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Now, welcome to the award-winning Best of the Left podcast with Clips Today from Intercepted Democracy Now,

The David Pakman Show, The Majority Report, The Young Turks, and on the media.

Bush's wars relied on what we now call alternative facts.

That's how the Iraq War was sold. That was how the Patriot Act was passed. That was how these endless

wars were justified over and over and over. Bush and Dick Cheney, yet they were a bit more sophisticated

than Trump and Bannon and their team appear to be. But we can already see that same machinery that

brought us the Iraq War playing out with Trump at his team. It's one thing to lie in all caps on

Twitter. It's another to manipulate intelligence. I'm joined now by two people who know a lot about

this. They both worked on sensitive operations within the US intelligence community under George

W. Bush's administration. Clint Watts was a US Army infantry officer who was then recruited after

9-11 to become an FBI special agent on the joint terrorism task force. Watts also served as the

executive director of the combating terrorism center at West Point. Nate Abokos was a career CIA

analyst. She found herself actually working on the program to find a connection between Saddam Hussein

and Al-Qaeda. And she was working on that as a result of pressure from the Bush White House,

particularly Dick Cheney on the CIA. That connection, of course, was never substantiated.

I want to welcome both you, Clint Watts and you, Nate Abokos, to intercept it. Clint Watts,

let's begin with you. What's your read on Trump's approach to the CIA, the military,

and intelligence operations in general? The Trump strategy is to build allegiance by

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