2/18/26: Hillary Lies About Epstein, Israeli Gov Installed Surveillance For Epstein, Trump Nonsense On Iran, Trump Bombs More Boats

26:32And it turns out that basically anybody who had to, anybody who had to go, wanted to go into the apartment, had to have a background check and had to be cleared by the Israeli government.

26:47And there was the handler for the apartment even turned over according to the emails. So like they're going back and forth with, you know, they say, hey, we're going to have some new folks coming in and a different person, different Israeli government official responds to, I'm taking over for Rafi. I'm now handling this apartment security. That's the gist of what we can glean just from these documents. Of course, 2016, 2017, this is long after his conviction. And the first thing it does is blow away the claims by Ehud Barak that they barely ever met. Okay. But I think we have pretty convincingly blown away that one already.

27:30Oh, my gosh, yeah. But it also means that the Israeli government, you know, knew how close Epstein and Barack was. This is also the same apartment where Yoni Koran, who was another Israeli spy and a protege of Barack, he stayed at that apartment as well. And where is this apartment? What is this apartment? So East 66th. This is the... This is not the townhouse. This is the... it's maybe a 20 minute walk from um from this apartment to the kind of central park famous townhouse this is it's an apartment where he would have people stay who were coming into town i was gonna say i've seen this in the emails and sometimes it's women yes a lot of times it's women yeah okay yeah so they would have to clear yeah he would have to clear those women um if it was during these stretches of time he often appears to be giving it as a favor with the It's a consulate.

28:28It is a favor. And he did his Paris apartment this way, too. Hey, I'm going to be in Paris. Can I stay at your place? Or I'm going to be in New York. Can I stay at your place? And sometimes you see him talking to girls where he says, at least do me the courtesy while you're staying in my apartment to keep me apprised. Right, because she didn't get back to him fast enough. She was out of town. So I assume that's the 66th. Yes. Yes. Well, so that's very interesting. Mark's company owned like most of the building, it seems like. Okay. The development company. And yeah, so you can read the story from some of the details on it.

29:09But yeah, so that's a pretty tight link right there. This is one of the most... The Israeli government was doing security for Epstein's apartment. This is one of the most significant stories to come out of the entire DOJ archive, I think, Ryan. This one from you and Ma is huge. And people will say, well, yeah, it's because Barack was a former prime minister and they all get security. It's like, okay, but follow that train of thought a little further. Right. So clearly what this shows, to paraphrase Bas Mucif, is that he was a KGB agent. Clearly he was working on behalf of the Russians. Yes, yes, of course.

29:55But I mean, this is the type of thing that's like, it's obvious. You know if Ehud Barak is staying. It's one of those things where it's like you can connect the dots, A and B, and say it's happening. But here what you guys did was prove, right? Like it's logical. It's a logical follow-on. But you guys found the actual proof that it was happening. Everyone would know if Ehud Barak is staying at a place, it's likely that this is happening. But it's not just likely. You know, certainly. There you go. It really happened. I know. Maz and I had another interesting story on Tuesday that if people miss, I think it's, and if you care about this kind of stuff, it's really interesting.

30:36It's another window into what Epstein was really doing with Barack and with the connections that he was building between Dubai Ports World, which is Sultan Suleyem, who quit recently under pressure. although everybody thinks he's put out in some type of garden leave. He's still probably in the mix. But, you know. I'm sure. Facing real pressure. By the way, sorry, just before you go there, I found an email from him last night. Epstein was asking him about another businessman. He said, well, this man is not like me. He's faithful to his life. That's what the Sultan said to Epstein. Sultan. Sultan, what are you doing, man?

31:16Yeah, anyway. Yeah, Sultan. Oh, boy. So we put up, this is A4. The headline, Epstein flipped Israel's Gaza-tested biometric scanners into Nigeria ports deal for UAE. The kind of headlines that we've been putting on drop-size stories lately are kind of mind-boggling. You read the story and there is zero sensationalism. It's just a straightforward, like, literally what he did here. So Boko Haram is going on its rampage in, what, 2013?

31:57And so Barak, and actually through his wife, he often used his wife to kind of make the first entree to other officials. They reach out, condolences to, you know, for this Boko Haram massacre. We are there for you. And what the way that they are there for you then becomes evident over the following years. They offer, why don't we come in and for this Christian private school, build a power plant. Like, you know, move, move, you know, move this entire community forward. Wonderful. That's that's terrific. You're going to build a power plant, you know, for this to power this school. which will then benefit the entire community, that's tremendous.

32:49That's what you want the, like, the, like, patrician elites, the good Davos crowd to be doing, lifting people up from poverty. Somehow along the way, instead of building a power plant, they accidentally installed facial recognition technology. Oh, no. What a mistake. Oh, did we say power plant? Yeah. We're going to, so we have this product that we have tested in Gaza that they used at the Rafa border crossing. Which Ehud Barak was involved with? So Ehud Barak, yes, bringing this in because Epstein and Barak were deeply entrenched in the Israeli cyber security and cyber weapons industry. So they tested this facial recognition technology early in Gaza.

33:36And they say, look, why don't you just install this facial recognition technology here in this school? And at the time, there's this big scandal going on in Nigeria because the government had been exposed for using a lot of Israeli surveillance equipment. And you can witness Epstein and Barack kind of massaging and managing the PR and the fallout. And despite the public outcry in Nigeria around this, managing to muscle it through and then ultimately building enough connections that Epstein is then able to bring Sultan and BP world into the mix. Nigeria, one of the wealthiest countries in the world, its people do not share in that wealth.

34:25It's people like Epstein and Sultan Zulian who extract the wealth, funnel a lot of it to the UAE where it's laundered through their makeshift mafia-like banking system. And then it emerges in, you know, as like penthouses in Miami and New York and Paris where it continues to be laundered. It then drives up property, you know, drives up the price of housing for people all over the world because it has to find somewhere to park that is quasi legitimate. So if you're asking how that affects you, it makes it so you can't afford a house. So yeah, so they, that's kind of what they're doing. It's crazy.

35:19Yeah. It's crazy. Yeah. And now Trump is like bombing Nigeria. Like, and also like bombing like even the wrong parts of Nigeria. Not that any parts of Nigeria should be bombed, but he was like claiming he's like bombing the remnants of Boko Haram or the like whatever they've evolved into. instead he's bombing completely different parts? Well, let me ask if we combine both of these stories, the extent to which we can say Ehud Barak. I should have, you can roll through A5 while Emily's talking. This is a slideshow of some of the pieces, so if you want to read that. Oh, yeah. Go ahead. Well, yeah, so if we combine these two stories, to what extent can we say that Ehud Barak and Jeffrey Epstein were state actors or extra state actors?

36:08What do we know about how this was in some ways connected with official Israeli government policy? It's not the wrong question. It kind of misunderstands the distinction between state and non-state actors in this Davos set. And so like Epstein is not like Epstein to do what Epstein was doing. He would never have had to have been on the payroll of any spy service. Yeah. No. Anywhere. Yes. And for Barack to do what he's doing doesn't need an official portfolio. Sometimes what he was doing, he was still minister of defense. But that's what I mean. Yeah. So sometimes he was actually minister of defense while he's doing these deals with Epstein.

36:59for the most part after March 2013 is when Barack leaves office. He then tries to make a comeback in 2018 and then into 19 and Bannon was going to run his campaign that it didn't, it fizzled I think they won like no seats or something, one seat or something because he formed a new political party. He was a Labour Party guy but their constantly working with the Israeli cyber security industry, which is fully aligned with Israeli state foreign policy and is completely populated by Unit 8200 and other veterans of, there's basically no membrane between these companies, Paragon being a major one that Barack is involved with.

38:00It's like Lockheed. It's like saying. Yeah. Yeah.

38:06There's probably more of a membrane in some ways between our military industrial complex. But that's the idea. It is a complex. The phrase military industrial complex, it's the same in Israel, but probably even tighter because of the way that... Yeah, it's a small country. It's a small country. Everybody's moving in and out of these positions. And you see Epstein and Barack frequently in contact with current intelligence officials. Like, in fact, like when they go to Nigeria, they get, Barack gets like, you know, has them like do up some intel for him on what Jonathan Goodluck. Give me a backgrounder on him.

38:57And that's not just Wikipedia. The backgrounders you're going to get from these intel guys are going to be much more interesting. They have a lot more information. Well, and I'm assuming that Ehud Barak, as former intelligence minister and prime minister, has access to whatever he wants for the most part. And then Jonathan Goodluck, just to bring it full circle for Breaking Points viewers, he was kind of the head of the Commonwealth Election Advisory Commission that went to oversee Pakistan's February 2024 election, which they found to be completely rigged and then buried their report until we got a copy of it and published it.

39:42Crazy. This is such good reporting. Thanks, Ryan, for breaking it down for us. Interesting stuff. That's for sure. All right. War with Iran. Today or tomorrow? Yeah.

39:58What do you do when the headlines don't explain what's happening inside of you? I'm Ben Higgins, and if you can hear me, it's where culture meets the soul, a place for real conversation. Each episode, I sit down with people from all walks of life, celebrities, thinkers, and everyday folks, and we go deeper than the polished story. We talk about what drives us, what shapes us, and what gives us hope. We get honest about the big stuff. Identity when you don't recognize yourself anymore. Loss that changes you. Purpose when success isn't enough. Peace when your mind won't slow down. Faith when it's complicated.

40:36Some guests have answers. Most are still figuring it out. If you've ever felt like there has to be more to the story, this show is for you. Listen to If You Can Hear Me on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

40:55What if mind control is real? If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have? Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car? When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings. Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you? I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused. Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. NLP, aka Neuro Linguistic Programming, is a blend of hypnosis, linguistics, and psychology. Fans say it's like finally getting a user manual for your brain.

41:31It's about engineering consciousness. Mind Games is the story of NLP. It's crazy cast of disciples and the fake doctor who invented it at a New Age commune and sold it to guys in suits. He stood trial for murder and got acquitted. The biggest mind game of all? NLP might actually work. This is wild. Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the A-Building. I'm Hans Charles. I'm Menelik Lumumba. It's 1969. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. had both been assassinated, and Black America was at a breaking point. Writing and protests broke out on an unprecedented scale.

42:13In Atlanta, Georgia, at Martin's alma mater, Morehouse College, the students had their own protest. It featured two prominent figures in Black history, Martin Luther King Sr. and a young student, Samuel L. Jackson. To be in what we really thought was a revolution. I mean, people were dying. 1968, the murder of Dr. King, which traumatized everyone. The FBI had a role in the murder of a Black Panther leader in Chicago. This story is about protest. It echoes in today's world far more than it should. And it will blow your mind. Listen to The A Building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

43:00Well, some news yesterday when it comes to Iran negotiations. Let's put this first element up on the screen. New York Post headline, Iran-US agree on, quote, guiding principles of nuclear deal, as Vance says, dismantling atomic program among red lines. Ryan, I thought we all kind of understood it was not a good idea to talk about red lines explicitly when you're making foreign policy at this point. It could come back to bite you, but that is where the admin landed yesterday. Well, so Netanyahu keeps trying to add new red lines. And, you know, it makes the most cynical observers of Netanyahu's behavior appear just prescient over and over and over again.

43:40So when throughout the years, actually, as Netanyahu was fighting against the nuclear deal, First, Obama reached a nuclear deal with Iran back in 2015, which if we had left it in place, we could be moving towards just normalization. Like if that's what we care about is Iran not having nuclear weapons and allowing inspectors in to make sure that that doesn't happen. People back then said this isn't even the thing that Netanyahu cares about. What he cares about is smashing Iran. Like he wants it as weak as possible and preferably if he can, broken up into little failing statelets a la like Libya or Syria.

44:28So you've got the Balok region. You'd have like insurgents going back and forth between Pakistan and Iran who are part of the like Balokistan liberation side. You have the Kurds up in the north of Iran who would then, you know, they'd break that off. You got like just be and then and then you can go in and kind of take the oil fields in the south and just kind of cordon that off. So that's like the long term goal and the total immiseration of tens of millions of of Iranians. And so the idea that, OK, once we do the nuclear thing, the next thing you say, well, we want the ballistic missiles. You can't have ballistic missiles.

45:06You can't have any missiles that go more than that can reach Israel. And then if we could get that, then we're going to move and say, oh, you can't support anybody else outside of Iran. You can't support the Iraqi militias. You can't support Hezbollah. You can't support MAS. You can't support PIG. Like, whatever. You can't do any of that. And Iran has been very clear we're not agreeing to these things. You want to talk nuclear program? Let's talk nuclear program. So last time they were announcing that they were making all kinds of progress on the deal. And then, boom, they kill the negotiators and kill the scientists and then launch the 12-day war.

45:45And so now they're back and they're saying, like, we've got the contours of a deal. But so Iran is saying that, which means that the U.S. has agreed to keep it to nuclear talks. But Trump, if you know, he told Larry Kudlow, this is his quote. He says, it's got to be a good deal. No nuclear weapons, no missiles, no this, no that. All the different things that you want. Now, if you're Iran, like, does that sound like somebody who's engaged in, like, genuine negotiations? Like, are you taking the negotiations seriously? It's got to be a good deal. No nuclear weapons, no missiles, no this, no that.

46:27All the different things that you want. Who's the you to Larry Kudlow? That Larry Kudlow wants. Yeah. that all the things you want, know this, know that. Like Trump is not even trying to put on an act that these talks are serious. Like he has moved anything that can float or fly and launch a missile has been moved within striking range of Iran. Like the buildup outside there, I think we'll have a piece at Dropside on this as well, later today by Maz and I think by Jeremy too, the buildup makes the previous Armada, you know, look like a pinprick. And so I feel like Trump has put himself in a position where he doesn't have the strength to like back down from it.

47:26He's put so many missiles over there. Right. And so and he's made such like such intense threats saying, you know, if you start harming protesters and then he backs down off of that one, then sends another aircraft carrier. He's talked very tough. So to your point, as he talked himself into a corner. And yeah. And what's interesting is that last time, I'm curious how he gets out of this or how Trump thinks he gets out of this. So the last time he did this, he stopped the war at 12 days. And people were glad because they were like, this could go on for a very, very long time. And the way he stopped it was by saying, we smashed the nuclear program to smithereens.

48:15Set them back many years. Turns out leaked audio from Netanyahu just days earlier had said they were years away already. So he was correct. They're still years away. They were years away, still years away. But they blew up a lot of things. And he watched it on his video game console. Yeah. And he's out there. He's handsome fighters. They did an incredible job. We did Top Gun 3. And we're so proud of ourselves and we're ending the war. He put the jet in the White House. It's next to the Resolute desk. Like it has a model of it. Yeah, he loves it. And so that's how he gets out of it. but I guess he could say he blew up every ballistic missile okay they don't have ballistic missiles anymore and then you could say well and the proxies are so weak that like Netanyahu needs to stop crying about them um so maybe that's the way out but yeah how does Trump so Trump's gonna start let's say he starts the war very much looks like he's going to Iran has said we're in a nothing left to lose situation.

49:20And so they fire as much as they possibly can. Now, the U.S. has such fire power that they may be able to just take out everything Iran has and be able to stop it before it lands. That's possible. Either way, they have said that they're going to launch strikes at American bases where there are American troops with the intent to kill hundreds of American troops to set up a deterrent. We also reported that there are hundreds of Afghan refugees still stuck at this base in Qatar because they got stuck in this diplomatic limbo. We moved them out of Afghanistan, but we won't let them in the U.S. So they're just like sitting ducks.

50:04That would be the worst outcome, that Iran just killed hundreds of Afghan refugees stuck at an American base. Okay, so Iran launches all of its missiles. then, you know, Trump fires and blows up the nuclear plants again, hits the missiles. Like, how does he end? Right. Especially if there are American troops killed. Right. Like, how does Trump, how do you see Trump ending this one? I have no idea. I mean, I think on the one hand, the quote that you read suggests a flippancy. I think you're right about that. But on the other hand, I wonder if it's because he feels like he dispatched Jared Kushner and Steve Whitcoff and actually can find some Gaza-style historic agreement.

50:51Maybe it's only as good as the paper that it's written on, but he can say he did it. And that actually brings us to what you all were reporting at DropSite. So, yeah, Whitcoff and Kushner were negotiating this in Geneva yesterday, and that's where Vice President Vance came out and said, negotiations went well in some respects, is what he told Fox News. But on the other, you know, President Trump has been clear he has all these red lines. Let's just jump to B3 here. This is a dropside exclusive that says Hamas says it will not unilaterally disarm as Trump and Netanyahu threaten a return to full scale war.

51:28Ryan, that's a report from Jeremy yesterday. And so it's the what's the best way to put this? that happening in parallel to the Iran talks is quite interesting because I actually, I do think Trump to some degree thinks that he's sending Wyckoff and Kushner around with this mission of putting together grand goals that can be marketed as major wins for peace, world peace, and they're business friendly and they're not like what anybody has ever done before. And so he just kind of, I don't know, is the right way to say it, trusts the process. Like he trusts the process that Witkopf and Kushner have.

52:12Or doesn't care about it because he knows he's going to do war. Well, if it falls apart, then he's comfortable doing war. It's almost like it's a horse apiece. I don't know. It's really hard to know what he thinks about all of this because if you could maybe even walk us through a little bit of what Jeremy is hearing and Jobseye is hearing from the Hamas side related to Gaza. how serious was any of that? I mean, we're learning in real time how serious the different points of the peace plan were. So that gives us, I think, some clues as to the authority that Kushner and Wyckoff have in negotiations with Iran too.

52:48Right. And this goes back to reality versus reality distortion. So the reality of the ceasefire was that Hamas very explicitly never agreed to disarm as part of the ceasefire. They agreed to cease fire. That was it. And they were very explicit. If you want to talk about disarmament, Hamas is willing to participate in those talks in the context of a national conversation among all Palestinian factions toward a process of self-determination in government, which means as long as there is a Palestinian police force that is constituted, then Hamas is open to disarming. But we're not going to, Hamas is saying, we're not going to just disarm and then allow the Israelis to come in and massacre us.

53:50They never agreed to that. And so there's everything they've agreed to has through phase one is now supposed to be leading into phase two, which is the reconstruction. Israel is saying, we cannot move into phase two reconstruction until we have disarmed Hamas. So Israel couldn't win disarmament on the battlefield. They couldn't win it at the negotiating table. And so now they're just trying to state it as fact and then get the U.S., because Israel couldn't do it, get the U.S. to execute on it. And from Trump's perspective, I think he does get like, well, wait a minute, hold on. You couldn't do it.

54:35Now you want us to do it for you? But Trump seems to be willing to effectively just go along. And so they're saying we're going to give Hamas 60 days. Now, the other problem for Israel here, just rhetorically and optically, Netanyahu is saying there's basically no kind of missile programs left, no like none of those types of heavy munitions. And Hamas has said we are we're actually willing to agree to any limits that you want on rockets. Sure. Disarming in that respect. Right. What you would call, as Israelites call them, offensive weapons. But they don't want to give up defensive weapons. Notice how like even in here in the U.S., even people like AOC are like, no, but Israel deserves defensive weapons.

55:23Even as she acknowledges they're carrying out a genocide, they're still entitled to defensive weapons. So what about the armed faction resisting the genocide? They're not entitled to defensive weapons? Somebody tried to explain the logical consistency there. So what Netanyahu says is that there are about 60 ,000 AK-47s. that are in circulation in the part of Gaza that Israel does not yet occupy, and that he wants every single one of those out before he will allow any reconstruction. Hamas is saying, no, we don't trust you. We think that you will massacre us. You're carrying out a genocide. But from an outsider's perspective, you're like, wait a minute, aren't you like the most well-armed military outside of the United States in world history and you're crying to us about 60 ,000 AK-47s and you're going to starve a civilian population and refuse like reconstruction over these AK-47s?

56:32Like how about you just stop doing the war? How about that? Like they're agreeing to no missiles. So we can put up B2. Yeah. The Board of Peace is meeting tomorrow. This is Trump's Board of Peace. And they're going to push this forward. And then there's talk about getting this international stabilization force. Was it Indonesia? It's talking about getting closer to having troops. We're talking, we're like a year out or something from that. And so if you're Hamas, you have said, and all of the resistance factions have apparently agreed, like we're not going to disarm until there is some type of mutually agreed upon Palestinian-led police force and like unless you're like completely blinkered by propaganda how how is that remotely an objectionable position like you like unless you're an abolish the police type maybe that's Netanyahu like he's like what are you the police this is just this carceral approach it's a criminal justice reform.

57:37He's a hardcore... Kushner, right? Did the First Step Act, maybe? Yeah. That's right. He's influenced by Kushner. Well, Netanyahu himself, he says... Kushner's not all the way at abolish the police. The unjust prosecution of Netanyahu himself. That's true. He probably is feeling sympathy for the criminal justice reform movement because of his own... He's been brought into the fold. He has been. So yeah, so Netanyahu's an abolish the police type, which respect, but most people are not. Like most people are like, no, you actually need a police force, especially if there's a genocidal army bearing down on you that is on a daily basis uttering genocidal statements and promising to annihilate you.

58:18That sounds like the type of negotiating point the Trump administration or the Trump camp would contra previous administrations, I don't know if compromise is the right word, but accept in the process of getting a deal. He has accepted in the past. I was going to ask, yeah, what do we know about how that can go? The Board of Peace is meeting tomorrow. They just left Geneva. Yeah, Trump has said publicly that he gets it. Like, yeah, you need to have security. He doesn't want it to become like Iraq. We need to de-pathification. Like Trump is in this interesting point in his life, I think, where he goes in and out of it.

58:53Like he'll have moments of clarity and then moments where he's like, yeah, whatever. Netanyahu, do whatever you want. Right. Yeah, that's a, I mean, I feel like that's a pretty good summary of everything we just talked about. Moments of clarity and the moments where he's like, yeah, Netanyahu, do whatever you want. Yeah. So, yeah, I think we're right now at a do whatever you want Netanyahu moment. What a time to be alive.

59:22What do you do when the headlines don't explain what's happening inside of you? I'm Ben Higgins. And if you can hear me is where culture meets the soul. a place for real conversation. Each episode, I sit down with people from all walks of life, celebrities, thinkers, and everyday folks, and we go deeper than the polished story. We talk about what drives us, what shapes us, and what gives us hope. We get honest about the big stuff, identity when you don't recognize yourself anymore, loss that changes you, purpose when success isn't enough, peace when your mind won't slow down, faith when it's complicated.

1:00:00Some guests have answers. Most are still figuring it out. If you've ever felt like there has to be more to the story, this show is for you. Listen to If You Can Hear Me on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:00:19What if mind control is real? If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have? Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car? When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings. Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you? I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused. Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. NLP, aka Neuro Linguistic Programming, is a blend of hypnosis, linguistics, and psychology. Fans say it's like finally getting a user manual for your brain.

1:00:55It's about engineering consciousness. Mind Games is the story of NLP. It's crazy cast of disciples and the fake doctor who invented it at a New Age commune and sold it to guys in suits. He stood trial for murder and got acquitted. The biggest mind game of all? NLP might actually work. This is wild. Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the A-Building. I'm Hans Charles. I'm Menelik Lumumba. It's 1969. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. had both been assassinated, and Black America was at a breaking point. Writing and protests broke out on an unprecedented scale.

1:01:37In Atlanta, Georgia, at Martin's alma mater, Morehouse College, the students had their own protest. It featured two prominent figures in Black history, Martin Luther King Sr. and a young student, Samuel L. Jackson. To be in what we really thought was a revolution, I mean, people would die. 1968, the murder of Dr. King, which traumatized everyone. The FBI had a role in the murder of a Black Panther leader in Chicago. This story is about protest. It echoes in today's world far more than it should. And it will blow your mind. Listen to The A-Building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:02:24Speaking of Trump doing war, let's move on to another boat strike. We've got C1 up on the screen. This is from Southcom. This is video Southcom released just yesterday, less than 24 hours ago. Late on February 16th, at the direction of Southcom Commander General Francis Al Donovan, Joint Task Force Southern Spear conducted three lethal kinetic strikes on three vessels operated by designated terrorist organizations. This is apparently what you're looking at on your screen. Intelligence confirmed the vessels were transiting along known narco-trafficking routes and were engaged in narco-trafficking operations.

1:03:0111 male narco-terrorists were killed during these actions, four on the first vessel in the Eastern Pacific, four on the second vessel in the Eastern Pacific, and three on the third vessel in the Caribbean. No U.S. military forces were harmed. Ryan, there was - It's an incredible line. Yeah. We carried out this attack from air-conditioned rooms in Florida. Nobody was— No U.S. military personnel were injured in the operations. Well, and once again, we are relying on their claims that the intelligence confirmed these were people, quote, engaged in narco-trafficking operations, transiting along, quote, known narco-trafficking routes.

1:03:41And I have to say, reading between the lines, them saying, one, the boats were transiting along known narco-trafficking routes, and two, were engaged in narco-trafficking operations, it tells me that their intelligence is literally that the boats were on the routes. We don't know, though. That's just me reading between the lines. They don't tell us what they knew. They aren't putting anybody on trial. They're just blowing them up once again. Right. And we wanted to cover this because the term normalized was abused in the first Trump term. But if you don't cover these like and you just kind of acknowledge that it's just normal that one government is sending drones into the sky and just blowing up boats like it is a crime against humanity.

1:04:30And so they've now hit at least 42 boats and killed at least 144 people. There are some lawsuits already from, I think, some Colombian and Venezuelan citizens or their loved ones of them for wrongful death.

1:04:52the Coast Guard when they intercept boats oftentimes they get it right something like a third of the time yeah Rand Paul has pointed this out something like a third of the time they get it wrong and that's with binoculars and they're closer they're able to look they're like okay we've been out here doing this a long time that looks like a drug boat to us and they stop it because you get stopped by the American Coast Guard. You stop. That's what happens. They board it. They search it. Oftentimes they find it. And then what you can do is you can then ask them, who paid you to do this? And that's how you do these drug enforcement operations, often with the Cubans in the past.

1:05:39Well, and you can also take the alleged drugs off of the boat and process them and such. Yeah, process them up through your nose and sell them yourself. Yeah. Process can be many things. Yes. Shockingly, there's a lot of shrinkage between the seizure and the trial oftentimes. But setting that aside, if the Coast Guard, which has been doing this for decades and can do it from the sea, is getting it wrong one out of three times, why do we think that Pete Hegseth doing it as a video game is going to get it right 100 % of the time? That is setting aside the question of whether if the person is carrying drugs, we are within our right to execute them.

1:06:33That they are engaged in an act of combat. Right. That's the argument is that they are engaged in a concerted government effort from Venezuela to... Our ally. Now we're in charge of Venezuela, yes, that they're engaged in a concerted... That's a great point, by the way. This is post-regime change, post-Maduro. I mean, it's not technically a regime change, but post-Maduro. The argument is that they're engaged in an act of war by trafficking. Again, the reason that you arrest people and then you tell the public what you're hearing, the reason you do that is precisely so that you know where they're actually going.

1:07:12Are they going to Trinidad? Are they going to other places? Is this going to Europe? A lot of the cocaine from Venezuela goes to Europe, probably more than goes to the United States. So we have no idea. And I don't know how their intelligence tells them precisely that this was narco trafficking coming to the United States organized by government actors, state actors, to commit war against the American people. That's all the burden that has to be met for this to make any sense. And to your point, that's why we're covering this. That makes no sense. Yeah, you make a very good point. And I think it's hard for people to take seriously the argument that the U.S.

1:07:51is making here to make these strikes quote-unquote legal. But if you do for a second, just to repeat the very important point that Emily is making there, The U.S.'s claim that these are legal, lethal strikes is rooted in the false claim. But let's accept the claim that Trende Aragua is a foreign terrorist organization that is run by Maduro that is at war with the United States. And that all of the narco traffickers in the Pacific, which two of the strikes were in the Pacific. Like, why is Trende Aragua sending people out to the Pacific? Eastern Pacific, yeah. I don't know what that means. Like, no, like, if they're Venezuela and they're in the Caribbean, not the Pacific.

1:08:35But let's just pretend that all three of these ships, we're going to grant everything to the government's argument here. All three of these ships are Turandia or Aragua. There's no evidence that Turandia or Aragua is an international narco-trafficking group. They're like thugs who, like, beat people up and, like, extort people and, like, one of those gangs. They almost certainly have some level of integration into the Venezuelan government. Of course, almost certainly. That is absolutely true. But whether they're being used as a military force by the Venezuelan government to commit war. Let's pretend, just for the sake of argument, that Maduro was in fact running Trente de Aragua and that Trente de Aragua was running all of these drugs.

1:09:17And that, so the argument from the U.S. was, if we blow up these boats, that is depriving the Maduro regime, which is a narco-terrorist regime that is at war with the United States, from that revenue. And that's what makes these legal strikes. As you may have noticed from following the news, Maduro is now in jail in the United States. Delce Rodriguez is running Venezuela. Trump just yesterday said that Delce Rodriguez is doing a tremendous job and that we are running Venezuela and that she is doing a tremendous job on our behalf of running Venezuela. This is someone who was, again, organizing allegedly Trendy Aragua to commit war against the United States government and that we are still striking people allegedly.

1:10:05Right. So she's doing a tremendous job. She's on our side. We, in fact, are running. If it's true that the Venezuelan government is still running Trendy Aragua, then Trump is running it. Right. I mean, but according to Trump's logic, he has. Delcy is great. She's an ally. And Venezuela is not at war with the United States. So then your legal justification that you have put forward for these strikes has completely evaporated. It never made any sense to begin with, to be clear. But now it has zero basis. Like this is now you're now just killing, at best, narco-traffickers. At worst, innocent people.

1:10:54Completely innocent people who are on the boats. Without a trial. So if they are narco-traffickers at this point and the money is going back to some government, it's either going back to Ecuador, which is your ally, Naboa,

1:11:12Colombia, who he doesn't like Petro, but like, he doesn't claim that Colombia's at war with us. Or Venezuela, which is our ally now, which we run. Or what else? The Alvador 100. Like, there's no one down there that we're saying is at war with us other than Cuba. And we're not saying that Cuba isn't behind this. Now, don't. I was just saying. I just gave them an idea. Are you planting? Apparently, yeah, no. Anyway. We're still doing it. Yeah, totally, like utterly, completely, totally criminal, even by the government's own attempted explanations. Like your point is a good one that like the world changed when they took Maduro and that and we we pulled out our rationale for these strikes and continue the strikes anyway, because we do not care.

1:12:05Well, we'll see if they I mean, we'll see if they even bother to. I mean, they're posting the footage here. We'll see if they even bother to say, you know, what state actor. All assumptions for the rest of the 41 other strikes since, what, September, would be that it was the Venezuelan. It was narco traffickers operating on behalf of the Venezuelan government, on behalf of Maduro. This was happening to be a shot across the bow to Maduro to either squeeze him out or make a regime change operation seem justified. and now that that's happened, we will see if they even bother to say who they think these narco traffickers were committing an act of war on behalf of because so far it's nothing.

1:12:51So far it's just almost bragging by posting that video we played earlier of the strikes. So I'm curious if they respond to that. Let's put in a comment request with the State Department actually. That sounds good. Hey, what's, or Defense Department, like you're doing this criminal activity. Why? What's your justification? Oh, yeah, defense, that would make more sense. Well, I mean... Well, it's Rubio. Like, yeah. Yeah. Well, because if it's Venezuela, I would love to know if we think that Delsi Rodriguez is organizing a war. Then is Rubio the kingpin? Or I think Trump is the kingpin. Yeah. Narco-Rubio.

1:13:41You can scroll the headlines all day and still feel empty. I'm Ben Higgins, and If You Can Hear Me is where culture meets the soul. Honest conversations about identity, loss, purpose, peace, faith, and everything in between. Celebrities, thinkers, everyday people, some have answers, most are still figuring it out. And if you've ever felt like there has to be more to the story, this show is for you. Listen to If You Can Hear Me on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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