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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Appearances
and use them, we are told, to unilaterally create a social media website in Cuba at a time when Cuba had banned U.S. social media, considering Twitter and Facebook and YouTube and the like to be arms of U.S. statecraft.
The Obama administration was riding high at this moment from the Arab Spring and the Facebook revolutions and the Twitter revolutions that USAID and NED played such a critical role in. Funding money to these networks, training them, teaching them how to use Twitter hashtags, teaching them how to coordinate Facebook posts to tell people where to protest.
$1.2 billion pumped in by the State Department in Egypt during that time, for example. And so what USAID in their own internal documents showed is that they saw the success of the Arab Spring and they wanted to create a Cuban Spring. They wanted street protests, riots, what they called smart mobs in Cuba on the basis of U.S. social media that they could instrumentalize.
The problem was they didn't have the asset in the region. They couldn't get their social media in. So what they did is they used a Byzantine labyrinth of money laundering flows from these humanitarian aids earmarked for Pakistan – again, back to Pakistan – and used that to go through a subcontractor called Creative Associates International, who's a frequent USAID contractor for this dirty work.
They were involved in all sorts of other ones, but it's CAI, not CIA, Creative Associates International, who then basically contacted two Cuban businessmen to create an identical version of Twitter, but for Cubans. Zunzanillo is... for Hummingbird. It's basically even simulated the bird. It had the like button, the retweet button.
And USA Documents showed that their plan was to get about 100,000, recruit people onto this platform, in their own words, with algorithms and feeds and promotion of that this was the site to share sports, music, and hurricane updates. That's their direct phrase in their own internal documents.
but that once they had gotten a critical mass of users on the site, between like 60,000, 100,000, they would shift the algorithms, they would use the data that they hoovered up from Cubans signing up, taking note of their political proclivities, the network clusters they'd formed, in order to get them to take to the streets in a violent revolution protest against the Cuban government to form what they called smart mobs,
And basically, at the appropriate moment, once they've got them in, to get them to overthrow their government. Now, this is a classic CIA covert action. This has massive diplomatic implications for the United States government if this kind of thing is revealed. That's why the CIA is in charge of this stuff. Because the CIA is... the political warfare arm of the State Department.
The State Department maintains our diplomatic relations and posture with the foreign world. The reason USAID is not supposed to be doing covert action, the CIA, is because if there's diplomatic blowback, it should be diplomatic organs who are doing it. But But what USAID said, you know, so evidently there was no presidential finding for that.
They ran it, you know, so without President Obama's approval, at least that's the official story. And when, you know, Senate staffers during the oversight could not get access. So the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senate Foreign Relations Committee said they were duped. The interagency of the White House said they were duped.
You know, the official story, and they had public hearings on this, by the way, I believe in 2014. Yeah. The official story is that USAID did this whole thing in-house. And they did it because it was so-called discreet rather than covert, that it was not a formal covert action. It was simply discreet democracy promotion work to bring democracy to Cuba.
That's a, if they ran that in the Obama administration, imagine what was done, you know, Trump wanted to knock out ISIS. ISIS, according to the previous White House, you know, we have WikiLeaks emails of Jake Sullivan saying to Hillary Clinton, Al Qaeda is on our side in Syria. And that effectively, you know, ISIS was a useful friend against Bashar al-Assad. Trump wants to knock out ISIS.
Hey, how do you fund money to ISIS if the president wants to eradicate ISIS, if you still want to use them as assets in the region? Well, you're not going to get interagency approval if the CIA does it in covert action. What if USAID does it? And that's how you see all this USAID money flowing to ISIS and Al-Qaeda and Taliban groups.
I think they just found $122 million from USAID to them just this week. I guarantee that number is a lot higher than that. And in fact, Trump's White House, Trump's OIG, who just took over USAID before this recent action, just published a memo where he said,
and this is unbeknownst to the entire American public until now, that actually there's a big fat loophole at USAID where their contractors evidently don't need to... There may be a technical... Everyone can read that OIG report. John Solomon at Just the News published all this.
But effectively, USAID can look the other way because there are no restrictions on their contractors in terms of their OFAC and counterterrorism money flow-throughs, or at least there's giant loopholes in them. So USAID can fund terrorist groups and get away with it in a way that no other U.S. government agency can. Wow.
This is where it gets really dicey, and this is where I'm in a really difficult position. Because we have two... Fundamentally, there are two simultaneous tasks that... that appear to people who are new to this cinematic universe that are in massive conflict with each other.
One is, given that this thing broke its sworn oath that it would never be used against the American people, and given the sheer depth and scale of what was weaponized, the American people need to know about it, and massive action has to be taken in order to not just knock it out, but salt the earth and stop it from ever rising again.
So you need to go extremely hard in terms of showing the extent of it. On the other hand, this has been, you can make a very compelling argument, the reason that Americans have the standard of life that they do and have the advantages and privileges of the world's most powerful nation that it does.
You can make a very, very compelling argument that the rise of America to the preeminent world power in the 20th century would not have been remotely possible without this blob apparatus. Come back to this concept of no blob, no pencils.
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