← Truth in the Barrel
Truth in the Barrel
Iran Mistakes, The Save Act, and Havana Syndrome | Unfiltered w Malcolm Nance
00:47:07
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- [00:01]
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- [00:34]
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- [01:40]
Amy
Welcome back.
- [01:40]
Malcolm
Malcolm.
- [01:41]
Amy
How are you?
- [01:43]
Malcolm
I mean, literally, this is like. It's like we're always on duty. My life is now an op center and I'm the collector, the analyst, the ops officer, and the communicator all at once. And this Iran war is dominating everything. I don't get cups of coffee. I have actual entire.
- [02:09]
Amy
You've got the whole thing. Yeah. So, you know, we're calling it a war and then we're not calling it a war. And now the President is calling it an excursion. Maybe he means incursion. I don't. I don't know. I think that's what he means. But he's going to keep saying excursion like it's some kind of vacation.
- [02:29]
Malcolm
Can I tell you where he got that?
- [02:31]
Amy
Where did he get that?
- [02:33]
Malcolm
Obviously you obviously never went ashore in a Persian golf tour since 19 when I was a kid. Back in 1985, they would sell these patches when you would in shop to the Persian Gulf. They had a patch that you would buy in like the ship store or on ns, you know, naval support activity. Bahrain, that had a camel with a little, you know, headdress being chased by a Missile and it says on it Persian Excursion. It has been known as the Persian excursion since the mid-80s operations in the Persian Gulf.
- [03:13]
Amy
We're in this war and it literally changes by the hour, certainly daily. What's going on? We now have the Strait of Hormuz shut down. We've eight American troops are killed, hundreds more are injured, not to mention the thousands of people in Iran who have been killed. We've got tankers burning in the Persian Gulf. Oil futures are spiking. They're talking about mining the strait. Trump was very excited yesterday. He came to Kentucky where I live and he boasted about how our United States military had destroyed 30 some mine ships. And that was, he was happy about that. I mean, where do you see the overall status of this war and what's going on right now?
- [04:03]
Malcolm
Well, you know there are two components to this war. Well three if you want to throw in Israel. But the two components are one, the United States armed forces is doing what we do best, right? Bombs, guns, fighter jet rides. And we go out and you tell us, you point us at something and you tell us to use the utmost precision to go out and destroy that. We'll do it like clockwork. We're excellent at this. Granted, we do have mistakes like hitting, accidentally hitting that girls school in down near Bandar Abbas. That's what happens when a, a young sailor who's tired is one keystroke off 300 meters. Right, because we can hit within one meter with a Tomahawk cruise missile. But we're doing our thing. And granted we are devastating Iran's armed forces, the regular armed forces and their ballistic missile forces and what remnants of the nuclear program that they had last year. But from the first day I ever went to the Persian Gulf in the mid-1980s, it has never been about their armed forces. Their strength has never been that. And now they are striking back with, in an asymmetric way, using our weaknesses as their strength, our biggest weaknesses. Right now they are carrying out an economic war not just against the United States, against the world. And the world is going to pressure the United States, which is why they're hitting. They've hit 12 tankers, four, five in the last 24 hours, including an American owned one that was just blown up in Basra, Iraq a few hours ago and damaged another one that was with it by an underwater boat. Right, an underwater drone. So Iran's asymmetric power of the Rev Guard doing things like blowing up oil refineries in Abu Dhabi, destroying pipelines in Bahrain. This is where the real Power is. They are losing trillions of dollars, not billions. Trillions in global production is going away because Donald Trump thought he could overthrow a regime from the air.
- [06:25]
Amy
And the regime think about, you know, the, the National War College, Naval War College, you know, the when. But when you go through the military and you get to a certain rank, whether it's, you know, major, lieutenant colonel, commander, that kind of thing, you go through these sort of strategic schools where you do war games. I did numerous war games, lots of different topics, whether it was North Korea or Taiwan, and of course, there's always several that deal with the Middle East. Every single war game that, that we dealt with Iran, this was front and center. And meaning exactly what you just said. We can do lots of damage from the perspective of a military perspective, but what these guys have and how they can shut the world economy was something that we always knew. And in the conclusion, every single time I did one of these war games is, let's not do this unless we absolutely have to. Unless we absolutely have to. And we did not absolutely have to do this. And that. I keep coming back to that right now, as you said, that the tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has basically ground to a halt. We are now looking at the most severe energy crisis maybe ever in the world. Obviously, Iran is retaliating by threatening the global economy. We have to understand that 20% of the global oil trade passes through this area. It has massive ramifications for the entire world. And it's not just oil where fertilizer, for example, has been in the front pages here because of farming and everything. I mean, we're now could potentially be in a food crisis because of this. So I just don't think we're anywhere near prepared for this type of global oil shortage and the effects that this is going to have.
- [08:31]
Malcolm
No, we're not prepared. And the last time both you and I were in combat, we had competent leadership. We may not have liked their politics, we may not have liked some of their social policies, but they were competent leaders. Even George W. Bush now, who looks like an absolute genius and the model of prudence compared to Donald Trump, he had his strategic policy wrong of taking, you know, invading Iraq and taking over Iraq, which was a big miscalculation because we gave Iraq essentially to Iran. But now taking Iran on personally, when they knew that they did, they weren't 11 days from a bomb. I mean, there have been. We are 12 days into this, 13 days, there have been 12, literally 12 different excuses every day, reasons for why we were attacking. And then there's their objectives of what would constitute victory. One was not regime change, but regime collapse. That they thought the people were going to rise up and then just wipe those guys out. When that happened in January and Trump didn't lift a finger and allowed 30,000 of them to be killed. No one's going back out on the street when 30,000 people are killed and no one comes to your aid. Then by letting Israel assassinate the leadership as the first stage of this attack. These people do not want to be supporting an Israeli overthrow of their government. It wanted to be natural. So Trump miscalculated on that point. Then they were going to eliminate their nuclear weapons materials forever. And then the destruction of the Iranian navy, that very fact that they included, that was. Was a showcase, because the Iranian navy isn't a combat force. It's a showcase.
- [10:24]
Amy
I didn't have much of a navy.
- [10:26]
Malcolm
No. Okay, can I point out there, Amy, they were in port, tied up at the pier. No crews, not even maintenance crews. The IRGC left all of their, like, super sophisticated catamarans at, anchored out in the harbor. And everyone else is drinking chai, smoking shisha, and waiting to see those ships get hit. Because it's the speedboats, 33,000 of them, that are in garages and tunnels that the Americans haven't hit. That is the real navy. That's where their real asymmetric strength comes in. There. We're seeing their unmanned drone boats. We had an unmanned drone torpedo attack last night, and we've had drones hitting tankers left and right. You can do this literally. Sitting in a coffee shop in Espadan, 500 miles away, you can operate a drone and try to attack an American warship and still get a second Turkish coffee.
- [11:31]
Amy
Well, the drones are really real. And the speedboats that you talked about, we should have had a little bit of practice there in Venezuela, right off the coast of Venezuela. But come on. Here's the other thing. Well, two things Donald Trump has said at first, a couple of days ago, hey, high oil prices is a very small price to pay for the USA and world safety and peace. Only fools would think differently. And then today, he's basically tweeted out that, hey, high oil prices. We're the best oil producer in the world. So this, this helps us. This makes us more money. I mean, I don't even know what to say. The level of competence is. Incompetence is through the roof.
- [12:17]
Malcolm
These people are really incompetent. Incompetent. Especially Pete Hegseth, as quote, unquote Secretary of Defense or slash war or whatever cool kid's name he wants to call today. I can tell you right now, I could have run this better, faster, cleaner, with more forethought. You know, you have Trump out making crazy statements like he wants, he talked about we will take over the Strait of Hormuz. Okay, really? Because I've gone through the straight couple of dozen times in warships. I've actually been there chasing Iranian vessels and small craft, gone through a minefield, hit a mine, been shot at by anti ship missiles. I had a horrible career with the Persian Gulf. Things were always flying. But here's one thing we, we tried to game out in the mid-1980s after the Iranians had placed a minefield where the USS Samuel B. Roberts struck a mine, almost sank that ship. We gamed out landing on Larrack Island, Hormuz Island, Kisham Island, Abu Musa, Greater Tomb, Lesser Tomb, Quiche island, and my favorite, Siri island because I almost got killed there in a missile battle off of Siri Island. And we land, we gamed out landing marines on there. You can land Marines on these islands and take them over. And the Strait of Hormuz nominally will be under your control except for all of those giant mountains that are behind and above these islands in which you can see straight across the soh. And you could put artillery down there, rockets down there, kids could hit things with a wiffle bat and it would go into the water out there and we just thought it would be a slaughter. You know what it would be Midway island without the US Fleet protecting it. Right. So for a historical analogy there, and here's the worst part, Amy, let's say we wanted to use Marines, the two Marine Amphibious Expeditionary Groups to muse. One is in the Philippines right now and the other is in Puerto Rico preparing to invade Venezuela or Cuba. Again, I don't know. There are no Marines, not in the theater in the Eastern hemisphere. So what kind of planning is this? There's not. They deep, they got rid of the minesweepers. They put in three part time minesweeping, literal coastal warfare ships that can't even protect themselves against drones. Oh my God, it's a disaster.
- [14:57]
Amy
Well, it's definitely ongoing and we're all watching it. I want to take us back a little bit because there was a story that came out about the negotiations prior to Trump deciding to go to war. Right. And there's negotiations that, that were happening in Oman and we now know the days before the United States attacked that Iran sent their nuclear negotiators to Oman. Oman's foreign minister was the mediator there and who was on the US Team. Now, you want to talk about competence, right? The US sent Donald Trump's son in law, Jared Kushner, and his golf buddy Steve Witkoff, and they apparently did not bring interpreters. They did not bring any seasoned actual diplomats, Malcolm, nor did they bring any nuclear scientists or any technical experts to this, to these talks. And appears now, at least the story is out there, that Witkoff and Kushner did not understand what the Iranians were offering in negotiations because they had no experts with them. So they balked at Iran's request or proposal that Iran would continue to use 20% enriched uranium at their research reactor, which is a civilian nuclear research development reactor facility actually built by us and provided by us, provided to Iran in 1967 by us. And Kushner and Witkoff thought that 20% HEU was weapons grade. They, you know, because they kept saying, well, you, there's no reason to, to go up that high. And, and they, they apparently thought that the research reactor could enrich uranium to weapons grade. It cannot, it cannot enrich, you know, at all. And, and I, I just point that out because it's, it again, it shows this massive lack of, of competence. I mean, most nuclear reactors produce electric energy. They, they only need 3 to 5% of, of highly enriched uranium. But we've known for years that, that you can go up to 20%. There is some research reactors that, that work on medicines and that sort of thing. And that's something that Iran has wanted to have. They're very proud of that, and they've wanted to have that for decades. And apparently we've got, you know, two guys that went and didn't even understand it.
- [17:47]
Malcolm
Yeah. Well, first off, let's talk about these two characters. Jared Kushner is as the son in law who, let me tell you something, in the, in, in the Muslim world, they understand that, they understand the use of your son because it's a mafia like tribal system out there. And they go, oh, well, we're gonna get a, we're gonna get the real word. We're gonna go. This will go straight to Donald out of this kid's mouth. They also recognize his father is a convicted felon who was pardoned by Donald Trump. So, you know, every year when I lived there, I lived in Abu Dhabi for 10 years. Every year for fun, we would go to the camel beauty contest festival that they would have out in the desert. And there's, there's one thing I Learned in my entire career in the Muslim world and the Middle East. You can go look at a camel, you can ride a camel, you can rent a camel, but you will never, ever try to buy one, because if this is their world, they know what they're doing when they buy camels from each other. And if you come in, you're going to pay $50,000 more. And when you wake up in the morning, the camel will have walked home. So they know how to negotiate and operate with. Between the Arabs and the Iranians, the Persians and the Gulf states, we walk in the words sucker on one guy and ATM on the other guy. And Witkoff is a real estate developer, and he has been sent everywhere to find real estate. Gaza to ethnically cleanse 2.2 million people. Ukraine to take over 20% of Ukraine, including 10% the Russians don't even have in their possession. And they all think that they're buying real estate like Mar a Lago. And Trump thinks that these are his two best guys. We have a incompetent, utterly incompetent negotiation. Also, I really think those negotiations were a delaying tactic to get Khomeini where he was going to be for that big meeting so that Israel could decapitate him.
- [19:58]
Amy
Yeah, and that may be true, too. I just. I mean, it's. It's. Again, it's just a bunch of lies coming out. If you were serious about actually negotiating with the Iranians, why would you send Kushner and Witkoff? I mean, it's terrible. Here's another thing that I've been thinking about a lot, and that is the proliferation of nuclear weapons and nuclear weapon use. Okay. This thing could spiral. I mean, it's already out of control. It could spiral out of control even more. We have sort of an unhinged president, sort of really. An unhinged president who will start a war without any authorization of Congress. And I just. I mean, he has his hands on the nuclear codes, and I feel like the odds of nuclear use right now are much higher. I worry that Donald Trump or Netanyahu may try to use a nuclear weapon for unconditional surrender that he keeps talking about.
- [21:08]
Malcolm
I. Look, you know, full disclosure. I worked a nuke, a short tour at a national nuclear command post when I was assigned to nsa, and they. They took military people over there. You literally go down into a mountain inside a mountain, a mile. And first thing they do with all new inductees is they bring you into the room with the big board. Right, like in Dr. Strangelove, and they show you, the world and ours had a navy commander and he goes, hey listen, before we start this thing, where are you from? And they ask everybody where they're from. And as they tell them where they're from, their name of their town appears on the map. And I was Philadelphia, of course. And they go, hey, listen, we're going to show you what this is about. And then what they do is they run a full scale simulation of a full scale Russian attack on the United States. And that, you know, showing the radar images of the, the, the, the ballistic missiles coming over the horizon. And then they show them, go to your town, right? And at that minute you become an ardent anti nuke. Right? Anyone who's around nuclear weapons hates nuclear weapons. Trump was the one who said in 2015, in the run up to the election, why don't we use nukes? We have so many of them. And we call this, by the way, the 23 minute solution. Because that's how long it takes to boost and arrive on the other side of the world, a ballistic missile with an atomic warhead in it. I'm afraid too, the problem is, for him, it would have to be something, as Mary Trump says, that would be narcissistic injury of the utmost to him. Like some, some disaster befalls us, he drops the Ranger regiment into Esfahan and decides that they're going to go and dig out these materials and they get wiped out. Right. Something that he cannot live with. Right. The shame of his winning, being destroyed on a global scale. That's when he might go to the 23 minute solution.
- [23:09]
Amy
Well, and I'm also worried about all of these countries around the world taking a lesson from this. I've been worried about this for a while. If you look at North Korea, we haven't, we haven't gone to war against North Korea. We have, you know, we've sanctioned them. But countries around the world, adversaries of ours are going to look and say, look, North Korea, they got nukes and they're safe. Libya, look what happened there. They didn't get nukes and he got toppled. Gaddafi, look what happened to Saddam, he got toppled. He's gone. Look what happened in Syria, he's gone. And now look at what, look at what happened in Iran and now, and this, this may lead to Iran itself and other countries racing for a nuclear weapon in secret to, you know, defend themselves, to have that deterrent.
- [24:02]
Malcolm
If, if I were Iran, I would find a hundred billion dollars and I'd go to North Korea and I said, we want to buy 2 3, right? You sell us, you name your price, we're going to give it to you. Right? And then you have a special transport just fly over and give the Iranians three, and they detonate one in the Baluch Desert to make their point. You can buy a nuke. But, you know, this is why Trump bought all the theater, high altitude interceptors, radars, from South Korea, because he thinks Kim Jong Un is his personal buddy and that he could. He wouldn't do anything like tax South Korea. Now, while we're disarming, you know, I mean, this is madness. There are no adults in the room, Amy. They're really.
- [24:53]
Amy
I know. And the other thing I keep thinking about right now is, you know, in the last. Since Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine.
- [25:03]
Malcolm
Mm.
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Amy
I've had this feeling that, like, okay, Putin, Russia, they're really trying to destroy the world order that the greatest generation built right for the world. This idea that you can't just invade another country, nab it, you know, assassinate its leader, take over, you know, your neighbor or any other country just because you feel like it. That hasn't really happened. I mean, in. In the way that we all permit it to happen. Okay. When Putin invaded Ukraine, I thought, okay, he's trying to destroy the world order. I. I look at the United States and Donald Trump right now, and I. I'm thinking, wow, we're. We're doing it too. You know, can America now just go and assassinate or capture any world leader whenever we want to without any international backing, without any act of Congress, without even the American people knowing or sanctioning? I mean, is this where we're at?
- [26:11]
Malcolm
We are there. We're there. We're right up there with Russia. Now, if things get any worse, if we, like the energy minister of Qatar said four days ago, if this goes on much longer, the global economy will break. Not our economy. The global economy will break. It is an artery, right, that's going into the heart of global production, and it is literally been cut and is spraying blood all on the interior of the body. Right. It requires immediate aggressive surgery. That's a medical analogy that is really starting to ring true, because soon enough, that heart will start just stop pumping and fibrillate out of control. And Donald Trump is the cause of it. He's a man. He's like. He's not a surgeon. He's just the guy who just came up and stabbed it in the heart and said, this will be fun to watch with whatever objectives are in his head. And I'll be honest with you, I really think this is mental illness being played out and masquerading as foreign policy. There's no adults here. All other presidents, no matter what you think about them, were decent, thoughtful, educated men with good, intelligent advisers who understood the secondary tertiary quadray effects of everything that they did. Except for George W. Bush for Iraq.
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Amy
Right.
- [27:35]
Malcolm
But he still thought about the secondaries. It was everything after that, the cascade of damaging things. Trump doesn't give a flip what he damages, he wants. You know what? I would not even be surprised if one of the arguments that he had here was that he was going to, at the end of this war, this massive victory, that he would say, now I'm going to build the Ark of Trump down there in front of Arlington Cemetery. Now I have my, my Battle of Austerlitz or, or, you know, Borodino, whatever French victory they built the Arctic triumph for. And this is Trump. This is how he thinks.
- [28:13]
Amy
That's true. But it's also Congress, and it's Congress's last fine. Well, I mean, they have allowed, they have allowed this to happen. And let's not forget we, the cost of war, obviously, the eight Americans who are killed, the hundreds who are wounded, and maybe even more, we don't know because, you know, the, the, the Pentagon doesn't want to say the numbers, but we spent $5 billion in the first two days of this war. And you know, the, the mega Trump Republicans, they went to court, they went to the Supreme Court to block SNAP funding last year, if you remember that, because they said we couldn't afford it. We couldn't afford, you know, school lunches and $6 a day for, for needy kids in America. What, we can spend a billion dollar or $2 billion a day on this war? I mean, this is insane.
- [29:09]
Malcolm
And the Iranians are charging a, a stupidity tax, right? Which is on, not just on our gas pumps. Everything that is ever made out of plastic that is now not oil. Going to China is going to get more expensive. South Korea just, they announced two days ago that they only have nine to 10 days of natural gas left over and that every microchip being produced right now in South Korea, which are all the advanced AI chips and all of the advanced telephone chips outside of Apple's chips, they will be destroyed. They're like vines. And if you cut the water flow off, they don't, these chips don't get to a manufacturing process to where they can be mature and they will have to be destroyed. They can't just stop. And they said it would take months to restart the production line, we are slitting our own throat. What do they say? 50% of the chemicals that help fertilizers come from the Arabian Gulf, from refineries and other facilities in the Arabian Gulf. And now US Farmers who slit their own throats by voting for Trump, knowing that he would get rid of the soybean industry, knowing that now he's giving Argentina all of our beef sales, knowing he would anger China so much they would stop buying from us. Now they can't, they're going to have a dust bowl. They can't even lay down fertilizer that's cost effective. And maybe give up every American family farm to a major corporation. It's Pottersville from the movie It's a Wonderful Life. Yeah, it's all hookers and bars and gambling joints now. It's horrible what's happened to them.
- [30:55]
Amy
And you're right, the agriculture thing is just we're shooting ourselves in, in the foot. We're hurting the American farmer left and right under Donald Trump. And I, I, I, I. It's just in insane. Something you brought up earlier in our discussion was the, the bombing or the, I don't, certainly not intentional targeting of this girls school in Iran on the first couple of days of the war. Apparently the school was struck by three missiles in the early hours of February 28th. 180 people dead. Lots of them were girls between the ages of 7 and 12. And this is absolutely a tragedy. We know it. And certainly in war, really, really, really bad things can happen. What struck me here was the denial from the highest, from, you know, Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump, because the American military, you know, knows, did an investigation. We now know it was, you know, tomahawk that did this. And the president first came out and said, well, he hasn't, yeah, it was, it was in Iran. Hit their own people.
- [32:20]
Malcolm
Right.
- [32:20]
Amy
He first blamed Iran and then he blamed another country, said, well, it's a Tomahawk. But lots of people, lots of countries have Tomahawks, so it's, it's not us. And then, and then, and now he's saying he doesn't know anything about it. The Secretary of War has basically not wanted to talk about it at all. And it just, to me, again, it's another example of, of how low this guy, this commander in chief and the Secretary of Defense, they're just look in America and if our military makes a mistake, we fess up to it.
- [32:57]
Malcolm
Right, right.
- [32:58]
Amy
We, we tell the truth, we do an investigation and these guys lying to the American public and, and Donald Trump lying to the world. I mean, it's just terrible.
- [33:12]
Malcolm
It absolutely is. I'm going to tell you something that's very personal for me. Last night by sheer accident, I watched a Danish film called the Bombardment. And what it was, it was from World War II, is a real incident that occurred. The Special Operations Executive wanted the British to bomb a prison in downtown Copenhagen called the Shell Building. It was old Shell Oil Co. But it's Gestapo headquarters. In the run up to Liberation, the British sent a flight of Mosquito bombers there. One of them got hit, crashed near a girls school called the French School. And the story follows these kids who were at that school. And because of the fire of the bombing, two other aircraft bombed the French school and killed 98 children, 10 nuns, because it was run by Catholics, dozens of civilians. And it was a horrific tragedy and I'm sorry, that's your homework. It is a heart rending film and it was an accident in the middle of a war. They hit the Gestapo headquarters but the flight leader was like, oh my God, we're bombing the wrong building. And that happens and we apologize from the bottom of our hearts when we do that. Every other war we've done that. When we hit the bunker in Baghdad, killed four hundred and fifty people, we fessed up. We, the Iranians have the engine from that T lamb from that Tomahawk missile. We know when it was manufactured, what ship it was put on, which vertical launch silo it was in, who the strike controller was that uploaded the feed of its data into its guidance system. You know the terrain, Turcom Terrain matching guidance system. We know which intelligence image it came off of that created the, the 10 digit grid that went into it. Was it a keystroke mistake? If you're off from a zero to a one, that's 100 meters, right. That missile will hit within three feet of where we aim it at without any question. So we hit, we program that site into that place. Did some intelligence geospatial analysts misidentify that as part of the compound? And they were doing one of these walking bomb routines where you collapse building after building. The point is, did anybody do a before scrub or an after scrub of that target and see kids lined up outside of that school at school time? We have on Fort Bragg five schools, two high schools, two middle schools and a massive kindergarten. Right. We would be devastated if one of our bases killed our service members, children. And here we are being blithe about it. It's disgraceful.
- [36:20]
Amy
It is disgraceful. It is absolutely disgraceful. And you and I both know, I mean, there's lots of ways something like this could happen. We don't know. But you got to take responsibility for it and be honest about it. It's terrible. And it's another reflection of just how heinous this war really is. I mean, just to start it, it was stupid, it's unnecessary, and I'm very worried about where we're going. So I want to move now to what's going on domestically here, though.
- [36:55]
Malcolm
Oh, yay.
- [36:56]
Amy
We spent a lot of time on Iran, but the president has said that he won't sign any new bills until the SAVE act passes. Okay. And I wanted to get your take on this. Honestly, no new bills at this point. I mean, what. What are the Republicans doing anyway? It really doesn't. Doesn't matter that there's total gridlock anyway. So I don't know. What's your take on the SAVE Act?
- [37:27]
Malcolm
Yeah. For your listening audience who are not seeing the video, I like sitting here with double thumbs up like Mike Myers. Right. Okay. Don't sign nothing, because everything they've been signing has been a disaster.
- [37:43]
Amy
Yeah.
- [37:43]
Malcolm
I have no problem not funding tsa, forcing them to have to go back into their coffers and take the cash from, you know, from their sex jets and have it reprogrammed from last fiscal year into paying TSA agents and everybody else so that you don't have a mass flight of personnel or to defund ice, which I believe is an organization that should not be defunded. I don't believe in defunding. That organization needs to be disbanded with malice, and people should have their law enforcement status stripped from them so that they can be civilly sued and have no protections. That organization needs to go away. If they aren't wearing blue blazer jackets that say, what was the old name there? Immigration and Naturalization Service with no firearms, then that organization shouldn't exist. It's an American Gestapo. So if Trump wants to play hardball on this, taking away 40% of American women's right to vote, which is what this is really about, it's really about taking, you know, using this cute little trick of forcing women to pay a poll tax of $169 to get a passport, and then his challenge is. Oh, challenge it in the court and we'll see. The Supreme Court will argue it next January and strike it down after the election.
- [39:08]
Amy
Right.
- [39:08]
Malcolm
It's just a disgusting, disgraceful display of imperial, you know, you know, George III or Mad Donald the First or the Mad Donald the last. Kingly power that he's trying to project. I have no problem. He doesn't have a congress anyway. He has a politburo. He has a so a Russian style duma because all he has is yes men sycophants that rubber stamp whatever he says. And now I understand that Fetterman and Thom Tillis are opposed and this thing isn't going to pass. But he's, he's so furious that he's willing to rip the system apart. You know, he's going to start. He's really waiting for Republicans to be threatened with their lives by his base. And there's a lot of that, according to Lisa Murkowski, that they're really afraid that they'll get walk out into a mall and some MAGA guy will use his second amendment right to resolve the issue of a recalcitrant senator by putting in a new temporary senator.
- [40:16]
Amy
Well, he came here to northern Kentucky just to campaign against the one republican that's been able to stand up to him and Thomas Massie. I mean, that was the whole reason he came here, you know. Congressman, Just yesterday. Yeah. I mean it's, it's. I don't know. I'm, I'm appalled every single time I think about what it is they're trying to do. The SAVE act is in my belief, terrible policy. We know why he's trying to do it. I don't think it's going to go through because I just feel like, you know, you can't massively change the election system in the middle of an election. I mean, we are in an election year already. Plus, it's just wrong. You know, our constitution says that elections are run at the, at the local, at the state level, at the local level. Not, you know, not at the federal level. But here we are. One thing I wanted to ask you about, and this also is kind of in the back of the newspapers, is our embassies around the world appear to be under attack because of what's happening in Iran. Right. We had this bomb go off in Norway outside of our embassy there. We have multiple shots outside the consulate in Toronto. Our U. S. Embassy in Saudi Arabia was attacked. The United States is trying to evacuate citizens around the Middle east who want to be evacuated. Of course, they didn't do anything prior to the attack to plan for this. I'm very worried that it's not safe for Americans to travel abroad if our embassies and consulates are being attacked. I mean, I just. What is your thought on this?
- [42:12]
Malcolm
Well, I, I travel a lot Overseas. And I've always been of the philosophy that you should never let Al Qaeda or, or Iran or terrorism.
- [42:21]
Amy
Good point.
- [42:22]
Malcolm
Be your travel agent. Because first off, Paris, okay, If you're really feeling reticent about traveling, go to Paris. There will most of these attacks or 99.999% of the things that are happening are happening at night. And it is not about you. It is about the symbol of the building. Very few Americans. I've been to Paris a dozen dozens of times, not a dozen dozens of times. And the only time I ever had to go into the embassy down there on the Champs sitting next to Hotel Carillon is when I had a friend of mine who was part of the consular section and we went to lunch. That was it. Never in my life did I need to actually use an embassy when I lived in Abu Dhabi. That crazy spaceship looking embassy that they built which is designed to deflect rocket propelled grenades. That's why it's crazy angles.
- [43:21]
Amy
Yeah.
- [43:22]
Malcolm
I had to go there for a new visa when my passport, new passport when that expired. But you're in and you're out. So don't let terrorism designate where you're going. Are you going to Iran? Well, you probably wouldn't be wanting to go there right now anyway unless you were going to get your relatives out from the border or something like that. The, you know, even in the Gulf States, the, the embassies that they've hit, which is Iraq, Riyadh, the consulate office in Dubai. They didn't try to hit the Abu Dhabi embassy. Bahrain, they took a shot at it. Two of those, they were hitting the CIA station offices like the one in Riyadh. They hit the, they direct hit the CIA's annex and wiped it out. According to reporting from CIA ex former CIA officers. So it's not about you. It's not about America. Don't go around wearing American flags and being the obnoxious American. Be the savvy sophisticated traveler who understands that a good French 75 can alleviate virtually all of your, your travel concerns.
- [44:27]
Amy
Well that's, that makes sense. That's good recommendation. Tell, tell everybody. Do you know about this Havana syndrome? Can you explain what. Yeah, because I, you know, I've, I've sort of listened, but actually it's been going on for years. You know the talk of it. 60 Minutes reported about this classified U.S. intelligence mission that it's involving directed energy attacks. And apparently it's really real. Right, and so what's this all about?
- [44:56]
Malcolm
Yeah, directed energy weapons are real. The what it was is US diplomats, in particular, senior officers in the State Department and CIA officers assigned to stations overseas. An enormous number of CIA which tells you that it's a targeted, whatever. We're getting this nauseous, sick feeling and then feeling like tingling or burning on their skin. And one of the places that it was first found was at a consulate office in Havana, right? And they called this the Havana Syndrome. And it gave long term physical and neurological problems. Mark Polymeropoulos, former CIA station chief in, I believe he was in Baghdad. He felt that he was victim of it. He became a big advocate when he went over to msnbc, replaced me as the terrorism and intelligence analyst, and he was a big advocate for it. But even worse, they said that during the first Trump administration, the CIA actually started spying on American citizen. Former CIA officers who were complainers and whistleblowers. This just came out this week and now turns out there's Department of Defense studies. We use systems like lrad, right? Long range acoustical devices. We use microwaves to make people's skin burn and tingle, right? And they believe that the Russians, the Russians, not the Soviets, were using this system to target and essentially soft assassinate CIA officers and State Department officers around the world. And people swore it didn't exist, even though the technology existed. And now they're finally saying, oh yeah, this technology exists. We're actually using this on the raid to attack Maduro. We used it on the bodyguards at, at his compound, at his, his Residencia.
- [47:05]
Amy
So, so it's, it's like a, it's a weapon that, you know, causes intense pain, but maybe it doesn't kill you, but it does have massive effects on, you know, long term on your brain, heart tissue.
- [47:20]
Malcolm
Same, you know, blinding, you know, headaches and all of these things. It's literally frying some of the systems inside you. Question was, how was it, how was it done? Where was it at? I mean, it would be like using a radiation weapon, right, where you had a massive X ray machine and we're pointing it at a person through a wall, right? You would wake up, your hair would fall out and they'd say, oh, radiation poisoning, how would that do? And you could look through the walls and detect radiation in the walls. Not with this. This is like microwave, like putting you in a very soft microwave. And when you're in deep sleep, turning it up to 10 and they're cooking you to a certain extent, the real problem was the denial that all of this was happening. And you people are crazy. Well, apparently they're not crazy.
- [48:08]
Amy
They're not crazy. They're not crazy. Well, hey, this has been a great show, Malcolm. I really appreciate you coming on. We have so much to talk about, and I'm gonna have you back very, very soon, okay? Iran and everything that's going on in the US Congress, it's just tremendous.
- [48:30]
Malcolm
We need a vacation. Let's go to Paris.
- [48:40]
Amy
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