Mike Ritland
speaker
855 appearances
6 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Feb 2025
Mike Ritland’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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The front cover that's funded by USAID has WikiLeaks at the center of this, Jack Posobiec as the other main highlighted note, a U.S. citizen, and the whole rest of the network map are all the different distributions of stories about these Macron leaks that helped Marine Le Pen but hurt their preferred winner of that election, Emmanuel Macron.
And what they were suggesting with that is that we need to stop Jack Posobiec and WikiLeaks from helping Marine, from publishing news stories that might help Marine Le Pen in Western Europe win that election. And that's USAID-sponsored, baby. They're touching every plot of dirt on God's green earth.
Well, this is why it's useful to think of it as a blob. So it can come from several directions, and then it gets consensus built to build the appropriate operations network to carry it out. So, for example, U.S.
foreign policy is supposed to be set by the White House through the interagency process at the National Security Council, and it's the State Department who's supposed to be the agency general to steward policy. the execution of those foreign policy and national interest goals. And it's the Department of Defense that is supposed to steward that on the national security and military side.
depending on what you are trying to do, like, for example, let's take the Georgia Ski Romania example. This could come from any number of directions in terms of how the idea first gets pitched and also a couple different tracks in terms of how it gets approved. And sometimes it can be done in a way that's totally rogue.
And this is one of the unique capacities of USAID in this story and why I believe it's important for the Trump White House to shut it down, to abolish it, executive order, congressional act, however, stored under state, and then after passing a series of reforms that we can maybe talk about at the end, if necessary, to spin out a new agency again.
But the typical way this will happen is the White House wants to do something, or the Secretary of State, or some sort of thought leadership node within that, or within the National Security Council, pitch the idea and
All the different equities that would be involved in it, whether that's the Defense Department, the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, supporting functions like FBI counterintelligence or DHS or other Justice Department and other people who would need to know in on that op would work. would all provide their comment and input.
It would finally get approved, and then it would be greenlit, and the appropriate grants to support that would all flow. The Pentagon would get the money, the State Department would issue grants about this, and then places like USAID would do the relevant humanitarian aid work in the region that would provide the cover to juice this, whether that's
doing civil society activity that has a sort of civil-military dual-use purpose or doing civil society work in the area that has a sort of CIA, State Department, national interest, political warfare element to it. And then that process would be midwifed by the National Security Council. But USAID is really unique in this process. And one of the reasons that it's gone so rogue is because
USAID has always been this switch player. It was created in 1961 by JFK. A point that I've stressed continually is that a lot of people are talking about this presently as if JFK was purely thinking of creating USAID as a magnanimous charity because of the his high moral fiber, and then it got corrupted through these money laundering and payoff networks that are being publicized.
Two weeks before JFK created USAID by executive order, he awarded the Green Beret to the U.S. Special Forces and is singularly responsible for the massive upscaling of U.S. psychological operations, civil-military affairs, and unconventional warfare. JFK was bogged down in Vietnam and Laos and all these counterinsurgency debacles where the U.S. had interests in the region
World War II had ended quite recently. The World-Based International Order made it a big no-no to declare conventional war and bring in, you know, 1950 North Korea-style tanks and planes and napalm. And so we moved into this small wars, political war modality. And JFK believed in that very, very strongly. You know, this is why you have places like the, you know,
John F. Kennedy Center for Special Warfare that trains our special operations folks and the whole Fort Bragg-JFK special relationship during his presidency. But just two weeks after that historic October 21, 1961 Green Beret Special Forces event, JFK created USAID, and just one month later,
launched Operation Pincushion, which sent the Green Berets, sent our special forces to Laos, where USAID was, you know, it would later turn out, USAID very quickly played this function of supporting these very same CIA-backed mercenary groups that Operation Pinkush was recruiting.
They were sent to Laos by JFK to train and recruit these hillside guerrillas in Laos as part of our Southeast Asia, Vietnam-connected sub-war, unconventional warfare effort. We sent the special forces there to recruit them. The CIA managed that CIA mercenary army. And it was USAID who paid the head of that mercenary army to acquire two... U.S.
aircraft from two CIA proprietary airlines, Air America and Continental Air Services, everyone can look this up, in order to buy the planes that they use to traffic it's unseemly, but illegal narcotics to fund that war effort, as well as humanitarian relief supplies and personnel.
So USAID has played this swing role between state, CIA, and DOD and special forces work practically from the day it was born. But what's unique here is it's get out of White House approval free card. Can I flush this out for a second? Mm-hmm. Most of the major CIA scandals of the past two decades have not actually been the CIA directly themselves.
In 1993, USAID created this new office to help wage the post-Cold War political warfare, initially in Eastern Europe, after we were trying to create political vassal states out of the former Soviet colonies in Eastern Europe. And this was called the Office of Transition Initiatives, OTI, USAID OTI.
And it was designed to be a fast, flexible, rapid response capacity for USAID to do regime change work, to do political stabilization, to basically do sort of a kind of civilian special forces for civil, military, and political warfare work that would not have to run the traditional traps of approval. It wouldn't be bogged down in bureaucratic red tape.
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