a special
Speaker 3: operation in risking the lives of the people conducting that operation.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, you know, it's it's definitely a positive
Speaker 4: thing when you consider the horrors of like past, you know,
Speaker 4: trench warfare and all of that stuff. But it has
Speaker 4: its own kind of bag of badgers in terms of
Speaker 4: potential negatives as well.
Speaker 2: Obviously, well, yeah, and individual human beings are being targeted
Speaker 2: in places across the world for a myriad of reasons.
Speaker 2: And the way technology has evolved in the access both
Speaker 2: individuals and governments have to every person's lives, you know,
Speaker 2: the digital lives that we all lead. Deciding who gets
Speaker 2: targeted what gets targeted has become increasingly complex and yet
Speaker 2: in some ways insanely simple.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's the thing. So on the one hand, as
Speaker 3: we said, the idea of these sorts of targeted strikes,
Speaker 3: they can ostensibly, in theory, save lives, but they can
Speaker 3: also produce operational costs, just to put the petty part
Speaker 3: out there. But on the other hand, they can lead
Speaker 3: to disastrous mistakes, the deaths of innocent people. Someone was
Speaker 3: literally just in the wrong place at the wrong time,
Speaker 3: or made friends with the wrong person on social media.
Speaker 3: This leads to the erosion of democracy. No fooling, no hyperbole. Tonight,
Speaker 3: we're exploring an ongoing conspiracy. Who gets to decide who dies.
Speaker 3: You know, here in the United States. Let's be honest,
Speaker 3: it's not as though the public at large gets to
Speaker 3: vote on the fate of every suspected terrorists. But our
Speaker 3: country does have a system for determining this. It is murky,
Speaker 3: it is powerful, it is fascinating, it is bureaucratic, and
Speaker 3: it is terrifying. Friends and neighbors. We want to introduce
Speaker 3: you to the disposition matrix.
Speaker 2: So weird. Yeah, and it's not just the US. Remember
Speaker 2: the old five Eyes group that once was that is
Speaker 2: now eroded. I don't even know. I think there's just
Speaker 2: one big old eye that sounds about it.
Speaker 3: Well, it's it's uh, well, we'll see how how these
Speaker 3: comments age because uh yeah, five eyes may be going blind,
Speaker 3: but that might be a story for another evening. The
Speaker 3: disposition matrix, Uh it sounds like a silly name, but
Speaker 3: it's it's a very real thing. And to understand why
Speaker 3: it's and why we consider it a conspiracy, we're going
Speaker 3: to have to start at the beginning of the United States.
Speaker 3: After word from our sponsors, here are the facts, all right.
Speaker 3: The US is like other democracies in theory, it's defined
Speaker 3: by rule of law. In theory, it's defined by the
Speaker 3: rule of the public. You vote for representatives. We've said
Speaker 3: it before. You vote for representatives who, in theory will
Speaker 3: represent your wishes and desires. And I don't know, it's
Speaker 3: something we take for granted so often. It's so weird
Speaker 3: to remember what a huge change democracy was back in
Speaker 3: the day, right back in the founding of the US.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, the concept of it on paper is fantastic.
Speaker 4: The idea that you put your faith in an individual
Speaker 4: who has the best interest of the people at heart,
Speaker 4: and hopefully through them your will is enacted.
Speaker 2: It's a nice thing to say yes and tell everybody yes.
Speaker 3: And it's a difficult thing to do right in a
Speaker 3: way that is fair to everyone. When when the US
Speaker 3: was founded itself by conspiracy in seventeen seventy six, a
Speaker 3: lot of other nations at the time were what we
Speaker 3: would call absolute monarchies. What does that mean? That means
Speaker 3: that if the ruler wakes up on the wrong side
Speaker 3: of the bed, or they catch a case of the
Speaker 3: Jimmy's a phrase I made up, they could instantly radically
Speaker 3: change the laws of the land, and thank you. I mean,
Speaker 3: it's nuts when you think about it. A monarch could
Speaker 3: order the death of hundreds or thousands of people with
Speaker 3: no checks on their power. If you're targeted in an
Speaker 3: absolute monarchy, you have zero legal recourse habeas corpus, the
Speaker 3: right to appeal, the right to even just go to court.
Speaker 3: None of that's a thing. The king, the queen, anybody
Speaker 3: in charge. They could just say, hey, go kill that guy.
Speaker 4: Oh. Historically, the only real recourse that the common people
Speaker 4: who are affected by this have is is revolution, is
Speaker 4: further violence, you know, is overthrow. There was really no
Speaker 4: other mechanism in place, and that, in theory, is what
Speaker 4: democracy provides.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there is a court. There's just one guy and
Speaker 2: he's a Well, maybe I think absolute monarchy is a
Speaker 2: great disc that's something we should use that somehow, And
Speaker 2: that dude is absolute monarchy. It just sounds like it.
Speaker 4: Malarchy.
Speaker 3: It's the opposite of hot cheese, which is a phrase
Speaker 3: we're bringing back on ridiculous history or something's cool. It's
Speaker 3: hot cheese. Yah, melty malleable yellow so yellow melty. So Yeah.
Speaker 3: It's a great point. For most of human history, this
Speaker 3: absolute monarchical thing applied to any kind of rule. You
Speaker 3: could imagine international situations obviously would get complicated, think of
Speaker 3: the multiple rulers who bucked against the Athlete Church in Europe.
Speaker 3: But domestic decisions were the whims of a single person,
Speaker 3: and the only avenue for serious political change was not
Speaker 3: just we said revolution earlier, but it could also be war,
Speaker 3: or it could be incalculable tragedies like the Black Death,
Speaker 3: you know, like the plague correction from the Rods right,
Speaker 3: Because the point is by hook or by crook, what
Speaker 3: had to happen was a great mass of people usually
Speaker 3: had to die for some sort of lasting change to occur.
Speaker 3: And if we're again being honest, a revolution or a
Speaker 3: war didn't usually change all that much. It's just like
Speaker 3: new management took over. There was a new parent company,
Speaker 3: and they kept the same system as before. They just
Speaker 3: put themselves at the top.
Speaker 4: A soft set.
Speaker 2: Unless we forget the year old assassination, which was you know,
Speaker 2: a good standby very valid too. You could think out, well, yeah,
Speaker 2: you could take out one or two really important people
Speaker 2: and not have the same effect, but you know that
Speaker 2: thing where where those people are no longer in charge,
Speaker 2: and then you just insert a few other people that
Speaker 2: are more to your liking, and then new management.
Speaker 4: Then it becomes about like the ideology of the winning
Speaker 4: you know, revolutionaries, like and if that's even that much
Speaker 4: better or like, is it even is it self serving
Speaker 4: in a different direction?
Speaker 2: You know?
Speaker 4: And this stuff takes a really long time to kind
Speaker 4: of shake out.
Speaker 3: Yeah, please check out our series on the concept of
Speaker 3: assassination historically a spoiler, It exists and will exist because
Speaker 3: it works. And if you're looking at the history here,
Speaker 3: you'll see that the US and France and other emergent
Speaker 3: democracies sought to change this system. You know, even the
Speaker 3: most powerful person, they reason, needed to have some sort
Speaker 3: of rubric, some kind of logic or system behind ordering murder.
Speaker 3: The president, they argued, would be the servant of the people,
Speaker 3: never their king. And that applies to prime ministers as well.
Speaker 3: If we fast forward to let's say, Dylan, give us
Speaker 3: a fast forward tunk you perfect stop it there, all right,
Speaker 3: So we're right after World War Two, the US already
Speaker 3: has a pretty bad jacket of when it comes to
Speaker 3: democracy and theory versus democracy and action. There are all
Speaker 3: kinds of disasters, massacres, genocides, assassinations. To your earlier point, Matt,
Speaker 3: they run against the letter of the law, the spirit
Speaker 3: of democracy. There's this new world on the horizon, just
Speaker 3: like other management shifts in nation states, the US says
Speaker 3: we're going to make a better world pox Americana, right,
Speaker 3: global peace with the US at the top. And they
Speaker 3: were able to do this because much of Europe and Asia,
Speaker 3: you know, it was in shambles after this horrific series
Speaker 3: of events ca World War Two. The planet looked around,
Speaker 3: the human planet looked around, and they said, okay, never again.
Speaker 3: But war never really disappears.
Speaker 4: It's challenges.
Speaker 3: Hey, it's like government, it evolves.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean you know, I was looking up, well,
Speaker 4: we were while you were opening the show bend. Just
Speaker 4: are wars less deadly? Now? Like numbers wise? Like does that?
Speaker 4: Does the data shake out? And like the soft answer
Speaker 4: is yes, But there are other factors, like other forms
Speaker 4: of collateral damage and maybe didn't exist because of the precision,
Speaker 4: because of the range and the way that these kinds
Speaker 4: of modern warfare tactics are deployed.
Speaker 2: Yeah for sure, Okay, are we gonna can we do
Speaker 2: the fast forward machine again?
Speaker 3: Yeah, let's do it. Let's go to uh September eleventh.
Speaker 2: Hey heard of it, all right?
Speaker 4: I was there, not there there, but I remember seeing
Speaker 4: it on TV in high school.
Speaker 3: Yep.
Speaker 2: Just let's throw in a couple tiny little pieces of
Speaker 2: context here, because as a part of that whole Pas
Speaker 2: Americana thing, the United States going up against the Soviet Union,
Speaker 2: we engaged in a little thing in Afghanistan and a
Speaker 2: couple other places, you know, in the Middle East and
Speaker 2: in Africa with Soviet Union forces the United States forces,
Speaker 2: but as mostly trained individuals within countries, right, And we
Speaker 2: had these proxy wars that occurred, which created a whole
Speaker 2: bunch of militarized groups that were splintered further and further,
Speaker 2: and a few of those came together and a couple
Speaker 2: theoretically attacked the United States on September eleventh, two thousand
Speaker 2: and one, and that created this brand new thing that
Speaker 2: our democracy and a coalition of the willing decided was
Speaker 2: going to be a war on a concept, and that
Speaker 2: concept would be terror.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I'm really glad you point that out, because that's
Speaker 3: what we're getting to when we say war evolves like
Speaker 3: government evolves, right, And it's just like that Philip Larkin
Speaker 3: poem which has a terrible title, This be the Verse,
Speaker 3: but it's an amazing poem. Everyone should read it a
Speaker 3: war on a concept rather than a contained war on
Speaker 3: a specific nation or a group of nations. The new enemies,
Speaker 3: many of whom are radicalized by their experiences surviving proxy wars.
Speaker 3: They don't exist in established military structure. We're talking shifting,
Speaker 3: decentralized coalitions of what you could loosely call extremist groups,
Speaker 3: and they're launching these waves of unpredictable asymmetrical attacks around
Speaker 3: the world. Hit an embassy one day, right, or maybe
Speaker 3: hit a single person, you know, via improvised explosive device,
Speaker 3: or thenaby tried to take down an airport. By the way,
Speaker 3: as we're recording, Heathrow is in some deep thank you
Speaker 3: for bp me, Dylan, Did you guys hear about this now?
Speaker 4: And hereby Heathrow, what's going on there?
Speaker 2: Uh?
Speaker 3: He throw lost power, his massive fire and thousands of
Speaker 3: people are are stranded at at the airport or tribe
Speaker 3: or planes are turning around and right now people are
Speaker 3: still trying to figure out what happened. The elephant in
Speaker 3: the room there always is going to be is it
Speaker 3: an accident? Was it on purpose? Sure?
Speaker 4: Well, that's something else the factor And like I mean
Speaker 4: in terms of this evolution of war. We also have
Speaker 4: to think about like the evolution of cyber warfare and
Speaker 4: you know, hacking of infrastructure and causing terror you know,
Speaker 4: quote unquote in that way.
Speaker 3: The weaponization of information. Gosh, great point.
Speaker 2: So hey, let's jump back to war, guys. So the
Speaker 2: United States government and that Coalition of the Willing realized,
Speaker 2: especially after a bunch of countries deployed a bunch of
Speaker 2: troops on the ground into Afghanistan, into Iraq and too
Speaker 2: other places across the Middle East, right after September eleventh run,
Speaker 2: right around early two thousand and three, they realized, oh,
Speaker 2: this battle, it kind of reminds us of something that
Speaker 2: time that we tried to expend Soviet resources by having
Speaker 2: them fight giant proxy wars in this same exact place
Speaker 2: in Afghanistan, in particular.
Speaker 3: The Banber of Empires exactly.
Speaker 2: Just realizing that, oh, we cannot fight this war the
Speaker 2: way we've fought previous wars, even the last time we
Speaker 2: were in Iraq. We can't fight the war like this.
Speaker 2: They needed a way to target these far flowng individuals
Speaker 2: in groups, right, and hey, they said, we've got this
Speaker 2: new technology.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is the way I think we can. We
Speaker 3: can approach this on the ground through personal experience. So
Speaker 3: a growing number of powerful policy makers are saying, look,
Speaker 3: we're dealing with a new threat, right, and we are
Speaker 3: functioning under military and democratic norms or policies or laws
Speaker 3: rules of the road that are unequipped to deal with
Speaker 3: this new flavor of danger. So if we stick with
Speaker 3: the rules of the road comparison for a moment, let's
Speaker 3: set the scene. If we get some traffic, sounds perfect,
Speaker 3: all right, You're an average person. You're stuck in traffic.
Speaker 3: It stinks. You want to get out of this mess
Speaker 3: of these shrieking orangs, these bumper to bumpered tail lights.
Speaker 3: But you're just another driver on the road. You have
Speaker 3: to obey the law. In this comparison, the United States,
Speaker 3: more so than many other countries, is the most powerful
Speaker 3: car out there. Uncle Sam owns the road. Uncle Sam
Speaker 3: makes the laws of traffic. So if you run in
Speaker 3: to any kind of complication or a thing you don't like,
Speaker 3: you can just change the rules. Right, And that is
Speaker 3: what brings us to tonight's exploration. It's a struggle for democracy.
Speaker 3: It's a profound philosophical operational dilemma. It's really kind of
Speaker 3: a question about the soul of a country. If you
Speaker 3: champion yourself as a protector of human rights, why are
Speaker 3: you creating secret list of people to be captured, kidnapped
Speaker 3: or killed. This is a true story. They were originally
Speaker 3: called killed list. But this all these things we're describing now,
Speaker 3: for this context, they have led our nation to something
Speaker 3: called the disposition matrix.
Speaker 4: That's right, that's right.
Speaker 2: And it all goes back in my mind to the
Speaker 2: Cold War. Back in the day. It was how do
Speaker 2: you find out if somebody in their heart of hearts
Speaker 2: believes in the other side?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 2: How do you know? It goes back to Spycraft's stuff
Speaker 2: and this paranoia about anyone could be a member of
Speaker 2: the enemy team.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: So, but in this case it's specifically, you know, they
Speaker 2: use that what do they use that word when they're
Speaker 2: talking about the war on terror? What they were saying
Speaker 2: without saying it was the war on Islamic terror. That
Speaker 2: is what they meant in those in those rooms, right,
Speaker 2: and that became a thing that was not okay to say.
Speaker 2: And but that is ultimately when they're in there in
Speaker 2: the White House situation room on Terror Tuesday, they are
Speaker 2: that's Yeah, that's what they call it.
Speaker 4: It's like Taco Tuesday.
Speaker 2: Holy crap, we're going to get into it. But like,
Speaker 2: that's what this thing was and and probably is. They
Speaker 2: were trying to figure out who could possibly be on
Speaker 2: the other team, and in this case, it was anybody
Speaker 2: that may be a part of one of these tiny
Speaker 2: splinter groups that are hidden away and unknown, and and
Speaker 2: how do you figure out if somebody is or is not?
Speaker 2: And that's why this thing, the disposition matrix, was born.
Speaker 3: And we'll see other precedents that will need to lean on,
Speaker 3: such as co Intel Probe, which also conducts what critics
Speaker 3: would call thoroughly un American attempts to leverage a divination
Speaker 3: for the greater good. We'll pause for a word from
Speaker 3: our sponsors, and then we'll introduce you to the disposition matrix.
Speaker 3: Here's where it gets crazy, all right, The term sounds
Speaker 3: of twos, right. Disposition matrix? What is that? That's I
Speaker 3: propose that's a thing where if someone is hostile to you,
Speaker 3: or you know, rude to you could just say I
Speaker 3: don't like your disposition matrix here, dog, But.
Speaker 4: It's in a disposition matrix. Dodge you.
Speaker 3: This, Yeah, in this sense. It is a concrete and
Speaker 3: dangerous thing. It is way beyond a kill list or
Speaker 3: list of names. It's a database. It's used to track, capture, kidnap,
Speaker 3: or murder suspected enemies of the United States. And we
Speaker 3: are purposely choosing our language here. Other euphemisms would be
Speaker 3: rendition instead of kidnapping or you know, enhanced interrogation. Sure, yeah, disposing.
Speaker 2: Of well yeah, it had everything. So it was a
Speaker 2: person's full biography, right where they went to school, where
Speaker 2: they currently live, the people they associate with. It had
Speaker 2: stuff in there about what particular threat they could pose
Speaker 2: to the United States or its allies again, like locations
Speaker 2: where they've been or might be, like with probabilities of
Speaker 2: where they might be, as well as a range of
Speaker 2: how to get rid of rid of them as you're saying,
Speaker 2: there have been like rendition or you know, kidnapping them
Speaker 2: and taking them to a black site maybe somewhere in
Speaker 2: East Africa, or how to take them out like the
Speaker 2: thing of those old lists we talked about with how
Speaker 2: to take out Castro think many versions of that for
Speaker 2: individual humans.
Speaker 3: Yeah, again, it's way more than a list of names.
Speaker 3: We're going to dive into that level of sophistication, as
Speaker 3: well as the inherent problems. In a moment I think
Speaker 3: before we continue, it is crucial to note the public
Speaker 3: owes a great debt of thanks to a journalist named
Speaker 3: Greg Miller. Back in twenty twelve, Greg Miller brought the
Speaker 3: existence of the disposition matrix to the public eye. His
Speaker 3: investigative series is the first in depth look at this.
Speaker 3: Prior to this journalist work, the mere existence of the
Speaker 3: matrix was officially considered a secret. And it's such a pickle,
Speaker 3: you know, because democracy prides itself on due process. So
Speaker 3: how did this bastion of human rights and rule of
Speaker 3: law find itself not just put it out hitless, but
Speaker 3: indeed going a step further and institutionalizing eurocratizing I don't
Speaker 3: know if that's a word codifying the practice. The story really,
Speaker 3: in this regard starts with a guy named John O. Brennant,
Speaker 3: not O apostrophe Brennant, but like his middle name, starts
Speaker 3: with him.
Speaker 4: He was born in New Jersey in nineteen fifty five
Speaker 4: and could be considered a pretty classic American success story.
Speaker 4: He started to work for the CIA in nineteen eighty
Speaker 4: and after that he answered an employment add or a
Speaker 4: one hat in the New York Times.
Speaker 3: That's how he got the job. I love that love
Speaker 3: he's reading the classified and he goes, oh, okay, yes, yea.
Speaker 4: So I guess that has very different recruitment tactics back
Speaker 4: in those days. But whatever it takes. He made a
Speaker 4: lot of particularly controversial decisions in his tenure, as well
Speaker 4: as some pretty powerful enemies in the United States and abroad.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and he's he's like the success story that Drake
Speaker 3: wants to be. He started at the bottom of the CIA,
Speaker 3: and as you said, he rose through the ranks because
Speaker 3: of his fairly strident stands or some would say unfairly
Speaker 3: strident stands on bending the rules in the face of
Speaker 3: a greater good or in the face of enormous threats.
Speaker 3: He's the guy who defended torture, extraordinary rendition, enhanced interrogation.
Speaker 3: This came to the four when he would be in
Speaker 3: confirmation hearings and he would say things like, look, I
Speaker 3: personally don't approve of waterboarding, but I didn't stop anybody
Speaker 3: from doing it because we had a mission. And there
Speaker 3: were consequences to this. He was prevented from becoming director
Speaker 3: of the CIA or National Intelligence back in two thousand
Speaker 3: and eight. I want to say because of this, but
Speaker 3: internally he had a lot of power. He had the experience,
Speaker 3: he had the expertise. He was considered a top authority.
Speaker 3: Colleagues admired him. He was also administration agnostic, which I
Speaker 3: think is a very important point here. So when you
Speaker 3: hear us reference you know, one of the Bush administrations,
Speaker 3: where you hear US reference the Barack Obama administration, we
Speaker 3: have to realize that Brennan was there regardless of which
Speaker 3: political party took the you know, took the King of
Speaker 3: the Hill seat.
Speaker 2: So yeah, well, and remember that that's six years up
Speaker 2: until two thousand and eight. That's six years of sending
Speaker 2: people to Guantanamo. Sometimes taxi drivers that accidentally got caught
Speaker 2: up in the situation. Sometimes that is, you know, the
Speaker 2: suspected leader of organizations that gets Antiguantanamo or to some
Speaker 2: other black site, and it's torture. This guy oversaw with
Speaker 2: all the rest of the military and intelligence apparatus of
Speaker 2: the United States and a bunch of other countries torturing people.
Speaker 3: Mm. Yeah, and he was Look, there's no two ways
Speaker 3: about it. These programs illegal and ethically fraud as they are.
Speaker 3: They did, they did get actual bad guys, but they
Speaker 3: also got innocent people who just happened to have similar names.
Speaker 3: That's a that's a huge piece to remember to that
Speaker 3: taxi driver example. As as Britain is the White House
Speaker 3: counter Terrorism Advisor under the administration of President Barack Obama.
Speaker 3: He leads the charge to institutionalize, to codify this stuff,
Speaker 3: and his former colleagues and officials came forward, first anonymously
Speaker 3: and then later with their names on it, and they said,
Speaker 3: this guy is the principle, like the driving force of
Speaker 3: these kill lists. One guy. Daniel Benjamin later told The
Speaker 3: New York Times that Bretan had quote more power and
Speaker 3: influence than anyone in a comparable position in the last
Speaker 3: twenty years. So this guy is This guy is a
Speaker 3: guy you can't really vote for directly, but he is
Speaker 3: making the moves, yep.
Speaker 2: And guys, to be honest, making this type of list
Speaker 2: of like your top enemies is something any military is
Speaker 2: going to do in a time of war, Right, who
Speaker 2: are the people we can take out that will have
Speaker 2: the most effect. That makes sense. It's weird to think
Speaker 2: of it in a matrix of all the other moves
Speaker 2: that the government is taking at the time, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, a sea change proper, you know, a change
Speaker 3: in the way warfare is conducted. This CIA becomes essentially
Speaker 3: a paramilitary force, or they're doing a lot of things
Speaker 3: a paramilitary force would do instead of an intelligence agency.
Speaker 3: The drone fleet massively expands. More and more groups are
Speaker 3: getting into the mixtape of the disposition matrix, you know,
Speaker 3: and they're also helping carry out its desires. It soon
Speaker 3: evolves or expands to take over all the other kill
Speaker 3: list that various drone programs run by various other US
Speaker 3: agencies and departments have. But yeah, by the way, I
Speaker 3: guess we should mention that the Pentagon Jaysack, et cetera.
Speaker 3: They had their killest too, and the matrix is bringing
Speaker 3: them all together. The word you would hear often on
Speaker 3: the Terrorist Tuesdays would be something like streamlining.
Speaker 2: Yeah, geez, just on that same tip Ben about how
Speaker 2: everything's changing so much. We mentioned a couple episodes back
Speaker 2: about the technology of drones and even using like a
Speaker 2: mothership drone and multiple smaller drones that could have explosives
Speaker 2: attached to them. That goes back to the original invasion
Speaker 2: of a rock like during George Bush's father's rain, and
Speaker 2: that technology has been involving and evolving. It's been used.
Speaker 2: The predator drones were in use when we invaded a
Speaker 2: Rock for the second time, and then that technology has
Speaker 2: been evolving. And then we get up to twenty twelve
Speaker 2: here when we start to learn about this stuff. Drone
Speaker 2: technology is so far advanced and the abilities that each
Speaker 2: single one has to theoretically theoretically target an individual, right,
Speaker 2: and we'll learn like how that's the kind of sales
Speaker 2: pitch thing that you would get right from the manufacturer.
Speaker 3: Right right. We also so you know, we know that
Speaker 3: there was a strong, a strong desire for that kind
Speaker 3: of technological aptitude. Just historically. I'm trying to remember, we
Speaker 3: did an episode of Ridiculous History on this. I'm trying
Speaker 3: to remember the experimental plane that could deploy other planes.
Speaker 3: We're saying it is, there's always been a precedent for this.
Speaker 3: The technology started to catch up with the desire and
Speaker 3: the imagination. Brennan is not himself designing UAV on mandarial vehicles,
Speaker 3: but he is reaching a position of prominence because of
Speaker 3: the climate at the time. The US is beset with
Speaker 3: global threats they're coming from multiple regions. There was this
Speaker 3: very real, and I hate to say it not invalid
Speaker 3: since that plane, by the old rules, would not just
Speaker 3: put the US on its back foot, it could mean
Speaker 3: that thousands of innocent people would die. So we had
Speaker 3: to take serious emergency action. If we didn't, people were
Speaker 3: saying in the halls of power, then September eleventh could
Speaker 3: be more than a single tremendous catastrophe. It could be
Speaker 3: a harbinger, a precedent.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's definitely what was driving everyone and everything. I think
Speaker 2: at this point, the thought that that could happen again.
Speaker 2: And while a catastrophe to the level of September eleven
Speaker 2: hasn't occurred in the United States yet, across the years
Speaker 2: that we're covering here, terror attacks or what we're labeled
Speaker 2: as terror attacks were occurring across the globe, and often
Speaker 2: in countries that were allies of the United States. So
Speaker 2: you can see why that pressure was there, and because
Speaker 2: the United States has set itself up as that peacekeeper, essentially,
Speaker 2: the one that goes in when stuff goes wrong, the
Speaker 2: human beings at the top, like Brennan here again, I
Speaker 2: keep trying to go back to internal pressure that somebody
Speaker 2: feels right. Sure, there's the there's the pressure overall that
Speaker 2: maybe an organization or like a governmental organization or an
Speaker 2: arm of the military feels But then that individual when
Speaker 2: they go to sleep at night feels it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and it's real. It's a ticking time bomb kind
Speaker 3: of situation because you can think of various moments in
Speaker 3: history and various things immortalized in film and fiction where
Speaker 3: someone says, yeah, I have to be sure I'm a
Speaker 3: bad guy, but I have to be the guy who
Speaker 3: keeps the other bad guys from the door tip of
Speaker 3: the cap to true detective you know, Brennan, his supporters,
Speaker 3: the various US presidents, everyone else. It's not as though
Speaker 3: they were waking up gleefully planning to kill folks for laughs.
Speaker 3: They were, perhaps at first reluctantly bending and then later
Speaker 3: breaking established norms in service of this greater good. You know,
Speaker 3: call me a villain if my if you, but if
Speaker 3: my actions are saving the lives of innocent people, then yeah,
Speaker 3: I'll let it stand as it is. I mean, at first,
Speaker 3: the kill list themselves, right, everybody's panicking Post nine to eleven,
Speaker 3: Pre nine to eleven co Intel pro stuff, the kill
Speaker 3: list themselves, or these observation surveillance lists. They're seen as
Speaker 3: a one and done thing, an emergency stop gap, but
Speaker 3: the mission creep always creeps, right, So it becomes a
Speaker 3: new normal in the future age of war. We can
Speaker 3: leverage information to be more precise, to be more correct,
Speaker 3: and if we lose a little bit of accountability on
Speaker 3: the way, you know, kudos to future historian grad students
Speaker 3: because we just got them their masters or their PhD studies.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I shout out to the Rabbel Rouser index that
Speaker 2: we discovered I don't even know years back now now
Speaker 2: where we realized that there was a huge list that
Speaker 2: the FBI was keeping of people internally in the United States,
Speaker 2: not just like this, but people that they were watching. Right,
Speaker 2: So you then watched did that person take a trip
Speaker 2: to I don't know, Egypt sometime recently? Uh? Oh, now
Speaker 2: they get upgraded within that list.
Speaker 3: Why does this guy keep going to Yemen? He doesn't
Speaker 3: have family there? Or does he?
Speaker 2: Oh wait to say he has dual citizenship?
Speaker 3: Oh snap, which is what they called it, the oh
Speaker 3: Snap file. The kidding, we hope, but this is maybe
Speaker 3: here we take a second to look at what the
Speaker 3: disposition matrix is how it works.
Speaker 4: Sounds good. We're going to enter the matrix right after
Speaker 4: a quick word from our sponsor. So remember we referred
Speaker 4: to this thing as being a database, but this isn't
Speaker 4: just like an elaborate Excel spreadsheet. It is so much
Speaker 4: more than a list alone. It compiles as you said earlier, Matt,
Speaker 4: I believe biographies of targets. It's a full dossier on
Speaker 4: their movements, their known associates, locations, group affiliations, and it
Speaker 4: goes even further than that with I guess recommended strategies
Speaker 4: for all of these various ways of handling or disposing
Speaker 4: of these individuals, including capturing, kidnapping, and even murdering them.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like, if this guy's in this is a quote.
Speaker 3: If this guy is in Saudi Arabia, let's pull our
Speaker 3: Saudi connections right. Or if they're on public transit in
Speaker 3: the right place, let's follow them there. If they happen
Speaker 3: to be in North Africa, here's who will work with
Speaker 3: to find them. Per Greg Miller, we just can't say
Speaker 3: enough enough good stuff about your work there, mister Miller.
Speaker 3: Per him, the names of terrorism targets are also correlated
Speaker 3: toward resources that could be used to track them down.
Speaker 3: And then you know, in the defense of the matrix
Speaker 3: or its architects, at least, you will run into justification. Right,
Speaker 3: why is this a bad guy? Here is a sealed indictment,
Speaker 3: or here is some human we gathered on this person.
Speaker 3: We are, at least internally, we are rationalizing why this
Speaker 3: person should be kidnapped or murdered. At this point, they're
Speaker 3: already heavily surveilled.
Speaker 2: Exactly. The wielders of the matrix know that this person
Speaker 2: is directly associated with this known group that is considered
Speaker 2: a terrorist organization, right, and we know that this person
Speaker 2: has made moves X through Y, and we're worried about
Speaker 2: move Z.
Speaker 4: So we need to take this person now.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, we see this idea that the database maps.
Speaker 3: Here's why it's called disposition matrix. It maps the disposition
Speaker 3: of suspects possibly beyond the reach of the American drone program,
Speaker 3: especially in the earlier days. If we go to the Atlantic,
Speaker 3: we'll see an excellent article by these journalists, Daniel Biman
Speaker 3: and Benjamin Wittess w I T TES that gives you
Speaker 3: a flow chart. Now, the headline of this article might
Speaker 3: strike people that some people the wrong way. It might
Speaker 3: ruffle some feathers. The headline is how Obama decides your
Speaker 3: fate if he thinks you're a terrorist. And if we
Speaker 3: scroll through then we can see the flow chart of
Speaker 3: sort of the decision tree, and it starts with a
Speaker 3: target being identified or you could even say pitched to
Speaker 3: the matrix.
Speaker 4: So first a target is identified in the criteria for
Speaker 4: identifying that target kind of by design is quite broad
Speaker 4: and pretty vague and based on inputs collaboration through multiple
Speaker 4: intelligence agencies who you know, are able to pull from
Speaker 4: telecommunication data, social media activity, all of the human intelligence
Speaker 4: kind of aspects that we've talked about on the show
Speaker 4: Ad nauseum, so pretty much anything you could possibly get
Speaker 4: your hands on, or your eyes on, or your ears on.
Speaker 4: They are leveraging that stuff.
Speaker 3: And so we've already violated a lot of what are
Speaker 3: called privacy protections in the first step. Now the data
Speaker 3: gets analyzed, you know, some coalition internally of different agencies
Speaker 3: and experts. They do that thing that people who like
Speaker 3: wine do. They sort of they smell the data, you know,
Speaker 3: the switch it around around the glass. They get the bouquet. Right.
Speaker 3: If something exists and then they say they determined. Then
Speaker 3: in step two, is this person, this individual a threat
Speaker 3: to US national security? And again the definition of threat
Speaker 3: is super vague here. The definition of threat is kind
Speaker 3: of like the old meme of walking into a target
Speaker 3: without a shopping list and just going off vibes. This
Speaker 3: is a vibe check, they but they do. You know,
Speaker 3: I don't want to dismiss it or diminish the level
Speaker 3: of work because they're looking into associations deeply. So, yeah,
Speaker 3: this person may not be identified as a terrorist. They
Speaker 3: may have never even had a late fee at the library.
Speaker 3: But what if they're in frequent contact with someone who
Speaker 3: knows someone who knows someone who is suspected of terrorist activity?
Speaker 3: What if they have any unexplained finances?
Speaker 4: Yeah, however to find I mean, if there are even
Speaker 4: seven degrees from Kevin Bacon, they're going to be of
Speaker 4: interest in this situation.
Speaker 3: The travel is a tricky thing too.
Speaker 2: Yes, well, and to remember all that hubbub about metadata
Speaker 2: guys back in the day.
Speaker 4: This is why this leads to this. We don't know
Speaker 4: who they are, but we basically know who's talking to
Speaker 4: who are that these nodes are communicating on a regular basis.
Speaker 2: More or less, right, Yeah, all you really need for
Speaker 2: those leads are those tiny little dots of data. Then
Speaker 2: you can start correlating that with all this other stuff
Speaker 2: that's getting caught up.
Speaker 3: And again, because the definitions right and the rubric is
Speaker 3: so broad here, it is possible, I'm not going to
Speaker 3: say plausible necessarily, but it is quite possible for someone
Speaker 3: to just have hit the wrong nodes of information. Right,
Speaker 3: You're in the wrong Facebook group or something, you travel
Speaker 3: to you know, insert country here too often. And once
Speaker 3: that all this goes through, you know that Bouquet snifting,
Speaker 3: smaller experience of surveillance, and once someone is considered viable,
Speaker 3: they enter the next phase, which has the most nineteen
Speaker 3: eighties action movie blockbuster ridiculous name to kill Chain.
Speaker 4: Yes, man, that's fine. Could you be in that? Maybe
Speaker 4: Jean Claude van Dam No, it's not quite up his alley.
Speaker 4: It needs to be a little more of like a
Speaker 4: Jason Statham type figure. I think the kill Chain.
Speaker 3: He was in Blood Sport. I'd watch Fandamn and kill Chain.
Speaker 4: Remember that one time we went to like an iHeart
Speaker 4: event and we got through the red carpet and John
Speaker 4: Claude van Dam was ahead of us online. I'll never
Speaker 4: forget that as long as I live.
Speaker 3: I bumped into him and he turned around, and I thought,
Speaker 3: oh man, the guy from Time Cop is going to
Speaker 3: beat the snot out of me.
Speaker 4: And when you said he turned around, I'm picturing him
Speaker 4: doing a roundhouse kick. To write to your.
Speaker 3: Face, he's a very he's he's ready.
Speaker 4: Yeah, he was ready.
Speaker 3: He's very kind to very small.
Speaker 4: He can get you.
Speaker 3: Ye. This kill chain is not automatically out. Instead, it
Speaker 3: is identification to determination of what happens next, heavy surveillance,
Speaker 3: real eye of sourron stuff. If the person does appear
Speaker 3: to be a threat, you get the next part of
Speaker 3: the decision tree, a series of options for actions Drone
Speaker 3: strikes for example, or this isn't this is less common now,
Speaker 3: but special operations for on the ground attacks. Think of
Speaker 3: Osama bin Laden extraordinary rendition. The real name for that
Speaker 3: is kidnapping and take him to a black site and
Speaker 3: figure out if he's actually a taxi driver.
Speaker 2: Yep, yep, guys, I'm going to bring up here so
Speaker 2: we know this reporting comes out twenty twelve right then
Speaker 2: very soon after that, other countries around the world, after
Speaker 2: they get wind of it thanks to Greg Miller, other
Speaker 2: journalists start looking into the same kind of stuff in
Speaker 2: their countries. And we learned from reporting by Ian Cobain
Speaker 2: and The Guardian in July of twenty thirteen that it's
Speaker 2: not just the United States looking at targets. It's not
Speaker 2: just all of the mechanisms you know, and organizations within
Speaker 2: the US. It is am I five, am I six.
Speaker 2: It's folks in Australia and again mostly the Five Eyed countries.
Speaker 2: It's folks all over the planet looking at some of
Speaker 2: the same information, gathering up some of the same information
Speaker 2: through their telecoms, through all of er systems, and then
Speaker 2: making recommendations to the United States as kind of I
Speaker 2: don't know, the weapon that gets aimed at people.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, it's real avengers assemble kind of thing. The
Speaker 3: Australian Secret Intelligence Service or ASIS is in there, as
Speaker 3: you mentioned massade. Obviously at first, at least on the
Speaker 3: US side, there's a lot of interest in Pakistan right
Speaker 3: and if Kakistan right in the stands And the first
Speaker 3: question for any enthusiast or fan of these things we
Speaker 3: call civil rights is do they have any civil rights?
Speaker 3: The people being accused? The answer there is no. But
Speaker 3: the second question would be, is there any sort of
Speaker 3: at least internal check and balance, internal review? Is there?
Speaker 3: You know, like the old philosophy of the tenth man.
Speaker 3: You guys know that one.
Speaker 4: It's third man, and what's the tenth man?
Speaker 3: Yeah, we love numbering people, right, So the tenth man
Speaker 3: is this old idea that if there are if there's
Speaker 3: a group of ten people decision makers, right, analysts, what
Speaker 3: have you and nine of them agree on a thing,
Speaker 3: that is the job of the tenth person there to
Speaker 3: play devil's advocate, to say, what if you know and
Speaker 3: you have to have you have to have something like that.
Speaker 3: So it may be at least a comfort of if
Speaker 3: a cold comfort, to realize that targets on the disposition
Speaker 3: matrix are to our understanding, reviewed every three months. And yeah,
Speaker 3: so if you make it without blowing up that first
Speaker 3: ninety days, that's the closest you get to something like
Speaker 3: an appeal. But you are not part of it. You
Speaker 3: may never know you're on the list.
Speaker 2: Geez jeez, Louise.
Speaker 3: We got to mention that when Greg Miller brought this
Speaker 3: to the public eye back in twenty twelve, holy smokes,
Speaker 3: more than a decade ago. Now, the Matrix was already
Speaker 3: a global enterprise. It was facilitating operations on and off
Speaker 3: the books in the stands in Somalia, Yemen, a couple
Speaker 3: of other countries, and the goal was to expand, to
Speaker 3: franchise out to operations across northern and Eastern Africa as
Speaker 3: well as in Iran. Okay, they were gonna they were
Speaker 3: gonna touch to Ran as well and UH with with
Speaker 3: some friends and Massade and our British friends. They were
Speaker 3: they were quite suited to do so.
Speaker 2: Yep, I'm gonna tenth man, the tenth man of that list.
Speaker 2: You noticed that nothing was happening in Saudi Arabia, even
Speaker 2: though the intelligence was showing that the threats were coming
Speaker 2: directly from there and some of the funding.
Speaker 3: Yeah confirmed it. Also also notice there's not a lot
Speaker 3: of coverage of Uncle Sam's so called hegemonic backyard right
Speaker 3: the Caribbean, South and Central America.
Speaker 2: Hm hmm, just interesting, just ye, just pointing.
Speaker 3: That one out. You know, we're just we're walking down
Speaker 3: the street of uh of trade craft houses and we're going, oh,
Speaker 3: that's it's weird. There's no one oh.
Speaker 2: No, one knows on that one.
Speaker 3: Eh. Yeah, so we could assume that this with all
Speaker 3: the information we've heard so far, we could, like a
Speaker 3: lot of people back in twenty twelve, assumed that this
Speaker 3: was just an intelligence gathering op, you know what I mean,
Speaker 3: the stuff that all the countries and all the big
Speaker 3: private businesses do all the time. But it clearly, very quickly,
Speaker 3: like Day two, evolved past that into a covert assassination initiative.
Speaker 3: No trial, no jury, none of that other pesky stuff
Speaker 3: that America appears to hold so sacro sainct. You don't
Speaker 3: know if you're on the list, right, And if you
Speaker 3: are on the list, there's no realistic way for you
Speaker 3: to appeal being on a kill list. You can't go
Speaker 3: in and say, hey, actually I am just you know,
Speaker 3: an uber driver. You're looking like I am just I
Speaker 3: am just a grad student, right, You're looking for the
Speaker 3: other ben bullet, and yes he's super down with you know,
Speaker 3: insert organization here, But that's not me. There's more than
Speaker 3: one person with this.
Speaker 4: Name, which can happen on like something much less severe,
Speaker 4: but like a no fly list. But if I'm not mistaken,
Speaker 4: you can there is some recourse to finding out if
Speaker 4: you're on that kind of list, and getting off of it.
Speaker 3: Correct, Yes, yeah, yeah, okay, that's correct, yeah, depending on
Speaker 3: your country, yes, yes, yes, yes, okay.
Speaker 2: I want to tell you some crazy here that deals
Speaker 2: exactly with this, and it comes from that Guardian article,
Speaker 2: and it was a It's a father who lives in
Speaker 2: London with his sons, okay and three sons, and he
Speaker 2: is a dual citizen of both Britain I guess or
Speaker 2: the United Kingdom and Egypt. And one of his sons
Speaker 2: there there there, they're all Muslim, right, they follow Islam.
Speaker 2: One of his sons becomes associated with one of these
Speaker 2: groups that's a quote known terrorist organization, sure, and one
Speaker 2: of his sons is targeted, put into the disposition matrix
Speaker 2: via the United Kingdom and m I five, only to
Speaker 2: be killed okay. And then the father has no idea
Speaker 2: why or what's going on why one of his sons
Speaker 2: has been killed, and in order to fix things, he
Speaker 2: and his whole family fly to Egypt, renounce their citizenship
Speaker 2: in Egypt, and then come back to the United Kingdom
Speaker 2: to say, hey, guys, we are not terrorists. Basically, because
Speaker 2: one of the things that the British government did around
Speaker 2: this time is they would if somebody had dual citizenship
Speaker 2: and was spending a lot of time in Somalia. Let's
Speaker 2: say they would send a little message and a letter
Speaker 2: to the known address somewhere in the United Kingdom that says, hey,
Speaker 2: you're no longer a British citizen.
Speaker 3: Whoa.
Speaker 2: And since they did that legally, they were getting around
Speaker 2: all these rules that they had of protecting their own citizens, right,
Speaker 2: so you don't have to do that anymore now, Okay,
Speaker 2: they got the go ahead to be a part of
Speaker 2: the kill chain.
Speaker 3: And then also add to that, further distancing the direct
Speaker 3: hand because you know, the same way five Eyes handles
Speaker 3: loopholes about intelligence gathering, they would say, okay, now it's
Speaker 3: not us the British, it's not the our guys executing someone.
Speaker 3: We provided information to something about someone who's no longer
Speaker 3: a citizen.
Speaker 4: Well, and you know, in the argument could be made
Speaker 4: that this again to the previous point we made about
Speaker 4: like the history of warfare and how things are seemingly
Speaker 4: comparatively less brutal and casualties are you down. One could
Speaker 4: argue though, that there's a kind of knock on consequence
Speaker 4: of this kind of you know, off the books kind
Speaker 4: of underhanded killing by the fact that you know, it's
Speaker 4: creating maybe more enemies than it is killing them, or
Speaker 4: more heavy handed actions that then result in you know,
Speaker 4: legacy resentment that can then create additional conflicts.
Speaker 3: I guess you know, sure, yeah, I mean, look, if anything,
Speaker 3: the disposition matrix is a highly organizational force. And we
Speaker 3: could argue again with validity that because there are so
Speaker 3: many agencies and so many countries, all of which have
Speaker 3: their own monopoly of agencies. Because of all these stakeholders participating,
Speaker 3: if they didn't have some kind of codex or single resource,
Speaker 3: their efforts could become chaotic, multiple groups doing the same
Speaker 3: thing at once, working with different information, making mistakes. There's
Speaker 3: a lot of precedent for this, even just in the US,
Speaker 3: agencies in the past have found themselves at odds. They're
Speaker 3: chasing the same proverbial rabbit and getting in each other's way.
Speaker 3: But again, the thing is, these aren't rabbits. These are people,
Speaker 3: some of them may well be innocent. And the damning
Speaker 3: piece of this is we might never know, we being
Speaker 3: the public, when these mistakes get made, Like we know
Speaker 3: a few. We'll do a few examples here, but this
Speaker 3: I think speaks to the controversies that you're alluding to.
Speaker 3: There noel civil rights groups definitely object to the matrix
Speaker 3: stem disturn. The ACLU has entered the chat, and in
Speaker 3: twenty thirteen, you know when all this was hidden in
Speaker 3: Other journalists like you mentioned Matt, we're writing about this
Speaker 3: as well. The ACLU director of the time, Hina Shamsi,
Speaker 3: had a quote. It's a bit long, so I suggest
Speaker 3: we round robin it. But I think this gives us
Speaker 3: very very good sense of where the criticism is coming from.
Speaker 2: At least here's the quote. Anyone who thought us targeted
Speaker 2: killing outside of armed conflict was a narrow emergency based
Speaker 2: exception to the requirement of due process before a death
Speaker 2: sentence is being proven conclusively wrong.
Speaker 3: That you mind.
Speaker 4: If I take the back out of this, I think
Speaker 4: it sort of hits on maybe what I was talking
Speaker 4: about to a degree. The danger of dispensing with due
Speaker 4: process is obvious because without it we cannot be assured
Speaker 4: that the people in the government's death database truly present
Speaker 4: a concrete, eminent threat to the country. What we do
Speaker 4: know is that tragic mistakes have been made. Hundreds of
Speaker 4: civilian bystanders have died, and our government has even killed
Speaker 4: a sixteen year old US citizen without acknowledging, let alone
Speaker 4: explaining his death.
Speaker 3: A bureaucratized paramilitary killing program that targets people far from
Speaker 3: any battlefield is not just unlawful, it will create more
Speaker 3: enemies than it kills. This is a practical appeal, right,
Speaker 3: and this is one of the main the main bones
Speaker 3: I have to pick with this thing personally, is the
Speaker 3: The argument primarily is against a lack of accountability and transparency,
Speaker 3: but it's also a plea to consider these long tail
Speaker 3: consequences that you could create more terrorists, more extremists through
Speaker 3: these attacks. You know, exercise empathy, folks. Let's imagine you
Speaker 3: are a five year old, right, you're a six year
Speaker 3: old your parents were collateral damage another damning euphemism. Your
Speaker 3: parents were collateral damage in a drone strike, and you
Speaker 3: grow up carrying that, right, Can you blame that person
Speaker 3: foreseeing the United States as an enemy? It certainly functioned
Speaker 3: as one in your life.
Speaker 4: I mean, it's the plot of every like revenge film
Speaker 4: ever made, you know, or at least many of them.
Speaker 4: You know, as someone witnesses their parents being murdered, they
Speaker 4: grow up to become Batman, you know, I mean yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: Or your brother, your sons. Remember that the father I
Speaker 2: mentioned earlier with the three sons, one of them got
Speaker 2: assassinated by the US government. He a quote from him
Speaker 2: in that Guardian article. Is its madness they're driving these
Speaker 2: boys to Afghanistan.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like our earlier episode on whether the FBI manufactures
Speaker 3: terrorist you know, it is precisely aspect to it.
Speaker 2: And it was a known thing in Washington at least
Speaker 2: in twenty twelve, twenty thirteen, it was known that drone
Speaker 2: strikes were fueling more splinter groups and more individuals to
Speaker 2: join up with a group in their town.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, you know, because now you're looking for some kind
Speaker 3: of recompense, right, And if we look at specific examples,
Speaker 3: let's go to the one that the ACLU alludes to
Speaker 3: in their previous statement from twenty thirteen. In twenty eleven,
Speaker 3: the Obama administration ordered a fatal drone strike on a
Speaker 3: suspected American many terrorists named Anwar al Awlaki. This guy
Speaker 3: becomes the first US citizen and he was a US
Speaker 3: citizen to be targeted and killed by a drone strike
Speaker 3: from his own government that occurred on September thirtieth of
Speaker 3: twenty eleven. Just a few days later, it's October fourteenth.
Speaker 3: His son dies in a drone strike. His son is
Speaker 3: not a suspected terrorist. His son is not the official
Speaker 3: target of the strike. He is a sixteen year old boy.
Speaker 3: And the target is a guy named Ibrahim Albana, an
Speaker 3: Egyptian that was suspected of being a senior Al Qaeda operative.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and the White House Press secretary at the time
Speaker 4: had this to say about it. I would suggest that
Speaker 4: you should have a far more responsible father if they
Speaker 4: are truly concerned about the well being of their children.
Speaker 4: WHOA this c really.
Speaker 3: Tone deaf allfing continues.
Speaker 4: I don't think becoming an Al Qaeda jihadis terrorist is
Speaker 4: the best way to go about doing your busines, says
Speaker 4: the guy had killed my father.
Speaker 2: It makes me think of the collateral murder video that
Speaker 2: WikiLeaks put out back in twenty ten. I think a
Speaker 2: two thousand and seven airstrike on people that ended up
Speaker 2: being journalists and a group of people that journalists were
Speaker 2: following and.
Speaker 3: With yeah, yeah, And then that's another example. Let's go
Speaker 3: to the example. Some of us may, unfortunately remember the
Speaker 3: drone strike on a wedding procession. On December twelfth, twenty thirteen,
Speaker 3: US drone launched four hellfire missiles on a convoy of
Speaker 3: eleven vehicles, cars and pickup trucks. This was a during
Speaker 3: a counter terrorism hop in Yemen, in rural Yemen. The
Speaker 3: strike killed a dozen people, it wounded at least fifteen others,
Speaker 3: and quite seriously, there's no two ways about it with
Speaker 3: this kind of stuff, whatever the intentions may be, civilians
Speaker 3: are getting murdered in the process of hunting suspected terrorists
Speaker 3: and again suspected So there are some internal documentation things
Speaker 3: assets that are justifying these operations, but there's no day
Speaker 3: in court. You know, there's no right to appeal. You
Speaker 3: might not know you're on the list until the explosion.
Speaker 4: And we know this program is it remains current correct correct,
Speaker 4: because it was my understanding that it came about under
Speaker 4: the Obama administration and then it was continued by the
Speaker 4: Biden administration, but that wasn't necessarily like a done dealer.
Speaker 4: I think maybe he even reinstated it like it did
Speaker 4: go away for a little while. It was my understanding.
Speaker 4: There's this article I found on forever wars dot com.
Speaker 4: Joe Biden's Disposition Matrix, and it just says that the A.
Speaker 4: Biden administration has reinstated a bureaucratic structure created under Barack
Speaker 4: Obama that wields the power of life and death.
Speaker 3: And drud strikes continue under the current administration as well.
Speaker 3: The Disposition matrix or something like it continues apace. You know,
Speaker 3: supporters will say, look, this is imperfect. Everybody admits that,
Speaker 3: but the program is still far more preferable to the
Speaker 3: tactics of the past. And I'm interested to hear you
Speaker 3: guys thoughts on that.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean, what are the other tactics Sending operatives
Speaker 2: in in the night, having a couple of well placed
Speaker 2: CIA spies that you know, take somebody out, But even
Speaker 2: then you're still killing people that you suspect are a
Speaker 2: part of something. It reminds me. I've been playing a
Speaker 2: lot of Call of Duty lately. It reminds me of
Speaker 2: all the storylines that they put in these video games
Speaker 2: where they they you know, have all this into hell
Speaker 2: on some bad guy. So they're going in or they're
Speaker 2: sending in a drone strike just like this, and it's
Speaker 2: just there's something about it. It's also secretive it's also.
Speaker 4: And weirdly corporate and cold, you know what I mean.
Speaker 4: I don't know, there's something mentality, yeah.
Speaker 2: But at the same time, there are human beings that
Speaker 2: are plotting terrible things absolutely, So it's just it's I
Speaker 2: get what we're saying when we're saying it's preferable, right.
Speaker 4: And I guess you have to look at the math though,
Speaker 4: and the math is murky and it's hard to make
Speaker 4: out because we don't know those knock on consequences, like
Speaker 4: we can't we can't always identify that in the data
Speaker 4: right away. That stuff that happens kind of behind the
Speaker 4: scenes and takes a lifetime of growing up with that
Speaker 4: resentment to lead down the path of making a choice
Speaker 4: to you know, continue on perhaps become an even greater enemy,
Speaker 4: you know, than the person that was killed in the
Speaker 4: first place.
Speaker 2: Because in many instances, they're like twenty year olds, right,
Speaker 2: young twenty year olds that are being targeted by this list.
Speaker 3: Right, And this is this is something that I think
Speaker 3: we should all collectively grapple with together because the idea
Speaker 3: that there is a less imperfect system inherently acknowledges that imperfections,
Speaker 3: dangerous ones exist and indeed, they may be endemic to
Speaker 3: the thing, they may be inextricable from that from the
Speaker 3: pursuit of the disposition matrix. So how much credence can
Speaker 3: we put in the idea that this will become better
Speaker 3: over time, the fewer mistakes will be made. We simply cannot.
Speaker 3: When there is no transparency outside of that three month
Speaker 3: review time window, there's not really there's not really anything,
Speaker 3: And outside of saying someone is suspected of terrorism, there's
Speaker 3: not hard proof. Now we know a lot of Again,
Speaker 3: a lot of supporters of this program will say, hey, logically,
Speaker 3: you're putting you're putting us in a very difficult position
Speaker 3: because we can't prove that we prevented another nine to
Speaker 3: eleven because we killed someone before it happened, right, so
Speaker 3: we can't prove what would have happened in the future. Still,
Speaker 3: it's not going away. Drone strikes are the new normal.
Speaker 3: The disposition matrix, the weaponization of data, the weaponization of
Speaker 3: the Kevin Bacon game, is not just going to continue,
Speaker 3: it is going to expand. And to the earlier question,
Speaker 3: there maybe one of the thresholds of efficacy or one
Speaker 3: of the milestones to consider if we have the numbers
Speaker 3: would be, at what point does the number of civilians
Speaker 3: who die as a result of this, At what point
Speaker 3: does that exceed the number of civilians who died in
Speaker 3: nine to eleven, right in actual terrorist attacks? And if so,
Speaker 3: how far can that discrepancy extend before someone says we
Speaker 3: need to reevaluate what's happening.
Speaker 4: That's right, because like, well, maybe total casualties may be down,
Speaker 4: you know, in modern warfare compared to the kinds of
Speaker 4: horrific trench warfare, you know, tactics of the past, and
Speaker 4: beyond the collateral damage of people that were unrelated to
Speaker 4: the actual battle or to any allegiance to one side
Speaker 4: or the other. To me, that's almost like, you know,
Speaker 4: you can it's hard to put a cost on any
Speaker 4: human life, but someone that's an active combatant losing their life,
Speaker 4: they kind of know what they're signing up for. I
Speaker 4: would maybe assign more of a value to someone who
Speaker 4: is completely unrelated to the cause and who it just
Speaker 4: happens to be killed as a result of it. So,
Speaker 4: I mean, I don't know, It's it is kind of
Speaker 4: like a numbers game. But to me, I feel like
Speaker 4: even if fewer mass casualties are taking place in warfare.
Speaker 4: If more, you know, innocent people are being killed, and
Speaker 4: that's worse than the past. I don't know.
Speaker 2: You know, guys, we've framed this entire thing around the
Speaker 2: war on terror, because that's really how this was fully weaponized,
Speaker 2: and you know, the evolution where it's at right now
Speaker 2: is based on continuing a war on terror enemies of
Speaker 2: the United States and its allies. The thing that really
Speaker 2: scares me is thinking about this weapon and system being
Speaker 2: aimed at people that some new organizations, some new regime
Speaker 2: aimed at civilians and citizens of the United States that
Speaker 2: are seen as enemies of whatever the structure is that
Speaker 2: you are trying to build or protect. It feels like this.
Speaker 2: I don't know what to say other than it's a
Speaker 2: feeling I can feel sometime in the future that's being
Speaker 2: used against United States citizens.
Speaker 3: That's the huge concern right now on the horizon.
Speaker 2: Well, it's certainly concerning me and not.
Speaker 3: Just you citizens, But proponents will say, you know what
Speaker 3: about other countries that are participating in this, Countries that
Speaker 3: are more tightly surveilled, like the UK. If there is
Speaker 3: not a clear rule of law, then it could become
Speaker 3: like a witch hunt. You know, the person accused is
Speaker 3: exonerated after their death, which is very not great. This
Speaker 3: is Yeah, this is a concern that I think is
Speaker 3: universal amid people who are I wouldn't even call us critics,
Speaker 3: just people who are watching the trends, the patterns, the
Speaker 3: current evolution. And you know a lot of our fellow
Speaker 3: conspiracy realists in the crowd tonight. You know, you're veterans.
Speaker 3: You're actively serving in the armed forces or in the
Speaker 3: intelligence agencies in the US or abroad, which means that
Speaker 3: some of us have witnessed the effects of the disposition
Speaker 3: matrix firsthand. That's something where I want us to go
Speaker 3: to a primary We would love to hear from you.
Speaker 3: Is this a necessary evil? Is this what you would
Speaker 3: call holdly a net positive for the world. Does it
Speaker 3: address the dangers it aims to solve? Or have we instead,
Speaker 3: through desperation with whatever noble intent, created something Unamerican beyond
Speaker 3: the balance of democracy, an unstoppable force leads to more
Speaker 3: disaster in the future. These are good questions. Try not
Speaker 3: to put our thumb on the scale too hard there,
Speaker 3: but I think we raise valid concerns.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, just knowing that way before you ever get
Speaker 2: taken out, whoever you are, whoever we are, you would
Speaker 2: be on some list somewhere overlaid with all of your
Speaker 2: associates and locations and behaviors and likes and dislikes, and
Speaker 2: knowing that all of that information is already being scooped
Speaker 2: up on all of us. So it seems as though
Speaker 2: it probably already exists in one form or another. Of course,
Speaker 2: where there's a probability that each of us would turn
Speaker 2: one way or another.
Speaker 4: There's a non zero likely. Well, and y'all just researching
Speaker 4: the stuff we do for this show and some of
Speaker 4: the travels that we do, you know, throughout our lives
Speaker 4: and careers, I mean, I can see us having a low,
Speaker 4: perhaps low probability of creeping up onto a list of
Speaker 4: this type.
Speaker 2: You know, I mean, or listening to the show absolutely
Speaker 2: is this part of your behavior.
Speaker 3: Or even being pulled in in the future expansions to
Speaker 3: help aid in a bet some of the goals of
Speaker 3: the matrix of the disposition matrix. Another thing I didn't
Speaker 3: put it in the episode here, but another thing that
Speaker 3: naturally has to occur is does the opposition have something
Speaker 3: like a matrix? Whoever that opposition may be and if so,
Speaker 3: what are what are they working toward. Anyway, this is
Speaker 3: the point of the show where we ask what you
Speaker 3: think and encourage you to enlarge your footprint with us.
Speaker 3: Participate in the list, where already on probably multiple at
Speaker 3: this time. Tell us your thoughts folks again, especially you know,
Speaker 3: not just to the veterans or the active members of
Speaker 3: armed forces and intelligence, but those who have witnessed the
Speaker 3: matrix effects firsthand. We really do want to hear from
Speaker 3: you your opinion on necessary evil or a leviathan that
Speaker 3: has grown beyond the bounds of democracy. So find us
Speaker 3: on a telephone, give us an email, or contact us
Speaker 3: online so you can add another data point to you
Speaker 3: know your position on the list. Is there a leaderboard?
Speaker 4: These are all good questions, Ben, and we'd like to
Speaker 4: hear from you. Reach out to us on your social
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Speaker 4: galore for you to enjoy. And on Facebook where we
Speaker 4: have our Facebook group here's where it gets crazy. On
Speaker 4: Instagram and TikTok, we're Conspiracy Stuff Show.
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