From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A production of iHeartRadio.
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is Noah.
They call me Ben. We're joined as always with our super producer Dylan, the Tennessee pal Fagan. Most importantly, you are here. That makes this the stuff they don't want you to know. Friends, neighbors, Fellow conspiracy realist Matt Noel Dylan, I was thinking we keep this beginning part short because as we record right now, it's Friday, March twenty first, and drone strikes are continuing across the globe US, Russia, China, Ron, pretty much anybody who can build a combat drone is
doing so. And they're doing so because, on the one hand, there are tremendous advantages. Right, you're not sending a manned F thirty five into enemy territory risking the life of a pilot, you know, or you're not sending a special operation in risking the lives of the people conducting that operation.
Yeah, I mean, you know, it's it's definitely a positive thing when you consider the horrors of like past, you know, trench warfare and all of that stuff. But it has its own kind of bag of badgers in terms of potential negatives as well.
Obviously, well, yeah, and individual human beings are being targeted in places across the world for a myriad of reasons. And the way technology has evolved in the access both individuals and governments have to every person's lives, you know, the digital lives that we all lead. Deciding who gets targeted what gets targeted has become increasingly complex and yet in some ways insanely simple.
Yeah, that's the thing. So on the one hand, as we said, the idea of these sorts of targeted strikes, they can ostensibly, in theory, save lives, but they can also produce operational costs, just to put the petty part out there. But on the other hand, they can lead to disastrous mistakes, the deaths of innocent people. Someone was literally just in the wrong place at the wrong time, or made friends with the wrong person on social media.
This leads to the erosion of democracy. No fooling, no hyperbole. Tonight, we're exploring an ongoing conspiracy. Who gets to decide who dies. You know, here in the United States. Let's be honest, it's not as though the public at large gets to vote on the fate of every suspected terrorists. But our country does have a system for determining this. It is murky, it is powerful, it is fascinating, it is bureaucratic, and
it is terrifying. Friends and neighbors. We want to introduce you to the disposition matrix.
So weird. Yeah, and it's not just the US. Remember the old five Eyes group that once was that is now eroded. I don't even know. I think there's just one big old eye that sounds about it.
Well, it's it's uh, well, we'll see how how these comments age because uh yeah, five eyes may be going blind, but that might be a story for another evening. The disposition matrix, Uh it sounds like a silly name, but it's it's a very real thing. And to understand why it's and why we consider it a conspiracy, we're going to have to start at the beginning of the United States. After word from our sponsors, here are the facts, all right. The US is like other democracies in theory, it's defined
by rule of law. In theory, it's defined by the rule of the public. You vote for representatives. We've said it before. You vote for representatives who, in theory will represent your wishes and desires. And I don't know, it's something we take for granted so often. It's so weird to remember what a huge change democracy was back in the day, right back in the founding of the US.
Yeah, I mean, the concept of it on paper is fantastic. The idea that you put your faith in an individual who has the best interest of the people at heart, and hopefully through them your will is enacted.
It's a nice thing to say yes and tell everybody yes.
And it's a difficult thing to do right in a way that is fair to everyone. When when the US was founded itself by conspiracy in seventeen seventy six, a lot of other nations at the time were what we would call absolute monarchies. What does that mean? That means that if the ruler wakes up on the wrong side of the bed, or they catch a case of the Jimmy's a phrase I made up, they could instantly radically change the laws of the land, and thank you. I mean,
it's nuts when you think about it. A monarch could order the death of hundreds or thousands of people with no checks on their power. If you're targeted in an absolute monarchy, you have zero legal recourse habeas corpus, the right to appeal, the right to even just go to court. None of that's a thing. The king, the queen, anybody in charge. They could just say, hey, go kill that guy.
Oh. Historically, the only real recourse that the common people who are affected by this have is is revolution, is further violence, you know, is overthrow. There was really no other mechanism in place, and that, in theory, is what democracy provides.
Yeah, there is a court. There's just one guy and he's a Well, maybe I think absolute monarchy is a great disc that's something we should use that somehow, And that dude is absolute monarchy. It just sounds like it.
Malarchy.
It's the opposite of hot cheese, which is a phrase we're bringing back on ridiculous history or something's cool. It's hot cheese. Yah, melty malleable yellow so yellow melty. So Yeah. It's a great point. For most of human history, this absolute monarchical thing applied to any kind of rule. You could imagine international situations obviously would get complicated, think of the multiple rulers who bucked against the Athlete Church in Europe.
But domestic decisions were the whims of a single person, and the only avenue for serious political change was not just we said revolution earlier, but it could also be war, or it could be incalculable tragedies like the Black Death, you know, like the plague correction from the Rods right, Because the point is by hook or by crook, what had to happen was a great mass of people usually had to die for some sort of lasting change to occur. And if we're again being honest, a revolution or a
war didn't usually change all that much. It's just like new management took over. There was a new parent company, and they kept the same system as before. They just put themselves at the top.
A soft set.
Unless we forget the year old assassination, which was you know, a good standby very valid too. You could think out, well, yeah, you could take out one or two really important people and not have the same effect, but you know that thing where where those people are no longer in charge, and then you just insert a few other people that are more to your liking, and then new management.
Then it becomes about like the ideology of the winning you know, revolutionaries, like and if that's even that much better or like, is it even is it self serving in a different direction?
You know?
And this stuff takes a really long time to kind of shake out.
Yeah, please check out our series on the concept of assassination historically a spoiler, It exists and will exist because it works. And if you're looking at the history here, you'll see that the US and France and other emergent democracies sought to change this system. You know, even the most powerful person, they reason, needed to have some sort of rubric, some kind of logic or system behind ordering murder. The president, they argued, would be the servant of the people,
never their king. And that applies to prime ministers as well. If we fast forward to let's say, Dylan, give us a fast forward tunk you perfect stop it there, all right, So we're right after World War Two, the US already has a pretty bad jacket of when it comes to democracy and theory versus democracy and action. There are all kinds of disasters, massacres, genocides, assassinations. To your earlier point, Matt, they run against the letter of the law, the spirit
of democracy. There's this new world on the horizon, just like other management shifts in nation states, the US says we're going to make a better world pox Americana, right, global peace with the US at the top. And they were able to do this because much of Europe and Asia, you know, it was in shambles after this horrific series of events ca World War Two. The planet looked around, the human planet looked around, and they said, okay, never again. But war never really disappears.
It's challenges.
Hey, it's like government, it evolves.
Yeah, I mean you know, I was looking up, well, we were while you were opening the show bend. Just are wars less deadly? Now? Like numbers wise? Like does that? Does the data shake out? And like the soft answer is yes, But there are other factors, like other forms of collateral damage and maybe didn't exist because of the precision, because of the range and the way that these kinds of modern warfare tactics are deployed.
Yeah for sure, Okay, are we gonna can we do the fast forward machine again?
Yeah, let's do it. Let's go to uh September eleventh.
Hey heard of it, all right?
I was there, not there there, but I remember seeing it on TV in high school.
Yep.
Just let's throw in a couple tiny little pieces of context here, because as a part of that whole Pas Americana thing, the United States going up against the Soviet Union, we engaged in a little thing in Afghanistan and a couple other places, you know, in the Middle East and in Africa with Soviet Union forces the United States forces, but as mostly trained individuals within countries, right, And we had these proxy wars that occurred, which created a whole
bunch of militarized groups that were splintered further and further, and a few of those came together and a couple theoretically attacked the United States on September eleventh, two thousand and one, and that created this brand new thing that our democracy and a coalition of the willing decided was going to be a war on a concept, and that concept would be terror.
Yeah. I'm really glad you point that out, because that's what we're getting to when we say war evolves like government evolves, right, And it's just like that Philip Larkin poem which has a terrible title, This be the Verse, but it's an amazing poem. Everyone should read it a war on a concept rather than a contained war on a specific nation or a group of nations. The new enemies, many of whom are radicalized by their experiences surviving proxy wars.
They don't exist in established military structure. We're talking shifting, decentralized coalitions of what you could loosely call extremist groups, and they're launching these waves of unpredictable asymmetrical attacks around the world. Hit an embassy one day, right, or maybe hit a single person, you know, via improvised explosive device,
or thenaby tried to take down an airport. By the way, as we're recording, Heathrow is in some deep thank you for bp me, Dylan, Did you guys hear about this now?
And hereby Heathrow, what's going on there?
Uh?
He throw lost power, his massive fire and thousands of people are are stranded at at the airport or tribe or planes are turning around and right now people are still trying to figure out what happened. The elephant in the room there always is going to be is it an accident? Was it on purpose? Sure?
Well, that's something else the factor And like I mean in terms of this evolution of war. We also have to think about like the evolution of cyber warfare and you know, hacking of infrastructure and causing terror you know, quote unquote in that way.
The weaponization of information. Gosh, great point.
So hey, let's jump back to war, guys. So the United States government and that Coalition of the Willing realized, especially after a bunch of countries deployed a bunch of troops on the ground into Afghanistan, into Iraq and too other places across the Middle East, right after September eleventh run, right around early two thousand and three, they realized, oh, this battle, it kind of reminds us of something that time that we tried to expend Soviet resources by having
them fight giant proxy wars in this same exact place in Afghanistan, in particular.
The Banber of Empires exactly.
Just realizing that, oh, we cannot fight this war the way we've fought previous wars, even the last time we were in Iraq. We can't fight the war like this. They needed a way to target these far flowng individuals in groups, right, and hey, they said, we've got this new technology.
Yeah, this is the way I think we can. We can approach this on the ground through personal experience. So a growing number of powerful policy makers are saying, look, we're dealing with a new threat, right, and we are functioning under military and democratic norms or policies or laws rules of the road that are unequipped to deal with this new flavor of danger. So if we stick with the rules of the road comparison for a moment, let's set the scene. If we get some traffic, sounds perfect,
all right, You're an average person. You're stuck in traffic. It stinks. You want to get out of this mess of these shrieking orangs, these bumper to bumpered tail lights. But you're just another driver on the road. You have to obey the law. In this comparison, the United States, more so than many other countries, is the most powerful car out there. Uncle Sam owns the road. Uncle Sam makes the laws of traffic. So if you run in to any kind of complication or a thing you don't like,
you can just change the rules. Right, And that is what brings us to tonight's exploration. It's a struggle for democracy. It's a profound philosophical operational dilemma. It's really kind of a question about the soul of a country. If you champion yourself as a protector of human rights, why are you creating secret list of people to be captured, kidnapped or killed. This is a true story. They were originally
called killed list. But this all these things we're describing now, for this context, they have led our nation to something called the disposition matrix.
That's right, that's right.
And it all goes back in my mind to the Cold War. Back in the day. It was how do you find out if somebody in their heart of hearts believes in the other side?
Right?
How do you know? It goes back to Spycraft's stuff and this paranoia about anyone could be a member of the enemy team.
Right.
So, but in this case it's specifically, you know, they use that what do they use that word when they're talking about the war on terror? What they were saying without saying it was the war on Islamic terror. That is what they meant in those in those rooms, right, and that became a thing that was not okay to say. And but that is ultimately when they're in there in the White House situation room on Terror Tuesday, they are that's Yeah, that's what they call it.
It's like Taco Tuesday.
Holy crap, we're going to get into it. But like, that's what this thing was and and probably is. They were trying to figure out who could possibly be on the other team, and in this case, it was anybody that may be a part of one of these tiny splinter groups that are hidden away and unknown, and and how do you figure out if somebody is or is not? And that's why this thing, the disposition matrix, was born.
And we'll see other precedents that will need to lean on, such as co Intel Probe, which also conducts what critics would call thoroughly un American attempts to leverage a divination for the greater good. We'll pause for a word from our sponsors, and then we'll introduce you to the disposition matrix. Here's where it gets crazy, all right, The term sounds
of twos, right. Disposition matrix? What is that? That's I propose that's a thing where if someone is hostile to you, or you know, rude to you could just say I don't like your disposition matrix here, dog, But.
It's in a disposition matrix. Dodge you.
This, Yeah, in this sense. It is a concrete and dangerous thing. It is way beyond a kill list or list of names. It's a database. It's used to track, capture, kidnap, or murder suspected enemies of the United States. And we are purposely choosing our language here. Other euphemisms would be rendition instead of kidnapping or you know, enhanced interrogation. Sure, yeah, disposing.
Of well yeah, it had everything. So it was a person's full biography, right where they went to school, where
they currently live, the people they associate with. It had stuff in there about what particular threat they could pose to the United States or its allies again, like locations where they've been or might be, like with probabilities of where they might be, as well as a range of how to get rid of rid of them as you're saying, there have been like rendition or you know, kidnapping them and taking them to a black site maybe somewhere in East Africa, or how to take them out like the
thing of those old lists we talked about with how to take out Castro think many versions of that for individual humans.
Yeah, again, it's way more than a list of names. We're going to dive into that level of sophistication, as well as the inherent problems. In a moment I think before we continue, it is crucial to note the public owes a great debt of thanks to a journalist named Greg Miller. Back in twenty twelve, Greg Miller brought the existence of the disposition matrix to the public eye. His investigative series is the first in depth look at this. Prior to this journalist work, the mere existence of the
matrix was officially considered a secret. And it's such a pickle, you know, because democracy prides itself on due process. So how did this bastion of human rights and rule of law find itself not just put it out hitless, but indeed going a step further and institutionalizing eurocratizing I don't know if that's a word codifying the practice. The story really, in this regard starts with a guy named John O. Brennant, not O apostrophe Brennant, but like his middle name, starts with him.
He was born in New Jersey in nineteen fifty five and could be considered a pretty classic American success story. He started to work for the CIA in nineteen eighty and after that he answered an employment add or a one hat in the New York Times.
That's how he got the job. I love that love he's reading the classified and he goes, oh, okay, yes, yea.
So I guess that has very different recruitment tactics back in those days. But whatever it takes. He made a lot of particularly controversial decisions in his tenure, as well as some pretty powerful enemies in the United States and abroad.
Yeah, and he's he's like the success story that Drake wants to be. He started at the bottom of the CIA, and as you said, he rose through the ranks because of his fairly strident stands or some would say unfairly strident stands on bending the rules in the face of a greater good or in the face of enormous threats. He's the guy who defended torture, extraordinary rendition, enhanced interrogation.
This came to the four when he would be in confirmation hearings and he would say things like, look, I personally don't approve of waterboarding, but I didn't stop anybody from doing it because we had a mission. And there were consequences to this. He was prevented from becoming director of the CIA or National Intelligence back in two thousand and eight. I want to say because of this, but internally he had a lot of power. He had the experience,
he had the expertise. He was considered a top authority. Colleagues admired him. He was also administration agnostic, which I think is a very important point here. So when you hear us reference you know, one of the Bush administrations, where you hear US reference the Barack Obama administration, we have to realize that Brennan was there regardless of which political party took the you know, took the King of the Hill seat.
So yeah, well, and remember that that's six years up until two thousand and eight. That's six years of sending people to Guantanamo. Sometimes taxi drivers that accidentally got caught up in the situation. Sometimes that is, you know, the suspected leader of organizations that gets Antiguantanamo or to some other black site, and it's torture. This guy oversaw with all the rest of the military and intelligence apparatus of the United States and a bunch of other countries torturing people.
Mm. Yeah, and he was Look, there's no two ways about it. These programs illegal and ethically fraud as they are. They did, they did get actual bad guys, but they also got innocent people who just happened to have similar names. That's a that's a huge piece to remember to that taxi driver example. As as Britain is the White House counter Terrorism Advisor under the administration of President Barack Obama.
He leads the charge to institutionalize, to codify this stuff, and his former colleagues and officials came forward, first anonymously and then later with their names on it, and they said, this guy is the principle, like the driving force of these kill lists. One guy. Daniel Benjamin later told The New York Times that Bretan had quote more power and influence than anyone in a comparable position in the last
twenty years. So this guy is This guy is a guy you can't really vote for directly, but he is making the moves, yep.
And guys, to be honest, making this type of list of like your top enemies is something any military is going to do in a time of war, Right, who are the people we can take out that will have the most effect. That makes sense. It's weird to think of it in a matrix of all the other moves that the government is taking at the time, right.
Yeah, yeah, a sea change proper, you know, a change in the way warfare is conducted. This CIA becomes essentially a paramilitary force, or they're doing a lot of things a paramilitary force would do instead of an intelligence agency. The drone fleet massively expands. More and more groups are getting into the mixtape of the disposition matrix, you know,
and they're also helping carry out its desires. It soon evolves or expands to take over all the other kill list that various drone programs run by various other US agencies and departments have. But yeah, by the way, I guess we should mention that the Pentagon Jaysack, et cetera. They had their killest too, and the matrix is bringing them all together. The word you would hear often on the Terrorist Tuesdays would be something like streamlining.
Yeah, geez, just on that same tip Ben about how everything's changing so much. We mentioned a couple episodes back about the technology of drones and even using like a mothership drone and multiple smaller drones that could have explosives attached to them. That goes back to the original invasion of a rock like during George Bush's father's rain, and that technology has been involving and evolving. It's been used.
The predator drones were in use when we invaded a Rock for the second time, and then that technology has been evolving. And then we get up to twenty twelve here when we start to learn about this stuff. Drone technology is so far advanced and the abilities that each single one has to theoretically theoretically target an individual, right, and we'll learn like how that's the kind of sales pitch thing that you would get right from the manufacturer.
Right right. We also so you know, we know that there was a strong, a strong desire for that kind of technological aptitude. Just historically. I'm trying to remember, we did an episode of Ridiculous History on this. I'm trying to remember the experimental plane that could deploy other planes. We're saying it is, there's always been a precedent for this. The technology started to catch up with the desire and
the imagination. Brennan is not himself designing UAV on mandarial vehicles, but he is reaching a position of prominence because of the climate at the time. The US is beset with global threats they're coming from multiple regions. There was this very real, and I hate to say it not invalid since that plane, by the old rules, would not just put the US on its back foot, it could mean that thousands of innocent people would die. So we had
to take serious emergency action. If we didn't, people were saying in the halls of power, then September eleventh could be more than a single tremendous catastrophe. It could be a harbinger, a precedent.
Yeah, that's definitely what was driving everyone and everything. I think at this point, the thought that that could happen again. And while a catastrophe to the level of September eleven hasn't occurred in the United States yet, across the years that we're covering here, terror attacks or what we're labeled as terror attacks were occurring across the globe, and often
in countries that were allies of the United States. So you can see why that pressure was there, and because the United States has set itself up as that peacekeeper, essentially, the one that goes in when stuff goes wrong, the human beings at the top, like Brennan here again, I keep trying to go back to internal pressure that somebody
feels right. Sure, there's the there's the pressure overall that maybe an organization or like a governmental organization or an arm of the military feels But then that individual when they go to sleep at night feels it.
Yeah, and it's real. It's a ticking time bomb kind of situation because you can think of various moments in history and various things immortalized in film and fiction where someone says, yeah, I have to be sure I'm a bad guy, but I have to be the guy who keeps the other bad guys from the door tip of the cap to true detective you know, Brennan, his supporters, the various US presidents, everyone else. It's not as though they were waking up gleefully planning to kill folks for laughs.
They were, perhaps at first reluctantly bending and then later breaking established norms in service of this greater good. You know, call me a villain if my if you, but if my actions are saving the lives of innocent people, then yeah, I'll let it stand as it is. I mean, at first, the kill list themselves, right, everybody's panicking Post nine to eleven, Pre nine to eleven co Intel pro stuff, the kill
list themselves, or these observation surveillance lists. They're seen as a one and done thing, an emergency stop gap, but the mission creep always creeps, right, So it becomes a new normal in the future age of war. We can leverage information to be more precise, to be more correct, and if we lose a little bit of accountability on the way, you know, kudos to future historian grad students because we just got them their masters or their PhD studies.
Yeah, I shout out to the Rabbel Rouser index that we discovered I don't even know years back now now where we realized that there was a huge list that the FBI was keeping of people internally in the United States, not just like this, but people that they were watching. Right, So you then watched did that person take a trip to I don't know, Egypt sometime recently? Uh? Oh, now they get upgraded within that list.
Why does this guy keep going to Yemen? He doesn't have family there? Or does he?
Oh wait to say he has dual citizenship?
Oh snap, which is what they called it, the oh Snap file. The kidding, we hope, but this is maybe here we take a second to look at what the disposition matrix is how it works.
Sounds good. We're going to enter the matrix right after a quick word from our sponsor. So remember we referred to this thing as being a database, but this isn't just like an elaborate Excel spreadsheet. It is so much more than a list alone. It compiles as you said earlier, Matt,
I believe biographies of targets. It's a full dossier on their movements, their known associates, locations, group affiliations, and it goes even further than that with I guess recommended strategies for all of these various ways of handling or disposing of these individuals, including capturing, kidnapping, and even murdering them.
Yeah, like, if this guy's in this is a quote. If this guy is in Saudi Arabia, let's pull our Saudi connections right. Or if they're on public transit in the right place, let's follow them there. If they happen to be in North Africa, here's who will work with to find them. Per Greg Miller, we just can't say enough enough good stuff about your work there, mister Miller. Per him, the names of terrorism targets are also correlated toward resources that could be used to track them down.
And then you know, in the defense of the matrix or its architects, at least, you will run into justification. Right, why is this a bad guy? Here is a sealed indictment, or here is some human we gathered on this person. We are, at least internally, we are rationalizing why this person should be kidnapped or murdered. At this point, they're already heavily surveilled.
Exactly. The wielders of the matrix know that this person is directly associated with this known group that is considered a terrorist organization, right, and we know that this person has made moves X through Y, and we're worried about move Z.
So we need to take this person now.
Yeah, yeah, we see this idea that the database maps. Here's why it's called disposition matrix. It maps the disposition of suspects possibly beyond the reach of the American drone program, especially in the earlier days. If we go to the Atlantic, we'll see an excellent article by these journalists, Daniel Biman and Benjamin Wittess w I T TES that gives you a flow chart. Now, the headline of this article might strike people that some people the wrong way. It might
ruffle some feathers. The headline is how Obama decides your fate if he thinks you're a terrorist. And if we scroll through then we can see the flow chart of sort of the decision tree, and it starts with a target being identified or you could even say pitched to the matrix.
So first a target is identified in the criteria for identifying that target kind of by design is quite broad and pretty vague and based on inputs collaboration through multiple intelligence agencies who you know, are able to pull from telecommunication data, social media activity, all of the human intelligence kind of aspects that we've talked about on the show Ad nauseum, so pretty much anything you could possibly get your hands on, or your eyes on, or your ears on.
They are leveraging that stuff.
And so we've already violated a lot of what are called privacy protections in the first step. Now the data gets analyzed, you know, some coalition internally of different agencies and experts. They do that thing that people who like wine do. They sort of they smell the data, you know, the switch it around around the glass. They get the bouquet. Right. If something exists and then they say they determined. Then in step two, is this person, this individual a threat
to US national security? And again the definition of threat is super vague here. The definition of threat is kind of like the old meme of walking into a target without a shopping list and just going off vibes. This is a vibe check, they but they do. You know, I don't want to dismiss it or diminish the level of work because they're looking into associations deeply. So, yeah, this person may not be identified as a terrorist. They may have never even had a late fee at the library.
But what if they're in frequent contact with someone who knows someone who knows someone who is suspected of terrorist activity? What if they have any unexplained finances?
Yeah, however to find I mean, if there are even seven degrees from Kevin Bacon, they're going to be of interest in this situation.
The travel is a tricky thing too.
Yes, well, and to remember all that hubbub about metadata guys back in the day.
This is why this leads to this. We don't know who they are, but we basically know who's talking to who are that these nodes are communicating on a regular basis.
More or less, right, Yeah, all you really need for those leads are those tiny little dots of data. Then you can start correlating that with all this other stuff that's getting caught up.
And again, because the definitions right and the rubric is so broad here, it is possible, I'm not going to say plausible necessarily, but it is quite possible for someone to just have hit the wrong nodes of information. Right, You're in the wrong Facebook group or something, you travel
to you know, insert country here too often. And once that all this goes through, you know that Bouquet snifting, smaller experience of surveillance, and once someone is considered viable, they enter the next phase, which has the most nineteen eighties action movie blockbuster ridiculous name to kill Chain.
Yes, man, that's fine. Could you be in that? Maybe Jean Claude van Dam No, it's not quite up his alley. It needs to be a little more of like a Jason Statham type figure. I think the kill Chain.
He was in Blood Sport. I'd watch Fandamn and kill Chain.
Remember that one time we went to like an iHeart event and we got through the red carpet and John Claude van Dam was ahead of us online. I'll never forget that as long as I live.
I bumped into him and he turned around, and I thought, oh man, the guy from Time Cop is going to beat the snot out of me.
And when you said he turned around, I'm picturing him doing a roundhouse kick. To write to your.
Face, he's a very he's he's ready.
Yeah, he was ready.
He's very kind to very small.
He can get you.
Ye. This kill chain is not automatically out. Instead, it is identification to determination of what happens next, heavy surveillance, real eye of sourron stuff. If the person does appear to be a threat, you get the next part of the decision tree, a series of options for actions Drone strikes for example, or this isn't this is less common now, but special operations for on the ground attacks. Think of
Osama bin Laden extraordinary rendition. The real name for that is kidnapping and take him to a black site and figure out if he's actually a taxi driver.
Yep, yep, guys, I'm going to bring up here so we know this reporting comes out twenty twelve right then very soon after that, other countries around the world, after they get wind of it thanks to Greg Miller, other journalists start looking into the same kind of stuff in their countries. And we learned from reporting by Ian Cobain and The Guardian in July of twenty thirteen that it's
not just the United States looking at targets. It's not just all of the mechanisms you know, and organizations within the US. It is am I five, am I six. It's folks in Australia and again mostly the Five Eyed countries. It's folks all over the planet looking at some of the same information, gathering up some of the same information through their telecoms, through all of er systems, and then making recommendations to the United States as kind of I don't know, the weapon that gets aimed at people.
Yeah, yeah, it's real avengers assemble kind of thing. The Australian Secret Intelligence Service or ASIS is in there, as you mentioned massade. Obviously at first, at least on the US side, there's a lot of interest in Pakistan right and if Kakistan right in the stands And the first question for any enthusiast or fan of these things we call civil rights is do they have any civil rights? The people being accused? The answer there is no. But the second question would be, is there any sort of
at least internal check and balance, internal review? Is there? You know, like the old philosophy of the tenth man. You guys know that one.
It's third man, and what's the tenth man?
Yeah, we love numbering people, right, So the tenth man is this old idea that if there are if there's a group of ten people decision makers, right, analysts, what have you and nine of them agree on a thing, that is the job of the tenth person there to play devil's advocate, to say, what if you know and you have to have you have to have something like that. So it may be at least a comfort of if a cold comfort, to realize that targets on the disposition
matrix are to our understanding, reviewed every three months. And yeah, so if you make it without blowing up that first ninety days, that's the closest you get to something like an appeal. But you are not part of it. You may never know you're on the list.
Geez jeez, Louise.
We got to mention that when Greg Miller brought this to the public eye back in twenty twelve, holy smokes, more than a decade ago. Now, the Matrix was already a global enterprise. It was facilitating operations on and off the books in the stands in Somalia, Yemen, a couple of other countries, and the goal was to expand, to franchise out to operations across northern and Eastern Africa as well as in Iran. Okay, they were gonna they were gonna touch to Ran as well and UH with with
some friends and Massade and our British friends. They were they were quite suited to do so.
Yep, I'm gonna tenth man, the tenth man of that list. You noticed that nothing was happening in Saudi Arabia, even though the intelligence was showing that the threats were coming directly from there and some of the funding.
Yeah confirmed it. Also also notice there's not a lot of coverage of Uncle Sam's so called hegemonic backyard right the Caribbean, South and Central America.
Hm hmm, just interesting, just ye, just pointing.
That one out. You know, we're just we're walking down the street of uh of trade craft houses and we're going, oh, that's it's weird. There's no one oh.
No, one knows on that one.
Eh. Yeah, so we could assume that this with all the information we've heard so far, we could, like a lot of people back in twenty twelve, assumed that this was just an intelligence gathering op, you know what I mean, the stuff that all the countries and all the big private businesses do all the time. But it clearly, very quickly, like Day two, evolved past that into a covert assassination initiative. No trial, no jury, none of that other pesky stuff
that America appears to hold so sacro sainct. You don't know if you're on the list, right, And if you are on the list, there's no realistic way for you to appeal being on a kill list. You can't go in and say, hey, actually I am just you know, an uber driver. You're looking like I am just I am just a grad student, right, You're looking for the other ben bullet, and yes he's super down with you know, insert organization here, But that's not me. There's more than one person with this.
Name, which can happen on like something much less severe, but like a no fly list. But if I'm not mistaken, you can there is some recourse to finding out if you're on that kind of list, and getting off of it.
Correct, Yes, yeah, yeah, okay, that's correct, yeah, depending on your country, yes, yes, yes, yes, okay.
I want to tell you some crazy here that deals exactly with this, and it comes from that Guardian article, and it was a It's a father who lives in London with his sons, okay and three sons, and he is a dual citizen of both Britain I guess or the United Kingdom and Egypt. And one of his sons there there there, they're all Muslim, right, they follow Islam.
One of his sons becomes associated with one of these groups that's a quote known terrorist organization, sure, and one of his sons is targeted, put into the disposition matrix via the United Kingdom and m I five, only to be killed okay. And then the father has no idea why or what's going on why one of his sons has been killed, and in order to fix things, he and his whole family fly to Egypt, renounce their citizenship in Egypt, and then come back to the United Kingdom
to say, hey, guys, we are not terrorists. Basically, because one of the things that the British government did around this time is they would if somebody had dual citizenship and was spending a lot of time in Somalia. Let's say they would send a little message and a letter to the known address somewhere in the United Kingdom that says, hey, you're no longer a British citizen.
Whoa.
And since they did that legally, they were getting around all these rules that they had of protecting their own citizens, right, so you don't have to do that anymore now, Okay, they got the go ahead to be a part of the kill chain.
And then also add to that, further distancing the direct hand because you know, the same way five Eyes handles loopholes about intelligence gathering, they would say, okay, now it's not us the British, it's not the our guys executing someone. We provided information to something about someone who's no longer a citizen.
Well, and you know, in the argument could be made that this again to the previous point we made about like the history of warfare and how things are seemingly
comparatively less brutal and casualties are you down. One could argue though, that there's a kind of knock on consequence of this kind of you know, off the books kind of underhanded killing by the fact that you know, it's creating maybe more enemies than it is killing them, or more heavy handed actions that then result in you know, legacy resentment that can then create additional conflicts.
I guess you know, sure, yeah, I mean, look, if anything, the disposition matrix is a highly organizational force. And we could argue again with validity that because there are so many agencies and so many countries, all of which have their own monopoly of agencies. Because of all these stakeholders participating, if they didn't have some kind of codex or single resource, their efforts could become chaotic, multiple groups doing the same
thing at once, working with different information, making mistakes. There's a lot of precedent for this, even just in the US, agencies in the past have found themselves at odds. They're chasing the same proverbial rabbit and getting in each other's way. But again, the thing is, these aren't rabbits. These are people, some of them may well be innocent. And the damning piece of this is we might never know, we being the public, when these mistakes get made, Like we know
a few. We'll do a few examples here, but this I think speaks to the controversies that you're alluding to. There noel civil rights groups definitely object to the matrix stem disturn. The ACLU has entered the chat, and in twenty thirteen, you know when all this was hidden in Other journalists like you mentioned Matt, we're writing about this as well. The ACLU director of the time, Hina Shamsi, had a quote. It's a bit long, so I suggest
we round robin it. But I think this gives us very very good sense of where the criticism is coming from.
At least here's the quote. Anyone who thought us targeted killing outside of armed conflict was a narrow emergency based exception to the requirement of due process before a death sentence is being proven conclusively wrong.
That you mind.
If I take the back out of this, I think it sort of hits on maybe what I was talking about to a degree. The danger of dispensing with due process is obvious because without it we cannot be assured that the people in the government's death database truly present a concrete, eminent threat to the country. What we do
know is that tragic mistakes have been made. Hundreds of civilian bystanders have died, and our government has even killed a sixteen year old US citizen without acknowledging, let alone explaining his death.
A bureaucratized paramilitary killing program that targets people far from any battlefield is not just unlawful, it will create more enemies than it kills. This is a practical appeal, right, and this is one of the main the main bones I have to pick with this thing personally, is the The argument primarily is against a lack of accountability and transparency, but it's also a plea to consider these long tail consequences that you could create more terrorists, more extremists through
these attacks. You know, exercise empathy, folks. Let's imagine you are a five year old, right, you're a six year old your parents were collateral damage another damning euphemism. Your parents were collateral damage in a drone strike, and you grow up carrying that, right, Can you blame that person foreseeing the United States as an enemy? It certainly functioned as one in your life.
I mean, it's the plot of every like revenge film ever made, you know, or at least many of them. You know, as someone witnesses their parents being murdered, they grow up to become Batman, you know, I mean yeah, yeah.
Or your brother, your sons. Remember that the father I mentioned earlier with the three sons, one of them got assassinated by the US government. He a quote from him in that Guardian article. Is its madness they're driving these boys to Afghanistan.
Yeah, like our earlier episode on whether the FBI manufactures terrorist you know, it is precisely aspect to it.
And it was a known thing in Washington at least in twenty twelve, twenty thirteen, it was known that drone strikes were fueling more splinter groups and more individuals to join up with a group in their town.
Absolutely, you know, because now you're looking for some kind of recompense, right, And if we look at specific examples, let's go to the one that the ACLU alludes to in their previous statement from twenty thirteen. In twenty eleven, the Obama administration ordered a fatal drone strike on a
suspected American many terrorists named Anwar al Awlaki. This guy becomes the first US citizen and he was a US citizen to be targeted and killed by a drone strike from his own government that occurred on September thirtieth of twenty eleven. Just a few days later, it's October fourteenth. His son dies in a drone strike. His son is not a suspected terrorist. His son is not the official target of the strike. He is a sixteen year old boy.
And the target is a guy named Ibrahim Albana, an Egyptian that was suspected of being a senior Al Qaeda operative.
Yeah, and the White House Press secretary at the time had this to say about it. I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father if they are truly concerned about the well being of their children. WHOA this c really.
Tone deaf allfing continues.
I don't think becoming an Al Qaeda jihadis terrorist is the best way to go about doing your busines, says the guy had killed my father.
It makes me think of the collateral murder video that WikiLeaks put out back in twenty ten. I think a two thousand and seven airstrike on people that ended up being journalists and a group of people that journalists were following and.
With yeah, yeah, And then that's another example. Let's go to the example. Some of us may, unfortunately remember the drone strike on a wedding procession. On December twelfth, twenty thirteen, US drone launched four hellfire missiles on a convoy of eleven vehicles, cars and pickup trucks. This was a during
a counter terrorism hop in Yemen, in rural Yemen. The strike killed a dozen people, it wounded at least fifteen others, and quite seriously, there's no two ways about it with this kind of stuff, whatever the intentions may be, civilians are getting murdered in the process of hunting suspected terrorists and again suspected So there are some internal documentation things assets that are justifying these operations, but there's no day
in court. You know, there's no right to appeal. You might not know you're on the list until the explosion.
And we know this program is it remains current correct correct, because it was my understanding that it came about under the Obama administration and then it was continued by the Biden administration, but that wasn't necessarily like a done dealer. I think maybe he even reinstated it like it did go away for a little while. It was my understanding. There's this article I found on forever wars dot com.
Joe Biden's Disposition Matrix, and it just says that the A. Biden administration has reinstated a bureaucratic structure created under Barack Obama that wields the power of life and death.
And drud strikes continue under the current administration as well. The Disposition matrix or something like it continues apace. You know, supporters will say, look, this is imperfect. Everybody admits that, but the program is still far more preferable to the tactics of the past. And I'm interested to hear you guys thoughts on that.
Well, I mean, what are the other tactics Sending operatives in in the night, having a couple of well placed CIA spies that you know, take somebody out, But even then you're still killing people that you suspect are a part of something. It reminds me. I've been playing a lot of Call of Duty lately. It reminds me of all the storylines that they put in these video games where they they you know, have all this into hell
on some bad guy. So they're going in or they're sending in a drone strike just like this, and it's just there's something about it. It's also secretive it's also.
And weirdly corporate and cold, you know what I mean. I don't know, there's something mentality, yeah.
But at the same time, there are human beings that are plotting terrible things absolutely, So it's just it's I get what we're saying when we're saying it's preferable, right.
And I guess you have to look at the math though, and the math is murky and it's hard to make out because we don't know those knock on consequences, like we can't we can't always identify that in the data right away. That stuff that happens kind of behind the scenes and takes a lifetime of growing up with that resentment to lead down the path of making a choice to you know, continue on perhaps become an even greater enemy, you know, than the person that was killed in the first place.
Because in many instances, they're like twenty year olds, right, young twenty year olds that are being targeted by this list.
Right, And this is this is something that I think we should all collectively grapple with together because the idea that there is a less imperfect system inherently acknowledges that imperfections, dangerous ones exist and indeed, they may be endemic to the thing, they may be inextricable from that from the pursuit of the disposition matrix. So how much credence can we put in the idea that this will become better over time, the fewer mistakes will be made. We simply cannot.
When there is no transparency outside of that three month review time window, there's not really there's not really anything, And outside of saying someone is suspected of terrorism, there's not hard proof. Now we know a lot of Again, a lot of supporters of this program will say, hey, logically, you're putting you're putting us in a very difficult position because we can't prove that we prevented another nine to eleven because we killed someone before it happened, right, so
we can't prove what would have happened in the future. Still, it's not going away. Drone strikes are the new normal. The disposition matrix, the weaponization of data, the weaponization of the Kevin Bacon game, is not just going to continue,
it is going to expand. And to the earlier question, there maybe one of the thresholds of efficacy or one of the milestones to consider if we have the numbers would be, at what point does the number of civilians who die as a result of this, At what point does that exceed the number of civilians who died in nine to eleven, right in actual terrorist attacks? And if so, how far can that discrepancy extend before someone says we need to reevaluate what's happening.
That's right, because like, well, maybe total casualties may be down, you know, in modern warfare compared to the kinds of horrific trench warfare, you know, tactics of the past, and beyond the collateral damage of people that were unrelated to the actual battle or to any allegiance to one side or the other. To me, that's almost like, you know, you can it's hard to put a cost on any human life, but someone that's an active combatant losing their life,
they kind of know what they're signing up for. I would maybe assign more of a value to someone who is completely unrelated to the cause and who it just happens to be killed as a result of it. So, I mean, I don't know, It's it is kind of like a numbers game. But to me, I feel like even if fewer mass casualties are taking place in warfare. If more, you know, innocent people are being killed, and that's worse than the past. I don't know.
You know, guys, we've framed this entire thing around the war on terror, because that's really how this was fully weaponized, and you know, the evolution where it's at right now is based on continuing a war on terror enemies of
the United States and its allies. The thing that really scares me is thinking about this weapon and system being aimed at people that some new organizations, some new regime aimed at civilians and citizens of the United States that are seen as enemies of whatever the structure is that you are trying to build or protect. It feels like this. I don't know what to say other than it's a feeling I can feel sometime in the future that's being used against United States citizens.
That's the huge concern right now on the horizon.
Well, it's certainly concerning me and not.
Just you citizens, But proponents will say, you know what about other countries that are participating in this, Countries that are more tightly surveilled, like the UK. If there is not a clear rule of law, then it could become like a witch hunt. You know, the person accused is
exonerated after their death, which is very not great. This is Yeah, this is a concern that I think is universal amid people who are I wouldn't even call us critics, just people who are watching the trends, the patterns, the current evolution. And you know a lot of our fellow conspiracy realists in the crowd tonight. You know, you're veterans.
You're actively serving in the armed forces or in the intelligence agencies in the US or abroad, which means that some of us have witnessed the effects of the disposition matrix firsthand. That's something where I want us to go to a primary We would love to hear from you. Is this a necessary evil? Is this what you would call holdly a net positive for the world. Does it
address the dangers it aims to solve? Or have we instead, through desperation with whatever noble intent, created something Unamerican beyond the balance of democracy, an unstoppable force leads to more disaster in the future. These are good questions. Try not to put our thumb on the scale too hard there, but I think we raise valid concerns.
Yeah, well, just knowing that way before you ever get taken out, whoever you are, whoever we are, you would be on some list somewhere overlaid with all of your associates and locations and behaviors and likes and dislikes, and knowing that all of that information is already being scooped up on all of us. So it seems as though it probably already exists in one form or another. Of course, where there's a probability that each of us would turn one way or another.
There's a non zero likely. Well, and y'all just researching the stuff we do for this show and some of the travels that we do, you know, throughout our lives and careers, I mean, I can see us having a low, perhaps low probability of creeping up onto a list of this type.
You know, I mean, or listening to the show absolutely is this part of your behavior.
Or even being pulled in in the future expansions to help aid in a bet some of the goals of the matrix of the disposition matrix. Another thing I didn't put it in the episode here, but another thing that naturally has to occur is does the opposition have something like a matrix? Whoever that opposition may be and if so, what are what are they working toward. Anyway, this is the point of the show where we ask what you think and encourage you to enlarge your footprint with us.
Participate in the list, where already on probably multiple at this time. Tell us your thoughts folks again, especially you know, not just to the veterans or the active members of armed forces and intelligence, but those who have witnessed the matrix effects firsthand. We really do want to hear from you your opinion on necessary evil or a leviathan that
has grown beyond the bounds of democracy. So find us on a telephone, give us an email, or contact us online so you can add another data point to you know your position on the list. Is there a leaderboard?
These are all good questions, Ben, and we'd like to hear from you. Reach out to us on your social media platforms of choice. We are Conspiracy Stuff Show on x FKA, Twitter, on YouTube or we have video content galore for you to enjoy. And on Facebook where we have our Facebook group here's where it gets crazy. On Instagram and TikTok, we're Conspiracy Stuff Show.
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