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The Tucker Carlson Show
Seth Harp Exposes the Murder & Drug Trafficking Taking Place Inside America’s Largest Military Base
01:55:08
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- [00:01]
Tucker Carlson
So you got out of the military in 2011. This is the. This is how I understand the genesis of the book that comes out today, the Fort Bragg cartel. You get out in 2011, you're a reporter. At some point, you start to understand that there are a lot of deaths at Fort Bragg, which is America's biggest Army base, home of the Special Forces, and you start to investigate those deaths.
- [00:28]
Seth Harp
That's right. I first read about a double homicide on Fort Bragg that took place at the tail end of 2020. Just an ordinary article in the New York Times that said that these two veteran Special Operations soldiers, Billy Levine and Timothy Dumas, have been found murdered on a remote training range at Fort Bragg. They've both been shot to death, and their bodies have been dumped in the wood. I also read that Billy Levine was a Delta Force operator. And in all my time reporting on the military, working as a war reporter, and then before that serving in the army myself, I had never heard of a Delta Force operator being in the news for any reason, because it's the most secretive and elite unit in the entire military. And the police were saying that this was believed to be a double homicide from a drug deal gone wrong. And so I knew that there had to be more to the story, because you can imagine if, like, let's say a CIA agent was found shot to death and dumped in a park in Maryland or something like that, and the police are saying it was a drug deal. I mean, that's the level of secrecy, and that's how elite Delta Force is as a military.
- [02:03]
Tucker Carlson
What is Delta Force?
- [02:04]
Seth Harp
Delta Force is what's called a Special Mission unit. It is an army unit. It's part of what's called the Joint Special Operations Command. It was created in the late 1970s to be an elite counterterrorism force for things like hostage rescue. For many years, they were obsessed with the problem or the. The danger of loose nuclear weapons and drilled constantly for scenarios in which they would be called upon to secure a loose nuclear weapon. This is all pre 9 11. After 2001, after the war started in Iraq and Afghanistan, Delta Force grew quite a bit and came to have a much more prominent role in US Military operations. And what they primarily specialize in are clandestine operations, covert operations, or we might black operations. That's Delta Force, and it's headquartered at Fort Bragg.
- [03:00]
Tucker Carlson
They get no publicity.
- [03:02]
Seth Harp
None. I actually looked into this when I was writing the book to see if they had ever been talked about in the 20 years that the US had been at war since 2000. 1. And I found that, in fact, they were talked about in the Context of the 2004 Abu Ghraib scandal and had been implicated in the abuse of prisoners in Iraq. Other than that, for 20 years, they kept their name completely out of the news.
- [03:26]
Tucker Carlson
So there are other units, famously, that have worked with Hollywood filmmakers a lot, whose members retire and go on talk shows, including this one. And, you know, you sort of know quite a bit about the SEALs, for example, the various SEAL teams and their training, et cetera. But has there ever been a Delta operator in public talking about the training or the missions or anything like that?
- [03:53]
Seth Harp
There are former Delta Force officers who I've seen occasionally talk on tv. But as far as the regular enlisted guys go, their culture really is. You know, the saying that they have that I've heard repeated is that, you know, seals write books, Delta guys write history, something to that effect. It's very much part of their culture not to come on TV shows and not to talk and not to write books.
- [04:24]
Tucker Carlson
Interesting. Thereby increasing the mystique. And I think the assumption that we all have is that they're. Because they're the most secretive, they are the most impressive.
- [04:35]
Seth Harp
They're very impressive in certain ways. The level of physical fitness that you have to have to be selected to be an operator is very, very impressive. Marksmanship, you know, other skills that they have. Very tough, tough people, for the most part. But I, as I talk about extensively in the book, the unit has, I, I think, declined in recent years in terms of its culture.
- [05:03]
Tucker Carlson
Hmm. So let's begin with the story of the Delta operator, Billy Levine, and the man with whom he was found dead. Who killed them and why?
- [05:13]
Seth Harp
That's the question that animates this book from the beginning to the end. I mean, although I talk a lot about military history, I talk a lot about foreign policy, really, it's a murder mystery. This book is at its heart. And the question is, who killed those two guys? And the fact is that there are many, many possible suspects. And that kind of is what made it such a rich topic for exploration. It turns out that Billy Levine, 18 months before he himself was found murdered, had killed a guy at his house in Fayetteville. In fact, he had shot and killed his best friend and fellow Green Beret, a guy named Mark Leshiker, right in front of his Mark Leshiker's daughter, who was about 6 years old at the time. And the police, the local police, the sheriff's department, the district attorney of Cumberland County, North Carolina, and the US army criminal investiga investigations Division completely covered up that murder. And I use that word covered up advisedly. I'm actually an attorney myself, so I don't use it lightly. But I devote the first two chapters of the book to showing what the evidence was against Levine and how that case was adjudicated and how he was not even placed under arrest. He was just lightly questioned and let go that same, that same night on the grounds that it had been supposedly a justifiable homicide, when in fact that theory, that defense was definitively contradicted by the physical evidence. So Levine, having previously killed a guy, then goes on to commit three, or excuse me, I think four or five felony offenses in Fayetteville over the next 18 months, including aggravated assault with a deadly weapon for shooting at a guy in the streets of Fayetteville, manufacturing controlled substance for cooking crack in his house, lots of weapons charges. He'd even been arrested for harboring an escapee, which is a new one to me. And in every case, the DA had dropped the charges against him.
- [07:15]
Tucker Carlson
Who was Billy Levine?
- [07:17]
Seth Harp
He was a Delta Force soldier. He had done more than 12 deployments, more than a dozen deployments in his career. He wasn't a high level officer in, in the Delta Force, but he was a, a veteran operator who had been, who had deep experience in America's classified assassination programs in Iraq and Syria and in Afghanistan. So that was the reason why I think he was not. He was dealt with with such leniency by the authorities.
- [07:50]
Tucker Carlson
Why did he shoot his best friend to death? That.
- [07:53]
Seth Harp
It's very mysterious why he did that. Both of them had severe drug problems. You know, this is one thing I. Levine was not a, he was not a one dimensional character by any means. He's someone whose military career and whose downward trajectory I reconstruct in the book because I think it's so illustrative of what's happened to our military over the past 20 years. He was such a great example of, of what has happened. He developed very severe ptsd, moral injury. He came to believe that the wars in which he was participating were morally wrong. He had severe substance abuse issues. Very severe. He was smoking crack every day and doing a lot of other drugs as.
- [08:36]
Tucker Carlson
Well while he was a Delta operator or smoking crack every day.
- [08:41]
Seth Harp
Yes. And I learned that that's not that unusual. To my surprise.
- [08:45]
Tucker Carlson
My understanding was, and your description suggests that these guys are like basically Olympic athletes whose physical condition is going to be monitored, I assume by, by the unit doctor or somebody.
- [08:56]
Seth Harp
Well, you know, operators have a particular type of physical fitness that you really only find in the, in the army, which is the kind of guy who can, you know, run a two mile run in, in 12 minutes, but also smoke a pack a day, you know, and get drunk five times a week. Yeah, I mean they're very, very savages. It's just savages. Yeah. So that's impressive.
- [09:19]
Tucker Carlson
So that. So but this guy was maintaining his, you know, his training schedule while smoking crack every day.
- [09:28]
Seth Harp
Yes. And I was shocked to the degree to which because not only, you know, I served in the conventional part of the military, not in the special Forces and I had also been out for more than ten years. Uh, so I was very, very surprised when I started investigating Fort Bragg and learning the extent to which cocaine use has normalized in, in the Green Berets. Not just in Delta Force, but in all of the army Special Forces, which is a much larger organization than Delta Force is pretty small. But the, but the Green Berets is thousands of troops and people just, you know, people that live in this community live in Fayetteville or live in Moore county, you know, to them that's just understood that this is just part of the lifestyle.
- [10:09]
Tucker Carlson
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- [11:41]
Seth Harp
He was a Green Beret in 19th.
- [11:43]
Tucker Carlson
Special Forces Group, but currently serving when he died. He was.
- [11:48]
Seth Harp
He was. So the 19th Special Forces Group is actually a National Guard unit. So he was a Green Beret. He was still serving in the National Guard. I don't believe he was on active duty the day he died.
- [12:01]
Tucker Carlson
Huh.
- [12:02]
Seth Harp
I'm not sure if it makes much of a difference, but to be precise.
- [12:05]
Tucker Carlson
Was Levine ever punished for killing him?
- [12:07]
Seth Harp
No, he wasn't.
- [12:08]
Tucker Carlson
In any way?
- [12:09]
Seth Harp
Not in any way. He remained an active duty operator on Delta Force after killing a guy in his house when they were both completely out of their minds on drugs. And Levine was not even given a toxicology test after he shot somebody completely crazy. The reason for that is because once you have done 10 deployments in service of covert operations, assassination operations, it is an unacceptable national security outcome from the perspective of authorities for you to go to prison, for you to be in a courtroom for any reason. Those guys, they are not supposed to exist, and they just can't process them through the criminal justice system in ordinary ways. And to me, that's what made his death so intriguing, because so many people alleged the sources that I quote. I want to be responsible about this and not say that it's what I believe, but the sort of conventional wisdom that when I first got into the case, people were saying that the military itself had killed Billy Levine because he had turned into such a problem and was. And was messing up so badly.
- [13:19]
Tucker Carlson
I don't want to derail your story, but you've referred twice to assassination programs. I wasn't aware that the United States admits it assassinates people. When did that start? That. When did that become a feature of modern war or statecraft or whatever it is? What is that? What are you talking about?
- [13:38]
Seth Harp
In 2001, President George W. Bush signed secret orders that essentially. And they're secret, so I haven't read them, but based on the best reporting that I've seen, he signed secret orders that essentially reversed the assassination ban that had been put in place decades earlier. Actually, the groundwork for that legal move had been laid under President Reagan. There were memos in place or certain authorities, executive orders in place that did allow for assassination in the case when the target was deemed to be a terrorist. That those authorities actually weren't used to, my understanding, for decades. But when, after the September 11 attacks, you know, the Bush reversed that, that and you know, you're saying that you haven't heard too much about it, but that's because we often hear about it by a certain euphemism, which is night raids. So you may have heard, I'm sure you have heard that under President Obama, the war, the war making all of the war effort in Afghanistan became about drone strikes and night raids. Well, night raids is just a euphemism for assassinations. Yes. If somebody comes out waving a white flag, well, he'll probably get shot anyway. But under certain circumstances, they will take people prisoner. But for the most part, you know, when they hit a target, every, every military age man, as they say on that, on that target, Diesel, whether or.
- [15:10]
Tucker Carlson
Not he's guilty of a crime or even suspected of a crime.
- [15:12]
Seth Harp
Well, guilty of a crime. I mean it all, it's, there's no accountability over this because it all depends upon the determinations of intelligence analysts in the Joint Special Operations Command and in the CIA and what have you. The people that generate targets, you know, Delta Force just hits the targets. They may not necessarily generate them, although they do have substantial intelligence assets that develop targets. But there's no way to check their work and say, you know, who these people really were. But you know, as I talk about extensively in the book and trying to get some clarity around this, you know, the error rate is believed to be very high, you know, at least 50%.
- [15:49]
Tucker Carlson
Is this a long standing feature of American military policy? Have we been assassinating people for centuries? Is this an American thing to do?
- [15:59]
Seth Harp
Absolutely not. And in fact, before the modern era, before the 21st century, assassination was not considered to be, you know, a valid or a, you know, credit worthy tool of war making. It was considered to be something dirty down low. I mean, and there also wasn't perceived to be a tactical advantage necessarily in assassinating enemy commanders in, in the enemy chain of command. There was more of a sense in w, in fighting out things out honestly on the battlefield. And that has completely changed. And you know, I think one big.
- [16:37]
Tucker Carlson
Influence on america up until 911 you're saying. So when you say modern era, you don't mean like the advent of electricity, you mean like 25 years ago.
- [16:49]
Seth Harp
So I'm not a military historian by any means, but my understanding is that there was extensive assassination operations also in Vietnam. And we call that, that's known as the Phoenix program, where the CIA was using assassination to dismantle what was perceived as enemy command and control networks.
- [17:08]
Tucker Carlson
Was it pretty effective? We won that war.
- [17:12]
Seth Harp
You know, actually I think that a Lot of people in the sort of national security set did. Although it elicited a great deal of repugnance in the public. I think that. My sense is that it was perceived as an effective way of waging war.
- [17:30]
Tucker Carlson
Well, then why didn't we win?
- [17:32]
Seth Harp
Well, we haven't won any wars since 1945, unless you count the Gulf War.
- [17:38]
Tucker Carlson
Right.
- [17:39]
Seth Harp
So, you know, I don't think we're doing anything right. Basically. Including assassinations.
- [17:46]
Tucker Carlson
Yeah, I mean, that is. That is a. A stat that. Kind of hard to argue with, that you almost never heard in and around Washington. Like, when was the last time you won a war?
- [17:55]
Seth Harp
Baffling.
- [17:56]
Tucker Carlson
You spend a trillion dollars a year, and you can't win a freaking war. You can't beat the Houthis. Like, maybe it's time for some reform or to rethink what we're doing. It's not working, even by their own measurements.
- [18:08]
Seth Harp
I completely agree. And I think a lot of people, including people who are anti war and who would prefer to see a more isolationist foreign policy, complacently assume that because we spend ungodly amounts of money on our military, a trillion dollars this year on the national defense budget, that whatever else you think of our foreign policy, at least we have the world's most powerful military. That assumption goes largely unexamined. And the reality is, we don't. I was just at Trump's military parade in Washington, D.C. a magazine sent me to cover that. And a lot of those troops were from Fort Bragg. And you may have seen on TV what a joke the parade turned out to be, how disorganized, how unimpressive it was, and the technology that was on display. You know, people expected to be this fascistic spectacle, this authoritarian spectacle like you might see in North Korea or whatever. But I was looking at the troops going by, not even marching in steps. You know, the Bradley fighting vehicles, which are 40 years old and perform very poorly, haven't been replaced with anything newer. Same goes for the Abrams tank. It's been in service for more than 40 years. The Blackhawk helicopter. Just before the parade, a Blackhawk helicopter had crashed into a passenger plane over the Potomac river, lest we forget, killed 68 people. Worst aviation disaster since 2001. I'm looking at all of this, and I'm thinking, man, our army is in sorry, sorry shape. And that was the 250th anniversary of the US army, because the army actually predates the Constitution and predates the creation of our nation. And to me, it is very worrisome. To see the state of decline and disrepair in which, in which it's currently languishing. And I think the stuff that's going on at Fort Bragg is highly symptomatic of just that.
- [20:04]
Tucker Carlson
Certainly is. So back to assassinations. So assassinations are. It sounds by your description, like a big part of our foreign policy or our war making efforts.
- [20:16]
Seth Harp
A central part of it. Sure.
- [20:18]
Tucker Carlson
And Delta is basically conducting a lot of these. Some of these, absolutely.
- [20:24]
Seth Harp
Delta Force and then SEAL Team six, which is Delta's naval counterpart, also part of the Joint Special Operations Command. And you hear a lot more about them.
- [20:33]
Tucker Carlson
Okay, can I ask a dumb question? Why? So if you're fighting a war or you're in some protracted struggle with violence, I don't know if it's a war, but you're like fighting. Why wouldn't, if you could, why wouldn't you capture key players from the other side in order to extract intelligence from the usable intelligence from them? I thought that's what we used to do.
- [20:53]
Seth Harp
I don't want to paint them in a cartoonish light. By them, I mean Delta and jsoc.
- [20:57]
Tucker Carlson
Well, they're not making these decisions. I mean, these are made, as you said.
- [21:01]
Seth Harp
Sure.
- [21:01]
Tucker Carlson
By, by, by the command structure.
- [21:03]
Seth Harp
Often it's the direct orders in the White House.
- [21:05]
Tucker Carlson
Right.
- [21:06]
Seth Harp
And with. Also with input from certain congressional leaders are involved in these targeting decisions to a degree that I was not aware. Congressional leaders, apparently I've heard anecdotes about, about operators sitting on target and waiting for the go ahead from Congress. I'm not sure what to make of that because all this is so classified, but that's what I've heard. In any event, there's no doubt.
- [21:25]
Tucker Carlson
Why would it be classified?
- [21:27]
Seth Harp
I'm sorry?
- [21:27]
Tucker Carlson
Why would it be classified?
- [21:29]
Seth Harp
Well, that's another big component of the evolution of the American way of, of making war, waging war for the past 20 years is the increasing secrecy around all of this, which I think also has had an extremely deleterious effect.
- [21:41]
Tucker Carlson
You're not able to complete a sentence without me interrupting you. I'm so sorry.
- [21:45]
Seth Harp
No, it's great.
- [21:45]
Tucker Carlson
No, you're just saying so many things that are evocative and interesting. I just, I'm trying to track them all down. Okay, I will stop interrupting you. So you said, I don't want to paint a clownish picture of the Delta.
- [21:55]
Seth Harp
Operators, but they do, they do capture people. They will abduct people. They will take them to like a ship that's in international waters and do God knows what to them to get information, but in most cases, they're just killing the person that they're, that they're targeting.
- [22:11]
Tucker Carlson
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- [23:29]
Seth Harp
It all depends on the theater. It depends upon the time. I can tell you what they're doing right now because Trump made an interesting comment in one of his speeches earlier this year where he talked about. He said something to the effect of since my inauguration. It had been a few months since he was inaugurated. He said, since my inauguration, we have eliminated 68 terrorists in Iraq, Syria and Somalia.
- [23:52]
Tucker Carlson
This is all going to come home. We're going to have this kind of violence here. You can't commit violence without facing the effects of violence. It's just a principle of the universe. Live by the sword, die by the sword. That never changes. And if we're running around assassinating people, we will have Americans assassinated. Fact.
- [24:10]
Seth Harp
Well, some of that blowback, I fully agree. Some of that blowback can be seen in cases like Billy Levine where he's someone who has, since he was a very young man, has been raised in this system of violence who comes back and is unable to control it. And, you know, when he Perceives small threats like with his buddy Mark Lesherker at his house, barging his front door because they're both out of their head on drugs. You know, he just as a reflexive mechanism, pulls out his, his gun and shoots the other guy. So I think one of the first signs of his eye. And I'm tracking about 24 murders involving Fort Bragg soldiers since 2020 in which it was either the Fort Bragg soldier who was murdered, accused of murder or convicted of murder. 24, 24, that's my best count. It might be off by one or two on the margins.
- [24:59]
Tucker Carlson
Well that's wild. Military base.
- [25:02]
Seth Harp
Yes.
- [25:03]
Tucker Carlson
I would imagine the murder rate at a military base would be zero.
- [25:08]
Seth Harp
I think it should be. If you're an employee of the government, if you're an active duty soldier, you're.
- [25:13]
Tucker Carlson
One of the most disciplined people in the world, right?
- [25:15]
Seth Harp
Supposed to be. I don't know if you can see that anymore.
- [25:21]
Tucker Carlson
So Billy Levine was by the way, was he from a service family? How did he wind up in all this?
- [25:26]
Seth Harp
No, he wasn't, he was a, he was a know a middle class guy from working class guy from the upper peninsula of Michigan who joined the army when he was 17 years old before 911 happened. And 911 took place while he was still in, in training. And he soon got taken up the pipeline of the 1st Special Forces Group and then from there by 2009 he was a relatively young man, 26 I think when the, at the time that he was selected for Delta Force.
- [25:58]
Tucker Carlson
So he was an extraordinary person in that he was clearly suited to the.
- [26:01]
Seth Harp
Job well, very physically fit, very outdoorsy, very tough. You know, a guy who had the self confidence that is necessary for this type of work. You know, an adrenaline junkie for sure. A lot of these guys are big time adrenaline junkies jumping out of planes. You know, parachuting is a big part of what they do. So he was like those guys in all these respects. But at its core, Billy Levine was somebody who also had a sense of ethics and right and wrong that his time in the service really degraded to tragic, tragic effect.
- [26:40]
Tucker Carlson
So he murders his best friend in front of the daughter, gets away with it, no penalty whatsoever. That is absolutely wild. And then some months later, he himself is found dead with another man on a remote training range at Bragg.
- [26:54]
Seth Harp
Right. About 18 months later.
- [26:56]
Tucker Carlson
Eighteen months later, what were they shot to death?
- [26:59]
Seth Harp
Yes, and it appears the, the, that double murder appears to have been the work of people who knew what they were doing. There were no.
- [27:12]
Tucker Carlson
Well you've got about 50,000 potential suspects on the scene because it's a military base.
- [27:17]
Seth Harp
Right. And the other guy, either was. His name was Timothy Dumas. Not to reduce them to their respective races, but to keep it clear. One was a white guy, one was a black guy. Levine's a white guy. Dumas is a black guy. He also was not someone who would have been easy to kill. He wasn't an operator. He was a supply officer who was attached to JSOC. He served in the 95th Civil Affairs Brigade and had done many deployments to Afghanistan in service of the. The JSOC led task force in Afghanistan. So he's a guy who gets the operators all the stuff that they need in the field, including cash, weapons, ammunition, you know, food, all the basics, gas. And he was deeply. He's a whole separate story that we could go into. But to come back to what we were saying about the murder itself, you know, both of them were very, very tough guys who never went anywhere unarmed, who kept their heads on a swivel, and who had been to war repeatedly. So the fact that both of them were cleanly taken out and then dumped in this remote area and that the scene was free of any kind of. You know, I interviewed several army CID agents who worked the scene of the. Of the murder, and by all accounts, they found no drugs, no guns, no money, and maybe a couple of shell casings. But, you know, there weren't even, like, footprints on the ground.
- [28:46]
Tucker Carlson
Were they shot with a rifle?
- [28:47]
Seth Harp
No. I was never able to obtain ballistic evidence. I believe that Dumas, the black guy, was shot in the head with a small caliber pistol. And I don't know what a type of weapon caused Levine's injuries, but he was shot multiple times in the torso and in the leg, maybe five times. I'm not quite sure.
- [29:09]
Tucker Carlson
Any idea where they were killed?
- [29:11]
Seth Harp
Dumas was killed on site. It seems he was killed execution style on site. Levine's body had been wrapped up in a sort of tarp or blanket and placed in the back of his own truck. And then his. He. Someone had driven out there and abandoned the truck in the woods with his body in the back. And so the army. There's lots of theories of this murder, but the CID theory was that somebody had the third man because there had to have been a third person there. These guys couldn't have shot each other because there were no guns. So someone left with the guns at a minimum. And so army CID presumes that Dumas, who was a really bad. A bad guy, to be honest, he was A drug trafficker and by some accounts, a hitman. And hitman. Yeah.
- [30:05]
Tucker Carlson
You said he was an army officer.
- [30:06]
Seth Harp
He was a warrant officer.
- [30:08]
Tucker Carlson
Warrant officer.
- [30:09]
Seth Harp
Okay. Yeah. But, yeah, I talked to a woman, a police officer, in fact, who Dumas had offered to kill her husband for money. And so CID presumes active duty. He was not active duty at the time of his death. He had just been expelled from the military for his criminal behavior. And that is actually a key fact that we can get into because the fact that he had been kicked out when he was a few months shy of his 19th year in service or a few months shy of his 20th year, in which case he would have been eligible for a lifetime pension. If you serve 20 years in the military, you get a pension. So the fact that he had been kicked out and deprived of his pension really is an operative fact in all of this, because the story, it goes on from here. But what was I saying about the murder itself?
- [31:03]
Tucker Carlson
So he was killed, Dumas was killed on site.
- [31:06]
Seth Harp
Right. So I was trying to recapitulate cid's theory of the case very briefly, which is that they think that Dumas was hired to kill Levine and did kill Levine with it with the cooperation of another person or persons. They then put Levine's body in the back of the truck, drive him out in the woods with the intention of throwing his body in a lake that's near there. But the truck got stuck in the in the woods, got stuck in the mud, because it wasn't on a road, it was on a firebreak trail. And at that point, according to cid's theory of the case, the other guy decided to just abandon the situation and decided to kill Dumas in order to get rid of any witnesses.
- [31:49]
Tucker Carlson
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- [32:53]
Seth Harp
Why he would have been hired?
- [32:54]
Tucker Carlson
Yes.
- [32:55]
Seth Harp
So there's a lot of competing possibilities. And as I said, I think that's what makes the. This murder mystery, for me, at least as a writer, it was. It was a productive narrative vehicle because there's lots of things to explore. One is that Mark Leshiker, the Green Beret, who. Who he killed, you know, his teammates, by some accounts, wanted revenge. The fact that that murder went completely unpunished, as you might imagine, leads to resentment in the community, leads to a lot of whispers and, you know, you. You can't just kill somebody, maybe get off legally, but there's going to be repercussions.
- [33:29]
Tucker Carlson
Yeah. A lot of dangerous people around.
- [33:31]
Seth Harp
Sure. Yeah. So that's one.
- [33:33]
Tucker Carlson
Okay, so that's a more human. I'm not saying justifiable. I'm not as bothered by Leshker's buddies getting together and killing the guy who killed him. That seems understandable.
- [33:46]
Seth Harp
I will say. I found no evidence for that. I also learned that Dumas and Levine were trafficking cocaine together at a high level and that they were trafficking cocaine, not dealing cocaine, you know, in little baggies to their friends. I'm talking about trafficking kilos of cocaine from Mexico up into the United States and distributing it in a large multi.
- [34:09]
Tucker Carlson
And Levine is a. Just once again, an active duty.
- [34:12]
Seth Harp
That's correct.
- [34:13]
Tucker Carlson
Member of Delta Force.
- [34:14]
Seth Harp
That's correct, yes. So they had. They had enemies in the. In the drug world. Dangerous enemies, people that will kill you if you don't pay for your product. And finally, Levine, as I said before, was known to be going around telling people that he didn't believe in the mission anymore, that what the. What the United States was doing was wrong and was in the process of writing a book. And we touched on this in the beginning of our conversation about how much the unit frowns on people writing books.
- [34:49]
Tucker Carlson
But, you know, possibly really frowns on it.
- [34:54]
Seth Harp
Levine's ex wife told me that he was writing a book. She showed me the text messages where he texted her and said, I'm writing a book. And he also said that someone already wanted to turn into a movie. Now, Dumas at the. So put a pin in that. Dumas. Because he had been kicked out of the army just shy of his pension eligibility date, he also was writing something variously described to me as a book or A letter in which it wasn't a memoir. He was. It was actually deliberately intended as a blackmail document. He told people that he knew about a drug trafficking ring and the Special Forces involving Special Forces soldiers who had gone over to the dark side in Afghanistan where there was a great deal of drug trafficking going on, by the.
- [35:37]
Tucker Carlson
Way, by active duty U.S. military, by.
- [35:41]
Seth Harp
The Afghan client state that the U.S. supported for 20 years.
- [35:44]
Tucker Carlson
Yeah.
- [35:46]
Seth Harp
So all these guys, having served many times in Afghanistan, would have been very close and in close proximity to working with warlords, police chiefs, militia commanders, and so on. Afghans who were some of the biggest drug traffickers in the world, period. So that context, I think, is important. But in any event, Dumas had written this letter purporting to name all these individual members of this drug trafficking ring and the Special Forces and was going around telling people that because of this leverage that he had over the Special Forces Command, he was going to get them to reinstate his pension. So the fact that both of these guys are writing tell all documents and then both turn up murdered on Fort Bragg is yet another potential theory for explaining their deaths.
- [36:36]
Tucker Carlson
You must have spoken to people. They knew, their friends. What is the prevailing theory among people who were there?
- [36:46]
Seth Harp
I can't say that anybody purports to know for sure, but I would say the most common reflexive answer that you get from folks is that they think that they were murdered by elements of Delta Force, either rogue elements of the unit or the command itself. Now, I want to be very careful.
- [37:06]
Tucker Carlson
Come on.
- [37:07]
Seth Harp
I want to be very careful and say that I don't have any evidence of that, and I don't pretend to.
- [37:11]
Tucker Carlson
Is that the opinion of any Delta operators?
- [37:12]
Seth Harp
Do you know, funnily enough, yeah, one of the guys I talked to, a former Delta operator, seem to find that. Excuse me, a former Delta officer seemed to find that perfectly plausible, which was disturbing to me, but it's bonkers. Again, it's not. Folks who read the book, they will. They will see the direction in which I lean ultimately. And I don't want to spoil, you know, the ending, but bottom line, no.
- [37:44]
Tucker Carlson
Arrests have been made.
- [37:45]
Seth Harp
That's not true. And a further complication comes in with regard to just that. So in recently, I don't want to spoil the last chapter of the book, but recently the Department of Justice accused someone of committing these murders. And let me just say that it is not at all who you would think and virtually all. Or I can just say all of the sources that I talk to about this either dismiss it out of hand and say there's no way or they just have a really hard time believing it. And the person they've accused has pleaded not guilty and he is scheduled to go on trial in January 2026.
- [38:29]
Tucker Carlson
Have you spoken to him?
- [38:30]
Seth Harp
I have not spoken to his father, but not him.
- [38:34]
Tucker Carlson
He's a Delta operator.
- [38:35]
Seth Harp
He's not, he's not. Yeah. He's someone who, people struggle to understand how he could have, how anyone could imagine that this person would travel from where he lived, which was not in the area, go onto Fort Bragg and murder these two guys who are, one of them is a real life Jason Bourne and the other one, also a very dangerous man. How he could have done that and gotten away with it. And also the indictment is very strange. You know, the victims are identified only by their initials. A lot of the cases under seal, the whole thing is very suspicious. I don't want to dance around it. A lot of people that I've talked to say the government is framing this kid. Maybe because he was 20 years old at the time. 20. And Levine's 37, Dumas is 44. You know, these are mature men who, the idea that a 20 year old stick up kid could have killed them defies credulity in a lot of people's opinion. Now personally, I have to think that the Department of Justice doesn't indict people for murder lightly.
- [39:48]
Tucker Carlson
I hope not.
- [39:49]
Seth Harp
I, I just, I have trouble getting that far mentally. So it seems like he must have had some involvement. I want to credit my government for being at least that minimum level of responsibility that they're not simply framing this kid. But they haven't made any of their evidence public. And as I said, he's pleaded not guilty. So we'll just have to see how that, how that trial goes.
- [40:14]
Tucker Carlson
Have they. But they made the indictment public, but.
- [40:17]
Seth Harp
None of the evidence, the indictment is public. But you know, like I said, it identified. I only knew about it because I think someone sent it to me. They, it's only identifies the victims by their initials, WL and td. I've never seen that before. A murder indictment where the, where the victims are identified by their initials.
- [40:36]
Tucker Carlson
I don't even, especially since their murder was public. I mean it was reported on at the time. Right.
- [40:40]
Seth Harp
It is a very, very strange case.
- [40:43]
Tucker Carlson
Here's what we know. We know that Levine murdered a guy, got away with it. Obviously his superior officers knew that. Command knew that. Was it widely known that he was a drug trafficker?
- [40:55]
Seth Harp
It was widely known that he was a drug user. And yes, it was known that he was the guy that dealt drugs to his fellow operators. I mean, I talked to Mark Leshiker's family. So Mark and Billy, they were best friends. And so Mark's wife and his mom, even, they. They all knew Billy Levine. They had all spent time at his house. And they. And many other witnesses. You know, I interviewed lots of family members and friends of both of these men. They said that, you know, you would go into Billy's house, and there was just cocaine everywhere. And all his fellow operators from Delta Force were at his house, too. There's a bunch of coke on the table. They're doing mdma. They're even smoking heroin. You know, I. And it's considered to be totally normal in this community. That's what, to me, was the most shocking to hear again and again. Like, not only to be told that all these people, these guys are using drugs, but that people just seem to think that that's kind of what they do. Which I. I didn't know that.
- [41:55]
Tucker Carlson
There's so many threads. I mean, the most obvious is the human effect of 12 combat deployments. So that's. That's too much, obviously, and that will destroy you. It sounds like it destroyed Billy Levine. The second is like, where's the Pentagon in this? This is the premier unit in the United States military, and people are openly using cocaine and smoking crack and shooting their friends, and no one's doing anything about it. Like, what is that?
- [42:21]
Seth Harp
It's baffling to me. I would have never imagined. I mean, I remember when I was in the army, one guy, a sergeant in my company, tested positive for cocaine in a piss test, and he was just gone after that. I mean, he was just removed from the unit.
- [42:35]
Tucker Carlson
Well, that's a question that I should have asked you a half an hour ago. What about drug testing?
- [42:40]
Seth Harp
So all members of the military are subject to random drug testing, but apparently they consider it a joke. I mean, there's a lot of reporting on this around the Navy SEALs. A lot of Navy SEALs have gone on the record to say that, you know, they were using constantly during their time in service and that the drug testing regimen was a complete joke because there's ways to defeat it. In particular, you can get a tip off when you. And because it's supposed to be random, it's not something they do regularly, and maybe that's what they need to be doing. But as the random. The randomized testing, you know, you can be told by someone in time, hey, your name is on the list. And that Gives you time to, like, suck down a bunch of water, stop doing drugs and, and pass the test.
- [43:19]
Tucker Carlson
Or buy urine.
- [43:20]
Seth Harp
Buy clean urine, by you would imagine. Maybe that's something that's going on as well. Hadn't heard that in particular, but I know that people can do that. They certainly can. You got to remember, these guys are intelligent, highly trained. They're spies just as much as they are assassins. Many of them are. There's various levels within Delta Force. There's compartmented elements, there's the line squadrons, et cetera. So it depends on the person. But, you know, these are people who are. Their job is to do covert action, so they're very good at getting away with things. When your job is to penetrate a foreign country that's guarded by paranoid counterintelligence officials, to go into that country and, I don't know, bug an embassy or kidnap a guy off the street, a drug test isn't going to be something that you're too worried about.
- [44:12]
Tucker Carlson
I think, and you alluded to this earlier, there comes a point where, you know the government is afraid of you because you know too much, you've done too much. You're also performing what they think is a valuable service. No one else can provide that service. Like you're too valuable to, to expel over a failed piss test.
- [44:32]
Seth Harp
That's a great point. That's absolutely part of it. Um, which is that, yeah, after they've spent millions of dollars training you, they don't really care. I think they would put it as like, if they were to come out and say it, it's like big boy rules, I think, is how they look at it. If you're gonna do drugs, then do it. Just don't get caught.
- [44:52]
Tucker Carlson
Right?
- [44:52]
Seth Harp
Just don't get caught is the rule.
- [44:55]
Tucker Carlson
Well, it sounds like their work life is. That has the same rule.
- [44:59]
Seth Harp
Absolutely. Yeah.
- [45:01]
Tucker Carlson
So you said Billy Levine had decided that the missions he'd been sent on 12 times were not morally justifiable. The whole war on terror was a bad idea. Is that a common view, do you think?
- [45:16]
Seth Harp
You know, it is. The fact that combat veterans are one of the most reliable anti war demographics in our country.
- [45:25]
Tucker Carlson
I've noticed they don't know that in cable news. They're always like, oh, combat veterans, support whatever mission this is. That's the opposite of what I've noticed.
- [45:35]
Seth Harp
The opposite is true. There's. There's data on this, there's polling. Super majorities of combat veterans say that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were not worth, I've noticed, fighting and I'm one of them. And so, Bill, to. To me to learn that Billy Levine, you know, held those views is not surprising at all.
- [45:47]
Tucker Carlson
When did that come to you, by the way? What's your can tell us? Take five minutes and tell us your story, if that's all right.
- [45:54]
Seth Harp
Sure. You know, I'm not. My story is really not part of the book. But the relevant background would be that I actually deployed to Iraq at the same time as Levine's first tour in Iraq. And, you know, I. Before that deployment was over, I had come to the firm point of view that the war was not just a mistake, but a crime to. To carry out this invasion on the grounds that there were supposedly weapons of mass destruction in Iraq when there weren't.
- [46:28]
Tucker Carlson
And what was your role? You were in the Army?
- [46:30]
Seth Harp
Yeah, you know, I was in. I was in college. I was a college student who joined the Army Reserves. I was a student at the University of Texas in order to pay for college.
- [46:38]
Tucker Carlson
Oh, wow.
- [46:40]
Seth Harp
I fell for the recruiter's pitch, which is, you know, one week in a month, two weeks a year. I was 19 years old. And that was in 2004. 2003. Excuse me.
- [46:55]
Tucker Carlson
That used to be real. Well, that was the year we invaded Iraq. Yeah, that used to be real. I mean, the Reserves served, you know, one weekend a month, two weeks a year for a long, long time. And then the war on terror commenced, and those guys were dragged into real war. But I don't think that had happened before, had it? Well, you would know. You did it.
- [47:15]
Seth Harp
No, it hadn't happened before. And in fact, you know, I sometimes, in retrospect, struggle to explain to folks how it could have been that I opposed the Iraq war and had no interest in fighting in the Iraq War and yet still joined the Army Reserve at a time when it was clear that the Iraq War was going to happen.
- [47:32]
Tucker Carlson
Well, because the Reserves were not used in that way.
- [47:34]
Seth Harp
There's that. And also, even people who opposed the war had no idea that it was going to last for years. We forget about this completely. But even people who oppose the war assumed that it would be over pretty quickly. And I can remember even asking my recruiter naively, are you sure I'm not going to get sent to this war, Iraq that everyone's talking about? Don't worry about that. But, yeah, of course, my deployment orders were cut even before I left basic training. They were sent to me while I was standing in formation in basic training, set to deploy to Iraq for 528 days.
- [48:07]
Tucker Carlson
Oh, come on. And you're a UT student?
- [48:11]
Seth Harp
Yeah.
- [48:12]
Tucker Carlson
Sorry to laugh.
- [48:12]
Seth Harp
It's okay.
- [48:13]
Tucker Carlson
It's hilarious.
- [48:14]
Seth Harp
It was, it was two years before I went back to college. After the day I signed that contract.
- [48:20]
Tucker Carlson
What did your girlfriend or parents or buddies say? Sorry, I'm sorry. It's like, do you see the humor kind of the.
- [48:29]
Seth Harp
I do, of course, yeah. My parents are pretty resigned to it. Bless their hearts. They had to put up with a lot. But you know, before I even deployed back to the United States, I was writing editorials for the daily texting because I wrote for my student newspaper, you know, talking about the Iraq war and using my perspective as a veteran to try to convince people that this was a mistake and that this whole post 911 permanent war paradigm should re examined. So that's kind of like my sort of origin story and how I came to wait.
- [48:58]
Tucker Carlson
So how long did you spend in Iraq?
- [49:01]
Seth Harp
528 days.
- [49:02]
Tucker Carlson
Oh, you actually did?
- [49:03]
Seth Harp
Oh yeah, yeah. Every single one of those days.
- [49:05]
Tucker Carlson
What was that like?
- [49:09]
Seth Harp
You know, I think a lot of people had certainly had rougher deployments than I did. I've read books about some of the units that had the toughest, that had the most casualties. I don't want to, you know, exaggerate what my experience was like, but at the same time it was, it was pretty rough. It was pretty rough. I mean, there were guys in my unit who were killed. We were attacked on a fairly regular basis. Nothing crazy, but you know, getting shot at and getting mortar was a continuous thing. We were often outside the wire because we were, although we were non combat troops, we. We built bridges and roads was our job. We did a lot of construction work and dirt work in war zones or in, you know, areas where there had been fighting, especially to repair roads that have been damaged by IEDs. So several of our convoys were ambushed. A lot of, I think maybe five or six guys were shot and survived. And then also there were other bad things that went on. You know, I. And one circumstance, there was a soldier who shot up a car in front of me and another group of soldiers and killed the occupants of that car, who were just a woman and her kid. And you know, he said that he thought that, you know, they were approaching too fast. I don't want to get into all the details of it, but the ugliness of it and the savagery and how unnecessary it all was made a deep, deep impression on me at that age. And I have dedicated all my work as a journalist and reporter ever since then to opposing, you know, the continuation of these wars.
- [50:53]
Tucker Carlson
Well, bless you for that. What was it like coming back after 528 days? Did you rejoin your fraternity or what? I mean, it must have been.
- [51:05]
Seth Harp
It was great coming back. It was good. You know, I didn't have, like, the sort of stereotypical Hurt Locker type of experience where, you know, I wasn't like, what's that movie, Apocalypse now where I'm laying under the ceiling fan, skinny rats? It wasn't like that. I mean, I def. I do remember having. It's been a long time now, but I do remember having nightmares for years, not necessarily of violence, but I would have this dream where I had lost my weapon and was unarmed. I was in Iraq on the street or whatever and didn't have a weapon. So, yeah, there were some lingering effects, but I don't complain about my personal experience in this. The US Killed a million people in Iraq. Maybe the estimates vary, but hundreds of thousands, possibly a million people. They're the ones who are the victims of this, not US Soldiers like me who have hurt feelings when we come back. I want to be clear about that.
- [52:08]
Tucker Carlson
But it sounds like your experience there affected your view of the broader mission for sure.
- [52:17]
Seth Harp
Yes, profoundly, I would say.
- [52:18]
Tucker Carlson
What about the guys you served with?
- [52:22]
Seth Harp
My reaction was typical. Like I was saying before most, there was a divide in the unit. I can remember debating the 2004 election with the guys who were for Kerry and the guys who were for Bush. You know, the military is very reflective of our society. Maybe not the Special Forces, but the regular army is. And so the same divisions we see in society at large are reflected in the ranks. So it was no different.
- [52:49]
Tucker Carlson
What do you think the prevailing view, let me ask you again, among the special operators, is of the mission itself. Like, why are we doing this? Is that a question they discuss?
- [53:01]
Seth Harp
I don't hear them talk about that sort of thing very much. Yeah, they just say, bad guys, we kill bad guys, we kill terrorists. I have to assume that in units like Delta Force, the majority of the guys are able to compartmentalize the ethics of it and say. Or the wisdom of it and say that that's simply not their job to think about and that they just follow orders. Yeah, but as you can see, in the case of a guy like Billy Levine, that only lasts for so long. Eventually it starts to dawn on you that this is not okay. And if you listen to operator type podcasts, you'll hear a lot of that. I mean, yeah, it's. They're not the most jingoistic and pro war people. Like you said before, are cable news anchors, not soldiers. The soldiers, I think, have a more nuanced perspective almost as a rule.
- [53:58]
Tucker Carlson
Did you ever run in to any cable news anchors when you were over there?
- [54:04]
Seth Harp
No. No.
- [54:06]
Tucker Carlson
So Mark Levin was not in your unit?
- [54:08]
Seth Harp
I didn't see him, no. I did see Joe Millionaire once.
- [54:12]
Tucker Carlson
Joe Millionaire? Whatever happened to him?
- [54:14]
Seth Harp
I don't know. I saw him in Iraq. I also saw 50 Cent gave a concert in Iraq.
- [54:19]
Tucker Carlson
How was it?
- [54:20]
Seth Harp
It was cool. Yeah. It was a high point of the deployment.
- [54:25]
Tucker Carlson
So this is the coolest Christmas present I'll get this year. This is a leather ALP pouch logo right there. Gets on your belt. Made in the United States out of actual leather. If you carry, you can put the firearm on one side and a loaded tin of Alp on the other. It will never be far from you. And it is legit cool. I'm going to be wearing it. Recommend you do the same. Alpouch.com is where you can find this, the leather alp pouch. Alpouch.com I want to go back to the connection between Levine and his friends, his colleagues, the Delta operators, but also the other Special Forces community members at Fort Bragg and drug use and drug trafficking. That's shocking, but it doesn't seem to have shocked their superiors. To what extent is drug trafficking tolerated in the military? I can't believe I'm asking this question, but it sounds like it is.
- [55:26]
Seth Harp
It's hard to imagine that you would have to ask that question. And yet, from what I was able to learn, it's not an isolated case. Lavina Dumas. In fact, it seems that after 2020, these, like the drug trafficking rings that permeate Fork Bragg only increased. And you even had public statements from Fort Bragg officials acknowledging, you know, for example, that they had 100% increase in drug crime on base from 2020 to 2021.
- [55:56]
Tucker Carlson
How could you have drug crime on a military base?
- [55:59]
Seth Harp
It was very surprising to me as well. But you even have cases of military police officers dealing drugs out of their police cars on Fort Bragg. Folks want to look that up? Look up the case of Jacob Dickerson, who was an MP on Fort Bragg, who was busted for drug trafficking. In fact, I obtained the investigative files in that case and learned that there was actually four or five of these MPs on base. They were trafficking drugs, and they dropped charges against all but one of the guys because he had exacerbated the trouble he was in by getting into a drunk driving accident. And even he was just given a slap on the Wrist, I think he got, you know, a month or two in the stockade and a dishonorable discharge. But there is a, I would say, pervasive practice of, or there's, there's drug availability on Fort Bragg that's comparable to any dense urban city in the United States.
- [56:58]
Tucker Carlson
The military is an authoritarian structure. I don't need to tell you that since you served in it. So it seems like you could prevent that if you really wanted to. You could fix that problem.
- [57:10]
Seth Harp
You would think so. You would think so. And I'm at a loss to explain why so little has been done. I've talked to people who, you know, CID sources who told me CID is what, the Army's Criminal Investigations Division. Yes, it's, it's a quasi military, quasi civilian police agency that has jurisdiction to investigate crimes involving American soldiers. So you have MPs, who are the uniformed officers and then above them you have cid. So they're the ones who investigate, you know, major crimes on bases. And they told me about closed door meetings in which the Fort Bragg brass mostly seemed concerned with, you know, massaging the statistics that they kept just to make it seem like drug crime was under control when in fact it's not.
- [58:01]
Tucker Carlson
Who runs Fort Bragg?
- [58:04]
Seth Harp
Well, Fort Bragg is under the, the largest umbrella formation there would be the 18th Airborne Corps. So the commander of the 18th Airborne Corps is going to be the highest ranking army officer on Fort Bragg. But you also have the Joint Special Operations Command there, which is a very elite formation in the military, the most elite. And so the commander of JSOC is also a very important and powerful person who's a three star general, if I'm not mistaken, who's on the base as well. So you have a collection of what people call the brass. And then of course they're subservient to the Pentagon and the Secretary of the army and the Secretary of Defense.
- [58:50]
Tucker Carlson
One connection that I've almost never heard anybody make, but I've thought about. So the war in Vietnam really starts in 1964 with the Gulf of Tonkin incident and extends all the way really to the, to the final end in April of 1975. That coincided almost exactly with the rise of a real drug epidemic in the United States. Vietnam is in a drug, is a poppy growing region, you know, the golden triangle. And for a bunch of different reasons, that war seemed to have had a material effect on drug use in the United States. Like, and a lot of people died from drugs during the period of the Vietnam War. And I think there must be a connection you see, the exact same phenomenon around the war in Afghanistan starts in 2001, ends three years ago, and it coincides precisely with this explosion in opioid drug use and the inevitable death toll from that. Is there a direct connection between those two things?
- [59:53]
Seth Harp
Yes, there is. And the US Media's failure to connect those things is probably the biggest dereliction of duty on part of the press corps that I've seen in my life. The.
- [60:04]
Tucker Carlson
Those are big things.
- [60:05]
Seth Harp
Big things, yeah.
- [60:06]
Tucker Carlson
The death toll from drugs during the Vietnam period and particularly during the Afghanistan period, dwarfs the death toll in the war itself.
- [60:14]
Seth Harp
Yeah. The number one cause of death for Americans age 18 to 45 is fentanyl overdose. And where does that. That comes. That comes directly out of the heroin crisis that afflicted this country from, let's say, the mid-2000s up until 2015. 16, 17, 18. And so it's very important to ask what were the causes of the heroin crisis? And it.
- [60:38]
Tucker Carlson
I don't think I've ever heard anyone ask that question.
- [60:41]
Seth Harp
Well, the conventional explanation, which is not wrong, is that the roots of it lie in the over prescription of opioid painkillers in the 1990s. Yes, that's very true.
- [60:51]
Tucker Carlson
That happened the Sackler family. Yeah.
- [60:53]
Seth Harp
That created widespread dependence on opiates among a large number of people. You also saw, at the same time, to feed this demand, increased heroin production in Mexico. However, more than 90% of all the world's heroin was produced In Afghanistan between 2001 and 2021, more than 9%, in fact, Afghanistan under US occupation produced more heroin than the whole world could absorb. So supply there outstripped global demand. And. And so for that reason, there are now believed to be large stockpiles of Afghan heroin in places like Pakistan and Tajikistan.
- [61:34]
Tucker Carlson
How could wait, do you think heroin production went up under US occupation?
- [61:38]
Seth Harp
I mean, it went up exponentially. So. And as a direct result of the US invasion. And we should talk about the Taliban in this context, because I'll try to keep it too brief to the essentials, because it actually goes back to the 1980s. So in the 1980s, the CIA armed and funded Afghan resistance fighters known as mujahideen to fight the Russians who had invaded Afghanistan and were occupying Afghanistan to prop up a communist government there. So. And they won that war. That's what we call Charlie Wilson's War, the movie, of course. But after the CIA withdrew, those warlords that they had previously set up took over Afghanistan and ruled it in the 1990s, and they were all major drug traffickers. They're the ones who were responsible for turning Afghanistan into the narco state that it became. You know, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, if I'm pronouncing that correctly, was the main recipient of CIA cash and he turned into by far the biggest drug lord in Afghanistan. There's also the clan of Nassim Akhunzada in the Helmand province, who was another major recipient of CIA aid and who turned the Helmand into the world's most prolific opium, poppy, heroin, morphine producing area in the world. The Taliban. We hear so much about the Taliban's oppression of women and making music illegal, and they do those things. The Taliban is an arch conservative movement whose ethics and morality I absolutely do not share.
- [63:10]
Tucker Carlson
However, I never understood why I was supposed to give a shit about that. I mean, I want everyone to be free, just as a matter of principle, but that didn't. But moving metric tons of heroin into my country, that seems like a real story. Whether people can. Girls can get PhDs in feminist studies or whatever is of less concern to me.
- [63:30]
Seth Harp
Right, right. Well, the Afghan people didn't like it either. All the drug trafficking that was going on in their country and what made the Taliban popular originally was their suppression of the drug industry in Afghanistan. They eliminate. They took over and eliminated all of the drug production that was taking place there because it's. You can see how it's ideologically consistent with their Sharia law. You know, they don't tolerate drugs. They don't tolerate alcohol either. So they get rid of all of it.
- [64:00]
Tucker Carlson
The Sharia law is bad, Seth. I don't know if you've heard that it's bad. It's worse than what's happening in New York and Detroit. It's just bad. I don't know why. Just like years of brainwashing. I just, like. I'm not Muslim. I'm not for Sharia law. On the other hand, compared to what? Compared to Baltimore, you know, shut up. Sharia law.
- [64:21]
Seth Harp
Well, in. Sorry, Sharia law in Afghanistan, the effect of implementing Sharia law was the total suppression of the heroin industry and the decimation of the world's supply of heroin.
- [64:33]
Tucker Carlson
And a massive reduction in the rape of boys. They didn't like that.
- [64:37]
Seth Harp
That's another subject that absolutely part of this. And I almost hesitate to go there because it's a. It's. It is a para. Everything I'm saying about drugs could also be talked about. I can't believe I'm even saying this, but child sex trafficking.
- [64:50]
Tucker Carlson
Yeah.
- [64:50]
Seth Harp
Was something that took Place that was something that the US backed client state was deeply implicated in. Child sex trafficking. Another thing that's falsely laid at the feet of the Taliban and said this is just part of Afghan culture, when that is not true. But to return to the heroin thing, the. It was actually in the summer of.
- [65:09]
Tucker Carlson
2001, like, your mind explodes with like when you start to understand what the truth is. Just that layers of propaganda that attach like barnacles to your brain. When they come off, you're like, I don't even recognize this world. Do you feel that ever?
- [65:24]
Seth Harp
In this case, yes. Because although I had served in the military and worked as a war reporter, I'd actually never been to Afghanistan. So I had to educate myself on the Afghan war starting from scratch. And what I learned was that the Taliban eliminated the drug industry just months before the US invaded. The DEA and the UN certified the eradication campaign that the Taliban had carried out. And when the US invaded in 2001, they teamed up with the exact same narco warlords that had previously ruled Afghanistan, what we call the Northern Alliance. And those people took over and Hamid Karzai was installed as CIA puppet president of Afghanistan and immediately legalized poppy production in Afghanistan. And within, within the span of, let's say two years, maybe three years, heroin production increased something like 7 or 8,000% in Afghanistan.
- [66:21]
Tucker Carlson
And, and of course a lot of it winds up in Europe and the United States, correct?
- [66:26]
Seth Harp
Yes. You know, you have, like I said, more heroin than the world can even absorb.
- [66:31]
Tucker Carlson
Why would the U. S. Authorities, why would the CIA, why would the White House allow that?
- [66:38]
Seth Harp
I my view, there's a paranoid point of view, conspiracial, conspiratorial point of view among people who believe that this is some kind of. This is some kind of societal program, some nefarious program that the US government wants the whole world to be inundated with heroin. I personally am more inclined to the view that they just don't care and that these type of mercenary drug traffickers make natural allies to a foreign power that's invading your country.
- [67:13]
Tucker Carlson
Is there a difference between negligence and malice? If I leave my toddler in the car with the windows closed on a hot day to go gamble a casino and he suffocates, does it matter if I wanted to kill him or if I just didn't care enough?
- [67:28]
Seth Harp
No, I don't think it matters.
- [67:30]
Tucker Carlson
It doesn't matter.
- [67:30]
Seth Harp
And I'm not making an excuse.
- [67:31]
Tucker Carlson
No, no, I know you're not. I'm just like, the bottom line is that US Authorities, the Bush administration and then the Obama administration, and then, you know, up up until the end, up until the Biden administration allowed the United States and its citizens to die of drug ODs. Because the, the country that they were running, Afghanistan, was producing all, all the heroin, right?
- [67:56]
Seth Harp
I mean, yes, the, I mean the amount of heroin that was being produced was very potent, high quality and large amounts of it. So that obviously supply and demand depressed prices. And you have ample reporting. It's not just Europe and Australia and Asia that's being flooded by heroin. Also the United States in this time saw a massive increase in supply. Now here's where the COVID up comes in. Because all of this was well reported up until the late 2000s, let's say 2007 or so. That's when the DEA started putting out statements to the effect that although there was rise in heroin supplies in the United States, they claimed that none of it was coming from Afghanistan. Less than 1% is the official figure. And so in the process of writing this book, I spent a lot of time in the weeds trying to figure out how exactly the DEA made this determination. Because it's kind of like saying no oil from Saudi Arabia ever gets burned in the United States. You ask how is that possible? That the world's largest consumer of drugs is not importing any drugs from the world's largest producer of drugs, which, by.
- [69:02]
Tucker Carlson
The way, it controls.
- [69:03]
Seth Harp
Which it controls. Yeah. That seems to defy reason. Yeah.
- [69:07]
Tucker Carlson
Yes, it does. That's why you're a good reporter, Seth.
- [69:10]
Seth Harp
If you read the book out, you will see that I get deep in the nitty gritty of it, down to the actual mathematics of it. But suffice it to say, I find that that statistic was totally bogus and invented as a way to cover up the fact this incredibly damaging effect of the war in Afghanistan had on, on US society.
- [69:32]
Tucker Carlson
So I, I guess another way to say that would be, in fact, a lot of heroin from our client state, Afghanistan was winding up in American cities.
- [69:40]
Seth Harp
Absolutely. Especially the China, what's called China White heroin. It's called China because of its color, not because it actually comes from China. Now the picture is slightly confounded because there was also a lot of Mexican heroin coming to the United States during the same time. But Mexican heroin is black in color and low in quality. It's called black tar heroin.
- [70:03]
Tucker Carlson
It's usually smoked.
- [70:04]
Seth Harp
Right. And it was. But it was the China White that really flooded the US during this, this time period and caused the most damage, especially in the Northeast and in Appalachia. And in the Midwest, because that's where flights from Afghanistan come. It's all traffic through airports on the Eastern seaboard, whereas Mexico kind of supplies the west of the United States in the South.
- [70:25]
Tucker Carlson
Right. That's why Jerry Garcia was a black tar addict in Marin County, California. And all the junkies in Philadelphia are using China White.
- [70:34]
Seth Harp
Right, right. And the China White, because it's so much more potent, is what leads to all of the. The huge overdose crisis that we suffered during these.
- [70:41]
Tucker Carlson
Pretty hard to OD from smoking heroin.
- [70:43]
Seth Harp
Possible, but that's my understanding. Yeah, yeah.
- [70:47]
Tucker Carlson
So who profited from that?
- [70:50]
Seth Harp
That's a very good question. Not the people of Afghanistan. The numbers that I've seen suggest that maybe a billion dollars a year was, you know, was the, was, was the profits that went to Afghans of one type or another. The majority of it went to drug supply chains outside of Afghanistan. And that's the most opaque aspect of all of this. And that's where I have the most unanswered questions. Who exactly was making all of this money?
- [71:21]
Tucker Carlson
So the occupation of Afghanistan was a military occupation, diplomatic as well, intel components, but basically we had our troops in Afghanistan, therefore we controlled Afghanistan. So if there's an exponential rise by thousands of percent rise in opium production, heroin manufacturing and export of heroin, it's kind of hard to believe the US Military didn't know that.
- [71:45]
Seth Harp
Oh, they certainly knew about it. And there's. There's a agency called the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction that, although it's a U.S. government agency, has done the most important retrospective work on this, including lots of interviews with key people who, who. And all of them acknowledged that they knew that it was going on. And Saigar is an agency, it's acronym. Discuss how the US Military didn't want anything to do with drug eradication because they saw it as detrimental to their mission because the people they were working with were drug traffickers. And the same story goes for the CIA, except Cigar explicitly says in its 2018 report on counternarcotics that the CIA, rather than cooperating with anti drug eradication measures, prioritized its relationship with significant drug traffickers. That's the language of the US Government report. And it even names some major drug traffickers who worked with the CIA who were on the CIA's payroll. And let's not forget that the President of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, and his brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, were on the payroll of the CIA and led this drug trafficking organization, which, you know, recently our government accused Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela of being the head of a drug cartel on some very, very flimsy evidence. And they make these organization charts where they purport to show Maduro at the top. And these other guys, if you had taken that same lens and trained it on Afghanistan, you could have very easily created an organization structure showing the world's biggest drug cartel with Hamid Karzai at the very top. And he's someone who, you know, is sitting down to dine with President Obama and all these other top US Officials.
- [73:29]
Tucker Carlson
But if I'm, if I'm a special operator in Afghanistan and I'm working with the local, local leaders who are also drug traffickers, I mean, it's not a huge step. And I'm buying heroin for, you know, $1,000 a pound when I can resell it for many, many times, that can be kind of tempting to bring some home. Right?
- [73:54]
Seth Harp
Timothy Dumas, who was found dead next to Billy Lavine on Fort Bragg in 2020, had evidently written a letter in which he outlined exactly what you're talking about. A drug trafficking organization involving Special Forces soldiers who were trafficking heroin from Afghanistan to the United States on military planes. And he was killed before that letter was ever made public.
- [74:19]
Tucker Carlson
Who do you write it to?
- [74:21]
Seth Harp
He wrote it. It was addressed to a top ranking. I never read the letter, but I, I interviewed someone who did read the letter. I interviewed three people who knew about the letter, including Dumas's son and also his partner in crime, a very corrupt former North Carolina state trooper named Freddie Wayne Huff, who was entrusted with a copy of the letter and read it. He said that it was addressed to a high ranking general. As I said before, Dumas intended to use this blackmail letter to exert pressure on the Special Forces in order to get his pension reinstated. But it doesn't seem to have been a very wise maneuver on his part.
- [74:56]
Tucker Carlson
No, no, you can push too hard, then you wind up executed. I'm coming around to your theory, by the way, that this may have been retaliatory.
- [75:08]
Seth Harp
That's. That's not my theory, although I get what you're saying, but just to be super clear about it, because these are not light allegations. So I just want to be as responsible as possible as a reporter and say that this is what people have alleged, this is what the evidence is. But we don't know for sure. And the reason we don't know is because our ignorance has been procured by the people, by the authorities who are, who have the responsibility to investigate this stuff and are not doing it.
- [75:35]
Tucker Carlson
Do you think Nicely put. And thank you for saying that. Do you think the U.S. people in the U.S. military in the Special Forces Committee did participate in drug trafficking?
- [75:47]
Seth Harp
I find it hard to imagine that, that they weren't. I will say that there's other ways of making money, other types of crime that I discuss in the book. The book's not entirely about drug trafficking. There's also a lot of weapons trafficking, a lot of weapons theft from the milit military, Fort Bragg. It would blow your mind if they ever disclosed how much, how, how many weapons and how much in explosives that they lose annually. It's really crazy.
- [76:17]
Tucker Carlson
What kind of weapons, what kind of explosives?
- [76:19]
Seth Harp
Military weapons and plastic explosives. They lose an incredible amount of weapons every year. It's. And Timothy Dumas was a guy who was trafficking weapons besides trafficking drugs.
- [76:28]
Tucker Carlson
Quartermaster.
- [76:29]
Seth Harp
He was a quartermaster. And so he was deeply involved in all of this. Yeah, I mean I read his separation packet. It's 128 pages and it makes crystal clear that his entire career was characterized by stuff going missing, documents going missing. He was the, he was the, the. When he was in Afghanistan, attached to JSOC. All of the records for two years, 2012 and 2013, if I'm not mistaken, went missing in their entirety. All the paperwork on all of the J A supply chain for that battalion was just gone.
- [77:03]
Tucker Carlson
But so what do you do with military grade weapons? Even small arms, fully automatic rifles. Like what do you do with something? You can't sell it in the United States. No.
- [77:14]
Seth Harp
You sell it to Mexican cartels and then that's how they end up better armed than the Mexican government in states like Tamaulipas and Nueva Leon. And Karen.
- [77:22]
Tucker Carlson
Yeah. The Ukrainian military has been selling NATO weapons, American supplied weapons to the Mexican drug cartels.
- [77:29]
Seth Harp
Fact.
- [77:29]
Tucker Carlson
They hate it when you say that, but it's true.
- [77:31]
Seth Harp
Well, I haven't seen that reporting. But I will tell you this about Ukraine, that agency I mentioned earlier, Saigar. There are provisions in the laws providing aid to a Ukraine that ensure that that type of accountability never takes place again. Because Saigar turned into a real embarrassment for the war in Afghanistan because apparently they took their job seriously and did it correctly. So the aid to Ukraine can never be audited. That's written in the law.
- [77:56]
Tucker Carlson
What?
- [77:57]
Seth Harp
Yeah.
- [78:00]
Tucker Carlson
Oh, this can't continue for too long. It's too out of control.
- [78:06]
Seth Harp
You know, the Roman Empire declined for hundreds of years before it finally disintegrated.
- [78:11]
Tucker Carlson
So well, and then it just moved east and it lasts another thousand years. But amazingly so of course you're Right. You're absolutely right. But it is bewildering that this was even just 20 years ago. If you had done a poll of people I knew, anyway, I lived in D.C. i was around the government every day. Is this country corrupt? I would say not really. I mean, that was my view. I think most people felt that way. When you joined the army, did you think the people who ran the army were corrupt? No.
- [78:47]
Seth Harp
The simple answer is no. But, you know, corruption takes many forms in the United States. If you get pulled over by a cop, you can't just bribe that cop to let you know that's not going to happen. But the higher you go up in the power structures in this country, the more you find legal corruption. I mean, is it corruption for a corporation to give unlimited amounts of money to a politician to get elected? Because that's. Our Supreme Court says that's totally legal under Citizens United. But in another context, in another country, in another time, that would just be considered the rankest sort of bribery. So it depends upon how you define corruption. Of course.
- [79:29]
Tucker Carlson
It is bribery.
- [79:30]
Seth Harp
I agree. Yeah.
- [79:31]
Tucker Carlson
Yeah. Well, obviously.
- [79:32]
Seth Harp
Yeah.
- [79:33]
Tucker Carlson
It's a complex question because, like, do you have a right to tell people to what extent they can support a politician? I don't know. I mean, I think it is complicated, but the effect, as it stands right now is politicians are bribed by donors.
- [79:46]
Seth Harp
Yeah, absolutely.
- [79:47]
Tucker Carlson
I mean, that's how we got Ted Cruz. Totally corrupt human being.
- [79:52]
Seth Harp
Yeah, he's. Unfortunately, he's my senator. I hope that he has a primary challenger soon.
- [79:57]
Tucker Carlson
Yeah, well, I think he just won, so probably not for a while. But anyway, sorry not to get off on a Ted Cruz tangent, but I just want to say again, Ted Cruz is corrupt. His wife works for Goldman in Texas, and when she pitches clients, I happen to know for a dead certain fact he goes to dinner with them. So that's. That's corruption.
- [80:19]
Seth Harp
Well, I'm sure he's looking forward to coming back on your show again after the last time.
- [80:23]
Tucker Carlson
Anyway, sorry. No, I'm being mean. But it's true, and there's a lot of it. But when it happens in the Senate, you're like, okay, of course Ted Cruz is corrupt. Look at him. But when it happens among people most civilians revere, like, you know, the most elite units in the US Military. That's dispiriting, among other things, right?
- [80:42]
Seth Harp
I think it is. And I think my inclination is to think that it is a result of waging wars that nobody really believes in for years and years, because think about what that does to Your psychology. When you're engaged in a righteous cause that has widespread societal buy in, you're going to be constrained by your own sense of yourself as a virtuous actor. And you're going to know that when you're tempted to do things for money or for other motives, that that's not consistent with your self image and so you don't do it. But when you're fighting for years in wars like Afghanistan that the public just doesn't even pay attention to, and you know, all your allies are drug traffickers and they're raping little boys and that they're trafficking sex slaves, but you're just doing it because you like your work and you like being an elite soldier, then it's easier to take a mercenary attitude towards this and just think, it's not going to matter if I skim, you know, $100,000 off the top of the op fund that we have out here in the field, all this cash that we're given, or it's no big deal for me to grab a couple bricks of this heroin and put it in my foot locker and then sell it for 50 grand when I get back to Fayetteville.
- [81:59]
Tucker Carlson
I hope what you just said is clipped, because that's a perfect summation of what my instincts are, that the more morally corrupt the enterprise is, the more morally corrupt the people participating in the enterprise become.
- [82:11]
Seth Harp
And that's why I spend so much time in the book talking about the wars in which all of this, the context in which this takes place, because it doesn't take place in a vacuum. And the decisions of our leaders in this country trickle down to the lowest levels and have an influence on how people live their lives.
- [82:29]
Tucker Carlson
That's right. Has any, anyone ever been held accountable? I mean, I think you've. I think you've confirmed my instinct, which is that there was a connection between the war in this drug producing country and our occupation of this drug producing country and the drug epidemic in the United States. I mean, there's clearly. I. You have to be an idiot not to see the connection. But has anyone ever been indicted, arrested, convicted for participating in that?
- [82:58]
Seth Harp
No. No. Nobody.
- [83:00]
Tucker Carlson
Nobody.
- [83:01]
Seth Harp
Nobody. No. For the drug trafficking that took place in Afghanistan?
- [83:05]
Tucker Carlson
Yeah.
- [83:06]
Seth Harp
No, that's never happened. And there's been. There was total impunity around the entire enterprise.
- [83:16]
Tucker Carlson
Pants. I think the United States government, I don't think. I know, is doing things right now whose consequences cannot be foreseen, but they'll be profound.
- [83:25]
Seth Harp
I agree.
- [83:25]
Tucker Carlson
And I think the more rotten your behavior, you know, the bigger the consequences. And you don't get away with it. No one gets away with it.
- [83:35]
Seth Harp
I agree. And, you know, you wonder what's going on now, because Afghanistan is fading rapidly into the past. You know, the war ended in 2021. And, you know, is there massive drug trafficking taking place under the auspices of US military control right now? Not that I know of. But there's other things. You know, Ukraine was the most corrupt country in Europe before the war there, before Russia invaded. And we've dumped so much money and so much equipment into that country with no oversight at all, and transferred it to a political class that we know is corrupt to the bone. So that would be the place to look now, in my opinion, for contemporary examples of corruption.
- [84:24]
Tucker Carlson
You'd get assassinated if you tried to do that. You'd be assassinated by the Ukrainians, perhaps, with the help of US intel agencies, period.
- [84:36]
Seth Harp
I feel like it would be very unsafe to look into that subject.
- [84:38]
Tucker Carlson
It would be very unsafe. I can tell you firsthand. It'd be very unsafe to do that. In fact, you couldn't do it, Whereas. Which is pretty crazy if you think about it.
- [84:47]
Seth Harp
It is crazy. There's a lot of things that are crazy these days. I think that what made it possible to write what I wrote about Afghanistan was something that happened while I was writing the book, not too long ago, in fact, which was that the Taliban took over after the US withdrew in 21, and then proceeded to do exactly what they had done in the year 2000, 2001, which was to completely eradicate all drugs from the country. And up until then, we had been told to the extent that drug production in Afghanistan came up, we were always told that it was the Taliban and that the insurgency and the drug production were just two sides of the same coin.
- [85:28]
Tucker Carlson
Liars.
- [85:28]
Seth Harp
Yes, but the best lies are the ones that are 180° opposite of the truth.
- [85:32]
Tucker Carlson
Exactly. Exactly.
- [85:34]
Seth Harp
And what made it. What gave me the. I guess what gave me the confidence to really. To hit as hard as I could in this narrative was seeing the Taliban in 2023. They completed another eradication campaign where they once again totally eliminated heroin production and drug production from Afghanistan. So at that point, you know, I had doubts as a reporter because I'm not omniscient. And, you know, there's all these conflict, this conflicting information. So I kind of doubt my own conclusions. I'm thinking, well, they must have been involved to some degree. We hear that said so often from the most prestigious institutions of media and government. There must be some truth to It. But seeing the Taliban totally eliminate drugs from their country again made me realize, okay, this was always a one sided thing. It wasn't that both sides were involved in it. And like I said, that didn't happen until 2023. And so, and that's what I think makes it possible to tell the true story of Afghanistan for the first time.
- [86:31]
Tucker Carlson
You want to get really red pilled. You want to make it almost hard to live here. Look up Taliban drug treatment. You know, you're in your early 40s, I think, so you've lived in this country a long time and you must know people who've been ensnared in drugs or died from drugs. I know. And you must, you live here. So, you know.
- [86:49]
Seth Harp
Sure, yeah.
- [86:49]
Tucker Carlson
Become addicted to drugs and can't get off. And a lot of them and most are dead. Ask yourself super simple question, is the Tal the Taliban drug treatment program? You can look this up, there are videos of it online.
- [87:02]
Seth Harp
Yeah, yeah, I've seen it.
- [87:03]
Tucker Carlson
Does it have, does it produce a higher or lower relapse rate than the American version in, say, Delray Beach, Florida? You know, are the Taliban better at getting people off opioids than we are? And the answer is not just yes, but hell yes, way better. Because they don't wean them off with methadone. This whole thing is a freaking lie, by the way. A lot of people get rich off that. You know who you are if you're listening. Some of them are big political donors who get rich on drug treatment programs. Disgusting. And doesn't work. It works for some small percentage, but it doesn't work for most, that's for sure. And a lot of them die and they never lead productive, joyful lives. And the Taliban have a faith based. I know I'm gonna probably get pulled off YouTube for saying this, but it's true. I'm saying this as a Christian, not a Muslim. They have a faith based, no nonsense, zero intoxicant policy in their rehab. And it works and ours doesn't.
- [88:02]
Seth Harp
Well, it's a really good point because.
- [88:05]
Tucker Carlson
Afghanistan drugs are a serious problem. And I do, because I've lived it and seen it. Yeah, it's a serious point. It's a serious point that we should think about. Yeah, what is that?
- [88:14]
Seth Harp
Well, Afghanistan came to have the highest rates of drug use in the world, the highest addiction rate in the world, which is a tragedy and something that was, that was foisted on them. And it's a source of profound misery and blight. And the Taliban's way of dealing with it, once the US left was to simply round up addicts. If they found them on the street, they would just put them onto buses and, and it was involuntary. Take them to these detox wards where they're not given any kind of methadone medication. They're just given, you know, food, water, and a place to stay. And then they just wait it out. You know, they're, they're basically locked in there and they suffer through withdrawals. And then once they're sober, you know, they're, they're allowed to leave at that point. And it was amazing to me to see the hostility in the Western reaction to the drug, to the Taliban's drug detox program. I mean, you can read all these think tank pieces and all these NGOs where they're talking about how inhumane this is and so on.
- [89:15]
Tucker Carlson
And I've been through withdrawal from alcohol and it was so unpleasant, and I did it alone. I'm not, you know, I didn't have not done anything extraordinary. But the one extraordinary thing I did go through that, man, I never drank. You go through that. I mean, I know people relapse after going through withdrawals for sure, but I can just speak for myself and other people I know have done it. That's a pretty powerful incentive not to do it again. It is. And I do think there's a cost to sort of easing people out of something. I mean, some withdrawal is life threatening. Of course, you don't want to kill people. But opiate withdrawal is not life threatening. It's just you just shit yourself a lot and feel terrible. I don't know. There is, I can speak from experience. There's true, there's value in that. Like you'll never have another glass of vodka if you've gone through something like that. That's, that was my feeling.
- [90:01]
Seth Harp
So let me ask you, would you like to see, you know, police officers tomorrow?
- [90:08]
Tucker Carlson
If you're standing leaning against a trash can in the fentanyl haze, if you're tweaking your brains out and picking open wounds on your face from meth, that is it. You are in hell. You're dying. You're a fellow American. I have an obligation to help you. You're beyond helping yourself in the way that a child, a toddler is beyond help in the way that a schizophrenic is beyond helping himself. You don't have reason. You don't have free will. And it's incumbent on me to love you through action. And we can argue about the details of treatment. I Personally think that when possible and not physically dangerous, total withdrawal is, is the best way, you know, having done it. But I also think more bigger than that is you can't allow this and call yourself a decent society. You cannot allow this. This is hell. And anyone who doesn't think it's hell doesn't know anything about it. What if that was your daughter getting pimped out? You know what I mean? Like it's that ugly and you're from a city where it's just totally destroyed your downtown. But most American cities can say that. And, and no one does anything. So yeah, tomorrow, tomorrow. This is a country where we force people to take the COVID vaccine. So don't lecture me about civil liberties, asshole. Sorry. Yeah, I do feel that way. Strongly. And how many addicts do I know personally who got sober in jail?
- [91:25]
Seth Harp
Yeah, yeah.
- [91:26]
Tucker Carlson
And they're grateful for that. And so when Nancy Pelosi starts talking about compassion. The partial birth abortion lady's talking to me about compassion. You actually. Compassion. Look at your city. There's no compassion there. That's hate. Hate for your fellow citizens allowing this stuff. Sorry. Drugs are destroying America. I, and I said as a former user of drugs and like was very liberal on drugs, but I was wrong.
- [91:50]
Seth Harp
You know, I should say I'm not a drug warrior. I don't believe in the war on drugs. I don't think drugs should be illegal. I think that they should be regulated rather than controlled as. Rather than being a controlled substance. That's totally illegal. But I'm inclined to your point of view about the rehabilitation of large numbers of drug people, of drug users. I think that drugs are one of the most salient features of American society for the worse. And that we have a just are as a country. We have a big, big drug problem. And you see that affecting the military, you know, more than ever.
- [92:30]
Tucker Carlson
And yeah, I guess I shouldn't be. You're. Well, of course, you're absolutely right. It's like the thing about getting older is it's like it's so hard to readjust your previous perceptions of things. But you're right, of course, you shouldn't be. I should not be shocked that there's a drug problem in the military. There's a drug problem everywhere else. There's a drug problem in suburbia, there's a drug problem in the inner city, there's a drug problem in rural America. We just have drug problems in America. Bottom line.
- [92:52]
Seth Harp
Let me say this in response to what you're saying about rounding people up and putting Them into. Into detox wards. I think that's better than arresting them and putting them in prison for. For using drugs.
- [93:03]
Tucker Carlson
Well, of course.
- [93:04]
Seth Harp
And probably cheaper too.
- [93:06]
Tucker Carlson
It's not even like, compared to what. How much aid have we sent to Israel to kill people in Gaza? I don't know.
- [93:12]
Seth Harp
Money's not an issue.
- [93:13]
Tucker Carlson
Well, I mean, on some level it is an issue, but it's also, it's an expression of your priorities. What I spend money on in my family is an expression of what I care about.
- [93:23]
Seth Harp
Well, what I mean is you care.
- [93:24]
Tucker Carlson
About your own people and the kids who were literally standing there like this. Like, how can you allow that? Or people lying in their own feces on the sidewalk. Like, that's so shameful. It's a mark of shame against all of us. Those are Americans and I, I don't think we should put them in jail. I completely agree with you. That's not a crime as much as it's a tragedy. It's a crime against them. They're committing a crime against themselves.
- [93:49]
Seth Harp
Yeah.
- [93:50]
Tucker Carlson
Don't allow that. Would you allow your child if you, if you had a child who's dicted to fentanyl, like standing like this, you'd be like, I'm gonna chain you to the freaking radiator until you get better. I love you that much.
- [94:01]
Seth Harp
Wouldn't you? Yes.
- [94:03]
Tucker Carlson
Yes, we should love our fellow citizens that much. But we hate them and we call it compassion. That's hate. It's not compassion.
- [94:11]
Seth Harp
Hmm.
- [94:11]
Tucker Carlson
Sorry. Oh, nothing bothers me more than that.
- [94:15]
Seth Harp
It is upsetting to see the degree of degradation.
- [94:19]
Tucker Carlson
Yes, that's the word.
- [94:21]
Seth Harp
As a result of, you know, the drug industry.
- [94:24]
Tucker Carlson
They're human beings.
- [94:25]
Seth Harp
Yeah.
- [94:25]
Tucker Carlson
And they've been reduced to something less than human beings.
- [94:28]
Seth Harp
Yes. And there's a lot of factors that go into that. There's a lot of causes. And one of them is something we're really not here to talk about today, but it's the downward mobility that we see in our society and the lack of. The lack of economic prospects that people have.
- [94:44]
Tucker Carlson
I strongly agree.
- [94:45]
Seth Harp
Especially if they don't have an elite education.
- [94:47]
Tucker Carlson
Yep.
- [94:48]
Seth Harp
The cost of housing. There's a lot of reasons why Totally agree. End up like zombies.
- [94:53]
Tucker Carlson
But you could also. I mean. Yes, I say that often. I mean it sincerely. And we're tiny number of the worst people are taking all the money. I totally agree with that. Oh, you're a socialist. No, I'm not. I'm an American who remembers a middle class country and I would like to have that again. That's it, even though I'm not middle class. But anyway, whatever, leaving that aside, you can say there are a lot of reasons your house is on fire, but the first response is to put it out. You know, we probably should upgrade the electrical after this or put a lightning rod on the roof or whatever. We can take steps to prevent it happening again. But right now you need hoses and water. And if you see Americans dying of drugs on the street, I'm, you know, you have to stop that immediately. Those are human beings with souls. They're your countrymen.
- [95:42]
Seth Harp
And I think that, you know, the government now under Trump, what they're trying to do is declare war on Mexican drug cartels or on the Venezuelan government. And this, I think is totally misguided and will be ineffectual if they actually go through with it because.
- [96:00]
Tucker Carlson
Well, certainly the Venezuela thing is a product of.
- [96:05]
Seth Harp
Yeah, the thing is we're talking about the complicity of the US Government and the international drug trade.
- [96:11]
Tucker Carlson
And you think that's real?
- [96:13]
Seth Harp
Oh, I definitely think that's real. And it's, again, it's not what I was saying before. It's not, you know, a top down conspiracy where that's actually the purpose. It's a side effect of our imperialism and the permanent war paradigm. And in Mexico, I've spent a lot of time in Mexico before I was working on this book as a reporter reporting on the drug war is there, the cartel war is there. And it's one thing, you know, Trump can tell people, he can tell his voters, we're going to declare war on Mexican drug cartels. And people will buy into that because they see them, you know, they as vicious criminals and murderers who are pumping drugs into this country. So it's easy to see why they would be for that.
- [96:54]
Tucker Carlson
But. Well, I feel that way. I see them that way.
- [96:56]
Seth Harp
Well, the reality is that Mexican drug cartels don't really exist in the same way that we've been taught to believe in them by Netflix and Hollywood. In fact, there's a recent book, it's an academic book, it's not the easiest to read, but I think it has an important thesis. It's by a Mexican academic named Oswaldo Zavala and it's called Drug Cartels Do Not Exist. What he means by that provocative thesis is that there are not the type of organizations that we see represented in shows like narcos. Take El Chapo Guzman, for example, the famous drug lord who was Captured, I guess 20, 15, 16. The US government to date has seized no assets Belonging to him? None. Why is that? I thought he was one of the world's richest men. He's on Forbes list. Was one of the world's richest men.
- [97:50]
Tucker Carlson
No assets?
- [97:51]
Seth Harp
None. Zero.
- [97:53]
Tucker Carlson
We reserved that only for Russian oligarchs.
- [97:55]
Seth Harp
Well, I don't think they can find any. They can't find any because the drug industry in Mexico is incredibly complex. The first thing to understand is that it's not a collection of organizations, it's a market. And the demand component of that market is in the United States. So people in this country wanting drugs is the battery that's running this whole thing. Because once there's that demand, suppliers inevitably arise to feed it. And in Mexico, those suppliers, yes, there are low level traffickers. There are the people, the disposable people, who are bringing the drugs across the border, the disposable hitmen who are 14 years old and carrying out hits. But the real power behind the drug industry in Mexico is the military and the police, politicians, lawyers, deep pocketed investors. They're the ones that are going in on drug trafficking ventures, essentially as joint ventures, as investments. It's much more organic and spontaneous than we're led to believe. The organization, to the extent that it exists, can be found in high level army generals or high level police officers who are taking a cut from all the little fish who are swimming through certain drug trafficking routes. So this sort of idea that we have of a cartel where it's just bad guys hiding out in their lair, having meetings with the bosses, that just simply doesn't exist in Mexico.
- [99:28]
Tucker Carlson
So El Chapo, just to get back to the original example, was described as a billionaire. We got a pretty, what seemed like a pretty detailed accounting of the revenue. Well, no, we didn't.
- [99:40]
Seth Harp
I mean, you're talking about the DEA and the, and the doj. I mean these, they, they are capable of manufacturing narratives. They're lawyers, they are prosecutors. You know, they can put this stuff together and, and make this case. Look, I'm not saying that El Chapo wasn't a drug trafficker to he was, but he consistently acclaimed that he was a small fry. And he had like four guys with him at the time that he was arrested.
- [100:07]
Tucker Carlson
I thought he had like a private zoo with white lions.
- [100:10]
Seth Harp
And where is that? I haven't seen that. I've seen his pictures of his mom's house in Sinaloa. But there was that time that Sean Penn went to go visit him.
- [100:18]
Tucker Carlson
Yeah.
- [100:18]
Seth Harp
Did that look like the lair of a drug trafficker? He looked like an ignorant campesino. Up there he had like chickens and cages and stuff. And he was clearly a very naive person when, when Sean Penn interviewed him like he wanted. He was entrapped into this by a desire to give flowers to Kate Del Castillo, the, the Mexican actress who was with Sean Penn. I digress to some degree.
- [100:41]
Tucker Carlson
The point is, the bottom line is they've. I just want you to say again, they've. The US Government, northern Mexican government, never confiscated any of this wealth.
- [100:50]
Seth Harp
That's right.
- [100:51]
Tucker Carlson
We were told he had.
- [100:52]
Seth Harp
That's right. Because the real power behind the drug industry in Mexico is the political class. That's like this with the United States security state. That is fun. That gets all of their, you know, the Mexican army. The. Things have changed in Mexico. By the way, this is a moving target to discuss because Mexico starting in 2018 has gone through profound political changes.
- [101:10]
Tucker Carlson
For sure.
- [101:12]
Seth Harp
That would be the beginning of amlo. Sure.
- [101:14]
Tucker Carlson
Of the AMLO period.
- [101:15]
Seth Harp
Yeah, amlo and then his successor, Claudia Scheinbaum. But at the bottom, especially in the northern states of Mexico along the Texas border.
- [101:22]
Tucker Carlson
Yep.
- [101:23]
Seth Harp
I don't think so much has changed there. And if you just take a state like Tamaulipas, which is just south of Texas, which has probably the highest intensity of drug trafficking anywhere in the world, bringing it to the United States, who are the real powers there? I mean, you could say it's the Gulf Cartel or you could say it's Lozetas. These are the organizations that we've been trained by the media to believe are the sort of puppet masters that are making all this happen.
- [101:49]
Tucker Carlson
By the way, I bought that storyline totally.
- [101:52]
Seth Harp
Okay.
- [101:52]
Tucker Carlson
I mean, I have no other information. I don't speak Spanish. I don't. I don't know. But I mean, I just sort of assumed that was true.
- [101:57]
Seth Harp
The real drug traffickers there, the real power, the idea that we often also hear that the Mexican state is outgunned by drug traffickers.
- [102:05]
Tucker Carlson
Yes, I bought that too.
- [102:07]
Seth Harp
I made a comment about that earlier about how the high power weapons that they have, there's some element of truth to that. But the reality is that the cartels are not a threat to the Mexican state. In fact, they're an appendage of the Mexican state in a certain way. And the elite class in Mexico, they're kind of a shadow paramilitary structure of, let's say a state government, like the state government of Tamaulipas and the police forces there and the military divisions that are stationed there. And we're not going to go to war with those people because there are allies. I Mean, people may not realize this, but there's close security cooperation between the US And Mexico. Yes, I mean, the Mexican army, we arm them, we give them their Black Hawk helicopters and their armored vehicles and also the state police forces in the north of Mexico, we arm all of them and they get training from the State Department and from American police officers and so on. And they're the, the real cartel to the extent a cartel exists. And you can see that in other places in the world, notably in Colombia, where, you know, again, it's changing there because they also have a new president. Latin America is changing rapidly in recent years. But for Pat, in the past, for many years in Colombia, the Colombian federal government and the, and the Colombian military have been the biggest drug, most responsible for moving the most weight in drugs, I would say. And once again, they're closely backed by the US Government. So to bring it home and wrap up this point, you can say we're going to target drug cartels in Mexico, but the fact is one, they have no idea who these people are, the people that they're setting up as drug traffickers. They may have developed some targets. To fight a war, you need not only political will, but you need targets. That was a problem, incidentally, parenthetically, in Afghanistan. It was hard for them to develop targets there because it's such a big, remote country. Anyway, in Mexico, they're not going to be able to find those targets. And to the extent that they are, they're going to be people that are protected by the State Department and the CIA. And so it's just not going to happen. This is this drug war, this war on Mexican drug cartels. I don't see it happening. And if it does, it'll be in the nature of very isolated strikes.
- [104:15]
Tucker Carlson
So what is the answer?
- [104:18]
Seth Harp
The. You have to address the demand. The demand is what's causing all this? So long as.
- [104:22]
Tucker Carlson
Why can't anyone just. Why? Here's what I don't understand. Sobriety is good. Okay. Sobriety is the key to joy and productivity and like having a useful life, making it worth being here.
- [104:34]
Seth Harp
I agree.
- [104:35]
Tucker Carlson
The short period that we are. I believe that through much experience, I've never heard any leader in our country say that.
- [104:44]
Seth Harp
What I'm saying about Mexico?
- [104:45]
Tucker Carlson
No, about sobriety.
- [104:46]
Seth Harp
About sobriety.
- [104:47]
Tucker Carlson
The goal ought to be clear thinking, you know, whatever, within the bounds of human nature. But like virtuous life. I don't know, try to be clear eyed, hard working, decent and sober. Like, I don't, I don't. No one. Like, there's no kind of goal set by our leaders. Like, maybe you shouldn't be wasted all the time. Maybe you should get off your freaking SSRIs, which make you impotent, by the way, you know, or your benzodiazepines or your beer or your weed. Like, no one even says that.
- [105:17]
Seth Harp
I mean, I think they're all on drugs.
- [105:19]
Tucker Carlson
Everyone's on drugs.
- [105:20]
Seth Harp
I think the whole US Government's on drugs.
- [105:22]
Tucker Carlson
I totally agree.
- [105:23]
Seth Harp
I mean, look at the people at the highest level. I mean, don't want to cast just reckless aspersions, but here's something that's concrete. Rolling Stone, a magazine I've written for for many years, reported on drug use in Trump's first White House. And in fact, Trump's personal doctor, Ronnie the Candyman Jackson, they called him. He was an admiral, if I'm not mistaken, in the Navy. A physician who was demoted by the Navy for running an unlicensed pharmacy in the White House because he was giving Trump's people prescription drugs without a prescription and for free. And even if you're the, the President's personal physician, that's illegal. So there's evidence that all of those people were. And you see it in their behavior as well. And I'm not just picking on the Republicans here because look at, look at Kamala Harris, for example. I don't know her personally, and I can't say for sure, but did she seem like someone who was, you know, taking a lot of prescription pills?
- [106:21]
Tucker Carlson
Well, I worked for someone like that in television. It was the head of a network who, I mean, we used to joke, this person's on benzos, like, just dead eyed. I mean, you see that so much.
- [106:33]
Seth Harp
Talking nonsensically, like weird, you know, laughing, weird reactions. People who just are not quite there in a certain way. And it seemed kind of zonked out in a certain way.
- [106:42]
Tucker Carlson
Yes, that's the whole country that seems.
- [106:45]
Seth Harp
Like a lot of our top leaders.
- [106:47]
Tucker Carlson
So my question is, why does no one ever mention that and, and just say, like, here's what the goal, you know, we all fall short of the goal. It's not even judging. I'm not judging anybody. I'm not qualified to judge anybody. But, like, I do think it's important to articulate the goal. And why shouldn't someone say the goal is sobriety?
- [107:09]
Seth Harp
You know, again, I'm not here to be a drug warrior or paternalistic or to lecture people who struggle with substance abuse, but I certainly agree with you that, that we should, that that should be evaluated.
- [107:23]
Tucker Carlson
You should know Seth. That the real danger is Sharia law. Sharia law. And you can tell when you go to a place like Abu Dhabi or Riyadh, like, oh, man, I hope we don't ever wind up with a society like this with a rape rate of 0, where you leave your keys in your Lamborghini and don't ever worry about it being stolen. And, you know, if people want to get wasted, they do it at home. You know what I mean?
- [107:45]
Seth Harp
Yeah, I. I don't.
- [107:46]
Tucker Carlson
I hope we don't wind up with that.
- [107:49]
Seth Harp
Yeah, I think that. I mean, Sharia law is obviously just a punchline. I don't know that too many people actually believe in the reality of that. And I mean, sure, like I said, you know, I'm a lawyer. I actually studied legal philosophy. Sharia is not that different from other legal codes. A lot of our own legal code, the Anglo Saxon common law, Anglo American common law, derives ultimately from religious authorities.
- [108:17]
Tucker Carlson
Hope so.
- [108:18]
Seth Harp
There's a lot of universal. Exactly. There's a lot of universal values in.
- [108:22]
Tucker Carlson
Hammurabi's code is recognizable. I wouldn't want to live under it. It's kind of. Kind of punitive. But it's not like from another planet. The oldest legal code that we have, Hammurabi's code, it's like. It's not like you sort of know what he's talking about. Right.
- [108:36]
Seth Harp
Look, they. I agree. Yeah. And look, they put up 10 Commandments in front of the. I live in Austin, Texas, and they put up the Ten Commandments in front of the state Capitol. And that's controversial among, you know, religious libertarians. But I'm of the view that they. I'm happy to see them put the Ten Commandments up there if they would just follow them, you know, starting with thou shalt not kill.
- [108:58]
Tucker Carlson
I couldn't agree more. So let me just put a bow on this really super interesting conversation. Thank you. With the question, like, how were your interactions during the two and a half years you were writing this? Or more with the author, with, like, DoD, for example, with the Pentagon, like, you must have called over there to the PIOs and said, you know, I have the list of following questions. How did they respond to you?
- [109:26]
Seth Harp
In general? They just didn't respond. And I was in touch with them just yesterday because Politico is publishing an excerpt of the book. And so we had to go back to them again for comment. And the fact that it involves Delta Force, the fact that it involves a special mission unit, you know, they said that explicitly in the response that I got from USASAK yesterday, they said, because your question implicates a Special Mission Unit, you know, our policy is to not comment. So for the most part, they didn't give me anything. I was on my own.
- [109:57]
Tucker Carlson
But so here you have a documented case of one of their guys murdering someone in his house. Obviously, there was drug trafficking, there was indisputably drug use, narcotic use by federal employees. And they don't have to answer any of your questions because the missions are shrouded in secrecy.
- [110:16]
Seth Harp
Yes, that's right. In general. That's right. I will say, you know, I try not to be. I try to be fair when possible or to give credit where credit is due. There was an. A case where the Senate Armed Services Committee questioned the commander of socom, which is an umbrella formation above jsoc and above all these units, questioned him in a committee, a Senate committee, about my reporting for Rolling Stone, and asked him to address, you know, the cases of drug trafficking and unsolved murders. And General Brian Fenton, who at the time was the commander of socom, said that he was concerned about it and said that it was unacceptable, said that they were laser focused on eradicating it. But whether those sentiments that they expressed to members of Congress was actually backed up with real action, I don't know. I don't know.
- [111:11]
Tucker Carlson
Do you see the possibility of reform?
- [111:14]
Seth Harp
You know, I don't think that I'm very critical in this book of every single presidential administration since 2001. Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden. None of them I give a pass to any of them. But I do see Trump's influence here to be uniquely negative because of the way that he surrounds himself with some of the craziest people in the special operations community, elevates these people who are, who among their own colleagues are considered loose cannons. Not credible. You know, there's the case of Eddie Gallagher, where Trump made it such a big part of his brand to defend this disgrace to the Navy seals who was turned in by his own teammates for killing bunch of people for no reason. I mean, you're talking about guys who are not bleeding heart liberals by any stretch of the imagination. They're there with Chief Gallagher next to him, seeing what he's doing, and they're not okay with it. They turn him in. The command wants nothing to do with Gallagher. They also think that he's an embarrassment and a disgrace and a murderer. But Trump intervenes to prevent him from, from losing his trident and Trump touts him and he becomes this big influencer and so forth. So that type of incredible irresponsibility and malignancy on Trump's part, his. His uniquely malignant influence as commander in chief, I think augurs very poorly for the possibility of reform in, at least in the next three years.
- [112:41]
Tucker Carlson
Well, you want honest, competent, decent military because, you know, it's the purest expression of power that a government has the power to kill people. And you have to think that they're operating on a different and elevated moral plane. They can't just be like an outlaw state. You know what I mean?
- [113:02]
Seth Harp
Yes. That's what I was saying before about the founding of the U.S. army 250 years ago. It is a core institution in. For our country, for our nation. So to see the degree of decline, it's everywhere, you know, possible to observe, it's very concerning. And I really don't think people are aware of the degree to which the military is incapable of fulfilling its functions. I don't know that you can say that the US has the most powerful military in the world anymore. I think that a strong case could be made that China has a more competent military. Even though they have never been in combat, they have totally untested. So there's a big caveat there. But just looking on the surface, like, I don't think Chinese soldiers are trafficking drugs and killing each other. I don't think Chinese soldiers are dropping dead from fentanyl overdoses right and left. And also, China has a much bigger army than us, while our army is shrinking to a degree that's really shocking. I mean, they're really running out of people. This year. Recruiting was a little bit better, but you're still talking about, you know, a long, long deficit in recruiting. The Army's never been smaller than it is right now. They can't get qualified helicopter pilots, let's say, as we saw so you know, tragically demonstrated over the Potomac river in January. So I think that, you know, beyond just the drugs, there's a lot of reasons to be concerned, you know, about the. The health and viability of the US Military in general.
- [114:38]
Tucker Carlson
Boy, that's a sad story. Seth Harp, thank you very much for that.
- [114:41]
Seth Harp
Thanks for having me.
- [114:42]
Tucker Carlson
Appreciate it. We want to thank you for watching us on Spotify, a company that we use every day. We know the people who run it, good people. While you're here, do us a favor. Hit, follow, and tap the bell so you never miss an episode. We have real conversations, news things that actually matter. Telling the truth, always. You will not miss it. If you follow us on Spotify and hit the Bell. We appreciate it. Thanks for watching.