Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, Michael and Dragon.
Speaker 2 (00:01):
For that last caller complaining about women's basketball, which we
all know is boring. I got two words for you,
Sophie Cunningham. Look up a picture, bro, No.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Did you look it up? I did?
Speaker 3 (00:16):
And yep, all right, dang it, this is not yep, Sophie.
What Cunningham. Sophie Cunningham, I now know she plays with
a fever. Oh oh, well, in this case, women's basketball
(00:41):
might be a good thing to watch. Got a little
bit more interesting, didn't it. It certainly did. Hmm, Sophie Cunningham.
Two words I ever thought i'd say together in my life.
I don't even I don't even know Sophie, do you know?
So I don't know any Sophie's. I know some Cunningham's,
but I don't know Sophie's. No Sophie's at all. This
(01:04):
next segment, this next this hour is a two parter,
So you're going to have to step up your game
a little bit because I need to establish today something
that I want to address in the morning, because I'm
not quite finished with tomorrow. Tomorrow we're going to talk
(01:26):
about temporary This is like, you know, oh, Michael, you
need to tease more. Okay, Well, I'm teasing for tomorrow
morning at nine am, at nine oh four or whatever
it is, we're going to talk about temporary protective status,
the countries that haven't and whether we should eliminate it
(01:47):
or not. But before I finish that, I've got to
do this, I want to talk about something that occurred back.
Speaker 1 (01:54):
In twenty twenty one.
Speaker 3 (01:57):
It's Biden's zero unit mistake, and it is it is
when Afghan or Taliban, yeah, either either Tomato Tomato death
squads came to this country. Death squads in this country.
(02:21):
If you've seen the video of the ambush of the
two young National Guard soldiers barely into adulthood, their early twenties,
they're walking their post near the White House, it is
very the video is very brief. It is very sickening.
An Islamic terrace rounds the corner, raises a revolver and
(02:43):
opens fire. Now, obviously everything's happening, you know, in real time,
really rapidly, and by the time the other guardsmen tackle him,
Sarah Beckstrom is fatally wounded. She died Thanksgiving Day staff
sergeant and through Wolf still fighting for his life. Indications
(03:04):
I haven't checked this morning. The indications light late last night,
well late for me anyway, were that he could wiggle
his toes when they requested it, and he pointed a
finger or something that he could hear what the nurse
was saying. The suspect from Nulah Luckenwall is not just
(03:25):
some random drifter that came here. He's a former member
of the CI's elite Afghan Zero Units. The Zero Units are,
or were, a paramilitary stripe force. They were trained to
kill and they were trained for capture missions in the
heartland of the Taliban occupied territory. He came here through
(03:50):
Biden's Operation Allies Welcome program and then he was granted asylum.
The war in Afghanistan did not stay in at Afghanistan.
We actually picked some of that war up and flew
some of it into our own neighborhoods. To see why
(04:10):
this matters. To understand why this matters, you've got to
know what the Zero Units were. You've heard of the
thin blue line. How about blue on green? Have you
heard of blue on Green? Well, I'll get to that
in a minute, but I want you to think about, Oh,
(04:33):
you've heard fragging, except this is not technically fragging. During
the later years of the Afghan War, the CIA quietly
created Afghan only commando teams and they operated outside of
the separate from Afghanistan's ordinary military chain of command. Human
(04:55):
Rights Watch describes these formations as CIA backed and they
conducted very high risk night raids. There was rarely, if ever,
any meaningful Afghan government oversight. There have been documents released
(05:15):
the show repeated allegations of extra judicial killings, force disappearances
at tax on medical facilities. Pro Publica's multi year investigation
into just one of these units concluded that the night
raids conducted by one unit killed hundreds of civilians, even
in a limited four year sample, with total casualties probably
(05:39):
higher than what Pro Publica found out. And these are
not claims based on speculation, They're not from partisan blogs.
They're the product of painstaking field reporting, interviews with survivors,
cross checking, checking a mor record, satellite imagery, everything that
you would expect an organization like Pro public had to
(06:00):
really do. Let's talk about the Candahar based Unit zero three.
This is where lock and Wall, the guy that killed
the guardsmen in DC, this is the unit that he served,
is based in Kandahar and operated out of fire based
Gecko Fire based Gecko is a former Taliban compound that
(06:22):
was repurposed as a CIA hub. Journalists and human rights
investigators have chronicled raids in Kandahar and Helman in which
the three operators separated women and children, dragged them in
from their homes, and then left the bodies in the courtyard.
Speaker 1 (06:41):
That's the unit where this guy served. Michael.
Speaker 4 (06:44):
If someone is given asylum here in the United States
and then commits a horrible, heinous crime like this gentleman
from Afghanistan, can as asylum be revoked?
Speaker 1 (06:56):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (06:57):
But why because if he commits the crown like like
this dirt bag that shot the guardsman, if they proved
the case and beyond a reasonable doubt and he's found guilty,
then you won't just sending back to Afghanistan because if
you listen to the rest of what I'm about to
talk about, I want the guy to get the death penalty.
(07:20):
I didn't want him to go back to Afghanistan to
become another terrorist to attack either US again by sneaking
back into the country or going to some other country
over that matter, killing an innocent Afghanis.
Speaker 1 (07:36):
I want the guy put to death.
Speaker 3 (07:38):
So the asylum has only to do with his immigration status,
nothing to do with his legal liability criminally or civilly
while he's in this country. And yeah, you could revoke
the asylum based on the criminal conviction. I'm pretty sure
into the Naturalization Act you can do that, but I
(08:00):
haven't looked at it specifically. But that's my gut feeling
as a lawyer. So let's go back to this Zero
unit operations. A lot of Afghan witnesses have spoke of
spoken about school principles executed in front of their families,
detainees taken away never seen again.
Speaker 1 (08:18):
And I told you.
Speaker 3 (08:19):
The twenty nineteen Human Rights Watch report listed at at
least fourteen separate zero unit operations with credible evidence of
war crimes, the killing of women and children during night
raids and pro publicas. Lindsey Billing, who spent years interviewing
these zero unit soldiers and their victims, quotes one fighter
(08:41):
saying bluntly that Americans pointed out the targets so the
Afghans could hit them, and then they would sign the
battle damage assessments. They reported no civilian deaths, even when
women and children would be lying over there in the rubble.
The defenders of these units would reply that they were
also extremely effective against Teliban and the ISIS commanders, and
(09:05):
that is probably true. CIA officers US Special operators did
not invest years in training a bunch of useless proxies.
They trained them to be effective and lethally effective. But
the moral problem is not efficiency, it's the method. These
(09:28):
units were built to provide deniability, to operate in the shadows,
to shoot first, and then count the bodies, if you
counted them at all. For that matter, the whole structure
was designed to insulate US political leadership from hard questions
about who was being killed in the dead of night.
(09:48):
It's why the CIA put these groups together, not the
US military. It is one thing, though already questionable, to
use such forces on foreign soil in an existential war.
It is quite another thing to fly them with minimal
rethinking and minimal safeguards into the suburbs of America Operation
(10:10):
Allies Welcome. I freely admit I've kind of racked my
you know, my diet coke addle brain to do I
remember that Moniker specifically about these units, and I don't,
(10:30):
But that's what it was called, Operation Allies Welcome. That
was Biden's signatory evacuation policy. In the weeks after Cabble Fell,
and by Biden's own count, almost one hundred thousand Afghans
were brought into this country under the umbrella of Operation Allies.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
Welcome.
Speaker 3 (10:50):
Among them were interpreters, embassy staff, but also large numbers
of Afghan special operators and at least in including at
least at a minimum two thousand members of these zero units.
Now a lot of the news outlets are now reporting
the whole clusters of Zero Unit veterans were resettled in
(11:12):
and around Seattle and other US cities. Rolling Stone describes
the Zero Unit disparate in this country as quote the
CIA's secret Afghan Army starting new lives in the United States,
and that many of these zero Unit members are actually
in touch with their former CIA handlers. There is something
(11:35):
deeply strange about that secret armies are not supposed to
have American zip codes. Secret armies that and look, I'm
not naive here. I know I got briefed about certain
things that the CIA was doing and recognized that you know,
they were to stay over there in the dark sights
(11:59):
or doing the dark things. They weren't to have us
zip codes, but they do. And then the case for
evacuating that was all based on some sort of morality
play that Biden forced upon us.
Speaker 5 (12:16):
I wish we had people in our elected offices for
Colorado that had common sense and a basic understanding of economics,
just like New York has done or will be doing.
Colorado wants to go after the wealthy people. What do
you think is going to happen when the wealthy people
get higher taxes, They're going to leave the state and
(12:39):
then you are not going to have the opportunity to
collect those taxes.
Speaker 3 (12:45):
And I wish I was a billionaire and has six
pack abs, and you know, was as handsome as well.
Nobody within my side that I can compare myself to
so And he's over back there doing lord knows what,
not paying that neither. What did you say nothing by sleeping?
By sleep. I'm gonna make something clear. This guy was
(13:12):
brought into this country under Joe Biden's temporary Protected Status program.
When he was brought into the country, he applied for
his asylum under the Biden administration under the laws that
(13:35):
exist for temporary protected status. Yes, his official date for
asylum is April of twenty twenty five, that would be
some depending on what day in April. That would be
a little over three months into the Trump administration. But
(14:00):
aim that Donald Trump granted asylum to this dirt bag.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
But be completely ignorant, which.
Speaker 3 (14:08):
Is not surprising to me among some people who have
Trump arrangement syndrome or on the other side of the
political spectrum, shows a really complete ignorance of how the
bureaucracy works and how once these processes start, the president
has no idea about who in the US Office of
(14:32):
Customs and Immigration Services or I'm sorry, Citizenship and Immigration
Services uscis what those bureaucrats down there in the bowels
of the bureaucracy are doing, which is why the President
makes these broad strategic decisions and the bureaucrats oftentimes do
what they down will please irrespect you of what the
(14:53):
change in the administration policy might be.
Speaker 1 (15:01):
But back to Biden's.
Speaker 3 (15:04):
Zero unit, absolute huge mistake of bringing these people in
the case for evacuation, as I said, was presented in
moral terms because they want to claim that, you know,
these men fought beside us. They did fight beside us.
(15:25):
But again I mentioned earlier about have you heard of blue.
Speaker 1 (15:30):
On Green.
Speaker 3 (15:32):
Blue on Green is where Afghans, particularly these operating under
I can't even say the authority authority of the CIA,
I'll bring under the supervision of the CIA decide to
kill American soldiers. So people in Afghan blue uniform or
(15:58):
even if they're not wearing the Afghan blue uniform, they're
operating trained by the CIA, but operating outside the direct
authority of the Afghan military, but yet they are members
of and pay by the Afghan military.
Speaker 1 (16:15):
Green and Blue.
Speaker 3 (16:17):
The best open source estimates indicate roughly one hundred to
one hundred and twenty attacks in Afghanistan during the war,
which resulted in approximately one hundred and fifty coalition troops killed,
of whom the largest majority were US personnel, on the
order of somewhere between out of one hundred and fifty
Afghans killing coalition soldiers, somewhere between one hundred and twenty
(16:41):
and one hundred and thirty of those one hundred and
fifty were American soldiers killed by CIA trained Afghan soldiers
like this dirt bag that came to this country under
Biden's evacuation orders. Now, precise counts vary based on data
(17:03):
set and definition, but the range of one hundred and
twenty to one hundred and thirty out of a total
of one hundred and fifty reflects the most commonly cited
compiled figures from US military and independent trackers. You know,
there's a great site, the Long War Journal, that you
can go read that. We'll talk about Green on Blue,
(17:24):
which is I think what we saw in d C
is a carryover from bringing these people into the country.
The facts about this dirt bag's life in this country
are really depressingly predictable. He arrived with a wife and
five kids. They settled in Bellingham, Washington. Reports from local
(17:45):
advocates and landlords subscribe a man drifting into isolation, cycling
through unstable jobs, taking sudden long road trips from WHEREVA
was outgoing, and then sinking to what one email called
called a dark depression. The AP obtained correspondence from a
community worker who repeatedly warned that he was becoming severely withdrawn,
neglecting his own children, showing signs of self harm, and
(18:07):
at the same time, national security officials now say he
was almost certainly radicalized after his arrival, consuming all this
online material that reinforced the sense of grievance and martyrdom.
Of course, doesn't take a rocket science to figure that out.
Speaker 1 (18:26):
In other words, we took a man who's only adult skill.
Speaker 3 (18:30):
Was lethal violence in a CIA designed environment of deniability.
We dropped him into an alien culture with minimal support,
and he just hoped the social services, completely inequipped and
incapable of dealing with someone like this. And of course
the non government organizations, the NGOs or the refugee nonprofit
NGOs would do what years of discipline, trauma and ideological
(18:55):
conflict could not be overcome by this not a serious
immigration system, It is foolishness. The problem is not that
Afghans as the people are uniquely prone to violence. The
problem is that the zero units are not a random
cross section of Afghanis. They are a very specific population.
(19:18):
They are selected precisely because they could be turned into
uncompromising instruments of violence, taught they were taught to kick
indoors at night, trained to push past any inhibitions that
most human beings feel when a rifle is pointed at
another man's chest in front of his children, and just
pull the trigger and then, for that matter, to take
(19:40):
out the children too. You know, human rights groups that
are generally sympathetic to refugees. They themselves had been warning
about this design flaw for years, because when Biden announced
the evacuation flights, Human Rights Watch stressed that members of
these abusive af forces, including the Zero Unit veterans, might
(20:04):
themselves require third country relocation or actually just keep them
in country, or alternatively prosecute them now quietly import them
into Western cities. The reporting in pro public of documents
show how Zero Unit soldiers, racked by guilt, describe themselves
(20:25):
as broken men. You want a broken man as subject
to radicalization and doctrination. And when you know that we
have Taliban units in this country, when we know that
we have Altaida units still in this country, of course
they're going to seek out these men. They're already highly trained,
(20:48):
they're already broken, and to radicalize them Hell's bills. I
could probably ride. They're so broken, I could probably radicalize
them into becoming conservative Republican members of the GOP. You
could write, you could radicalize them into anything. And the
administration's answer has been that Operation Allies Welcome Vetting was multilayered. Oh,
(21:11):
it was vigorous, involving all sorts of intelligence databases, biometric checks, interviews.
We ought to be honest about what that kind of
vetting can and cannot do. It might occasionally catch a
known terrorists or a known criminal, or an individual flag
by existing records, but it cannot see inside someone's mind.
(21:32):
It cannot tell you which if two zero unit team
leaders is quietly unraveling, or which one will process the
loss of a comrade by reading his way into extremist forums.
To rely on vetting alone is to confuse a background
check with the psychological evaluation. These people should never have
been brought into this country. But that's precisely what Biden did,
(21:55):
and it was all on the moral ground that, oh,
they fought alongside us. Well, I would remind you what
the mainstream media will not remind you of, and that
is the blue on green incidents that killed at least
one hundred and thirty of our soldiers. Where they were,
you know, probably in some area of operation, carrying out
some you know, raid of some sort, and decided or
(22:16):
maybe they finished the raid, and then we're just going
back to their barracks, back back to their unit, and
the blue and Green occurred, and they just turned their
rifle and just boom, killed an American soldier and then
probably escaped and ran off into the darkness. Now, defenders
(22:39):
of these units, they want to claim that they were
among the most thoroughly vetted Afghans during the war itself. Well,
guess what that proves the point. That proves the point,
because to thoroughly vet Afghans to go do what the
CIA trained them to do, the same system that supposedly
vetted them overseas also produced by every serious independent account
(23:03):
a record of civilian killings, botched trades, unaccountable Knight operations
that poisoned local support for the Afghan government. Again pro
public is tally of at least four hundred and fifty
two civilians killed by only one zero Unit The zero
two forced this unit in Kandahar over four years, probably
(23:24):
an under count, yet it was it was enough to
at least shock some members of Congress who saw the numbers.
If that is what supposedly thoroughly vetted means looked like overseas,
we should not be reassured by the claim that those
very same filter systems filtered who got on the evacuation flights.
(23:47):
Should we have left as zero Unit members to face
Taliban revenge Taliban have in fact hunted and killed former
three officers, Yet granting them that you just admitting that
fact does not force a conclusion that the only humane
response is permittent mission into this country. A serious country,
(24:10):
especially one that has already absorbed decades of immigration challenges,
should have and would have considered regional safe zones or
third country resupplement or even temporary holding arrangements until an
individual case could be evaluated more carefully. It would have
distinguished between interpreters who didn't have any combat role and
(24:33):
Black Ops paramilitaries trained for deniable operations.
Speaker 1 (24:39):
It would have.
Speaker 3 (24:39):
Recognized that importing a secret army into your heartland is
an extraordinary step. It's not some afterthought to be buried
in the chaos of that withdrawal. You know, there's another
good and I think serious constitutional point here. We as
citizens have never had a clear debate about whether they
(25:02):
were in thousands of CIA proxy fighters as neighbors. Did
anybody ever stop and say, wait a minute, he may
ever go to Congress. Now, I know the president has
the authority to do this, but did this shows you
that when you grant a president executive authority that it's
(25:24):
not just acceptable to just say okay, well just do it.
It's like me questioning everything. And here Biden should have
at least his advisors, at the very minimum, should have said,
you know, mister President, the zero three units, the zero
units writ large, maybe before we evacuate them, along with
(25:48):
the interpreters, maybe we move them to a third country
while we evaluate them. That would have been the rational
thing to do. But the Biden withdrawal from Afghanistan was
not rational, and so now we pay for that. There
was no discussion, there was no vote, There was no
(26:09):
staff meeting, there was no cabinet meeting, there was no
consultation with Congress. There was nothing. Instead, the decision was
effectively made by a very narrow limited number of people
in the national security bureaucracy under the cover of these
emergency airlifts. That is not how a republic should make
decisions that are going to have profound long term security implications.
(26:35):
If persistent deployment of the National Guard in our own
capital now requires clear congressional authorization, then surely permanent resettlement
of our own deniable units. These are deniable. You know,
we don't even know about them. Well, the only reason
we do know about them is because after the withdrawal,
which was chaotic, can a complete cluster f we start
(27:00):
to learn about these we should confront a very hard
cultural fact that many in I think polite society.
Speaker 1 (27:09):
Would rather ignore.
Speaker 3 (27:11):
These Zero Units were not generic soldiers. They were embedded
in a religious and a cultural context shaped by a
form of Islam that sees the West not as a home,
but they see the West as their next battlefield. And
that's precisely why the CIA embraced them as proxies against
(27:34):
the Taliban, because they shared a related but rival vision.
Speaker 1 (27:41):
And then to.
Speaker 3 (27:42):
Pretend that years of fighting in that ideological framework can
somehow be washed away by hey, here's a free apartment
and here's an electronic benefits card so you can feed
yourself and pay your utilities. That's not compassion, that's dereliction
of duty, because healthy assimilation requires a shared civic framework
(28:02):
and a serious attention to the ways in which some
imported belief systems actually cut against our core Western beliefs. Now,
none of that means that every Zero Unit veteran in
America is a sleeper cell or is a latent terrorist.
Some may really just want to raise their children in
(28:24):
peace and forget about to try to deal with everything
that they know they did and try to now live
a new life. God give them peace. But we have
a civic duty ourselves to find out who's which. Which
ones are those that really want to leave that horrible
life behind and now live in a country that's providing
(28:47):
them a free apartment and free food and everything else
and maybe actually at some point find you know, really
good work and become a productive member of society, and
which ones are going down the dark path. Policy cannot
be built on just your optimistic hunch about human nature.
If you understand human nature, you know that we're dealing
(29:10):
with two kinds of devils. The devil where they're going
to fall to the dark side and they're going to
do things like go kill a guardsmen in Washington, d c.
And those that are still dealing with that devil and
that darkness in their mind but really do want to
raise their children, and they've compartmentalized that darkness in the
backside of.
Speaker 1 (29:31):
Their brain and they've learned to live with it, and.
Speaker 3 (29:33):
They keep pushing up back there every single day while
they try to find a job, go to work and
live a life because they know they've been given a
new opportunity, but without some sort of psychologic or psychiatric intervention,
we don't know A from B. We don't know one
from the other. The lasson is not that these Afghans
(29:54):
are uniquely dangerous. It's that when we have our own
government training deniable death squads abroad, then when we import
them wholesale into our society, that's a stupid experiment. It
is reckless that no republic small or republican form of
(30:15):
government had any right to run and just willing Nelly
make a decision. What should happen now is straightforward. I
understand it's straightforward an outline, and it's difficult in practice,
but there should be a complete public accounting of how
many zero unit members and family households were brought here,
where they live, what support they've received, what incidents have
(30:37):
any involved them. There should be in an immediate pause
on further admissions of any former CIA proxy fighters from
any country, whatever theater they're operating in, until Congress has
legislated some clear rules. There should be mandatory mental health
evaluations and if necessary, intensive treatment for those already here,
(31:00):
with some honest risk assessments about who can safety remain
in a civilian environment and those who cannot. And then
there should be an end to the quiet habit of
treating CIA design programs as immune from scrutiny from our
democratic processes once they cross onto American soil. Zero units,
(31:24):
zero units and blue on green. You'll look it up yourself.
Hey, Michael and Dragon.
Speaker 2 (00:01):
For that last caller complaining about women's basketball, which we
all know is boring. I got two words for you,
Sophie Cunningham. Look up a picture, bro, No.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Did you look it up? I did?
Speaker 3 (00:16):
And yep, all right, dang it, this is not yep, Sophie.
What Cunningham. Sophie Cunningham, I now know she plays with
a fever. Oh oh, well, in this case, women's basketball
(00:41):
might be a good thing to watch. Got a little
bit more interesting, didn't it. It certainly did. Hmm, Sophie Cunningham.
Two words I ever thought i'd say together in my life.
I don't even I don't even know Sophie, do you know?
So I don't know any Sophie's. I know some Cunningham's,
but I don't know Sophie's. No Sophie's at all. This
(01:04):
next segment, this next this hour is a two parter,
So you're going to have to step up your game
a little bit because I need to establish today something
that I want to address in the morning, because I'm
not quite finished with tomorrow. Tomorrow we're going to talk
(01:26):
about temporary This is like, you know, oh, Michael, you
need to tease more. Okay, Well, I'm teasing for tomorrow
morning at nine am, at nine oh four or whatever
it is, we're going to talk about temporary protective status,
the countries that haven't and whether we should eliminate it
(01:47):
or not. But before I finish that, I've got to
do this, I want to talk about something that occurred back.
Speaker 1 (01:54):
In twenty twenty one.
Speaker 3 (01:57):
It's Biden's zero unit mistake, and it is it is
when Afghan or Taliban, yeah, either either Tomato Tomato death
squads came to this country. Death squads in this country.
(02:21):
If you've seen the video of the ambush of the
two young National Guard soldiers barely into adulthood, their early twenties,
they're walking their post near the White House, it is
very the video is very brief. It is very sickening.
An Islamic terrace rounds the corner, raises a revolver and
(02:43):
opens fire. Now, obviously everything's happening, you know, in real time,
really rapidly, and by the time the other guardsmen tackle him,
Sarah Beckstrom is fatally wounded. She died Thanksgiving Day staff
sergeant and through Wolf still fighting for his life. Indications
(03:04):
I haven't checked this morning. The indications light late last night,
well late for me anyway, were that he could wiggle
his toes when they requested it, and he pointed a
finger or something that he could hear what the nurse
was saying. The suspect from Nulah Luckenwall is not just
(03:25):
some random drifter that came here. He's a former member
of the CI's elite Afghan Zero Units. The Zero Units are,
or were, a paramilitary stripe force. They were trained to
kill and they were trained for capture missions in the
heartland of the Taliban occupied territory. He came here through
(03:50):
Biden's Operation Allies Welcome program and then he was granted asylum.
The war in Afghanistan did not stay in at Afghanistan.
We actually picked some of that war up and flew
some of it into our own neighborhoods. To see why
(04:10):
this matters. To understand why this matters, you've got to
know what the Zero Units were. You've heard of the
thin blue line. How about blue on green? Have you
heard of blue on Green? Well, I'll get to that
in a minute, but I want you to think about, Oh,
(04:33):
you've heard fragging, except this is not technically fragging. During
the later years of the Afghan War, the CIA quietly
created Afghan only commando teams and they operated outside of
the separate from Afghanistan's ordinary military chain of command. Human
(04:55):
Rights Watch describes these formations as CIA backed and they
conducted very high risk night raids. There was rarely, if ever,
any meaningful Afghan government oversight. There have been documents released
(05:15):
the show repeated allegations of extra judicial killings, force disappearances
at tax on medical facilities. Pro Publica's multi year investigation
into just one of these units concluded that the night
raids conducted by one unit killed hundreds of civilians, even
in a limited four year sample, with total casualties probably
(05:39):
higher than what Pro Publica found out. And these are
not claims based on speculation, They're not from partisan blogs.
They're the product of painstaking field reporting, interviews with survivors,
cross checking, checking a mor record, satellite imagery, everything that
you would expect an organization like Pro public had to
(06:00):
really do. Let's talk about the Candahar based Unit zero three.
This is where lock and Wall, the guy that killed
the guardsmen in DC, this is the unit that he served,
is based in Kandahar and operated out of fire based
Gecko Fire based Gecko is a former Taliban compound that
(06:22):
was repurposed as a CIA hub. Journalists and human rights
investigators have chronicled raids in Kandahar and Helman in which
the three operators separated women and children, dragged them in
from their homes, and then left the bodies in the courtyard.
Speaker 1 (06:41):
That's the unit where this guy served. Michael.
Speaker 4 (06:44):
If someone is given asylum here in the United States
and then commits a horrible, heinous crime like this gentleman
from Afghanistan, can as asylum be revoked?
Speaker 1 (06:56):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (06:57):
But why because if he commits the crown like like
this dirt bag that shot the guardsman, if they proved
the case and beyond a reasonable doubt and he's found guilty,
then you won't just sending back to Afghanistan because if
you listen to the rest of what I'm about to
talk about, I want the guy to get the death penalty.
(07:20):
I didn't want him to go back to Afghanistan to
become another terrorist to attack either US again by sneaking
back into the country or going to some other country
over that matter, killing an innocent Afghanis.
Speaker 1 (07:36):
I want the guy put to death.
Speaker 3 (07:38):
So the asylum has only to do with his immigration status,
nothing to do with his legal liability criminally or civilly
while he's in this country. And yeah, you could revoke
the asylum based on the criminal conviction. I'm pretty sure
into the Naturalization Act you can do that, but I
(08:00):
haven't looked at it specifically. But that's my gut feeling
as a lawyer. So let's go back to this Zero
unit operations. A lot of Afghan witnesses have spoke of
spoken about school principles executed in front of their families,
detainees taken away never seen again.
Speaker 1 (08:18):
And I told you.
Speaker 3 (08:19):
The twenty nineteen Human Rights Watch report listed at at
least fourteen separate zero unit operations with credible evidence of
war crimes, the killing of women and children during night
raids and pro publicas. Lindsey Billing, who spent years interviewing
these zero unit soldiers and their victims, quotes one fighter
(08:41):
saying bluntly that Americans pointed out the targets so the
Afghans could hit them, and then they would sign the
battle damage assessments. They reported no civilian deaths, even when
women and children would be lying over there in the rubble.
The defenders of these units would reply that they were
also extremely effective against Teliban and the ISIS commanders, and
(09:05):
that is probably true. CIA officers US Special operators did
not invest years in training a bunch of useless proxies.
They trained them to be effective and lethally effective. But
the moral problem is not efficiency, it's the method. These
(09:28):
units were built to provide deniability, to operate in the shadows,
to shoot first, and then count the bodies, if you
counted them at all. For that matter, the whole structure
was designed to insulate US political leadership from hard questions
about who was being killed in the dead of night.
(09:48):
It's why the CIA put these groups together, not the
US military. It is one thing, though already questionable, to
use such forces on foreign soil in an existential war.
It is quite another thing to fly them with minimal
rethinking and minimal safeguards into the suburbs of America Operation
(10:10):
Allies Welcome. I freely admit I've kind of racked my
you know, my diet coke addle brain to do I
remember that Moniker specifically about these units, and I don't,
(10:30):
But that's what it was called, Operation Allies Welcome. That
was Biden's signatory evacuation policy. In the weeks after Cabble Fell,
and by Biden's own count, almost one hundred thousand Afghans
were brought into this country under the umbrella of Operation Allies.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
Welcome.
Speaker 3 (10:50):
Among them were interpreters, embassy staff, but also large numbers
of Afghan special operators and at least in including at
least at a minimum two thousand members of these zero units.
Now a lot of the news outlets are now reporting
the whole clusters of Zero Unit veterans were resettled in
(11:12):
and around Seattle and other US cities. Rolling Stone describes
the Zero Unit disparate in this country as quote the
CIA's secret Afghan Army starting new lives in the United States,
and that many of these zero Unit members are actually
in touch with their former CIA handlers. There is something
(11:35):
deeply strange about that secret armies are not supposed to
have American zip codes. Secret armies that and look, I'm
not naive here. I know I got briefed about certain
things that the CIA was doing and recognized that you know,
they were to stay over there in the dark sights
(11:59):
or doing the dark things. They weren't to have us
zip codes, but they do. And then the case for
evacuating that was all based on some sort of morality
play that Biden forced upon us.
Speaker 5 (12:16):
I wish we had people in our elected offices for
Colorado that had common sense and a basic understanding of economics,
just like New York has done or will be doing.
Colorado wants to go after the wealthy people. What do
you think is going to happen when the wealthy people
get higher taxes, They're going to leave the state and
(12:39):
then you are not going to have the opportunity to
collect those taxes.
Speaker 3 (12:45):
And I wish I was a billionaire and has six
pack abs, and you know, was as handsome as well.
Nobody within my side that I can compare myself to
so And he's over back there doing lord knows what,
not paying that neither. What did you say nothing by sleeping?
By sleep. I'm gonna make something clear. This guy was
(13:12):
brought into this country under Joe Biden's temporary Protected Status program.
When he was brought into the country, he applied for
his asylum under the Biden administration under the laws that
(13:35):
exist for temporary protected status. Yes, his official date for
asylum is April of twenty twenty five, that would be
some depending on what day in April. That would be
a little over three months into the Trump administration. But
(14:00):
aim that Donald Trump granted asylum to this dirt bag.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
But be completely ignorant, which.
Speaker 3 (14:08):
Is not surprising to me among some people who have
Trump arrangement syndrome or on the other side of the
political spectrum, shows a really complete ignorance of how the
bureaucracy works and how once these processes start, the president
has no idea about who in the US Office of
(14:32):
Customs and Immigration Services or I'm sorry, Citizenship and Immigration
Services uscis what those bureaucrats down there in the bowels
of the bureaucracy are doing, which is why the President
makes these broad strategic decisions and the bureaucrats oftentimes do
what they down will please irrespect you of what the
(14:53):
change in the administration policy might be.
Speaker 1 (15:01):
But back to Biden's.
Speaker 3 (15:04):
Zero unit, absolute huge mistake of bringing these people in
the case for evacuation, as I said, was presented in
moral terms because they want to claim that, you know,
these men fought beside us. They did fight beside us.
(15:25):
But again I mentioned earlier about have you heard of blue.
Speaker 1 (15:30):
On Green.
Speaker 3 (15:32):
Blue on Green is where Afghans, particularly these operating under
I can't even say the authority authority of the CIA,
I'll bring under the supervision of the CIA decide to
kill American soldiers. So people in Afghan blue uniform or
(15:58):
even if they're not wearing the Afghan blue uniform, they're
operating trained by the CIA, but operating outside the direct
authority of the Afghan military, but yet they are members
of and pay by the Afghan military.
Speaker 1 (16:15):
Green and Blue.
Speaker 3 (16:17):
The best open source estimates indicate roughly one hundred to
one hundred and twenty attacks in Afghanistan during the war,
which resulted in approximately one hundred and fifty coalition troops killed,
of whom the largest majority were US personnel, on the
order of somewhere between out of one hundred and fifty
Afghans killing coalition soldiers, somewhere between one hundred and twenty
(16:41):
and one hundred and thirty of those one hundred and
fifty were American soldiers killed by CIA trained Afghan soldiers
like this dirt bag that came to this country under
Biden's evacuation orders. Now, precise counts vary based on data
(17:03):
set and definition, but the range of one hundred and
twenty to one hundred and thirty out of a total
of one hundred and fifty reflects the most commonly cited
compiled figures from US military and independent trackers. You know,
there's a great site, the Long War Journal, that you
can go read that. We'll talk about Green on Blue,
(17:24):
which is I think what we saw in d C
is a carryover from bringing these people into the country.
The facts about this dirt bag's life in this country
are really depressingly predictable. He arrived with a wife and
five kids. They settled in Bellingham, Washington. Reports from local
(17:45):
advocates and landlords subscribe a man drifting into isolation, cycling
through unstable jobs, taking sudden long road trips from WHEREVA
was outgoing, and then sinking to what one email called
called a dark depression. The AP obtained correspondence from a
community worker who repeatedly warned that he was becoming severely withdrawn,
neglecting his own children, showing signs of self harm, and
(18:07):
at the same time, national security officials now say he
was almost certainly radicalized after his arrival, consuming all this
online material that reinforced the sense of grievance and martyrdom.
Of course, doesn't take a rocket science to figure that out.
Speaker 1 (18:26):
In other words, we took a man who's only adult skill.
Speaker 3 (18:30):
Was lethal violence in a CIA designed environment of deniability.
We dropped him into an alien culture with minimal support,
and he just hoped the social services, completely inequipped and
incapable of dealing with someone like this. And of course
the non government organizations, the NGOs or the refugee nonprofit
NGOs would do what years of discipline, trauma and ideological
(18:55):
conflict could not be overcome by this not a serious
immigration system, It is foolishness. The problem is not that
Afghans as the people are uniquely prone to violence. The
problem is that the zero units are not a random
cross section of Afghanis. They are a very specific population.
(19:18):
They are selected precisely because they could be turned into
uncompromising instruments of violence, taught they were taught to kick
indoors at night, trained to push past any inhibitions that
most human beings feel when a rifle is pointed at
another man's chest in front of his children, and just
pull the trigger and then, for that matter, to take
(19:40):
out the children too. You know, human rights groups that
are generally sympathetic to refugees. They themselves had been warning
about this design flaw for years, because when Biden announced
the evacuation flights, Human Rights Watch stressed that members of
these abusive af forces, including the Zero Unit veterans, might
(20:04):
themselves require third country relocation or actually just keep them
in country, or alternatively prosecute them now quietly import them
into Western cities. The reporting in pro public of documents
show how Zero Unit soldiers, racked by guilt, describe themselves
(20:25):
as broken men. You want a broken man as subject
to radicalization and doctrination. And when you know that we
have Taliban units in this country, when we know that
we have Altaida units still in this country, of course
they're going to seek out these men. They're already highly trained,
(20:48):
they're already broken, and to radicalize them Hell's bills. I
could probably ride. They're so broken, I could probably radicalize
them into becoming conservative Republican members of the GOP. You
could write, you could radicalize them into anything. And the
administration's answer has been that Operation Allies Welcome Vetting was multilayered. Oh,
(21:11):
it was vigorous, involving all sorts of intelligence databases, biometric checks, interviews.
We ought to be honest about what that kind of
vetting can and cannot do. It might occasionally catch a
known terrorists or a known criminal, or an individual flag
by existing records, but it cannot see inside someone's mind.
(21:32):
It cannot tell you which if two zero unit team
leaders is quietly unraveling, or which one will process the
loss of a comrade by reading his way into extremist forums.
To rely on vetting alone is to confuse a background
check with the psychological evaluation. These people should never have
been brought into this country. But that's precisely what Biden did,
(21:55):
and it was all on the moral ground that, oh,
they fought alongside us. Well, I would remind you what
the mainstream media will not remind you of, and that
is the blue on green incidents that killed at least
one hundred and thirty of our soldiers. Where they were,
you know, probably in some area of operation, carrying out
some you know, raid of some sort, and decided or
(22:16):
maybe they finished the raid, and then we're just going
back to their barracks, back back to their unit, and
the blue and Green occurred, and they just turned their
rifle and just boom, killed an American soldier and then
probably escaped and ran off into the darkness. Now, defenders
(22:39):
of these units, they want to claim that they were
among the most thoroughly vetted Afghans during the war itself. Well,
guess what that proves the point. That proves the point,
because to thoroughly vet Afghans to go do what the
CIA trained them to do, the same system that supposedly
vetted them overseas also produced by every serious independent account
(23:03):
a record of civilian killings, botched trades, unaccountable Knight operations
that poisoned local support for the Afghan government. Again pro
public is tally of at least four hundred and fifty
two civilians killed by only one zero Unit The zero
two forced this unit in Kandahar over four years, probably
(23:24):
an under count, yet it was it was enough to
at least shock some members of Congress who saw the numbers.
If that is what supposedly thoroughly vetted means looked like overseas,
we should not be reassured by the claim that those
very same filter systems filtered who got on the evacuation flights.
(23:47):
Should we have left as zero Unit members to face
Taliban revenge Taliban have in fact hunted and killed former
three officers, Yet granting them that you just admitting that
fact does not force a conclusion that the only humane
response is permittent mission into this country. A serious country,
(24:10):
especially one that has already absorbed decades of immigration challenges,
should have and would have considered regional safe zones or
third country resupplement or even temporary holding arrangements until an
individual case could be evaluated more carefully. It would have
distinguished between interpreters who didn't have any combat role and
(24:33):
Black Ops paramilitaries trained for deniable operations.
Speaker 1 (24:39):
It would have.
Speaker 3 (24:39):
Recognized that importing a secret army into your heartland is
an extraordinary step. It's not some afterthought to be buried
in the chaos of that withdrawal. You know, there's another
good and I think serious constitutional point here. We as
citizens have never had a clear debate about whether they
(25:02):
were in thousands of CIA proxy fighters as neighbors. Did
anybody ever stop and say, wait a minute, he may
ever go to Congress. Now, I know the president has
the authority to do this, but did this shows you
that when you grant a president executive authority that it's
(25:24):
not just acceptable to just say okay, well just do it.
It's like me questioning everything. And here Biden should have
at least his advisors, at the very minimum, should have said,
you know, mister President, the zero three units, the zero
units writ large, maybe before we evacuate them, along with
(25:48):
the interpreters, maybe we move them to a third country
while we evaluate them. That would have been the rational
thing to do. But the Biden withdrawal from Afghanistan was
not rational, and so now we pay for that. There
was no discussion, there was no vote, There was no
(26:09):
staff meeting, there was no cabinet meeting, there was no
consultation with Congress. There was nothing. Instead, the decision was
effectively made by a very narrow limited number of people
in the national security bureaucracy under the cover of these
emergency airlifts. That is not how a republic should make
decisions that are going to have profound long term security implications.
(26:35):
If persistent deployment of the National Guard in our own
capital now requires clear congressional authorization, then surely permanent resettlement
of our own deniable units. These are deniable. You know,
we don't even know about them. Well, the only reason
we do know about them is because after the withdrawal,
which was chaotic, can a complete cluster f we start
(27:00):
to learn about these we should confront a very hard
cultural fact that many in I think polite society.
Speaker 1 (27:09):
Would rather ignore.
Speaker 3 (27:11):
These Zero Units were not generic soldiers. They were embedded
in a religious and a cultural context shaped by a
form of Islam that sees the West not as a home,
but they see the West as their next battlefield. And
that's precisely why the CIA embraced them as proxies against
(27:34):
the Taliban, because they shared a related but rival vision.
Speaker 1 (27:41):
And then to.
Speaker 3 (27:42):
Pretend that years of fighting in that ideological framework can
somehow be washed away by hey, here's a free apartment
and here's an electronic benefits card so you can feed
yourself and pay your utilities. That's not compassion, that's dereliction
of duty, because healthy assimilation requires a shared civic framework
(28:02):
and a serious attention to the ways in which some
imported belief systems actually cut against our core Western beliefs. Now,
none of that means that every Zero Unit veteran in
America is a sleeper cell or is a latent terrorist.
Some may really just want to raise their children in
(28:24):
peace and forget about to try to deal with everything
that they know they did and try to now live
a new life. God give them peace. But we have
a civic duty ourselves to find out who's which. Which
ones are those that really want to leave that horrible
life behind and now live in a country that's providing
(28:47):
them a free apartment and free food and everything else
and maybe actually at some point find you know, really
good work and become a productive member of society, and
which ones are going down the dark path. Policy cannot
be built on just your optimistic hunch about human nature.
If you understand human nature, you know that we're dealing
(29:10):
with two kinds of devils. The devil where they're going
to fall to the dark side and they're going to
do things like go kill a guardsmen in Washington, d c.
And those that are still dealing with that devil and
that darkness in their mind but really do want to
raise their children, and they've compartmentalized that darkness in the
backside of.
Speaker 1 (29:31):
Their brain and they've learned to live with it, and.
Speaker 3 (29:33):
They keep pushing up back there every single day while
they try to find a job, go to work and
live a life because they know they've been given a
new opportunity, but without some sort of psychologic or psychiatric intervention,
we don't know A from B. We don't know one
from the other. The lasson is not that these Afghans
(29:54):
are uniquely dangerous. It's that when we have our own
government training deniable death squads abroad, then when we import
them wholesale into our society, that's a stupid experiment. It
is reckless that no republic small or republican form of
(30:15):
government had any right to run and just willing Nelly
make a decision. What should happen now is straightforward. I
understand it's straightforward an outline, and it's difficult in practice,
but there should be a complete public accounting of how
many zero unit members and family households were brought here,
where they live, what support they've received, what incidents have
(30:37):
any involved them. There should be in an immediate pause
on further admissions of any former CIA proxy fighters from
any country, whatever theater they're operating in, until Congress has
legislated some clear rules. There should be mandatory mental health
evaluations and if necessary, intensive treatment for those already here,
(31:00):
with some honest risk assessments about who can safety remain
in a civilian environment and those who cannot. And then
there should be an end to the quiet habit of
treating CIA design programs as immune from scrutiny from our
democratic processes once they cross onto American soil. Zero units,
(31:24):
zero units and blue on green. You'll look it up yourself.
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