Breakfast cereal is a podcast about the podcast cereal, featuring Katia Delgado, Matt Jackson, Hijark Sykes, and Manuel Lübenes. So like the first thing I think we should cover off on is it's 70 degrees, it's December, it's Christmas week, I'm pretty happy with that. I'm not. What's wrong with you?
It's supposed to be Christmas. It's still Christmas, it's still Christmas, even though it's cold. It's not supposed to, whatever, it doesn't matter, it's fine. Something's wrong, something's weird with the world.
Something that's weird with the world. Something that's so much, something that's so much like it should be okay with this. No, okay, things are supposed to be white for Christmas. You are racist.
So, second topic, obviously, is the look on Steve Harvey's face the other night, because he's so priceless. I'm sure that the Colombian cartels will have him go on in a moment. And then, of course, it's a cereal. The reason that life is brought us together today.
I am having delicious Kellogg's Disney Frozen cereal. Courtesy of my lovely daughter who chose this one for today, it's some kind of oat snack with marshmallows, and if Kellogg's wants to send me as many boxes as they feel necessary to keep my business, then I would be glad to have it. Is that okay to let it go? Maybe not this one.
Hijar? Hijar got a breakfast, but I have a banana upstairs, I guess it's what's happening to you. I think I have a pine bar. How about we?
That's great. We all kind of have to eat breakfast. I appreciate the charity. Yeah.
Oh, this is a really good one, too. Did I have a banana one? It's a Madagascar vanilla almond, isn't it? No, thank you.
Aren't you a Madagascar? Kind of. Kind of. Kind of.
On the other side of whatever. Close to them. Close to them. Close to them.
And then, and it's where the leavers are from. They are. I love all the random facts I learned. Well, it's not well.
It's going rock in the Starbucks. The Starbucks deliciousness again. And Vadur, our special guest for the day. In the spirit of Christmas, I have a lead route, smoothie.
Oh, wow. Yeah, I know. It's based as it sounds. Can you please talk about the name of the smoothie?
Yeah, the name of the smoothie is vision plans smoothie. And why it's named vision plans smoothie is because it has carrots, spinach and beetroot, which actually are good for your vision. And which is a way to actually make people drink it because we work in a company that deals with vision. So, we can now add a subcategory for our podcast on iTunes for health and fitness.
Yeah. And thanks, Vadur, for bringing that up. He's the reason we have the tag now. And he's the reason for the season.
Wow. Wow. Wow. That's somebody else.
Yeah. All right. That's my neighbor. That's the golden chicken here.
The golden chicken was the second episode in this season's serial podcast. It was a good one. It was heavy. It was heavy.
Yes. Very heavy. Lots to go through. It took a couple of listens.
Well, we've not had that everybody had to listen to it twice or were we going to talk during all the details from the first one. I listened to it a couple of times. I went in and out and I skipped to some of the parts I found during the first time, but definitely it runs. All right.
You found stuff more. I don't know that I ever need to hear Sarah say Coochie ever again. No. I'm pretty sad for her.
I think she's got her allotment of Coochie. But I appreciate that she clarified the translation for us. That was not fair. I'm going to get caught up in the very first thing.
It's up to our life. Right? We are all both. We tend to know in addition to being what we know.
So, one of the highlights to me was the... What about this tent was that the Taliban group that they talked to through the reporter had this story about this tent and Burghal being in this tent. And they wrote up and they said, look, we're the police. We're going to take you to Kabul or whatever.
And he jumps on the back like, all right, I found the cops. Let's go. And he says, no, that never happened. There's a lot of things that weren't like that in the episode.
And I think we're getting to the crux of the story where everything in the trial, you know, it's going to be a... He says she says kind of thing. So the tent was one something weird. Something weird is that she keeps saying that he doesn't have a lot of memories from this time, but he's in pretty detail giving us, you know, he's given us details of how at one point he had a...
Not the veil on his head, but a blanket. And I was like, first of all, it doesn't have a lot of memories from that time. You sure are caught up on details on a lot of things. Like the specifics about a guy with his younger buddy or brother or whatever that was shooting a video and they kept saying, American and smacking him.
And then yeah, he was trying to make it get away. And the English language story, did you guys pick up on that? The fact that no one's spoken much. Yeah, the video was recorded in English.
And the rude comment that he had to translate, you know, why he was doing that. And I'm like, well, somebody recorded the video on July 9th. Well, that's kind of after that. I think to me that's when he was captured, he was trying to work in English with these other guys who spoke very little English.
I think that July 14th, I think to me it's almost a little bit of Pakistan. He's already in Pakistan. Yeah, there is a time there where he's just telling the story of what the video happens. Because what is interesting to me is that first the Taliban say, oh, you think we're going to go west and then we go east and they start to move him around.
And at the same time, I think when he's being moved around all these groups. Because he's going in chicken. So everybody's reaching like a precious thing, right? That's what comes out with the discussion from Raman.
The Taliban guy is like, he's the precious guy and we're trying to keep him alive. Because the other guys that they have kind of want to kill him, the Taliban, or the Taliban want to kill him, but we want to keep him alive. I think for Taliban, one of the things was like most of the stuff they said, of course there was some hint of truth into it, but much of it was VR. They knew where this was going.
And much of it was actually targeted to the audience either to make them extreme or to tell foreigners like you are not welcome here. Like we'll capture you. You are what 5,000. That was like a huge statement for them to save.
And right now they are downsized so much that they actually need more people. So I felt like for them to say that, that was just a propaganda kind of thing. And what I found different in this episode was Sarah usually points out like this was extreme. She only mentioned it once in the episode that this is not what actually might have happened.
She says because Taliban changed their story, right? In any other episodes before that, she actually makes it that you should know that these are not impartial. Views like before the statement, after the statement. But in this, she did very little talking and she let us make the decision on where it's going.
She didn't point out the discussion in a specific direction. So the joke that she wasn't able to get, I know you're not from Pakistan but you're from a neighboring country. So I know there are some cultural things that you may understand that we do not over here. The joke that she didn't get was where Burghal, who was in bare feet at the time, kicked the one Taliban fighter who was from Pakistan.
And they laughed and said, ha ha, even he knows you're from Pakistan. And it's because basically they were making fun of the lower level person. The lower level person is from Pakistan and you put your dirty feet on him, right? That's kind of the joke.
Yeah, that's kind of the joke. And it was kind of like we read it in history also when India and Pakistan was partitioned. The people from India who went to Pakistan to stay there were considered also second-class citizens. So kind of these jokes were made about them also.
It's still an issue with Kashmir that whoever is a citizen there, they don't consider them as class citizens. So I kind of got that. I also had to think about it. In the second reading, I actually got the joke.
Okay, that's what they mean. But it was kind of telling you will never be the leader. Like you are always a supporter of this. Just kind of a dig to this guy that was from Pakistan, that kind of thing.
I mean, it's the same idea of when the dude threw a shoe at George W. Bush back in the day. If I hit you with my shoe, that's the dirtiest thing that I have because it was on my feet. But one of the things that I found strange was in the previous story, even that he was searching for intelligence information.
I think there was no mention of him in this situation. Basically, he worked out in the desert, but there are two different stories which say exactly the same thing. To me, being a very factual person, I think his story doesn't end up there at all. He was outside.
It does add up that he wanted to go back. As soon as they said that they were police, he knew that they would probably take him back to his base. So he jumped out. I think the Taliban says that he fought against them once he realized that he was gone.
But on the first episode, he said he didn't fight. He was like, do you think? Would you be stupid to do something like that? He didn't say the same thing against those kinds of people.
I couldn't do anything about it. You're right, what you said earlier about the PR kind of spin. When this reporter that Sammy, I think his name went that she was talking to, he went on assignment to talk to these Taliban guys. He didn't record them or much of that, but he made the notes and he's relaying what they said.
I'm wondering how much of that the discussion's about. They called him guest. They treated him with respect. The one guy said he was at Bagram for two years and he wanted to treat this prisoner better than they treated him.
How much of that is actual? Like, yes, they actually did this or is it sympathetic to their cause that these are the ugly Americans coming in. We are treating them better than they're treating us. Maybe from a recruitment standpoint or just from a PR standpoint, that's what they told that reporter and he's not relaying that.
So here's the dual nature of this. There's a public version of us. I know she's going to try to build a story that would either make a sympathize or really just reject this whole guy and his personality and everything that happened. In court, in court, Marshall, none of this matters.
None of the background about the terrorist and what they think. They're not going to use that as evidence to support him or go against him. I don't know how I feel about all this information. I can paint the story of a guy who was hated by his friends because he just packed up and left and put everything in danger.
But at the same time, he is in trouble. He's a trouble for the living part. Anything else that happened after that? One of the comments at the beginning of this episode from one of the people that was on the case or looking at the information for the case was that he already spent five years.
Additional confinement is not the answer for this situation. I think that adds up to the point that if somebody takes a kid and looks at the story, if somebody talks to him, they say, okay, he may not mistake, he's suffered so much, he shouldn't go there. But as she said again, in court, Marshall, it's not how the human experience he went through, but you actually did. And adding up to your point, actually, of them treating him as guests, it adds up to like, has any of you read Lone Survivor or saw the movie?
So basically in that also, they say there is a group of gans that keep him safe from the actual Taliban and they keep him as guests. Yeah, even at their cause. So I can see that they were going through the basic nature of a country or people stays the same. Some might be radicalized, but they are actually very welcoming people.
So I get that that some of the people treated him well, but I don't think that was the whole issue, that was the whole issue and that has anything to do with this. The main thing is that he left. And that's a big difference as well between season one and season two, whereas all the evidence that she kind of gathered through season one added up to something that shook, you know, the evidence that shook the trial of Adam Said. For this, it's really just purely emotional storytelling for us.
Another thing that stood up to me in this episode was the army and what the guy said about Bowe. I think it was so spectrum opposite ends of, complete opposite ends of the spectrum of the guys who were just using expletives to describe how much they hated him versus, and there wasn't anything to counter that apart from the terrorist guys who were saying he's basically just a soldier we kept and I don't know where that leads. For me, this is one of the thing we learned from episode one that we learned about the justice system in the United States and how the legal system works. So here we are kind of learning a bit about how the military works and the tactics of the military, and then she said she can compare it to be astonished about how they do this thing and there is no man left behind or how it doesn't make sense, you know, how the overreaction of the whole group.
So to me, I think we will see that in the next episode as well, how the military actions are and not just matter of fact from the military themselves, because I think you can hear that from the other guy Jason, which is the PhD guy who's from the military strategy in West Point. So I think we will learn much more about that. I think, parallely, I want to hear about the mental state of the board, because to me, I think a question is his sanity, so I want to learn in the future how sane Mr. Boyz, because ultimately it was made of determinant for his style, but I think as listeners we would kind of empathize on what kind of individual this is in the whole picture.
But let's think about from the Arne's perspective. I think, like, we will of course go into details probably in later episode, but Arne was like no man left behind. If somebody in your office asks you to stay an hour longer than you have to, you curse them in your mind, right? And there, a whole battalion is working to find this guy.
For 19 days. In horrible condition. And for the first, probably five, six days, they don't know what happened to him. And somebody leaks the information.
The high general says this guy actually went on his own and he was not captured. Think about the emotions that everybody is going through. We are going through this. We are developing hatred for ourselves everywhere, especially treating the woman that is taking the veil off and everything.
Everybody is hating them for what they are doing. And they realize all this is because of that one guy who just went like the system. And I went into the guy's history also. He was rejected as a Coast Guard in 26 days.
And I know that on a psychological reason he wasn't allowed to be a United States Coast Guard. And they gave him an uncharacterized discharge and in which they didn't actually mention it, but they say it was for psychological reason. He wrote to his dad that I hate what America has become through a letter to his dad. Probably she'll share it in the next episode.
That I hate what we have become, what we are doing. And he went through this. So psychologically he was not in a war mind frame. He had already, he was not there for that.
That to me is somebody's wrong decision to actually put him there on a borderline case. To me, if he was not even a Coast Guard, which is kind of the easier job as compared to being in war zones. And say, kind of, but it's in page. In the war zone.
But it is true. It's more domestic than it is before. It's psychologically not fit to be a Coast Guard. How is he psychologically fit to be an army?
Exactly. In a war zone in the conditions that were described. And if they already had that sort of idea about US government and the way we are handling things. Can we just have that last time?
Yeah. We joined the military. The military was always in need for more soldiers. You know, your standards go down.
Is it okay? You have drugs? It's not probably coming. Things like that happen.
I'm not surprised. So speaking of the war. There was a bit about it about this episode. There was a little, I don't know, borderline political that kind of gave us an idea of where the war situation was in Afghanistan.
It was the leading nature of the information we actually had about the tribal situation in Afghanistan. And how little we knew about politics in Afghanistan. And that this war that lasted so long. And that's still going on.
It kind of gives us the, again, building the emotional side of things. You know, why were we there even in the first place? We were just sending guys for seven to 12 months without collecting any solid information that helped us. And it's like every seven to 12 months, we're starting over with new people that have new perspectives that have a new map of the situation.
And then we get rid of that map and bring in another new guy. Yeah. And that's, I thought that was really interesting. Well, those guys have to be the elders in the Pashtun tribe and talk to them.
And then he goes to stay and relate, have some relation with them. And he's only disappears. And all of a sudden, I think you mentioned that, then the guys may not like the Taliban but also may not like the government in Afghanistan. And now they have the US guys coming and open all the women's jails.
Yeah. Who do I hate? But then at the end of the day, Beau is the only one who's been there the longest. Who's actually lived with these guys who probably didn't, I mean, he doesn't speak the language.
But after five years, he's sure he's start picking up on understanding the basics. His dad knew enough to say some words in the Rose Garden. So, yeah, you start to figure things out. And I think we've seen so far that they weren't exclusively, when they were around him asking him stuff, they would speak some form of broken English.
He knew some words. You communicate. People communicate. It's just how we are.
One way or the other. So. It allowed to me. It seems like ARMY is following the protocol, but they were told to do.
And it's like some people's personal emotions would say they hated him, but still they went through the protocol. They did what was told to them that they don't leave any man behind. But this one guy, he decided to break the protocol and try to make a news out of it. Like to me, yeah, we don't know either yet.
But right now to me, ARMY seems like in a positive light on that. But they were still trying to save the guy from anything possible. Probably because they were thinking he has information on our bases. What do we have in firepower and stuff like that?
Because that information is also very essential. But to me, right now, that's my state of mind. So then to that, to a number of things that she's talking about during this show. And we'll probably get to later on in episodes things like the nature of the five detainees from Guantanamo that were released.
We'll probably get deeper details on who they are and what happened after the fact. Can you take a case strictly on the merits of the event that took place that day without looking at all the repercussions that came from that? Can they, in the court martial case, say, you walked off your post, doesn't matter the reason, that's against the rules, you're done. And look at it one way and say, well, he did walk off the post, but he was done and it was mistaken.
He's kind of suffered enough. But if you also look at it from the other side and say, yeah, he walked off his base, but these people had to do this and these people did this and we released these guys and these guys went back and did this and all these things happened. Usually we're not trying a case so far in arrears to when the event actually happened. I mean, generally in most court cases it doesn't happen.
So we're now five years down the road at six years down the road and we're trying to piece it all together. Do any of those pieces matter to the fact that you walked off your post and then that's it. Well, I mean, that's when Manuel's point comes in. It's what's the, how's the psychological state?
You know, if all that evidence help build a case for him, you know, not being fit for the military and not being fit for tribal really, then all of this doesn't help. Matt. And then you have to question the protocol. Yeah.
This guy's to have a search of tattoos going around looking for people actually creating more problems and creating people to die. Then you have to question, is this the right protocol we should follow next time? Should we change that? Or is something like, well, is somebody is captured by any of the troops because he just was in their own place?
But if somebody would walk around out when the protocol should change because you can see the hate of the people is because the protocol is asking them to do very dangerous things, right? Going to places where the booby traps, the whole compound was, they were once everywhere so that the action from the Taliban is taking advantage of exactly the protocols. So it looks like something. And it's tipping our hand from a military perspective.
I feel like it's tipping our hand even further to where the Taliban will now know exactly what we're going to do. I mean, it's already been like that. And he mentions it at one point. She brings up the analogy of the walkers from Empire Strikes Back, right?
And Luke's little plane zipping around in between their legs and toppling them over. And that, I think, is a very good analogy, you know, in that we have this, like, general overview idea that we know everything. But they're finding all the little Swiss cheese holes in there and working that out. I think all these little events, like the people changing in the army and everything, it's like kind of a butterfly effect, a general change, who has a good relationship with the Afghani people.
The next one comes, he has a different view. Probably the first general was almost about to crack where this person is. And then they lose the whole chain of the event and it's a new chain of event. So I think these are like small changes that end up in the whole, but I still go over to Jarski.
It's like in the end, he won't be created against all this. Whatever has happened, they are not going to do this. Although if anybody would have died in his search that would have been blamed on him, if any movie to happen, I think during his search would have gone through. That would have come to him because he was indirectly responsible for that.
So I need to make my own land. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Hi, from the homeland reference.
Hi from the homeland reference. The Pakistani terrorist group that's mentioned, the Haqqai group, is the exact name that's used in homeland. So I didn't know that was a true name. I thought they just came up with that name in the TV show, but she started mentioning it.
I was like, whoa, conspiracy theory. What's going on again? And all the crazy stuff. But, yeah, I think for next time I'll research these guys a little more.
I think they're going to play a significant role in how the Guantanamo guys were selected. If it follows in any way, check before I'm with some homeland. And that determines who gets liberated from Gitmo. They want certain people.
They want certain people. And that would be that Pakistan group. All right. Good deal.
The next week is New Year's. New Year's week. Can you believe that? No.
I can. I mean, it happens. It's just how time goes. So we've got the 31st scheduled New Year's Eve for our final show of the year.
And then it's on to next year. Good time. Maybe Kati will be back. Maybe not.
I told her to call in, but I just don't think she likes us that much. Did you like it? I liked it. Thanks for coming in.
That's awesome. Thank you. Enjoy your Starbucks. Thank you.
We'll talk to you later. Bye. Bye.