Maj. Eric Kleinsmith
speaker
35 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Maj. Eric Kleinsmith’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
persons, even if it's incidental, which is the tools, you can't read 2.5 terabytes of data with the human eye.
in that time so 90 days hits were required to delete all that and since we were given a cease and desist order the clock's still ticking the 90 days hit i had a lawyer come down from my command says here's your day delete the data or go to jail and i had to sit with one of my warrant officers we had a deep moral discussion on should we hide some of it should we just put some on a removable hard drive and hide it in a file cabinet and we ended up deleting all of it and that's
That's about the worst day you could ever spend in the military knowing now, in hindsight, that you're now the guy that could have prevented 9-11.
So here's the issue. I'll give you an example for what we did when the FBI came down. We were talking to them about able dangers. We gave them... a car dealership in Morocco that was used as a front organization. We gave them, here's a car dealership. Who was them? The FBI. We had some FBI agents that showed up.
Right. So it was just, the front was the business, but in the back, we knew the people that we're associated with were funneling information in. The first question the Bureau asks, or the agents there, is like, well, where'd you find this? And what we showed them was, well, here's the hit that we got on unclassified information.
And it was this really wild Michigan militia conspiracy theorist website that said, you know, the FBI is trying to arm the KGB in northern Michigan to take over Upper Peninsula. Chelsea Clinton's real father is Webster Hubble. And then there's this car dealership used as a front organization. And so, you know, this is what I mean by raw information. It was all on the same page.
Yes. The story we've all read about. The web page that the tool hit had this on the page. And so we're showing this to the Bureau. And this is what I mean, the difference between raw intelligence versus what comes out of an agency, which has to be peer-reviewed and edited and screened and then produced into a very slick product.
We were feeding raw information out to Congressman Weldon, out to PACOM, out to all these organizations.
I had my own, I mean, I had a small shop of 24 analysts. So we were doing it on a very small level, but it wasn't the size of, you know, we're not the 40,000 people that work at NSA or whatever. So we got 24 people working in the second floor basement of this organization. So the Bureau looks at this and says, you guys are a bunch of cracks.
Even though we were able to show additional information that corroborated it and show them right there, it didn't matter. It was the fact that you just squandered your credibility because what you saw as the tip-off came out.
You know what? Yeah, I don't even. We didn't even touch that stuff. And again, that's the problem is when you go after stuff.
The second time I had to, we went up to testify was in February of 2006. And we had, you know, after everything's done, you know, you've got reporters floating around the room and everything. And I had one guy come up to me and he was asking me some very personal questions. What are you doing now? What are you doing for work? That kind of thing.
Followed me out into the hallway and I said, you know, I'm sorry. I'm not going to answer any more of your questions. I don't know who you are. And he goes, oh, I'm sorry. I'm Kirk Lippold. I'm the commander of the USS Cole. And, I mean, Kirk and I are friends now, but that's the moment that, again, it hits you that, again, I feel responsible for the loss of your sailors.
I have the response. I get to carry the responsibilities for the loss of 3,000 people on 9-11. The 20th, I really wish you hadn't played that video just a few minutes ago because— On the 20th anniversary, my wife found me totally broken down in our kitchen. And I get to carry that PTSD the rest of my life.
And I didn't think I had it, and it got worse and worse, and it gets worse and worse every year.
Showing 21–35 of 35 · page 2 of 2
← Previous