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Oct 23, 2026

Unknown podcast

The SHADOW STATE: Inside the Government's SECRET Multi-Billion Dollar Empire

Oct 23 · 3 Mentions

speaker_5HOST

19:21

And to facilitate this level of interrogation outside the bounds of the Geneva Conventions and the U.S. Constitution, top CIA officials, including Acting General Counsel John Rizzo, helped engineer a completely off-the-books global network of detention facilities.

speaker_4HOST

19:36

The Black Sites.

speaker_5HOST

19:37

Yes, widely known as Black Sites.

speaker_4HOST

19:39

And they were just everywhere.

speaker_5HOST

19:41

The investigation revealed there were roughly two dozen of these secret prisons scattered across the globe.

8 MINS LATER

speaker_5HOST

27:48

It is a profoundly sobering reality.

speaker_4HOST

27:50

It really is.

speaker_5HOST

27:52

And while this covert warfare apparatus was expanding its footprint globally in the deserts of Iraq, the mountains of Afghanistan, the airspace of Yemen, and the hidden cells of the Black Sites, there was an equally massive parallel expansion occurring domestically.

The Conspiracy Podcast

The Hunt for Bin Laden - EP 173

Oct 20 · 7 Mentions

EricHOST

11:11

This is also where the war on terror turns into a thing with its own gravity.

EricHOST

11:16

Black sites off U.S. soil.

EricHOST

11:19

Oh,

JorgeHOST

11:19

yeah.

6 MINS LATER

SeanHOST

16:58

EricHOST

16:59

otherwise known as yeah

JorgeHOST

17:01

cia black yeah they're black sites yeah you're all you're in international territory

SeanHOST

17:05

well so it doesn't it's not just guantanamo right they probably had no they're everywhere

Booknotes+

John Ryan, "America's Trial"

Oct 13 · 1 Mention

John RyanGUEST

8:42

But basically, I'm gonna go back in about a week, hopefully, to, uh, attend the resumption of these hearings.

John RyanGUEST

8:50

And one of the things the judge wants to hear argument on in, uh, the next hearing, uh, which is an issue that's been going on for quite some time, is whether as the defense teams are trying to investigate what happened to their clients at the CIA black sites before they arrived in Guantanamo Bay, whether there are investigative restrictions put on by the government are too burdensome for the govern- for the defense teams to make various arguments.

John RyanGUEST

9:17

That's a very important argument.

John RyanGUEST

9:19

It's been sim- it's been part of the case in one way or another for the past decade, and the judge wants to hear, I think, kind of, in a sense, final oral arguments on part of that dispute.

C-SPAN Bookshelf

BN+: John Ryan, "America's Trial"

Oct 13 · 8 Mentions

John RyanGUEST

8:23

But basically I'm gonna go back in about a week, hopefully, to, uh, attend the resumption of these hearings.

John RyanGUEST

8:31

And one of the things the judge wants to hear argument on in, uh, the next hearing, uh, which has been an issue that's been going on for quite some time is whether as the defense teams are trying to investigate what happened to their clients at the CIA black sites before they arrived in Guantanamo Bay, whether there are investigative restrictions put on by the government are too burdensome for the govern- for the defense teams to make various arguments.

John RyanGUEST

8:58

That's a very important argument.

John RyanGUEST

8:59

It's been sim- it's been part of the case in one way or another for the past decade, and the judge wants to hear, I think, kind of, in a sense, final oral arguments on part of that dispute.

10 MINS LATER

John RyanGUEST

19:14

But they were held for a significant period of time where they would go through, um, what I think their lawyers would call torture, and then would be transferred into a different debriefing phase where the government would still be extracting in- intelligence.

John RyanGUEST

19:31

So the idea is the CIA as, or as there's two psychologists, contract psychologists who helped dev- develop the program.

John RyanGUEST

19:39

What-- the way that they described the program at the black sites was that they would use the harsh interrogations to convince the detainees to cooperate, and then once they started cooperating, it would be more of a debriefing system.

John RyanGUEST

19:52

Uh, but the threat was always there that they could return to the, the quote, unquote "hard times" if they stopped cooperating.

Unknown podcast

Most Disturbing CIA Secrets Revealed: MKUltra, Mind Control, Assassinations, Coups, and Government Cover-Ups

Oct 11 · 13 Mentions

speaker_0UNKNOWN

12:37

The CIA operated secret detention facilities in Europe and Asia, referred to in documents as overseas operational sites.

speaker_0UNKNOWN

12:45

At these black sites, the agency conducted some of its most brutal experiments using foreign prisoners, suspected spies, and even their own agents as human guinea pigs.

speaker_0UNKNOWN

12:56

They used barbiturates, amphetamines, and most notably, LSD.

speaker_0UNKNOWN

13:01

But unlike the psychedelic curiosity that LSD later became in the 1960s, the CIA saw it as a weapon, a tool to shatter a person's reality, to break their mind wide open and mold it into something else.

speaker_0UNKNOWN

16:27

There are only fragments of documents, heavily redacted, and enough breadcrumbs to know that whatever happened was bigger than we've been allowed to see.

speaker_0UNKNOWN

16:36

Project Artichoke is often overshadowed by MKUltra, but in some ways, it's even more unnerving because it shows how early the CIA's obsession with mind control began and how willing they were to turn people into lab rats in the process.

speaker_0UNKNOWN

16:52

It reminds us that long before phrases like enhanced interrogation and black sites entered the public conversation, there were already government programs quietly erasing the line between science and torture.

speaker_0UNKNOWN

17:06

And it leaves us with the unsettling question: If this is what they were doing in the 1950s, what might they be doing now? In 1953, the CIA carried out one of the most consequential covert operations in its history.