With everything that's happened since and everything we know about the government – Have you at all revised or are you tempted to revise and take a look at it again?

I'm always, you know, open to revising it.

You have to be if you've reached a conclusion based upon all the available evidence and then new evidence would come out.

You'd be a fool to say, you know, I'm stuck on my opinion.

I'll never change it no matter what the evidence shows.

But I'm waiting for that evidence.

It hasn't come yet.

But how do you feel about where we are right now?

With everything that's happened since and everything we know about the government – Have you at all revised or are you tempted to revise and take a look at it again?

I'm always, you know, open to revising it.

You have to be if you've reached a conclusion based upon all the available evidence and then new evidence would come out.

You'd be a fool to say, you know, I'm stuck on my opinion.

I'll never change it no matter what the evidence shows.

But I'm waiting for that evidence.

It hasn't come yet.

uh cool thank you real quick as we uh say good afternoon and we move on um how are you feeling about america right now um you're very observant obviously and you've chronicled so much uh you know post midterms a lot of people are kind of dazed and confused right now feels like a dark time um how do you feel i feel like ultimately we're going to be great and we can win and all kinds of things i don't want to assume your politics either but how do you feel about where we are right now

Were the Republicans bound to take a hit just because he's not on the ticket this time?

Yeah, no, I don't think so.

I mean, yes, he is very popular, but he really, I mean, the current, the new governor, Governor Donald, was his... pick, meaning that DeSantis worked hard for him, campaigned across the state.

It's a good candidate, by the way.

It's not as though it's a weak Republican candidate.

It's a very strong candidate.

The candidate he was running against was a Republican who had been a Democrat before, a Democrat who had been a Republican before, had switched parties a couple of times, had lost once before for the governor's race.

And they're going to be pretty ominous two years from now against whoever the Democrats put up because they still don't have an obvious candidate to be president.

So do you think that Jews could have had advanced warnings of the attack? Somebody

should tell that.

And I'll answer Silverstein one by one.

But somebody should tell the fact that Jews had advanced warning of the attack to the approximately 400 Jews who died in the towers coming down.

So forget about that.

You know, a story went out, by the way, also Egyptian made Egyptian newspapers.

It came out from Hezbollah originally and then picked up in Egypt, Lebanese papers as well.

Are they right?

[laughs]

The-- Put it this way.

I know that from the, the people that, uh, helped me on why America slept back in 2002 and 2003, some of them, most of them, are now retired.

But they were in the services, um, security services, intelligence services, through the, uh, 2013, 2014, '15 period.

There was a period immediately after the 9/11 report came out when the agencies were behaving.

They were talking to each other much better.

They were sharing information.

Mm

Please tell us the story of the interrogation.

So Michael, I, I had, uh, three different sources, one of whom was in a very close position to know exactly what happened, who described to me that when Zubaydah was captured, since he was wounded, they were able, they, the Americans, were able to, as interrogators, to apply pressure by delivering him pain medication that would, uh, when he needed it, to relieve the time from his wounds, and then take it off in the hope that he might talk.

He wasn't giving them anything.

Once they realized that he would survive, they moved him into an operation that was a fake flag in which they had a couple of American Special Forces who were able to speak fluent Arabic pretend that they were Saudi interrogators.

And when Zubaydah woke up from this drug-induced narcotic haze, he thought he was in Saudi custody.

The thought was the Saudis wanted him for crimes.

They were ready to execute him, and he knew that they had no holds barred in terms of interrogations.

You rejected all the conspiracy that surrounds that case.

Please tell us the story of the interrogation.

So Michael, I, I had, uh, three different sources, one of whom was in a very close position to know exactly what happened, who described to me that when Zubaydah was captured, since he was wounded, they were able, they, the Americans, were able to, as interrogators, to apply pressure by delivering him pain medication that would, uh, when he needed it, to relieve the time from his wounds, and then take it off in the hope that he might talk.

He wasn't giving them anything.

Once they realized that he would survive, they moved him into an operation that was a fake flag in which they had a couple of American Special Forces who were able to speak fluent Arabic pretend that they were Saudi interrogators.

And when Zubaydah woke up from this drug-induced narcotic haze, he thought he was in Saudi custody.

The thought was the Saudis wanted him for crimes.

They were ready to execute him, and he knew that they had no holds barred in terms of interrogations.

You rejected all the conspiracy that surrounds that case.

Gerald.

Absolutely.

And so all of the, uh, the, you know, the Chicken Little, as I call it, the sky is falling in, the scare tactics of, "Oh, no, if you come here, it's gonna be terrible.

Uh, uh, you're, uh, you know, and that's why we're not gonna have people coming to the World Cup.

They're gonna be boycotting it.

They're gonna be afraid to come in." Then none of that happens.

And I went back to look at some of those accounts online that had sort of generated up beforehand to see what they were saying Post-Smerconish.

[laughs]

Why on earth has the government gone to such great lengths to make themselves look complicit in this assassination? It's mind boggling to me.

Yeah, you know, you're absolutely right.

I mean, it was generational changing.

There's no doubt about it.

I mean, I was in fourth grade when Kennedy was killed.

I was at a Catholic grammar school, Sisters of Charity.

It's the first time I ever saw nuns cry.

But a little bit of history on, let's say, the pharmaceutical industry, on morphine, heroin, cocaine, being able to buy those at some point in pharmacies, and then how that leads up into a World War II, Cold War era when really this industry comes into its own.

How far along have we come from cocaine being a drug that doctors use to today?

No, it's unbelievable because PBD, think about this.

When you said Sears and Roebuck sold a little kit that you could use, that was the Amazon of its day.

That was where everybody went.

So you were essentially going on the biggest retailer that you could find.

They sold a packet that would make it easy.

And cocaine is just one example.

them to say you can't do it

Wow.

... they're very, very smart about spending it.

So they ha- uh, will give a grant, and I go through this, I have a thing called the j- Transgender Money Pipeline, I did an article about it.

They will give a grant, let's say to the University of Illinois, or University of San Francisco, and they say $20 million, $22 million grant, whatever else, "But we want you to open up a gender studies program.

We want you to have a study to look at, uh, bringing, uh, children possibly who might be born in the wrong body." Let me tell you, sidelight, hate to say this, no question, nobody's born in the wrong body.

Just not true.

The, there are people born intersex, right? They have to make a decision.

What is the history behind it?

What would, what would you say to those people?

So, uh, so I think that, uh, uh, I mean, there isn't an easy soundbite in this sense, but the, the real answer as to why Oswald alone killed Kennedy is Oswald himself.

Without understanding Oswald, you can't get an idea of as to how the assassination happened, and what the conspiracy theorists do, and you know this so well, is Oswald becomes a cipher.

They don't discuss him.

They talk instead about Angleton, and what about CIA memos, and what was happening in the Cold War, and what should we be doing in this.

So everybody thinks, well this, who's this fellow, this 24-year-old who was shooting at the president? Why would he do it? And he did say after he was arrested, "I'm just a patsy," as Oliver Stone has.

So at that mo- he must have been telling the truth.

Why do you think that's happening?

Why doesn't the mob theory work?

Well, I used to believe in the mob theory before I wrote my book, uh, in the early '90s.

Um, I went into it thinking, you know, we all have sort of an inclination.

You get a big subject, if you're assigned to cover like the Epstein files or look into what happened with Snowden and his leaks or that, you have a feeling for what you think might happen, and then as a journalist you go ahead and follow the evidence.

So my thinking was that, "Man, it could be the mob," and the reason I thought so was because two days after the person accuses the assassin, Oswald, is arrested, he's killed in police custody.... by a guy who was a nightclub owner, who looks like he's straight out of central casting for the mafia.

So I thought, "Oh, that looks like a mob silencing." Then I followed the evidence and came to a conclusion it was just Oswald.

But there's good reasons to suspect the mob because you're right, Bobby Kennedy was not only JFK's brother, but he was the attorney general.

The book that you wrote, Case Closed, is more than 30 years ago now, 1993, right? Have any of the disclosed files, um, disclosed over the years, not just this, this last batch, um, you know, made you think twice or planted any seeds of doubt?

Why the two different conclusions?

Great questions.

The House select committee investigation in the late '70s had got me interested in the case 'cause I was going to law school at the time, '75 to '78 out in San Francisco, and I sort of followed it closely.

That select committee did some fantastic work investigating new leads, looking at new evidence.

They debunked a whole bunch of conspiracy theories, and then at the very end of their investigation, somebody gave them a copy of a Dallas police Dictabelt, which was recording all the scenes of what was happening, all the sound recordings of what was taking place on two police channels, one of those police channels in Dallas that day.

And the sub-committee said, "Hey, maybe it recorded the sounds of the assassination," and you listen to them and there's no sounds of gunfire or anything else.

But they gave it to two sound experts from New York who said, "Hey, we see four supersonic-like impulses.

it for you?