coming and thanks very much to richard lang and to the university temple it is great to be here i think we're all in if i can say so in modestly for a treat because i don't actually know what i'm going to say which means that i'm going to enjoy the surprises as we come along as well as everybody else the reason for that is because i'm out there day by day talking to people and investigating and there's so much coming into me that i sort of feel like my head is exploding it's i could write up notes but any any notes i had a few months ago from a talk would be completely irrelevant today because so much is happening so fast in the world everything really is quite a bit sped up u sually when i give talks i start and i tell a story of my fantastic voyage into the dark realm of politics there was the adventure i had writing researching and then writing family of secrets that we've got some copies in the back there it really sort of blew my mind because i had been involved in politics as a young man and then worked in journalism for many many years and i thought i knew everything i thought i knew how things worked and i discovered that i really didn't and so often what i do with these talks is a sort of share some of the things i discovered but i i have noticed that the crowd gets more and who are depressed and then by the end somebody says well this is really riveting stuff but what can we do about it and at the beginning when i started giving talks of a few years ago based on family of secrets i didn't know how to answer that as it was really sure what we could do about it but i've been thinking about it because i've been asked so many times and i i have now sort of figured out what we can do about it and i'm going to go into that i suppose a little more at the end but i'm going to start with the end of my previous talks and just tell you what we do about it and you'll find out what it is a little bit later what we do about it is we take an interest in the truth and then we share that by persuading other people that they need to know these things and then all of us together take action what i mean by that is if you take your own situation you're at home and there's water pouring out from somewhere and it's filling the floor and you're becoming concerned that there's something wrong and you're going to have a big problem and i'm going to guess you don't say yeah you know water not an interesting issue to me it is too boring you know it's just you know it just doesn't it's not the car dash and you know i'm not going to pay any attention the water issue what you do is you say oh boy i've got a water issue i better study this immediately and figure out what's going on and what i can do about it and then i better take action and the truth is that when you know what's going on in almost any situation you sort of measures to change lifestyles and industrial output in order to address that there actually are so many groups out there working to solve problems and you know that you're probably members of them there are groups everywhere there are thousands tens hundreds of thousands of fantastic organizations working on every possible thing and there are a lot of people with good ideas regarding what to do about them so it occurred to me as i said over the years of being asked that question what can we do about it i realized the solutions are already there the problem is that there's no action and the reason there's no action is because most people are immobilized because they don't fully grasp the importance they don't fully grasp that there are solutions and i think they don't really understand how things work and so what i'm interested in talking about is how things work i became interested in it back in two thousand  thousand and two two thousand three i was living in the balkans training journalists there in investigative reporting and we were getting the first rumblings about a possible war in iraq it seemed very clear to me that they just wanted to go to war and i wrote pieces saying that and then the war happened and i living there i noticed that the coverage of the war i was able to get a lot more now you can get channels here i guess from everywhere but back then you couldn't but i was able to watch channels from all over the world and i was struck by the difference not just from fox to these channels but from c n n to these channels and i said my god the they're getting completely different stuff and it just occurred to me that my own profession wasn't doing a very good job or even a very honest job of dealing with what was going on and so the next thing that happened was everybody said oh well george bush either lied or somehow put out false information to cause  war and there were no weapons of mass destruction i'm sure you all remember that and then i thought well he must be done for because how could you possibly survive that well by late two thousand and three early two thousand and four there he was running for reelection with good poll numbers and then i saw that there was we have howard dean and i thought well he's an impressive articulate fellow he ought to do well and then it turned out it was going to be john kerry and i said well well then it's pretty much all over because here's bush where we've heard that he skipped out on his own military service and here's john kerry this be medalled war hero and you know the war hero is at the time you know more or less anti war and the guy had skipped out was pro war and i said that's an easy one there is going to be a walk well it wasn't a walk and then all these it started happening like kerry started having all these problems and right when the focus was supposed to be on bush and his being a wall they started looking at kerry's military service and they were alleging that he had somehow not really deserved his purple heart and you know he had been in the swift boats but he had lied about some of that and i was just sort of amazed at that and then and then we had this this swift boat veterans remember those ads and so forth and then there was that big explosion with dan rather and c b s news which was about how the media was falsifying something not about how bush was false and i thought somebody is up to something here and they're very very good at it and i thought you know maybe there's another way to look at how these things happened kind of don't don't take it on a retail level but look at it a little bit more behind the scenes and that's what i started doing in two thousand and four and that's what got me writing family of secrets around the same time i also started a nonprofit organization who what why without any funds or resources just because i thought oh my god i just got to do my part to save the world i mean the journalism is not leveling with people they're not telling the truth and if you don't tell people the truth you know it's like they say democracy needs clean information or it dies and this is what occurred to me is that we don't really understand what's going on and i know that because i didn't know what was going on now if you read those amazon reader reviews there's always people who write i read family secrets is pretty good course i knew all of that already and i thought well that's amazing that they knew all these totally secret things and they didn't actually know it but many of us have this idea that we know that everything's pretty bad so anything new that anybody tells us we say well you know it's kind of fits with what i expected but we do need to pay attention to facts and we need to marshal facts and we need to be able to go to that thanksgiving dinner with you know cousin ed who disagrees with us on everything we need to be able to articulate lee and without screaming point out some things and one of the exciting developments of all this is the tremendous response from people who are not what i would have considered to be my own kindred spirits who are  reading family of secrets going to who what why and saying you know i had no idea of this stuff or this is change my mind one guy came to one of my events he had been the commander of the united states nuclear fleet and admiral and he said he said i'm pretty skeptical this stuff but i'm listening to you and it's interesting and you seem like an articulate guy and you're not drooling and so he you know he was willing to take a take a stab at it and he did purchase a copy of the book and start reading it and i heard from others that he was very impressed by it and it was changing his way of looking at things because you have to remember when you are very close to something you don't necessarily see the bigger picture i think this is true of a lot of people in the military i think it's true of a lot of people even in intelligence organizations everything is so compartmentalize it so there's so regimented they're so focused on what they've always been taught that it's very hard for them to step back into think differently  of the things that i've been doing while i was here in seattle is to try to find out what's on people's minds what people care about what are the sorts of things that it who what why we ought to be covering because our mandate is to cover the most important stories that exist and apparently this is sort of a novelty because if you think about the news it's what i call the zone of low hanging fruit you know i mean did we ever hear a single news bulletin that actually gave us any information about that malaysian plane i mean it's like they're running out the clock you know and you know justin timberlake did this and you know the car deschamps did that and so forth and it's just almost none of it is about anything actually and so we started was you know and you know boy but with from that impassioned speech he gave in lincoln park to do today that's an awful long trip and a pretty weird psychedelic one at that because he ain't the same guy and then people say well you know and so people either say oh i'm disgusted with him or they say i still like him i still think he's a good man and the problem is he's not in charge that's the thing that people don't get and this is really what i discovered this is what family of secrets is about is that george w bush wasn't in charge either because it's a culture and there are thousands and thousands of people who are part of this particular culture  there are thousands of whatever culture you feel that you belong to who are in another culture and they work for police departments and they work for corporations and that are involved with the military industrial complex and so forth and they have a very different view of the world very different value system very different appreciation of democracy what it can be what it should be you know they're there they're older relatives we just thought you know francisco franco is terrific and you know the hitler had a few things to teach us and so on and so we we there's so much propaganda about how democratic america is if you notice that there's more flag waving there's more i was on a radio show a few days ago and it was a liberal show nationally syndicated but the usual host wasn't there and they had this guest host and she announced her liberal bone a few days and then she proceeded to say it was to talk about the boston marathon bombing which i'd like to talk about a little bit we've been covering extensively on who what why and she said and you know they invited me on to talk about the boston marathon bombing i assume they had read my stuff well i guess she hadn't because she said i am don't know about you but i am wearing my boston strong t shirt and she  maybe she asked me if i was and i said listen i don't mean to be disrespectful but i am just not into the propaganda and the mythmaking stuff i'm here to talk about what really happened in boston and what it means about the way that  they were able to basically declare martial law and force everyone to stay in their homes as had never been done before in this country that almost nobody spoke about it or asked about it or questioned it not the media and not most institutions either not all those great  institutions of higher learning in the boston area those should have been at the forefront of raising questions are full of constitutional law professors and so on nobody really said anything and then almost immediately we heard that they'd solved this gee you know it's that they always solve everything really fast i mean they do they solve everything really really fast it's never like colombo or agatha christie they get it in a second and so i was thinking boy that f b i is really good i mean they're  so good and then i thought you know when i was working on family of secrets and i discovered that george h w bush couldn't remember where he was the day that john f kennedy when when john f kennedy was shot we can talk about that later if you want or you could just read the chapters in the book about him and and the kennedy assassination but i became interested in the kennedy assassination and i was struck by that that the f b i was so incompetent that they you know the you know had lee henry wald the lead they couldn't find the files and i thought either they're incredibly incompetent or they're doing that deliberately or some combination of the two both and any combination all pretty bad but guess what here we are fifty years later and they're doing the exact same stuff and we have an article on who i hope you'll take a look at about the report that just came out from the inspectors general of all these different alphabet agencies where they are you know deliberately released at the time of the first anniversary of the bombing and it's the most astonishing document because if you read it very quickly it's kind of boring and hard to fathom it be sort of get a sense that they say well you know they didn't do everything they could but they did something and there were some things that we would do differently and that's the end of it that's by the way that's what all reports say you could just use the same report you know year in and year out because it always says the same thing and so i thought let's take a closer look at this and then i realized that what these inspectors general were basically saying was their hands were tied they couldn't really diggin they had themselves had been obstructed by these agencies they had to black out a redact a whole section of the most interesting and important section which had to do with what relationship if any might have existed between the u s government and the alleged bombers themselves several years prior to the bombing well you would think people would be interested in the media was not joint you know and yet here you've got you know it the fire is awfully thick not just smoke but the fires right there and they say oh well and so i was looking at this and i saw that this one i agent who had been interacting with the with the tsar now i have family have particularly loved this story because when they wrote about what he did here's what he did they the russians said we've been we have some information about these this kid  family and we think that he's involved with some sort of terrorist activities and you know we urge you to take a look at him now i mean that's pretty much all the u s government seems to be in business is these days is homeland security so you would assume well they jump right on it well and i would say well what would i do if somebody tipped me off that there was a potential terrorist in our midst so let's let's let me ask you quickly what would you do if you got a report that there was a potential terrorist your mitts what would you do you to investigate him ok and how would you do that qualified to be the director of the center of the f b i because none of them thought of that so what they did instead they didn't put him under surveillance you know what they went they went to talk to him and they said are you a terrorist i kid you not you have to read this you know and then they went to their neighbors and they said it's your neighbor a terrorist and i were like no i don't think so girlfriend no not that i know of ok clean bill of health i swear this is what happened and then i think the russians indicated that you know he was going to maybe go to russia or chechnya and so forth and he goes and when he goes they there are normal flags that are supposed to be raised and i know because they harassed me at the airport and so they did nothing to him and when he was coming back through somehow the border people who were monitoring who knew a little bit about him the flag was taken down in other words he was supposed to sail through and this is very very important because nine eleven was almost the exact same thing all those guys were given those visas and stuff and you know michael springman the u s consul was objecting over the years to all of these guys who he was he was saying i don't you know they're lying and they want visas and i can tell that this is not kosher funny term to use in saudi arabia but anyway and and they said higher ups just ordered him to admit all these people and that's how we got them all you know in the u training to fly planes and so it's a very similar thing again that they they let these guys in now you say well what could possibly be going on here and it seems to me after years of studying this stuff that really here's how it works how does the f b i have such an incredible track record how is it that they're always able to nail somebody anybody when take a guess they set him up ok something like that basically what you do you know the member the motto the f b i always gets it's me and and then it occurred to me they would get their man because it's their man they know these guys you know they're in cahoots with them they're going out for beers with them and so it's a great system you know but it's a kind of corruption and it's just like you know you go to have your you take your car to the mechanic and you know it's a rocket right they flip something they tell you oh you need this and you need that and so on and it's often not true well it's not just car mechanics and there are many honest car mechanics or perhaps more higher percentage of car mechanics than people in one of these agencies you know about you but it's easy to kind of dump on them you know because they don't have the same kind of lobbying power but but if you look at the f b i they do this stuff all the time and they get away with it all the time and to get a sense of why that is you have to take a look at let's say dianne feinstein recently complaining that the cia was going into the senator's computers you know other people telling either publicly or privately that they've been threatened i remember one u s senator once said to me rest what do you think is the biggest industry in washington and i said well as a government and then maybe a lobby and he goes he said maybe but i would say the most powerful industry in washington is sexual blackmail because we live in this kind of fantasy of perfection that everybody is you know happy with the ten kids they have and that in their marriage is fantastic and they go to church regularly and so forth and so there's nobody who's you know kind of a flawed human being as in terms of the way that they have to sort of campaign and present themselves and so it creates an impossible situation there how many people still  in high levels of politics who are closeted can't talk about their sexual orientation and it's a real problem and so they're all sort of trapped and as you know if you've ever read any books about j edgar hoover he was very much in the blackmail business especially since he was able to stay in the closet you know dress up in women's clothes all those years and then harass gay liberation people so very interesting situations and this gets me back to the importance of what we're trying to do with who what why which is to be honest you know it's we don't consider ourselves a liberal or left or right or conservative or libertarian thing we feel that our job is to figure out what happened what's happening and report it and believe it or not there are a lot of things you can do in journalism that involve objectivity you know either there are three people sitting in those chairs or there aren't you know either there's a guy we're running a camera or two guys running a camera they're not now somebody could say well i did only one guy running a camera because i don't see anybody the other camera say well he's just a little he's you know kneeling down or something so you know these are things that can be factually resolved and so you know drones do they kill the people that they're wanting to kill and the people they wanted to kill did they have any justification to kill them these are mostly things that we can investigate and we can solve and we think it's a real public service and more than that it's absolutely crucial to the to the vitality of the democracy and indeed even to our our future as a free country and as a viable civilization that we do this kind of work anyway i can go on on i have absolutely no idea how long i've been talking but what do we do this i think there's that rich has this idea to break up into groups and chat do you want to do that now do you want me to talk longer sure ok is that story interesting to you because i can talk about almost anything i mean that's just a very hot when the reason i like that it's what i would call deep politics in a real time you'll see in family of secrets that i discovered some really astonishing things about the kennedy assassination about watergate about a lot of these eggs and i discovered that many of these traumas in this country are always presented as these complicated convoluted things you can never get to the bottom of it turns out you can get to the bottom and they most of them have the same cast of characters until those people pass from the scene and then their children seem to take on the the mantle and and so that this is what's called deep politics which is the idea that there's politics and then there's deep politics and what i mean is there's the sort of superficial stuff you know sarah pailin is annoying you know or dick cheney is evil or something like that but that's the kind of i call that the cartoon version of history the reality is these people don't operate on their own they're groups of people who say who should we run you know dick cheney was told to become the c e o of halliburton i mean he was on a one hundred seventy the guys came in dick we decide you're going to be the c e o however he said oh ok and then you know they decided somehow he's going to be vice president and so these people don't do this in a vacuum there's a whole sort of culture in a system that that perpetuates these things and and  what frustrates me is that when you talk about these things they attack you and they use these pejorative terms my favorite one is conspiracy theorist which actually doesn't mean anything it just means you don't accept the conventional version and of course there are people who as a call i was recently in the call of the nutters which are people who just always assume some convoluted scenario and that nothing is ever as it appears which is not right either or some just incredibly fantastic  thing that you could never figure out how that would possibly be done but there are a lot of things that are not the way we're told and it is the instinct of institutions of all kinds to cover up and this is not surprising i mean if any of you have children you know you don't tell the kids everything to you now so you're sort of covering up you know you know or you wait until they're old enough or something but you have to think about that you know the u s government says let's wait until the american public is old enough and then we'll tell it so they just don't you know we're never old enough and they can't tell us and so it goes back to stuff like that the polio vaccine where you remember that the first round and they give it gave it to all these kids and and they got polio i'm trying to remember was it was unsolved but one of the one of these doctors in new orleans wanted to show how safe it was and he gave it to his kids and they got polio you know and so they were all horrified and they had to cover this up because it would just destroy them the faith in the system and so on and so this is always going on and that's the importance of doing the journalism anyway boston bombing real time deep politics because that first week the second i heard that this thing happened i went oh boy because i don't know what it is maybe it's so many years of looking at those color coded alerts and then they don't turn in anything and the timing of them always around elections and the like then i thought these people are taking advantage of us and they're using you know they're tightening the screws that key moments and why wouldn't they do that that's a that's a very valuable control mechanism and so looking at the boston bombing somehow you know because i've been thinking that ever since nine eleven the really were no zero as far as i know real terrorist attacks on u soil you have to think about you know they all tell us we have to be afraid of muslims but like how many muslims live in this country who didn't commit a terrorist act you know like millions of i meet him every day in new york city driving cabs and you know give me a sandwich or something and they're basically pretty nice law abiding people and so i thought you know what was this all about and and i thought how do they sustain this because if you go back to the early ninety's anybody remember the peace dividend committee remember that it didn't happen we were we were told that's the end of history member francis fukuyama or whatever and the end of history and it's all over now and you know we you know sword shall be beaten into plough shares and so forth and and it didn't happen and in fact there was no reduction of any note in the in the military spending and then in addition to all of that and all the foreign threats then we got homeland security this giant boondoggle which is the greatest cash cow for all these companies and by the way i encourage you to if you have stock in a these outfits or some just read the annual reports of these companies because they actually say you know you know people are afraid in the world and chaos looks like it's going to be a pretty good year for us you know they basically say that and so anyway so the boston bombing so i don't know what happened to me i just get these instincts and i was just reading somewhere that instincts aren't real you know the debate over noetic sciences i don't know but i get instincts all the time and they're probably not instinct scientifically they're probably you know you collect a lot of data and it processes somehow but anyway whatever it is that as soon as i heard about the bombing i was like oh my god i get a bad feeling about this one it's too perfect it's tax day you know wh said when he called patriots day it's the boston marathon this you know how load family events that you know in boston you know the home of the american revolution and this bought these bombs go up and i say oh boy i got a bad feeling about this so the next day we were doing some fundraising because who what why is we don't take any corporate money we're nonprofits are all the money comes from folks regular people and so i was talking to somebody who's involved with fund raising and a large university and she was sort of going to give us some advice and then she said what do you think about the boston bombing do you think there's more to the story and i paused and then i said i do think there's more to the story and she said what do you mean and i said well i just from my experience i wouldn't be surprised if it turns out that whoever did it or wherever we're told did it turns out to be have more connections than they will admit and that there may be some more awareness on the part of the authorities then they're going to admit and this woman became so angry at me i mean she's like ninety two years old she's still working and she's you know a liberal democrat and she just begins almost like shaking and she kind of wanted us out of her place and later we were downstairs meeting with her staff she came in and she said we have other things to do and you know she wanted one of us out it's very upsetting this stuff is very very upsetting it causes cognitive diss security for people who are out there waving flags all the time and saying my country right or wrong it's on take this stuff just doesn't it doesn't compute it actually it rubs like you know fingernails on a chalkboard and so people fight they fight this stuff and they call you names or they just become furious but i had a feeling and then the next day nothing happened remember there were very briefly they said it was a saudi guy they had held and there was another guy who just disappeared and by the way they found his body in a river that story was never followed up on these are all people who are early you know mentioned in relation to the story monday tuesday wednesday thursday people are nervous to media is doing its usual malaysia air style non coverage and nothing's going on there's this weird thing on wednesday they suddenly announce that they have some suspects in there at the courthouse and so he has a bomb threat and the courthouse is evacuated nothing ever comes of that that was weird thursday nothing's happening in seventy five o'clock there they are you  member that is just if you had your t v on suddenly just out of nowhere they go live to this press conference and there's the head of the f b i office there and suddenly they've got these images up there very incriminating of images of people at a sporting event wearing hats and backpacks wow but i sort of looked at that and then i noticed that everybody else that had some bags that wasn't sure what it was about these guys and they said these are suspects i thought well why are they suspects it's interesting and they said we don't know who they are if anybody has any information please come forward that was five o'clock on thursday later in the evening  heard suddenly that a police officer had been shot and i was like oh my god that's like the kennedy assassination remember they didn't know who had shot the president suddenly a police officer shot and then they they they identify supposedly oswald dropped his wallet i mean you know shot the guy and left his wallet and business cards everybody could get in touch with him you know and you know this was sort of similar and kind of kind of weird oh and then a little later carjacking and then this guy escapes from the car and the first thing he does is he says this guy carjacked me but it wasn't enough that he had a gun i don't know about you but if a guy has a gun any carjacks me i'm pretty much going to do whatever he wants but he apparently that wasn't enough of the man had to say to him do you know who i am and he said you're a guy with a gun he said no no no i'm the  m the busted marathon bomber and he said oh i also just shot a police officer and i thought that is the weirdest darn thing you know because honestly i you know you want the driver of your car jack him to just kind of be calm and not imagine a larger scenario distin he wants to drive you and that's it so that seemed very strange to me and then we began looking at all these things we looked at the shooting of this police officer they they made a huge big deal about the fact what a hero he was a first responder they say a year later they still say it's all a lie and it's disgraceful and it really is tragic because obviously his family i am sure i can't talk to them about this because they they want to be proud of him well they should be proud of him because he was a good police officer at mit and the kids liked him and that's enough but he was not a hero in anything this regional story they put out and if you ask people what have they say oh they shot him in a you know he was stuck trying to stop them and you know that's not what happened in this it took days and weeks for this to come out in almost nobody knows the real story the real story is not only did he not confront them he never saw them and you know they finally said oh well he was sitting in his car on the street and they came along and they want to take his gun well that's not what happened either what happened was he was sitting in his car wedged between buildings on a completely dark campus why would they even be on the campus you're fleeing for your lives supposedly f b i showing your pictures and you're going to go to a darkened campus to see if you can find a cop sitting between two dark dark and buildings and and then you're going to shoot him in the head and not take his gun it doesn't make any sense and so what we do it who what why as we just go you know you know i'd like to say i went to the colombo school  journalism i was going you know i just don't quite can't see i mean you know i can't quite you know why you know this doesn't make any sense to me it doesn't make any sense to me and so that didn't make any sense and then it took me this took me almost nine months of looking at the story of the carjacking victim by the way who knows the name of the carjacking victim since he's the one who was the recipient the confession he would know their names his name danny what's his last  until recently something weird is happening again they never showed his face was always in shadow they altered his voice and they never told us who he was so here's the guy who has the confession the reason we think those two kids did it is because of him he talked about it turns out they never showed us them planning bombs they've released some stills and we'll have some articles about whether the stills are real or accurate and what they actually show but it's just one thing after another it's like they've got an endless bag of tricks and so you look at this stuff and you say none of the heads of this danny by the way we found that he told different versions to different news organizations and some he was carjacked for ninety minutes which is a really long time you know it's a small area there in boston where would you go for ninety minutes another account was sixty minutes which is still pretty long another one was thirty minutes and another one was get this that he was not carjacked at all he actually told that to a news organization early on he said that they just took his car it's astonishing this is the biggest story in the country and nobody seems to know any of this stuff and so we write about all this and we found many many more things about that story it goes on and on and i mean it's truly staggering you can see photos that have been altered statements that they made him a nose make no sense we go we're working on about five or six stories right now so i i don't want to say too much about them but it's really unbelievable and for an investigative journalist this is only almost like a dream story because it's it's like an easter egg hunt that stuff that is wrong is everywhere and yet nobody's looking at this the media is not looking at this and you could say well you know i could ask you who you like public radio not looking at this liberal weekly and bi weekly magazines not looking at this websites that are progressive blogs with a lot of traffic not writing a wor about any of this there's a complete silence and for for anybody who lived in germany or lived in she lay or argentina or something this is a very terrifying time folks because nobody's doing anything and nobody's saying anything it's like there is a conspiracy of silence and so i do want to start wrapping up here but what i'd like to say is this it doesn't have to be that way  does not have to be that way this is interesting i think you'll agree this is interesting stuff people who like to you know when you go on vacation and you see all those guys with the marine stuff or whatever they're all reading thrillers about spies and the f b i and stuff like that but it's all made up stuff and you say well why not take the real stuff and pay some attention to because it's really as or more interesting is pretty incredible in fact what i find amazing is that we are convinced we have very little free time we have very little bandwidth for things outside ourselves and so that time that we spend absorbing things we're told to watch lots of movies with battles and you know whether it's hobgoblins battling on some amazing set that cost two hundred million dollars or it's people battling for their lives on a ship going down or something like that we watch all these we don't think about why we spend so much time on sports football which is simulated battle  wars on t v which is again a kind of simulated battle with the drone strikes and all that and then just the gossip the amount of time that we all spend on things like this pistorius case i mean i'm sorry that he shot his girlfriend but i never even heard of the guy until recently you know we shouldn't really be spending that many hours debating you know these horrible stories with a mother drives her kids into the water because it's a tragedy but you know we didn't know and we can't do anything about it it's not a policy issue it's an isolated cases of tragedy and you can fill up all your time we could fill up all of our t v and everything else with that stuff because you can always find those kinds of things and i don't think it's an accident i think it's deliberate it's easy it's low hanging fruit it doesn't expose news organizations to high costs or any kind of risks and they love it so what we're trying to do is get folks to say you know what i'm going to watch less of that stuff and so on and what i'm going to do is try to find a way to make this real stuff interesting to other people and i'm going to share it and so what i think all of you can do at a minimum and this is really really easy is use social media to spread the word and also just talk to people go to events and talk to people because if each of you regularly talks to three or four people and lets them know these things and you know educate yourself get armed with the specifics and tell the kind of stories i'm telling people are going to find it interesting i mean i do it on my own level i you know over the years i had lunches with people like dan rather and whatever and they would they would just say well you just you know you're blowing my mind and now dan tweets our stories you know after after what happened to him but still you know it takes him a while we get notes privately a guy at the boston globe send me a note the other day praising something we had done i mean he'll never write a word but at least he praises so there's a food chain going on there and we're i was describing us as sort of sort of the phytoplankton of the information food chain you know everybody's got to eat the stuff and it'll it'll move its way up so i'm go stop with that i guess and i know we're going to do some q and a do you want to go right to that or do you want to go to groups or the question i'm going to repeat these for the microphone the comment was that there are certain points where the system becomes very very vulnerable that there are these kind of deficiencies become so pronounced and this gentleman saying he thinks this is one of those times do i agree and if so what are some of those pressure points that might be applied  i do agree i actually feel this is a great time for us that this is a very hopeful period believe it or not if you look at the pace of the revelations obviously the edward snowden thing was very important before that the  republican who some people say it's because he's a republican there's democratic candidate but i think he's always been reasonably outspoken he's been challenging the f b i about whether they're being candid he wrote a very tough letter to them democratic congressman keating from massachusetts did the same so i think that on these civil liberties issues these privacy issues we can really come together it's not really a left or right thing and in fact one of the frustrating things for me is to see how this country is always divided between left and right and it's always you know they sort of split everybody and then all the elections are close and they use these hot button things to to get people usually the emotional social issues to get the people all worked up and then that sort of tips the balance the truth is the one percent is really you know one tenth or one one hundredth of one percent it's a very small group of people and within them there are some actually very fine people who don't like what's happening so if you actually take the the sort of bad people within the one hundredth of one percent or something they actually are vulnerable because there are a lot of us and there are very few of them and just understanding who they are and how they operate they they operate in the shadows is very important that however they are able to influence someone like barack obama or bill clinton or hillary or any of these people is not known it's not understood how does that work what's that mechanism one of things i mention to people is going on here because i'm sure there are many more questions but one of the things that always strikes me is they you know  say why does obama do this or why doesn't he do that well i mean this guy was a illinois state senator six years before he was president and he didn't know much i mean he yeah he's intelligent a constitutional law professor they play all that up but what did he really no things even on constitutional law yes and acted like a constitutional law professor and the problem is you know what do you know we see the president getting his briefing and my question is will who's briefing him who are they we never hear that you and you know a bunch of guys a crew cuts come in and say mr president here are your options there's this and there's that you know we can we can go into syria and bomb a little or no in a syrian bomb a lot which one would you prefer you know so the whole thing is kind rig to get outcomes that these constituencies within the government want but i think that this i think that that this area of rights and you know the clamp down in boston i hear people all over the so called political spectrum being upset about that that's why i think this boston story we need to stay on it i'm hoping we can raise some more money because we need to put more reporters on that thing and really scramble over every lead and just just stay on it so i think that itself is probably the biggest one right now yes you know if the question was about somebodies website had i seen it and he was just mentioning about the what may or may not have happened when the bombs went off  if they went off it's a trade center my default to most of these things is to apply logic i saw pictures of people with missing limbs i assume those are real missing limbs i mean i think those people have relatives and neighbors and stuff and if they fake that i do think that would probably become known whether it's possible that there was more to the scene we do know that there was a drill taking place almost contemporaneous with this just as with nine eleven there were drills going on at the same time that concerns me because that's a common intelligence technique that you have multiple things going on in my book family of secrets i talk about the kennedy this is i don't think ever been reported anywhere the week of the kennedy assassination it has been mentioned few places that they were holding this bottle as convention people who are a soda bottle is but they didn't mention that there were something like eight thousand  complete strangers poured into dallas and were all there at the time you know this is the kind of way that you can create cover for military movements for all sorts of things and so i think that we need to be wise and we need to be awake and we need to know that these are the kinds of things that are taught at the military war colleges there are certainly taught when you're in intelligence agencies that the use of deception and distraction and so on i think we need to be open to all of it but at the same time we need to be cautious and we need to be responsible and it is a problem for serious investigators that there are always people proposing scenarios that sound so kooky that it sort of taints the serious inquiries and we're very aware of that and were very very careful about that sure the question was i had mentioned earlier about cheney being told he'd be the head of halliburton can i name names yeah i mean there may be in my book i think you can look that up there was a hunting trip of a number of men i think we know the names of them  and it's that circle around you know sort of the bush family a lot of those companies like brown and root later became kellogg brown and root and dresser industries was controlled by a group of people that the bush family was involved with back to the one nine hundred twenty s these are these different companies providing of kinds of oil services and so on and they have all these interlocking boards of people who are on this and on that and so on and they all know each other and  you know i mean that's pretty much how things happen everywhere i mean how does somebody become the new head of microsoft i mean they don't decide they're going to be the head of it somebody else decides that so i think that's just the way things work yeah the question is the numbers show that a large majority of americans believe that john f kennedy was not killed by one person that there was a larger operation there and how you know what does that mean that people believe that some people are very comfortable living with internal inconsistency and they're perfectly happy to say oh yeah we know yeah it probably was the mob or see the thing is there are many variations on the conspiracy was the mob it was some disgruntled element it was a conspiracy but it was the russians who were the conspirators it was the cubans or it was anti castro cubans there are many many variations of you to actually proper poll you would have to you would have to actually you would find that the public would break down into lots of different groups with different theories if you talk about what percentage actually agrees with the the dominant theory of the skilled researchers the sort of people who have spent decades studying this there's is a general consensus that what happened to john f kennedy was some you need some water ok so so there really is a kind of a consensus on that i don't know where the public is accepting that because again this is about the mythology is about a basically america is a good country and although it does some bad things to people themselves are inherently good and so the idea is yeah it's true they kill democratically elected people in other countries but they would never do it here to which i would reply well why would you not take action when the stakes are the highest if you've got a big company and the kennedy administration is coming after you you're not going to sit by you didn't sit by when i was going to maybe nationalize your bottling plant why would you sit by when you know your whole company potentially is threatened at its base and so i'm not sure how involved the public is on that but i do think over the years more and more people accept that and yet what's quite extraordinary is if you look at the bestselling books on the kennedy assassination there are two or three or four of them that are all say that lee harvey oswald did it and they get all the ink if you go to the universities and go to the  bookstore and you see what's on the reading list it's all baloney and if you go to again your favorite you know n p r p b s this and that this and that the nation magazine they all say that the warren commission was right now how is it possible that those good institutions stick to the original story of sixty to eighty percent of americans don't buy it i mean this is the kind of thing we need to to explore yes ma'am the question is how is it then that the media acts as it does it is so sort of blind willfully or otherwise i've spent years thinking about this i think that this stuff like the term conspiracy theorist has been so effective in sort of inoculating the establishment that journalists know and by the way things like what happened to dan rather and the every so often there is something like that you probably know about this the the rolling stone journalist who died in a one car crash the one who did the story about a about a general about general mcchrystal in afghanistan and on i mean we were one of the few news organizations that started looking at his crash what he was working on at the time and so forth and then they really came out very quickly the media oh he had somebody says he had some kind of a drug problem and he was  that are depressed you know they always do that well maybe maybe not and we need to look at these things but i think that there is a i basically let me put this way by journalists journalists are like everybody else they like their job they enjoy the perks the kids in college whatever it is they want to keep their job and they know you cannot stick your neck out in australia they call it cutting the tall poppies you know and the people like to say you know if you're in australia if you stand out as really excellent people want to cut you down so they have this kind of brain drain people leaving australia because of that in the united states if you want to stay in journalism you know what to do and what not to do and when you don't when you get outta line bad things happen to you and so people say well look i'll do what i can just a lot of do what it is so the whole system itself is rotten basically and that's why we need to invent a whole new journalism that's where we started who what why we don't plan to be small we plan to be big we your help we plan to grow into a major international news organization we keep our costs low but we still need support and we're looking to bring people on board working for us all over the world and online  video and audio and you know tell stories with graphic novel comicbook style drawings and everything whatever we have to do to reach people we particularly course want to reach the younger generation i mean you know here we are right near a college campus and i'm guessing most you are not college students you know how do we reach them and what are they doing they're all off watching house of cards or something you know about how evil the system is let's see  know right there the question was was there any evidence of private contractors be involved in intelligence work around the boston bombing there is i mean there were all those people i'm sure you've seen this is all over the internet all these guys with the black hats and black backpacks and as soon as the bombs went off they immediately were sort of taking control of the scene it's quite astonishing that a year later it is never been firmly established who those people are we are told that some of the more it is insignia for a contractor called craft international we've looked at that we continuing to look at that but it's quite amazing in this country that i mean you would think that to remember that video of that night they had arrested a young man who looks quite a bit like terrilyn sir and i have they had him stripped naked they had him on the ground and then you see them bundling him into a squad car you know their mother said that that was her son and then later suppose he dies in a shootout i mean the authorities were almost never questioned about this even though it was on fox and all the channels you could see if you go online you can still watch this thing just type in you know arrested boston bombing april fifteen it's amazing how could that not be interesting to the new york times and the seattle times  boston globe that they're not interested in a man who looks exactly like the terrorist was in custody and then you know and so somebody did ask him you know what they said they said oh yeah that was another guy well who was that please you know if you arrested somebody we ought to be able to know who was arrested it's just just staggering richling i think had a question you know the question was have we done anything on this rash of suicides of people the financial industry very interested in that  problem is we're small and we're already way overextended we get i cannot tell you how many things every day with people saying you know you really need to look into this thing or i'm being harassed or whatever it is and we just we don't have the capacity so we're trying to you know i don't want to talk about money the filthy lucre but we need more money so we can hire more people and get on these things that story is very high on my list because those are people that all these big ban supposedly were aware of it were privy to you know billion dollars scams affecting all of us so obviously if all these people suddenly you know go ill or jump out of windows we have to take a look at that again the media's completely  not doing any this is just bloggers who who bring that stuff to our attention the question was about the militarization of police departments the united states with it being a very significant factor here in seattle and federal funds coming in and what can people do about it first of all these are not ringers in the audience but that's another story we've written about at who what why we're getting we're almost alone in covering that there have been a few articles here and there we try to do it on an ongoing basis we actually spoke to a police chief who said he didn't want that stuff didn't need it and as you pointed out in our most recent article the crime rates all over the country have gone down there is a corresponding you know the more they ramp up with this stuff the less there is a justification for it and this is pretty alarming because this is how you get a police state military police state and you know so what can we do and how can we make people care i think honestly people just are not really you know you have you know they say you have to expose people the same information at least three times before it registers you know so on and so forth so i think that you know we have one one fell as one of ours donors and he just send stuff to his brother regularly and eventually the brother started reading them and started paying attention to it i think it's just it's a numbers game you're where i'm down with with good information stories well told thank you very much