Okay everybody, Scott Horton here from Anti-War Radio, with an interview of Sabel Edmonds recorded the night of Monday, January the 4th, 2010.
Introducing Sabel Edmonds, she's the infamous, I think, maybe just famous, former FBI contract translator, turned whistleblower.
And she keeps the website boilingfrogspost.com.
Welcome to the show Sabel, how are you doing?
Thank you Scott, good to be with you again.
Well thank you very much for joining us, I appreciate you putting aside the time for us tonight here.
Okay, so the reason I want to get you on the show was this great article that you wrote about Dennis Hastert here.
Of course, I have to say that because Sabel Edmonds' interview could be about a lot of different things.
But we're going to narrow this one down to this great article that you put together about the former Speaker of the House of Representatives, Dennis Hastert.
And of course, for people who are familiar with your story, they'll probably immediately think of the Vanity Fair article, especially from 2005 by David Rose, and of course other reporting by Luke Grey and many others, about Dennis Hastert and what it is that you learned about him while you were a FBI contract translator, before you turned a whistleblower.
So why don't you, I guess, start off with your specific knowledge that you learned actually on the job, and then we'll get into the rest of this portrait that you paint here, which is very interesting.
A termite indeed, this guy.
Yes, as disclosed by Vanity Fair in 2005.
And for that article, Vanity Fair had to interview several other witnesses.
And these were people from the Justice Department, from the FBI, agents from the FBI, both former and current, and also they interviewed several congressional investigators.
So when they wrote the story, when they published the story, it was not only a story that was only based on one source.
In fact, there were certain things that I couldn't get into details about, and they got those details from other witnesses, people with firsthand knowledge, which a lot of it had to do with Dennis Hastert, and they intended to focus on Dennis Hastert because, as you know, my case was pretty complex.
I'm using the past tense, was, because it's been long gone.
So with Hastert, it had to do mainly with FBI's counterintelligence and counterespionage investigation that had started in 1996, and it continued until 2002, mainly focused on the FBI's Chicago field office.
And one of the targets of these investigations, I would say the primary, outside the foreign targets, happened to be Dennis Hastert.
And it had to do with his and his office's connection and not very legal dealings with foreign operatives, and some of it had to do with his fundraising for his campaign, and a lot of it had to do with Dennis Hastert's connections and other politicians in Chicago, mainly in Chicago.
Well, now, I know you're always having to somewhat tap dance around going to prison here and all that kind of thing, but...
Not really, not really, Todd.
Oh, you're over it now, huh?
I mean, you haven't...
All right, so then you can...
You haven't read about it all.
So then you can outright tell us then, you heard this guy, you heard these Turkish spies talking about paying him off, these kinds of things?
You're not looking only at Turkish spies.
See, that's another thing.
You're looking at Turkish operatives who, some of them have become U.S. citizens.
These people, they don't have only government connections, but they are in charge of the biggest narcotics operation that is headquartered in Chicago.
As you know, 80% of the world's heroin goes through Turkey and is actually processed and marketed by Turkish operatives, both in Europe and in the United States.
So then that's a yes you did hear these people talking about bribing the Speaker of the House of Representatives?
Yes, and I got to become very familiar with Dennis Hester's main people, people who worked for Dennis Hester, both in Washington, D.C. office, but also the person in charge of his office, in offices, plural, in Chicago.
And now importantly here, you're not a gumshoe.
You're a contractor language specialist working for these guys.
This was an FBI investigation that you were a small part of and know about, but this was a major counterintelligence, counterespionage investigation that included tapping the phone, apparently not only of the House Speaker, but of many people who worked for him as well?
Is that what you're saying?
In counterintelligence operations, it doesn't work that way.
What you do is, in terms of tapping, in terms of surveillance, you first target the foreign entities under FISA.
And if, based on what you collect, you have enough on the U.S. persons involved, then you go and you request warrants for surveillance on the U.S. persons.
So the initial targets were not U.S. people, let's say Hester or others, but the Turkish operatives.
But then based on what was collected, then they went further, the FBI went further, and started specifically investigating and collecting information on activities of Hester's political offices.
You've told me before that part of the reason that there was pressure inside the FBI, to make this whole thing go away, not just from the Justice Department pressure on them, but even internally, was because they had illegally used these foreign intelligence surveillance court warrants in what were essentially criminal investigations.
Is that part of the same story in this case?
Well, that story had to do mainly with Washington, D.C.
Yeah, I thought so.
And it had to do with the Congressional offices.
I'm talking about official Congressional offices here in Washington, D.C.
And it didn't target only Dennis Hastert, but it targeted several other representatives, including Dan Burton, including other people that you have already read about, and their names have been out.
And for people who aren't that familiar with all these congressmen, this is sort of the punchline buried in the subtext, is Dan Burton was the head of the House Oversight Committee.
It's always the most powerful people that you're talking about.
The Speaker of the House of Representatives and the head of the Oversight Committee.
They're the ones under investigation for some of this worst corruption.
And, Scott, before Dennis Hastert, the main person in Congress was Bob Livingston, who had the involvement, and he was the Speaker of the House at the time.
Then Bob Livingston left.
Well, people might remember that Newt Gingrich was forced to resign in disgrace over the impeachment of Bill Clinton in 1998.
And Livingston came after Gingrich, but only lasted a couple of months because Larry Flint caught him cheating on his wife, and so he had to resign.
And then Dennis Hastert came and took his place at the end of 1998.
That's how people cannot remember Bob Livingston.
He was only in the seat there for a very short time.
But the importance of Bob Livingston, we should mention here, is as soon as he resigned, Bob Livingston, in 1999, within a few months, he opened his own lobbying firm, and he registered as foreign agent with the Justice Department and took on Turkey as his largest client with something around $1.5 million a year.
So he was already serving the Turkish operatives and the Turkish interests while he was a congressman.
He was the Speaker of the House later.
But as soon as he left, he made it actually official.
He took them as his largest client, and he registered as a foreign agent.
As Hastert followed and did the exact same thing.
Tell me this.
I remember years ago you did an interview with Amy Goodman where Dan Ellsberg was there with you, and the way he put it was people were bringing sacks of cash money to Dennis Hastert for his payoffs.
And I never heard you put it quite that way, but is that what you heard these people discussing, bringing him satchels of cash money?
Correct.
And of course, it was not only discussion.
Did they have big dollar signs on the side?
You know, like a rope holding them at the top?
Well, what they did was, for example, to deliver a large amount of cash, then the FBI surveillance team in Chicago, they would go and they would have the surveillance on these people, and they had to ensure that actually this took place.
So it was not just some hot shot talk or empty conversations, but the fact that, yes, these people entered a particular office location on a Sunday in Chicago with briefcases of cash, etc.
So the agents acted upon that, and they followed up with further surveillance to see whether or not this was taking place, these transactions were taking place or not.
Well, and now you mentioned that David Rose, of course Vanity Fair must have a hundred lawyers who are just completely flipping out that they even let him write about this story at all.
And I think from when I talked to him, he talked about the lawyers really went over and over and over and over everything.
You're looking at fact-checking.
Usually they do it two or three times.
Well, and they probably cut some good stuff out of there too, just for fear's sake.
I mean, we're talking about a pretty major publication here playing with fire.
We know the politics of the situation.
So in this particular, this is the most compelling part of that article about your story, was the corruption of the Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert.
And as you said, he says in there, he talked with not just the language specialist, he talked with the FBI agents working on this case.
He talked with the congressional aides who apparently, this is actually my question, I think the congressional aides that he talked to to verify this, were these people who were part of the committee that you had testified to?
And have you told these same stories?
I know you testified before the 9-11 Commission about some things, but that's a separate issue.
Have you told this whole story to Congress under Seals, Sebel?
What happened was this had to do mainly with the Senate Judiciary Committee, mainly Senator Grassley's and Senator Leahy's office.
And after I briefed their cleared staff inside the SCIF and the Senate in several sessions, they launched their own investigation.
And this is the Senate offices for Grassley and Leahy.
So they basically summoned many FBI agents and supervisors, even the guy in charge of polygraph into their office, they interviewed them.
They also went over all the witnesses that were interviewed by the Inspector General's office for the Justice Department.
So they had to, the Senate offices had to investigate, not only based on what I told them, but by talking with many, many insiders from the FBI.
Again, not language specialists only, but the agents.
And they actually summoned documents.
And based on what they found out, they were familiar with the story intimately.
And whoever discussed it with the Vanity Fair reporter, David Rose, was the person, I guess, who knew all these bits and pieces of this case from not only one source, but from many, many sources, because they won't go and jeopardize their own statute by going and saying, oh, yeah, we were told, and this is true.
They have to confirm it themselves on their own, as the Inspector General's office had to do.
All right.
Now, well, let's get into the larger theme of the article here about the political system termites, as you put it.
I always think of William S. Lynn's term, which is not his, but the way he describes Washington, D.C., is it's simply an imperial court.
The idea that it's the seat of a government even is not even really right anymore.
And I think that's really what you're getting at with this political termite thing, where these people are able to, because the corruption basically is so deep in Washington, D.C., that it's no longer, I guess this is the conversation I have with Charles Goyette about economics, which it all kind of ties in sort of, but it's the idea that the American state, the American country, the people here and our wealth, that we're the goose that laid the golden egg.
That has really been replaced by the idea that we are the biggest piñata in the world and that basically it's a race to just take every single thing that they can from us before the damn thing collapses or something.
It doesn't even seem like there's any interest in preserving even the system we have now for the long term.
It's like just a race to steal it all.
And that's really what you're talking about with the termites here, where these people come in, they're taking so much and giving back so little that this whole thing's going to fall down.
Of course, not only that they give back very little, actually they take away.
I mean, you take a person like Hastert, who had been there for two decades and who served for almost a decade as a Speaker of the House.
Well, while in Congress, this guy was involved and was in the center of the Abramoff scandal.
He was involved and had dealings with the Mark Foley scandal.
Then this guy, when he was elected to Congress, his entire wealth, his net worth was around $260,000-$265,000 in 1988.
And without having any inheritance, without marrying another woman who happened to be very, very wealthy, this man ended up accumulating somewhere from $4 to $17 million while in Congress.
That is just amazing.
I almost want to say it can't be true, but I know it must be.
Well, this guy, he goes and he earmarks this highway project for this area in Chicago.
But two months before Hastert does this, he goes and he invests and he buys 65-70 acres, then goes back in his office and says, okay, let's earmark this for these developers and have a highway going through it, this land that I invested, and he actually gets it.
So what he spends, let's say, $200,000-$300,000 on these lands, after two or three months, he collects $1.7 million.
After two or three months, overnight, literally overnight, he buys the land, he puts the highway through, he sells the land.
Simple.
That's it.
You know what?
Here's the deal with that, though.
Isn't that the accusation, the false accusation against Mr. Smith when he goes to Washington in that movie?
Isn't that what they try to do to destroy him, is say that he did some phony land deal to drive up the prices and take over some land with federal power or something in order to drive up the price of his next to it or something?
This is the definition of corruption in the American system.
You just nailed it.
This is even fatter, because this actually ended up making it, you know, just only for one or two days, as the pattern goes with the mainstream media.
They don't do it like, let's say, Watergate and pursuing it day after day after day.
So people, they say, yeah, this is enough.
You're not going to have this guy in this office.
No, they just run the headline for a couple of days.
So it was open.
Everybody knew about it.
Nobody did anything.
Who would do something?
I mean, the only thing that I can think of are people voting him out of office.
This guy has been involved in one scandal after another scandal after another scandal.
And the amazing part is that people in Chicago, every two years, they went back to the polls and they reelected this guy.
And not for two or three or four terms.
I'm talking about for nearly 10 terms, this guy kept getting reelected.
So you kind of look at it and say, well, what's wrong, people?
And it's not like they don't know.
A lot of people, they shrug it off and they say, oh, what can you do?
They're all corrupt.
Well, you are saying you want this health care bill, right?
You're trusting these corrupt people with your health care?
Are you trusting these people with your national security?
You're trusting these people with how your tax money is going to be spent?
You admit that they're corrupt and vote them out.
Don't just shrug it off and say they're all like that and say, maybe we should go down the independent road.
Maybe we should vote independent.
But what does it take to get people to say enough is enough?
And that's the real question, because Hastert is only one of many.
I wrote another piece on Chicago.
I mean, you're looking at, I mean, she's at least a mixed bag.
You're looking at someone like Jan Schakowsky, congresswoman.
She has some good records.
OK, this woman stood up on Blackwater, which was really good.
Right.
Well, she's an intelligence committee.
Right.
And and her husband is a convicted felon.
This guy, her husband, Robert Creamer.
OK, he's a Democratic strategist who worked actually who hired Rahm Emanuel 22 years ago and gave him his first fundraising job.
This guy, her husband worked and ran the campaign for daily.
He ran the campaign for Blagojevich.
Everybody that you see as criminal, this guy, Jan Schakowsky's husband, helped and worked for and worked with.
Right.
Then for 10 years, from 1993, 1994 to 2005, he embezzled and he did check getting.
And guess what?
He took two and a half million dollars.
If you fraud at the bank and then you went to jail.
OK, deal with this woman.
OK, she says she didn't know, even though she signed every one of those tax returns with her husband, Jan Schakowsky.
OK, she didn't read them, she said.
All right.
And she was also part of the board of the director for the foundation where the guy, her husband, was using the for all this embezzlement.
Right.
Even though she was on the border on the board, she said she didn't know.
She didn't understand.
It kind of went, you know, past her.
Well, if she's that stupid, this woman is that stupid and despotic.
She shouldn't be in Congress.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
As simple as that.
OK, if she's that naive and stupid, she shouldn't be in Congress.
She shouldn't be on the Intel Committee.
On the other hand, if she knew and if she she's lying, then she should be in jail.
But again, it ends up like what's going on in Chicago.
People, they're going and they want the people.
The answer is pretty simple, too.
I mean, the people are the same everywhere.
The job of a congressman is to bring home the bacon.
The job of every congressman is to try to steal more money from the rest of the congressional districts than get stolen from his or try to bring back as much as they can.
And any politician who doesn't act that way, his constituents will complain.
That's what letters to the editor are for, to say, I'm mad because my congressman isn't working hard enough to bring home the money.
I read an article just the other day about Pennsylvania's Mirtha based economy because they have no other economy.
They have the warfare state and the sheet metal factory doesn't go unless the tanks roll.
And so, John Mirtha, the whole society in parts of his state, you know, at least in his district, depend on him bringing federal money for military contracts so these people can have jobs.
Otherwise, they're, you know, we all know with the Depression and everything else, they're screwed anyway.
But as a whole, as a nation, Scott, we are depending on these guys to watch for our civil liberty.
Then we are complaining and mumbling about, you know, the fact that, you know, they are not holding people accountable.
They have abdicated their oversight responsibility.
In fact, look at the, you know, for the last three, four years, the confidence rate in Congress is less than 14, 15 percent.
It's the lowest it's been.
So, you know, it's like, yeah, you're right.
Locally, yeah, they're saying, well, this guy is bringing home the bacon.
But as a nation, we're all suffering, saying, well, why are they renewing the Patriot Act?
Why are they giving this contract?
Why aren't they holding anyone accountable?
Well, look at these people.
First of all, they are the ones who should be held accountable, you know.
You think Justice Department, they don't have files on these guys?
They didn't have it only on Hansen.
They had it on several other people in Congress.
Just from what I know, well, if they want to go after Justice Department and want to really exercise oversight, it's very easy.
You know, Mueller can have a meeting and say, by the way, Congressman, we have this and this and that, you know, like what they did with Harmon.
You know, Dane Harmon.
Well, and it's my position that there's no, if there's a legitimate reason for the Justice Department to exist at all, it should simply be to prosecute other government officials.
Well, they're working with each other.
They are padding each other, and neither one of these branches basically have been serving us.
Hey, I want to let you talk about Harmon.
I like talking about Jane Harmon, too.
Isn't she fun to talk about?
Let's talk about her.
But first, I didn't ask you what the bribes were for.
They brought satchels of cash for Dennis Hastert, and I guess the easiest explanation is it was the Armenian Genocide Resolution.
But was that it?
I mean, is Dennis Hastert in with these drug dealers for real, or they were just the guys that brought, they were the bag men?
That was, that genocide was a very miniscule, small part of this.
Some of what they had Hastert do for them had to do with information, and we are looking at highly classified sensitive information.
Another dealing they had with Hastert actually had specifically, and this is only on Hastert's case, not the case that I had in Washington, D.C., counterintelligence with all the other congressional people, including Hastert, but had a lot, a lot of it had to do with Illinois.
In fact, some of those actually included the mayor, Mayor Daley, because the headquarters for these operatives since 1993 had been, I believe still is, but I don't know, had been Chicago.
Well, so if you're a criminal, move there, because that's where the money's at.
But it's deeper than that, Scott, because when you say these criminals, these operatives, well, these operatives, they also serve our foreign policy-related entities, whether in the CIA or the State Department.
For example, these foreign operatives are the ones who actually go to places like Yinyang in China, and they organize uprising there.
They are the ones who are doing the, a lot of dirty work for the CIA in Central Asia.
So their operations happen to be beneficial overseas for our foreign policy sector, at least the shady part of our foreign policy sector.
Which is all of it.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, let's talk about, I think this is sort of the ultimate political term, right?
This is, if there's one name, one personality that you ought to be able to beat people over the head with and say, would you look at this and get them to finally want to vote out the whole mess of them or whatever it is they're supposed to do?
Maybe not vote for any of them ever again would be a better thing.
But this lady, Jane Harman, Sabelle Edmonds, Jane Harman is a burned Israeli spy.
She was burned, not just at CongressionalQuarterly.org or .com, whichever, CQ.com there, Jeff Stein's great reporting.
But it was followed up and confirmed and developed by the Washington Post and the New York Times, who each did one big piece on it.
And so there's a Congresswoman right now represents, I think, Long Beach, part of Los Angeles that I'm, for some reason, stuck here.
And this lady has already been busted, and she didn't have to resign, and nobody else really said anything.
And the Post and the Times never ran a second article about it ever again, and the whole thing went away.
And there's literally a burned foreign government agent in the frigging Congress.
Well, you are talking about Israel, and when it comes to Israel, all deals are off.
Because the same, you know, you're talking about her.
How about the two spies who were sent free?
But you're talking about Washington Post and New York Times following up on this and confirming it.
But on the other hand, the other side, the large network of Zionist-oriented media people here, and that includes the alternative media, they attacked Jeff Stein.
They went out of their way to actually make this excuse saying, oh, this was happening because Harmon was tough on CIA.
I mean, you're looking at, I'm talking about not only U.S. mainstream media, Scottie, I'm talking about the so-called alternative media.
Yeah, like Laura Rosen at War and Peace.
Absolutely.
Well, I'm in Washington, D.C.
This lady, Laura Rosen, she's in Washington, D.C.
And she's done a lot of great work in the past, by the way, which is why this is such a problem.
Well, because Laura Rosen cannot separate herself from Israel's interests.
Therefore, she shouldn't even have written about this, okay?
She should have excused herself.
She may be a good reporter in some other areas, because no one is purely bad or good.
But on the other hand, there are people, and there are unfortunately many reporters, including U.S. mainstream media and the alternative media, who cannot separate themselves from Israel's interests, okay?
And she happens to be a very good example of this.
And I'm not saying it only based on Harmon's case.
But you know what?
That's not even, I don't think, a legitimate explanation.
Because there are a lot of people who care a lot about Israel, and that's why they oppose things like this to the nth degree, to the same degree as anybody who doesn't like Israel at all would oppose it.
Well, there is Israel, and then you're looking at the right-wing Zionists.
But you're looking at a lot of things that the Israel lobby does.
I mean, to equate that with, let's say, either Jewish people or the entire Israel, that would be wrong.
Sure, sure.
For example, a good example is Haaretz.
Haaretz, you know, Israeli newspaper, they are far better in giving coverage and more objective than our own media here.
Yeah, but I mean, Rosen is much more of a Haaretz kind of lady.
She's not a Likudnik.
But boy, did she get that story wrong.
And I think we should be specific here.
I mean, the spin that you're talking about that was in any of the major media that paid any attention to it at all, and really especially among the somewhat alternative media, the blogosphere, was that Porter Goss had a vendetta.
You kind of referred to this, but I'd like to be specific here.
Porter Goss had some vendetta against Jane Harman.
And yet Porter Goss's only role in the story that Jeff Stein wrote at all was that he did his bound duty to notify the House Speaker that one of her inferiors in her party was under investigation by, or could possibly very likely soon be under investigation, because she's been overheard by the NSA who were listening to an Israeli spy, and turned out he was on the phone with her.
So all Goss did was notify.
That was his role in the whole thing.
He notified.
He had nothing to do with what was going on or the construction of the facts of the case at all.
So it was, I mean, Laura Rosen, really epic fail on that one.
And everyone else who followed her lead, too.
It was not failure.
Jeff Stein got that exactly right.
I don't believe you're that naive.
It was not failure.
It was not naivety.
It was not being misinformed.
It had nothing to do with that.
The same, similar, actually similar scenario happened with the AIPAC espionage case.
The same people turned it to the First Amendment issue and the freedom of press.
Right.
Okay?
Do you think that is just because they are naive?
No.
This is a propaganda that is specifically designed, specifically formatted, and specifically implemented.
So this is exactly what happens.
In some cases, you cannot attribute it to a person's naivety or being misinformed.
And in this case, I know at least one of the FBI people who knew about this, who actually talked about this to the newspapers.
And it was not only the NSA, but it was also the FBI.
And one of the main reasons he decided to disclose this particular case, because he already knew what was going to happen with the AIPAC trial.
This was just a couple of months before they said they were going to drop the case.
So those two cases are absolutely related.
Well, sure.
I mean, the reason that the investigation never went anywhere is because Gonzales, the Attorney General, agreed to kill it if she would – oh, wait.
No, I forget.
No, no, no.
She agreed with the spy that she would intervene with the White House or Gonzales to try to get the charges reduced against Rosen and Weisman.
And then Gonzales let her off if she would defend the illegal NSA spying, which was not how they got her.
They got her on a legal FISA warrant against the Israeli spy, not against her.
Well, obviously, she did better than that.
They dropped the entire case.
Right.
They just got rid of the whole thing.
But, yeah.
Amazing.
Don't be too very kind with people who actually specifically go and design this propaganda machine.
You know, I guess I'm just not on all the right email lists about what are our talking points for today supposed to be.
I need to sign up for, you know, what everybody's supposed to say today so that those things are the things I can specifically refute each day.
Well, you're lucky you don't live in Washington, D.C.
Unfortunately, where I live, and I get to meet with a lot of people, everybody knows everybody and everybody talks.
You know, how much of these conversations are rumor, how much of this stuff are due to whatever reason.
But in this city, you get to see and hear a lot of things.
Okay?
And I can tell you with 100 percent certainty, 100 percent certainty in the Rosen case, this was not stupidity.
Okay?
Right.
Yeah.
Well, it sure doesn't seem like it.
All right.
So now let's wrap up here, Cybele, with everybody again.
I'm sorry I should have mentioned it a couple of times by now.
It's Cybele Edmonds, the former contract language specialist for the FBI-turned-whistleblower.
She keeps the news site, boilingfrogspost.com, which you can read.
But I wanted to let you go ahead and finish up with a little more, if you want, about people's responsibility here.
Now, I'm not really too into voting.
If you want to make this about voting, that's fine.
You can say whatever you want.
But at some point, something's got to give here where people at least stop believing them or something, you know?
Well, the problem is you're right.
It doesn't come down to voting only.
And it's very easy for people to label, and this is absolutely wrong, those people who are talking about action and say, oh, these people are radical.
You're looking at a system that is rotting on all fronts, whether it's civil liberties here at home, our foreign policy.
Look, how many wars are we engaged in?
When did we declare war on Yemen?
When did we declare war on Pakistan or certain regions of Pakistan?
We don't even have to declare them anymore.
We are just going in and out of places, bomb and kill and come back.
And the military-industrial complex is doing great.
It is action time, because Internet has been a great tool.
And we cannot say people are not informed, because a lot of people actually are.
And my new website is actually proving that, because I'm getting thousands and thousands of visitors.
I'm getting hundreds of emails.
But it has been limited to this I call yak-yaki and saying how horrible things are.
And as you said, scandals after scandals, they are not secret.
They are out there.
Everybody is reading about it.
Everybody knows about it.
But the question comes down to what do we do?
And obviously, it's not vote.
You know, they were calling Obama a bush light.
My prediction for 2010 is they're going to call him bush dark.
And that is literally, metaphorically, and allegorically, because this was a candidate of change.
No, he wasn't a candidate of change.
He was a candidate of establishment.
And then they present you with these candidates.
The establishment presents you with these candidates.
You get McCain.
You get Obama.
There are no differences.
And I believe a lot of people are getting to see it.
But the question is how do you channel this and translate it into action to say enough is enough?
Because you have to turn this system upside down and inside out, okay?
And with the Internet, the possibility is there.
But I'm not seeing the movement being organized in such a way that we would get what we need to have.
Otherwise, we are absolutely doomed.
And I'm not saying it as a really pessimistic doom.
Just look at the state of our country.
Look at it.
I'm talking about financially, whether it's our deficit.
I'm talking about our civil liberties.
I'm talking about our foreign policy.
Look at the corruption that is happening, scandals after scandals.
And what?
There needs to be a real change, and the change has to come from people.
It's not going to be this wishful thinking that, oh, yeah, they put out there, the guy got millions and millions of dollars.
The establishment put him out there, and they got him.
How McCain would have been different?
McCain would have done exactly the same thing.
You think there was going to be any difference with McCain?
Well, he might have nuked Moscow by now or something.
I don't know about that guy.
Maybe not.
And maybe, you know what?
This guy has been in office only for one year, and look what he's been doing.
I mean, just look at the civilian casualties in Afghanistan.
Oh, well, I sure don't mean to stick up for Barack Obama.
John McCain has that particular very George W. Bush-ian mix of arrogance and stupidity that, you know, I'll take the arrogance and the mass murder with a little bit of intelligence at least.
Can I give it like a half a percent?
Well, Scott, that can sometimes be more dangerous.
That can be sometimes more dangerous than conning.
There will be a good piece on my side with Dan Ellsberg.
He believed he was conned into voting, and because of that, he believes Obama is a con man because he conned people.
It will be interesting to look at that perspective and listen and read his words and really think about it, okay, because we do have to do that.
But then, as I said, after thinking, after talking, we need to translate it into action, and the country is ready.
Mainstream media, alternative media, unfortunately, the sad part is any candidate had even a potential of doing even a tiny bit better.
They were marginalized, you know, what they did with Dr. Paul.
You know, they go about calling them nutcases and racists, and they paint these wrong colors on these people and say, no, we want you to look at the establishment.
And we choose them for you, the candidates, okay?
That's why I call it the two sides of the same coin.
Now you pick, you know, one of the two.
No matter who you pick, the establishment wins, and that's the system we have today.
All right, well, I think that Boiling Frogs Post has been a great addition to the alternative media.
You know, you can't do the revolution all by yourself, but it's a hell of a great website, and you've got a lot of great writers and articles up there already.
And it's been how many months now?
With Boiling Frogs Post, it's been only two months and ten days.
And we have a great team.
We have people like Peppa Escobar.
We have Christina Borgeson.
People can go and check out about us.
And hopefully, these people, these are just real investigative journalists who really want to do the work.
They haven't even found alternative channels where they can go and do cover these blacked-out issues and cases.
And hopefully, we'll be able to do that.
Well, you know, I think there's a major change going on.
You know, a lot of horse companies went out of business when the car was invented.
And there's a major change going on in the media.
The newspapers are going bankrupt and will be merging together more and more.
They're laying off people like mad.
And there are a lot of people out there who really want to be journalists.
And the thing is, you know, places like the Boiling Frogs Post and other alternative places don't have the money.
Antiwar.com certainly doesn't have the money to pay real journalists to go out there.
We can pay a pittance to our opinion writers.
But we can't pay full-time journalists to really go out there and be investigative journalists.
You know, we have to deal second-hand stuff most of the time.
But, I mean, not that we don't get our scoops because we certainly do.
But I think what's going to happen is we will find a way through the market where all these washed-out journalists who, you know, didn't make the cut when the Great Depression hit will end up finding their way to places like the Boiling Frogs and Antiwar.com and, you know, the best of the alternative media.
And then, you know, it's all ripples in a pond, you know.
But having good information readily accessible to people, having a place for them to go and find the truth, if they're actually looking for it, is priority number one, right?
Absolutely.
And I tell you what, and this is not to make you feel good, but I start my day every single morning with my first coffee, Antiwar.com.
That's where I get a pretty good view of what's going on, what's happening, and that basically determines, you know, what I'm going to research for that day because of Antiwar.com.
There are, you know, very few publications, online publications I visit.
I don't go to hundreds of websites like some people do, but Antiwar is the first place I go to every single morning, and I've been doing that since 2003.
Awesome.
Well, I promise you, Angela, we'll be sending that out in the next fundraising pitch.
Thank you very much for your time on the show today, Sabel.
Thank you, Scott.
Anytime.
All right, y'all, that was Sabel Edmonds, a former contract language specialist turned whistleblower from the FBI.
There are, I don't know, tens of thousands of pages of things by and about her that you ought to go read, so grab your Google and get to work.
