Episode 137: "Top Secret America"

PBS Frontline has released "Top Secret America" from 2011 for the 25th anniversary of 9/11. It is a documentary worth watching.

➡️ National security sites with entire underground societies across the US. Why? Maybe Phil Schneider wasn't so crazy with his DUMBS theory after all...

➡️ Secret black site prisons. Why would an intelligence agency even possess such things? How? Why???

➡️ War is no longer solely about weapons; it is about information. (Michael Aquino talked about this decades ago.) And that's only deepened with AI and robotics. 

Links: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6gNfDl-Fss&t=18s

Episode 19: ThinThread, Spying Before 9-11, and The Shadow Factory

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2289560/episodes/14162586

Episode 86: 9/11 - The Man Who Knew

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2289560/episodes/17750865

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Transcript

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Transcription by Otter.ai.  Please forgive any typos!

Sara Causey discusses the PBS Frontline documentary "Top Secret America," which investigates the U.S. government's post-9/11 anti-terror efforts. The documentary reveals a covert international war involving drone strikes and black site prisons, and a domestic surveillance program that intercepted communications without warrants. Causey highlights the expansion of intelligence agencies like the C!A and the establishment of secret prisons. She critiques the lack of transparency and oversight, drawing parallels to historical abuses and the potential for AI and robotics to exacerbate surveillance. The discussion emphasizes the long-term impact of 9/11 on U.S. security policies and the erosion of civil liberties.

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Top Secret America, PBS Frontline, 9/11, anti-terror apparatus, drone strikes, black site prisons, enhanced interrogation, domestic surveillance, AI and robotics, civil rights, intelligence agencies, military operations, weapons of mass destruction, militarization of police, psychological warfare.

Welcome to con-sara-cy theories. Are you ready to ask questions you shouldn't and find information you're not supposed to know? Well, you're in the right place. Here is your host, Sara Causey.

Hello, hello, and thanks for tuning in. In tonight's episode, I will be discussing the PBS Frontline documentary Top Secret America, which originally aired on September 6 of 2011. However, as we rapidly approach the 25th anniversary of 9/11, it's easy to see why they have recently re-released this on YouTube. As of this recording, it has close to half a million views. The little subject line on YouTube reads, "How the U.S. built a hidden anti-Tword apparatus After 9/11, in the description box we read: In Top Secret America, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Dana Priest investigated the growth of a massive maze of clandestine government and private agencies aimed at fighting T-Word after the 9/11 attacks. Those secret efforts, she and her team reported included a covert international war waged by the Charlie India Alpha that included drone strikes, black site prisons, and enhanced interrogation techniques widely criticized as torture. A domestic surveillance program that authorized the November Sierra Alpha to intercept certain telephone calls and emails of American citizens without a warrant and other anti-word programs. The information given to us in this documentary is chilling. Even more so when we think about not only has nothing changed vis-a-vis spying, and covert wars-things going on that the American people will never know about in totality. It's not just that those things are of the past; they happened and they've gone away. They most certainly have not. We're living in the age of AI and robotics, where it is easier than ever for people to be spied upon, for people to be listened to with no warrant, with no concern about due process or civil rights or the rule of law, and we've come to accept that. So all these years later, it's even worse than it was before. If this is of interest to you, and you want to go down this very frightening rabbit hole with me, select your frosty beverage of choice, and we'll saddle up and take this ride. 

Thanks so much for tuning in and listening on a regular basis. It really does mean a lot to me. This is an independent broadcast, and it always will be. I don't have corporate sponsors, nor am I looking for any. I do have con-sara-cy theories way after dark as an option for you to get bonus episodes, special news alerts, etc. Information that might be a little too hot for normal TV. If you're interested, please check out the show notes for a way to subscribe. 

So in the prologue, the kind of whetting of the appetite to get the viewer to stick around, we hear things like the gloves were coming off. We were not going to abide by the normal rules of warfare anymore. The money just flew out of Congress, and I sat there shaking my head like, yeah, I don't even think we needed anybody to tell us that officially, because if you were alive and well back then, you remember all of that happening. Richard Clark claims he was a White House T-word advisor, and he claims that on the night of 9/11, President Bush says there aren't any limits. Whatever you need, you'll get it. And then they go to Congress, and Congress essentially says whatever you want, we'll give it to you. There are are no limits, and it's sort of a mic drop moment. We're told that the president was willing to do whatever and spend whatever in order to conduct a new kind of war. So let's stop right there and think about that. What a watershed moment this is! It it still boggles my mind that there are entire generations of young people now that don't have any memory of any of this. They don't remember the 2000 election. They don't remember all the build-up to Y2K. They don't remember hanging chads and all the drama in the 2000 election. They don't remember 9/11. They've seen things about it on television, but they weren't alive. So for me, being an adult at that point in time, it's like this. This is such a huge moment in history, because it really sparks off the kind of surveillance that we have now. It it wasn't.

The origination point of it, early on, going all the way back to episode 19, which I released on May 29th of 2024, and I'll drop a link to it in case you missed that episode because it was one of the early episodes. But it was titled "Thin Thread: Spying Before 9/11 and the Shadow Factory. It is absolutely not true to say that the government was not spying on people pre 9/11. They were, and Thin Thread proves that. But this is like a spark that becomes a conflagration. 9/11 is really the turning point for all of this. What we see now with Palantir and Peter Thiel and God, like Philip K. Dick, and the idea of minority report pre-crime becoming true, we can draw a line back to 9/11 and sort of say, here you are. You have Bush saying, I will do whatever is necessary, I spin whatever is necessary, because by God, we're in a new type of warfare. That should chill you to your fucking bone. Whether you were alive back then and you remember it, or you're a young person listening to this broadcast, you should be fucking concerned about this. John Ashcroft said that Bush looks in his direction and says, "Don't ever let this happen again. Fran Townsend, who is also a White House T-Word Advisor says that she's taking this to mean there's nothing we won't do, there's no end of the earth that we won't go to to make sure that something like this does not happen again. So here's another theme that we're going to hear recurring: This cannot happen again. This is a horrible event. A lot of people died. We cannot allow it to ever happen again, and I think there's also this sense of we need to strike while the iron is hot, while everybody is scared and outraged and frightened about what might happen next. This is the time to do it. We see a media clip of that old fucking penguin, Dick Cheney. Oh, you know, I just absolutely detested him, even back in the days when he was in office. And just seeing him now, it's like a bad flashback. It's like a bad fucking flashback. He makes my skin crawl. I just ooh ooh ooh ooh. So we have old Dick Cheney sitting there saying to the media, we have to spend time in the dark side, we have to spend time in the shadows of intelligence, and I'm like, oh, got to spend time on the dark side, right wink. We see a video of Kofor Black, who was the Charlie India Alpha officer in charge of counter T word maneuvers, and he tells Congress he's like at some kind of Senate hearing or something, and he he tells Congress all you need to know is there was a before 9/11 and an after 9/11, and after 9/11 the gloves come off, and then we're told that beyond that he refuses to divulge any further information. Dana Priest characterizes Kofar as really feeling like there weren't any limits to what he could do. Allegedly, he says that he wants Bin Laden's head on a silver platter or on a pike with flies eating his eyeballs. We're told that Kofer puts together a plan basically at rapid speed. He himself says, while everybody else is looking at their maps of Afghanistan, we were already ready to go, ready to rock. And it's characterized by John Brennan as they wanted the Charlie India Alpha to become the vanguard of what was happening? This certainly makes me think of what JFK said-that there were things going on within the government that the Charlie India Alpha had its own agenda, and he didn't always know. As the president of the United States, he didn't always know what they were up to. Operation Graystone is the name of it. The idea is we need to go after Bin Laden, and anywhere that his supporters are. Here, here are a list of nations that we need to look at that have ties to Al Qaeda. It also sounds like there was some kind of power struggle, pissing contest between old Rumsfuck and this Kofler guy about who was really going to be in charge because the Charlie India Alpha sort of subverts the U.S. military, like we want to use your services, but we're really in charge here.

We're also told that Bush said, "I want the Charlie India Alpha in there first. We're told that the authorization that's given is sweeping, and that the American government was not going to be quote prissy about how they did things. Whatever they needed to do to get in and get the job done and get these bad guys, by God, they were going to do it. Kofor wants the survivors of 9/11 to know that the Charlie Indie Alpha went into. Afghanistan and the Taliban fell, and we kicked ass. It was the finest hour, so hopefully that's some consolation to those people who had loved ones that have lost their lives. Or there was a lady I saw on television today that not only has respiratory and pulmonary problems, but also has severe PTSD. So you know, hopefully that's a great comfort to that woman who's suffering to know that Kofor Black says they went in and kicked ass and took names. We start to get a lot of propaganda shoved down our throats about the war on the T word. That oh, all these baddies that were part of the Taliban and were part of Al Qaeda. Some of them are dead, and some of them are in cells at Guantanamo Bay, but they're not out loose in the public anymore. They can't do harm to people. We're told that Graystone goes on well outside the boundaries of Afghanistan. More than a dozen countries, as a matter of fact, had people on the ground in this secret, shadowy war. They also discuss the strike that happened on November 5, 2002, when a Charlie India Alpha Predator drone killed six Al Qaeda operatives who were traveling in a vehicle in Yemen, and as Dana says, they were using a weapon that the public didn't even know existed and doing war in a way that traditionally it hasn't been done. You're talking about an unmanned aerial vehicle that pops this jeep that's driving along with these operatives. Michael DeLong, who was a lieutenant general as part of CENTCOM, which is Central Command, makes the comment: It's just war. It's no different than going to the store and buying a carton of eggs. You're just doing what needs to be done. These people had killed 3000 people at the World Trade Center. They had killed 200 at the Pentagon. So this was an easy decision. And so we have people asking, "What are the rules? Who's authorizing this? Does the Charlie India Alpha director now have a license to kill like James Bond? Who who gives the go-ahead? Where's the oversight for any of this? What is the public allowed to know, and when are they allowed to know it? Dana starts talking about people who have been captured, but they're not going into the military penal system, so the question becomes: Where are these people going? Where are they being sent to after they've been apprehended? We start to learn about these euphemisms like stress and duress techniques, as well as enhanced interrogation techniques. Doesn't that sound like lovely verbal gymnastics? A total playing with of the semantics of the situation. We see images of a memo from august 1, 2002. We're not able to see the whole thing, but we are able to see things like facial hold, facial slap, stress positions, sleep deprivation, and waterboarding. We're told that Khalid Sheik Mohammed was waterboarded almost 200 times. We're told now about a secret network of Charlie India Alpha prisons called Black Sites. So let's just let's just take a beat here, because there's a lot, a lot to unpack, a lot to unpack. We're told officially that Khalid Sheik Mohammed is a Kuwaiti-born Pakistani militant and the former head of propaganda for Al Qaeda. As of 2026, he is held by the U.S. at Guantanamo Bay detention camp under T-word-related charges. We're also told that he is the alleged self-proclaimed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks and will stand trial in June of 2028. So you will have some people that say, "Well, he's a baddie. He's a bad guy. If we needed to waterboard his ass over 150 times to get information out of him, so be it. Okay, I want you to to take that argument and put it in one bucket because we're going to come back to it.

Now let's also take a look at why the fuck does an intelligence agency have its own prison system, and then the people, the the public, are not even allowed to know about this. We're not told here's what's going on and here's why we're doing it and who's in detention here. They're just these black sites that we're not supposed to know anything about. Why would a spy agency even have such a thing? You know, ostensibly we think that if spies catch a baddie, a bad guy that was doing something bad or was planning to do something bad, that individual would be put into the justice system out in public. We could see them. We would be allowed to know who they were and what they were planning to do. So. What's up with this? So let's let's put these two things into buckets. Why does the intelligence agency have fucking prisons? And then what about the argument people make that Khalid Sheik Mohammed is a bad dude? So if bad things had to be done to him, so what? Put a pin in those for just a minute. Dana says that she finds about two dozen prisons around the world that are managed by the Charlie India Alpha, but are also sort of allowed and funded with the cooperation of other countries. John Rizzo, an attorney who was the deputy counsel of the Charlie India Alpha for the first nine years of the war on terror talks about helping to create these black psych prisons around the world. His excuse is that these people-that's what he says-these people had to be held at secret facilities with as little contact with other people as possible, and that's why you had to have these super secret prisons in other parts of the world. Okay, as Dana says, we began falling deeper and deeper into a secretly run government, and I think it's very important for us to understand that there's the bread and circus, there's the pageantry that we are allowed to see. Did the orange man fart on TV today? Did senile old man say my butt's been wiped? Did the orange man dye his hair or put on a really unflattering wig? We're allowed to see all of this, but there are so many deeper, scarier things that are going on behind the scenes that we are not allowed to see. We hear yet again that Rumsfuck is mad that the Charlie India Alpha is getting out ahead of the military. We see him at some type of press conference saying the only way to defend against the T word is to go on the offense, and the way that you do that is you can't fight a war the way it's always been fought in the past. This is something else. Okay, so let's get another bucket to put this in, because all of this talk about we need to fight wars in a different way than we've ever fought them before. That's going to become relevant as well. So Rumsfuck decides to expand JSOC, Joint Special Operations Command. We're told in this documentary that he's essentially his own empire builder, and he decides, well, I have this little kingdom, and I'm going to greatly expand the powers that I have. Now, here's where it gets even more interesting. If JSOC does a covert operation, it doesn't have to be approved by the president in every case. It doesn't have to be made public. Nobody has to go to Congress, so it can happen much more in the shadows under the guise of well, it wasn't really a covert operation; it was a special military operation. Now we start to see Iraq coming into the picture, and we're told that there was no credible evidence that Iraq had been helping Al Qaeda or Bin Laden or that Iraq had anything to do with 9/11. So it's basically like go and find the evidence, and lo and behold, old Rummy says that he's the one who can prove it. So then the team gets to work going out in the media talking about weapons of mass destruction, Dick Cheney says that there is evidence that Iraq and Al Qaeda have been in cahoots. We see Colin Powell saying we cannot leave Saddam Hussein in possession of weapons of mass destruction. Hmm. Well, we don't have to set this in a bucket to talk about later.

We can just look at what's happening with this war with Iran. We were spoon-fed the same bullshit. We cannot allow Iran to have weapons of mass destruction. We cannot allow them to get a nuclear warhead or kaboom. We're all going to die. 'Twas ever thus. The more things so-called change, the more they stay the same. They just run the same old tired-ass shit out of the same old tired-ass playbook and expect everybody to go along with it. Now we get to the November Sierra Alpha and this whole idea of, in order to make sure that nothing like this ever happens again, we need to have more power than we've ever had. So why not eavesdrop and listen to millions of phone calls? As Dana says, nobody was really in the mood to start asking these questions about civil liberties because the idea was in a contest between personal privacy or the possibility that another 9/11 could happen, your personal privacy had to go out the window. We're told that they intercept billions of calls and communiques every day, and it's so much that no human could ever go through them. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. You know. It makes one wonder if maybe the advent of AI and robotics will severely help, or is presumably already severely helping with this goal of going through everything. And will it always be benevolent? Will it always give people the benefit of the doubt and be totally rational? What do you fucking think? Dana says something else that's really interesting because they begin to bring on private contractors, and so some of the companies that before had been building weapons and ships and so forth rapidly pivot into intelligence operations. Now, could some of those people get displaced by AI and robotics, yeah, certainly. I think that that's coming too, but it's just scary to see how quickly these changes can happen. As we're told, this war did not require fighter jets and tanks the way that other wars did. It was about information. Interesting. Let's put that in another bucket. William Arkin and Dana Priest start examining these secret buildings that are basically just hiding in plain sight, just any old office building, but it's actually being used by the November Sierra Alpha. Now, here's something that's even more frightening. As we're told, it might only be kind of a squatty three or four story building that just looks like any old office building. But what you're not seeing is that it could go 10 or 11 stories below ground, and there's an entire society down there-shops, a gym, restaurants, etc.-to serve the people who work there, so they don't even have to leave. They can just go there for a shift, and stay there for whatever length of time. And there's this whole society that's happening inside this building that you and I know nothing about, and certainly does make us think about Phil Schneider and the DUMBS, these underground military bases. Like, what if he wasn't so offbeat after all? Now I don't know about Valiant Thor and all the aliens and all that shit and and pop pop battles between outer space Martians and whatever, but this is giving us very credible evidence of things going on below ground that we never fucking see and would never know about. In fact, we're told it's a huge new bureaucracy that you can't really see. Hmm. Now let's also contemplate why these goddamn data centers are going up all over the place. Not so much in other countries, but all over the place in the U.S. Hmm. Just would have to wonder what might be going on with those things. Of course, the war in Iraq starts to go badly. The soldiers are not able to really manage the insurgents, and then it becomes clear to the American public that there were no weapons of mass destruction. The reason that we were told was a justification for going over there was just bullshit. John Negroponte comes in to be the first director of National Intelligence, the DNI, on february 17 of 2005. We're told that even now, well, I guess as of 2011, when this documentary was made, as of then, and I'm sure still relevant now. There's not much clarity on what the organization does, but yet it's become sprawling. At that point in time, Dana Priest describes it as being like five WalMarts stacked on top of each other. We're told about Obama's inauguration. So it's like we fast forward all the way to 2009. We're told that a Somali T word had said that he was going to do something. So like there's this massive security response going on behind the scenes, and then it turns out to not even really be anything credible. And for those of us who remember, Obama did say that he was going to rein all of this in. Remember, there was going to be all of this hope and change that came out of his presidency if he was elected, and we know that that didn't happen. It became a continuation of Cheney-Rumsfeld.

So we're told officially that after Obama has this really scary experience at the inauguration, where he thinks that there might be a T-word plot to kill him, and then after he gets into the Oval Office and he starts to get these regular intelligence briefings about all the scary, spooky stuff that's actually going on in the world, he decides, well, maybe these procedures are in place for a reason, and as we're told, Obama winds up reauthorizing almost all of what happened during the Bush-Cheney Rumsfuck years. In fact, in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Obama actually expands the covert. Against Al Qaeda, Richard Clarke says, "Oh, there's going to be another one, and when it happens, if you have cut back the budget, then whoever the other party is doesn't even matter, donkey elephant, whoever the other party is is going to say you caused this because you cut the budget. We could have known about this, we could have prevented this, but it's all your fault. Isn't that some magnificent logic for you? We're told that Obama greenlights sending billions of dollars to state and local police. Dana describes it as being like the front-line foot soldiers who can start passing tips on to the Foxtrot Bravo India and the Charlie India Alpha. Wow, that that that's fucking terrifying. We start thinking about the militarization of the police, and who are they actually there to protect and serve? I take a rather libertarian view on this because, and I don't mean right wing libertarian that's like, oh, corporate America will save everybody somehow. I mean, libertarian in the sense of they are there to protect and serve the interests of the state. If your interests and the state's interests are on the same side, congratulations. If they're not, you might be fucked. They talk about cameras, biometrics, license plate readers. Now this is only getting worse with AI and robotics. Look at all the fucking flock cameras. I saw a report just the other day about cameras being placed on the back of a garbage truck, so that this city can determine if there are any code violations going on, so that even if nobody calls it in and nobody's bothered by whatever it is that you're doing, the government can find out and start issuing you complaints and fines. And one of the things that I'm just absolutely gobsmacked by is that Richard Clarke says, when you look at all of this and ask, "Did this prevent another attack? you can almost universally say, "No, it didn't. They list a couple of situations. One being the Times Square bomber, the attempted Times Square bomber. Another one where a Nigerian man got on a plane with a BOMB in his pants and almost detonated the damn thing. And they're talking about it was average citizens who stopped that? Like street vendors who saw something suspicious going on in Times Square and alerted authorities, other passengers on the airplane that was like, "What the hell is this guy doing? What's he got in his pants over there? So it was like, "Why are we spending billions of dollars, trillions of dollars on all of this shit if it's not doing what we're told that it's doing, when you can bet it's doing something. We're finally told on May 2nd, 2011, that Osama bin Laden has been killed in a military operation, and so at last the ultimate baddie, the baddie of all baddies, has been eliminated. If you missed the episode that I recorded last year regarding John O'Neill, the man who knew. I'll drop a link to that episode as well in the write-up. Go back and check that out because some of the same players, some of the same issues, are writ large in that episode. Like how how much did they know ahead of time that they just sat on, and then if they chose to sit on it. Why? Just things that make you say, "Hmm. Now I want to return to our buckets, right? Because we're told like, okay, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, bad guy. So what if he was waterboarded? If he had to be tortured, and that's something that under the Geneva Convention we're not going to do. That's a sort of ultimate no-no. If he was a bad guy doing bad things, then why does it matter? Don't we have the right to get the baddies? Okay, that's that's one bucket.

Then we have why are there all these fucking Charlie India Alpha prisons? What are they doing? What is an intelligence agency doing with black site prisons where somebody could just be shunted off in there, their family doesn't know, the public doesn't know, the press doesn't know what the fuck is up with that. Okay, so let's let's start to combine these two buckets together. I don't even know how many times I've told you before, this is what Nazis do, and I'm not saying that Khalid Sheik Mohammed isn't a bad dude or that he wasn't some propagandist in Al Qaeda. I'm not saying that he's not a baddie or a shithead. Don't get me wrong. What I'm saying is, take a look at at the Nazi playbook. They start out with people that can be presented to the general public as undesirable. Why would you fight for the civil rights of somebody who's a giant baddie, who is the self-proclaimed architect of 9/11, who's a propagandist for Al Qaeda? What an ultimate shithead! What a complete fucking bastard! So yeah. Man, if you got to waterboard that son of a bitch, waterboard the hell out of him, torture his ass until he gives everybody else up. It doesn't stay with the so-called bad guys. This is part of the Nazi playbook. I'm telling you, it starts to fan out to broader society. Why are there Charlie India Alpha prisons. Do you think that those are only for people that are the ultimate bad guys, people that are doing mass T word attacks and acts of genocide and so forth? Do you really think that that's all there is to it? Remember the the old poem about when they came for the Jews, when they came for the trade unionists, when they came for the Catholics, when they when they came for these various people, I didn't speak up. And then by the time they came to get me, there was nobody left to speak up. That's how it fucking rolls. Now let's go back to our other buckets about rums fuck saying we've got to fight wars as never before, and this idea of it's no longer fighter jets and tanks rolling around-it's a war of information. I've talked before, again, I don't even know how many times on this broadcast about Michael Aquino and his book Mind War. For those of you who may only just be waking up, maybe your new tuner enters. Michael Aquino was a political scientist. He was the founder and high priest of the Temple of Set. He was very openly a Satanist, and he was also high up in the U.S. Army in psyops. Years ago, he wrote a book called Mind War, and he talks about things like Non-lethal conflict. The idea that war would always be blood and guts strewn across a battlefield was simply not true. You would have a war of the mind, a psychological operation. The idea is you start to make change by shifting human psychology and human perception. You get into psychological methods, arguments, information shaping. You start to manipulate human consciousness, and I think this is becoming more prevalent as well with the advent of AI and robotics, because now we all have smartphones and we all have chatbots. There are apps on every smartphone now, where if you don't know the answer to something, you can just go on one of these chatbots and say, "Hey, what happened back in such and so time at such and so event, or what percent of 15 is three? People are not even going to mess around with basic thought anymore. They just go to the fucking chatbot. So you cannot convince me that all of these things are not interrelated. I absolutely think that they are, absolutely. And so I just think that we can look back on what happened on 9/11, not necessarily as the genesis of it. As I was speaking about with thin thread, there were things going on pre 911, but we can certainly look at it as an accelerant-the sort of moment where a bucket of gasoline gets poured on the fire and the spark turns into a conflagration. In the meantime, please take very good care of yourself, stay a little bit crazy, and I'll see you in the next episode.

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