John Poindexter

We've given that to you.

In my book, Behold a Pale Horse, you can see some of the history of President George Herbert Walker Bush in connection with the Central Intelligence Agency, the drugs in the Golden Triangle, the connection between the Iran-Contra affair, drugs, Oliver North, Admiral Poindexter, and a whole bunch of other things, and... that tremendous financial conglomerate known as Bank of Credit and Commerce International, otherwise known to researchers as BCCI.

The Central Intelligence Agency, under George Herbert Walker Bush, and later under Vice President George Herbert Walker Bush, and even later under President Bush, George Herbert Walker Bush, assisted the Afghani freedom fighters in Afghanistan against the invasion and occupation of their country by the Soviet Union.

In order to create the elements that was needed to bind the various Islamic sex groups and different tribal affiliations, under one concerted cause to fight the Soviet Union, the Central Intelligence Agency corrupted the religion of Islam and taught this corrupted version to special leaders that they recruited in order to teach it to others in cooperation with the Pakistani SIS, that's their secret intelligence service, A lot of these schools and a lot of this instruction was conducted within the borders of Pakistan and in Afghanistan by operatives of the Central Intelligence Agency from America's SEAL teams and special forces sent to Afghanistan by the Special Operations Division of the Department of Defense, also known as the Special Operations Group, or SOG.

It was as if the danger of free and open networks, of walking onto a plane without a body scan or participating on the net without total surveillance apparati in place, had been proven.

Admiral Poindexter, he was part of the Bush administration, proposed a total information awareness program.

That's what they called it.

Mass surveillance and predictive policing on an unprecedented scale.

It was shut down in a year by a horrified Congress, but then it was essentially restarted in the private sector by Palantir.

Ed Snowden, remember him? His leaked documents revealed how Palantir software eventually fed the government systems where everything Poindexter's program was supposed to do.

And in parallel, the net became safer for banking, ultra-fast trading, derivatives activity, unimaginable in the era of manual buy-order tickets and live phone calls between traders.

The whole yuppie scum normative business culture we were trying to escape by going online had successfully taken over the whole thing.

But he's also interesting because he is also a bit of a sort of a shape-shifting chameleon.

I would also speak to people, like I interviewed Admiral Poindexter, the famous Iran-Contra figure, Ronald Reagan National Security Advisor, who had met with them in the early days.

who said like, wow, he showed up with like a suit and a conventional haircut.

So he also knows how to dial it in.

He acknowledged approving the arms sales, but maintained he was unaware that profits went to the Contras.

National Security Advisor John Poindexter...

Guy's name is really Poindexter, you know? His name is literally that.

Testified, he deliberately withheld the diversion decision from the president to give him deniability.

So some of the convictions that didn't stick.

Two central figures were convicted and then walked free on appeal.

Oliver North and John Poindexter were both found guilty, but their convictions were overturned because their immunized congressional testimony had tainted the prosecutions.

The Constitutional Protection Congress granted to compel their testimony ultimately ended the criminal cases against them.

These guys fucked up.

Dick Cheney, Donald Rundfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, David Fife, Richard Pearl, John Poindexter, all these guys, right? They got us into all these legal wars, and they gave us the Patriot Act, which not only did not go away, but is up and running and is one of the most successful businesses I think we've ever had in the U.S.

And it's given to us with two selling points.

It's going to make your life better.

TIA.

So this was attempted to be rolled into the programs begun in the 90s, but once we had our new Pearl Harbor program, being 9-11, which that's what it was called in the Project for a New American Century by the same neocons that I just listed.

Then we get John Poindexter, who became kind of the point man on total information awareness.

We had 9-11, and all Americans were just scared shitless and like, what do you have to do to make sure that never happens again? These guys went like, now's the time.

And there's even, I forget, it's a Mark Bowden book which says that, you know, Palantir perfected what total information awareness started.

So I went back to Admiral Poindexter.

He'd

been Ronald Reagan's national security advisor.

John Poindexter.

yeah you know he had been convicted related to the iran-contra scandal later that was overturned but admiral poindexter had started and run the total information awareness program at darpa in 2003.

And so I went to him and asked him, is it true that Palantir grew out of Total Information Awareness? He's like, it's absolutely not true.

He had gone back to the private sector, but he still worked with one of the contractors.

And then this moved from the realm of an unsuccessful policy to a great scandal.

When John Poindexter, who succeeded Bud McFarland as National Security Advisor, and his aide, Oliver North, decided to take the profits from the sale of weapons to Iran and to funnel the profits to the Contras in Nicaragua, these anti-communist rebels, even though Congress had passed the Boland Amendment forbidding aid to the Contras.

And so this was... a scandal that blew up in Reagan's face in 1986.

He could have actually been impeached because of it.