Title: John Kiriakou: A Whistleblower on Torture
Show: Scheer Intelligence
Date: 2015-12-11
URL: https://podcasts.captivate.fm/media/e49cf2d9-baac-42d0-98d5-44adfc615c48/audio.mp3
Duration: 38:00

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[00:00] Hi, this is Robert Sheer with another edition of Sheer Intelligence, the podcast I've been doing for KCRW. And I have a wonderful guest tonight, John

[00:30] Kariaku. He was a intelligence operative for the CIA for 14 years from 1990 to 2004. After the World Trade Center attack, he was involved in Pakistan and the capture of the third highest ranking leader of the Al Qaeda. And he blew the whistle on torture in 207, an interview with ABC. And after that, while he was working for the Senate

[01:01] Foreign Relations Committee, he ran into some trouble because of an interview he gave to a reporter for the New York Times in which he was said to have revealed the name of another agent to that reporter. It's ironic because that's the sort of thing that General Petraeus, who is head of the CIA did 10 times in books that he turned over to his mistress, who was writing a book about him. And he got no such penalty. My guest, John Carriacou, served over two years in prison.

[01:35] And what I want to ask you about, because you know a lot about the so-called war on terrorism. And you know about what works and what doesn't work. And one of the first things that came up here is that a number of high ranking officials the head of the FBI, the head of the CIA, and the former head of national security, all jumped up before the TV cameras and say, you see, this is why Apple and Google are wrong to have encryption. This is why we can't have a restraints. This is why Edward Snowden is weakening us

[02:07] and with his revelations and so forth. What was your immediate response to that? Oh, it was first, a feeling of disgust. And second, I wanted to shout to the nearest person in proximity to me what nonsense this was. This is exactly what our senior government officials do. Every time they're embarrassed by a revelation is that they try to pass the blame on to somebody else. Ed Snowden is a very easy scapegoat.

[02:39] Google and Apple aren't going to defend themselves publicly, the truth of the matter is We can certainly fight against terrorism and fight terrorist groups around the world without having to give up our own civil liberties. They're not mutually exclusive. And the government, whether it's a Republican president or a Democratic one, makes no difference. They both want us to give up our civil liberties. That's unnecessary. It's anti-constitutional.

[03:09] And I think Americans, all Americans, should stand up and oppose it. Yeah, the irony, of course, is because it could be Barack Obama, it could be George W. Bush, they all claim they don't really want us to give up our civil liberties, they say it's a necessity. And one of the things that happened right away, and with an amount of hours of the Paris tragedy, it was revealed that in fact the terrorists in this case had used unencrypted messaging. Exactly. That they were known to the authorities, that there was no mystery to it. They had telegraphed what they were going to do. Now you had worked

[03:41] as a key. Why don't you give some of your background? Yeah, I served multiple tours overseas for the CIA in Bahrain, in Athens, in Pakistan, throughout the Persian Gulf. I have a degree in Middle Eastern studies. I speak Arabic. I spent virtually my entire adult life living in or working on the Middle East. Even after I left the CIA, I joined the senior staff of the Senate Foreign Relations committee. I was the senior investigator for the committee and I was the intelligence advisor to

[04:16] its then chairman, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, who of course is now the Secretary of State. So I like to think that I know what I'm talking about as well. I was assigned at the CIA to the Counterterrorism Center working specifically on terrorism issues and more specifically on al-Qaeda and Sunni extremist groups. So again, I like to think I know what I'm talking about. In each case, we could have found these people. Some of them had been arrested, as in the case of the Boston Marathon. The fellows now in the Paris bombing had announced on the internet publicly

[04:52] and unequipped messages what they were about and so forth. You were one of the people out there in those U.S. embassies out there in the field trying to recruit spies. And in fact, that's how you were instrumental in the capture of the third most important member of Al-Qaeda. Can you take us through that story? What were you, what were you doing and how did you do it? Immediately after the September 11th attacks, I volunteered to go to Afghanistan in any capacity that the CIA wanted me. Four months passed before I was able to go overseas just because

[05:25] my skill set was not one that was important in those really early days after the attacks. So finally in January of 2002, I was sent to Pakistan as the chief of counterterrorism operations there. I had been in country for just a couple of weeks when we received word that Abu Zubaydah was somewhere in the country. Now, we believed at the time that Abu Zubaydah was the number three in al-Qaeda. I think that's probably not true in retrospect, but Abu Zubaydah was a very important facilitator and logistician for al-Qaeda. So if you're an al-Qaeda fighter

[06:00] and you need a false passport, a credit card, a disguise, a safe house, a ticket home, Abu Zubaydah is the person that you would go to for that. We were able to track Abu Zubaydah over the course of about six weeks, and we were able to narrow down his location to one of 14 separate sites around Faisalabad, Pakistan, and a couple of sites around Lahore, Pakistan, although it was less likely that he was in Lahore. We finally conducted simultaneous raids on all

[06:31] 14 of these sites at two o'clock in the morning on March 22, 2002. And sure enough, we found Abu Zubaydah and more than four dozen other al-Qaeda fighters in these sites. So, Abu Zubaydah was severely wounded during the capture. He was shot by a Pakistani policeman in the thigh, the groin in the stomach with an AK-47, we were able to patch him up or have him patched up and I sat with him for the next 56 hours before we put him on a

[07:05] plane and sent him off to what it turned out was a secret prison in a third country. You're doing what you said the CIA's function is to do and you've written a book about it called The Reluctant Spy My Secret Life and the CIA's were on terror and actually I was amazed at that this book which does discuss this escapade Was actually approved for publication by the CIA. That was a fight I should tell you it took me nine months to write this book and

[07:36] 22 months to get it cleared and the CIA ended up taking 90 pages out of it So it was quite a battle. So I was gonna say where did you come from? What led you to be a CIA agent and what led you now to be a whistleblower? Well, it's actually kind of a funny sort of romantic story in that it can't happen today. I was in graduate school at George Washington University and I was taking a class called the Psychology of Leadership, a fantastic class.

[08:09] And so my professor tasked us with writing a psychological profile of our bosses. So I was working at the United Food and Commercial Workers Union at the time, and I worked for a man who I was actually physically afraid of. I saw these outbursts of temper, even violence that frightened me. So I wrote a paper about him in which I concluded with supporting evidence that he was a sociopath and that he had psychopathic tendencies. And I backed this up with evidence.

[08:44] So I handed in the paper. A week later I got the paper back and the professor had given me an A and he wrote in the margin, I've never done this before but I urge you to quit this job. In fact, I had quit the week earlier. And then he wrote, please see me after class. So I went to see him after class and he closed the door of his office and he said, look, I'm actually undercover as a professor here. I'm a senior CIA officer acting as a spotter looking for grad students who I think would fit into the CIA's culture.

[09:17] Would you be interested in working for the CIA? This is a scene out of a movie. This really happened. It really happened. And to tell you the truth, I had never really given any thought to working for the CIA, but graduation was upon me. I was getting married just a week or two after graduation. I had no job, no prospects for a job really. This is graduation from grad school. And so I said, sure, I'd be interested in working for the CIA. I went through the tests. He facilitated that. And then I ended up apparently doing

[09:49] very well on that psychological test. So they called me and said, we've scheduled the second battery of tests. We want you to go to this utterly nondescript building in Vienna, Virginia. and you're going to take some tests there. So I went out to this building and I was met there by a secretary who took me into a small room and there was a table and at the table were a psychiatrist, a psychologist and an anthropologist. And there was a seat for me on the other side of the table.

[10:19] So I sat down, introduced myself, hello, how are you? And the psychiatrist said to me, describe your relationship with your mother. And I said, well, she's a good mother, I love her, she loves me. And then we went on to the next question, was your father the disciplinarian of the family? And I said, not really, I think, you know, my dad's a big strong guy, he was a big strong guy. I think he was probably afraid that he would hurt us, so he never really disciplined us.

[10:51] He'd give us a stern look over his glasses, which always frightened us as children. And then they said, and I remember this very clearly, have you ever betrayed a friendship? And I said, oh my gosh, I don't think so. I hope not. I said, let me think about it for a minute. And they said, no, no, that's the answer we were looking for. And they all look at each other and they nod and nod. And they said, okay, we're gonna need some hair, blood and urine and you're free to go.

[11:21] So I gave them some hair, blood, and urine, and I left. And I got home and my wife said, how'd you do? I said, I have no idea. No idea whatsoever. Then I got a call saying, hey, you aced those tests. We'd like to see you at headquarters. And at headquarters, I was interviewed by several different offices, both in operations and intelligence. And in fact, I ended up getting one job offer and it was from the office that was founded by my grad school professor. So I went into the office of leadership analysis

[11:54] as an Iraq analyst in the first week of January, 1990. So you arrived there at the CIA and they teach you Arabic and you're learning about Iraq. Here we had been allies or a supporter. We have this famous photo of Donald Rumsfeld and Saddam Hussein together. That's right, shaking hands. Yeah, and we were, we being the United States, I didn't particularly vote for these guys who made the decision, but we were on the side of Saddam Hussein against Iran.

[12:26] In fact, we were providing tactical intelligence to Saddam Hussein in order to fight the Iranians. We were providing not just defense intelligence, but overhead satellite imagery to help him fight the Iranians. So it was actually a much closer intelligence and military cooperation relationship than I think most Americans realized. You're listening to Sheer Intelligence. I'm speaking with former CIA agent John Kiriaco. I want to get into the whole question of what has kept secret, what has classified, what

[12:59] do we have a right to know, which is after all what we began with. There's this terrible tragedy in Paris. It's once again being used as an excuse for tightening classification, for greater surveillance, for invading the rights of Americans. And what we lose with classification is what really happened in history, so we can't learn the lessons. How did Iran, one of the great centers of human history and development and culture, end up being a center of madness? And the U.S. and Brits have a real role in it.

[13:31] So I'm taking you back now, you're a young guy in the CIA. And to what degree in that culture, was there any questioning, any thinking? Absolutely none. Those experiences were seen as historical and they had nothing to do with us. They had nothing to do with the present. Maybe mistakes were made. We learned from those mistakes and we move on. I remember probing some senior officers

[14:03] and asking questions. Well, what was it like back then? What was the decision making process like? and people just not even being able to answer me because they had never asked. So I concluded on my own that we did not learn from our mistakes because we never even discussed our mistakes. What went wrong in your career or went right depending on one's moral perspective is that at first you were drinking the Kool-Aid.

[14:35] Oh, sure. I was very proud to be a CIA officer. You know, I always maintained, and I've said this publicly many times, the Republican party and the conservative movement in this country do not have a monopoly on patriotism. And so, you know, I was always a proud, progressive Democrat, and at the same time, proud to be a CIA officer. There seemed to be a division between people who went into the CIA to do analysis and thought and so forth, and the people out there doing the interrogating and the

[15:06] special ops and all that and you were on that other side so you were I wasn't usual you know if I were writing the script for the movie about you I mean there you are in Pakistan and you are tracking the number three guy in Al-Qaeda and and this guy gets captured right you basically organized yes right the raid okay you've got this guy and instead of doing what they did with bin Laden, you're trying to keep him alive. Yes. Right. Well, you're getting him a glass

[15:40] of water. You're right. Yeah. Now, you personally did not witness torture. No, I did not. Abu Zubaydah was tortured a couple of months after his arrival at the secret, more than a couple. Actually, we captured him in late March 2002. The torture didn't begin until right around the 1st of August. And I say right around because the White House authorized the torture to begin on the 1st of August, but there's some evidence that he was tortured before August in anticipation of the approval coming through.

[16:13] So the torture began right around the 1st of August. Now he had been in FBI custody really since right around the 1st of April, 2002. And the FBI agent that was interrogating him, Ali Sufan, was actually doing a masterful job at rapport building and at engaging him in a conversation to which he responded. For example, Ali just sitting across the table from him and carrying on a conversation was

[16:43] able to get Abu Zubaydah to identify a very mysterious character whom we had been hearing about, Muhtar. For many years, we had first heard about Muhtar in the mid-1990s in relation to the Bojinka Affair where this group called Al Qaeda that we had never heard of before was planning to hijack six Boeing 747s, leaving Manila and crashing them into the sea. So we knew that there was this bad man out there named Muhtar.

[17:14] We didn't know who that was. It was Abu Zubaydah who said that Muhtar is Khaled Sheikh Mohammed. We had never heard of Khaled Sheikh Mohammed before. And it turned out that it was Khaled Sheikh Mohammed who was the mastermind of the 9-11 attacks. Again, all we had was this nom de guerre. We knew this was a bad guy. We had no idea who he was or where to find him. And it was Ali Sufan who was able to draw that information out of Abu Zubaydah by treating him with respect and by engaging him in a conversation.

[17:45] The 9-11 Commission report, which is fascinating to reading, there's a narrative of how this whole thing happened and who are these people and you know so forth. There's a disclaimer in there where they say that the 9-11 commission people who after all had the highest level of security clearance picked by the president of the United States and people of best experience were not allowed they said we were not allowed to directly interview the key witnesses. True. And nor were we allowed to actually interview the people who interviewed them.

[18:20] That's also true. We put questions to them, so we really don't know. And our analysis is limited by that fact. Well, the most interesting of these key witnesses was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. And what I have never been able to figure out, and I've read, I think, everything that's out there about him, is how did this guy go from being a student in North Carolina in a Christian school first, and then some sort of engineering school with, and there There was no indication that he hated Americans or Christians or Jews.

[18:51] No, in fact, he lived with an American family, like as an exchange student. And they said that he was a perfectly lovely guy while he was here in college. So when we try to think about what makes a terrorist, what causes these movements, and so forth, it's very difficult to get any sense at all of what drives them. And in the case of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, you know, what caused this guy to go there? Was there any ever discussion about who are these people?

[19:21] Yeah, we tried as best we could to look into their backgrounds. We found some very interesting things, like the fact that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had gone to school in North Carolina to a Christian college, like I was a beta lived in Paris, sort of as a bohemian. I mean we even found photos of Osama bin Laden in Stockholm wearing shorts and a sleeveless t-shirt on tour with his brothers and sisters, 10 or 12 of his brothers and sisters.

[19:55] But we never really found, maybe it's because we didn't look so hard. But we never really found anything that allowed us to truly understand the genesis of this transformation. The $64 question, really, is, is there a blowback? Are there policies that give rise to this? What causes people to become terrorists? It comes up in the Paris attack, and after all, this was not done by Syrian refugees. It was done by French nationals, right?

[20:26] So what causes this? So much of what we do as part of our own foreign policy or national security policy creates, I believe, creates terrorists, for example, drone attacks. We kill so many innocent civilians with the use of drones that we radicalize populations that would otherwise never have had a problem with us.

[20:58] If you launch a drone attack on a suspected terrorist, okay, fine, you're going to kill the terrorist. But if you fire the drone while he's sitting at a cafe, let's say, which happens all the time, and you kill everybody at the cafe, which also happens, or you think you see somebody at a wedding and you drone the wedding, which has happened more times than I can even count. You have successfully then radicalized all the surviving members of that family, people

[21:32] who otherwise would never have had a problem with the United States, and they're going to seek vengeance. Was this true with the person that you were with when he was captured? I don't think so. He was a, for lack of a better phrase, I was a beta was a lost soul. I found him to be extraordinarily bright, not even really, not even really a true believer,

[22:05] but I think he had, he had assessed his life and he had come to a conclusion that he was going nowhere and it's because he was Palestinian. You know, he didn't think he would ever see a free Palestine and he just could think of no other way to sort of fight for the cause other than to ally himself with Al Qaeda. Now, he had never joined Al Qaeda. He had never pledged fealty to Osama bin Laden. But he was

[22:37] certainly acting as Al Qaeda's, like I said, logistician or, you know, go to, what's the word just go to guy for things like passports and safe houses and such, um, but he told me very directly that he was opposed to the September 11th attacks. He supported the idea of an attack, but he wanted to attack Israel. He said to me very plainly, all I ever wanted to do was to kill Jews is what he said.

[23:10] But he said that bin Laden had overruled him and bin Laden had insisted that the attack be against the United States. When you had him in custody, you were not engaging in torture. No, no, certainly not. And you were making the point earlier that the FBI was actually being quite effective in talking to him. Believe me, it kills me to compliment the FBI, but they were actually quite good. Well, I gather from most of the accounts it's the FBI that objected to the torture. Yes, not only did the FBI object to the torture. But as soon as it became apparent to Director Mueller that the CIA was going to begin

[23:45] torturing prisoners, he ordered every single FBI agent out of the country. He said he didn't even want his people in the same country where this was taking place. Ali Sufan reported when he left the country and went back to FBI headquarters, he actually did engage with the Inspector General and reported what he had seen as a war crime and was told, well, you know, this has been approved at higher levels than ours. So how do we know what he was able to find?

[24:16] Has that been published? Yeah. He testified before the, I think it was the Senate Armed Services Committee back in 2008. And even though the CIA forced heavy redactions on his testimony, much of it made its way into the public record. And so he was actually able to get the needed results without torture. Absolutely. In fact, he was the only one who was able to get the results. Torture or no torture.

[24:49] Now you've changed your position on that, I notice. I have. You know, I tried, in 2007, Brian Ross of ABC News called me and said that he had a source who said that I had tortured Abuzabeta. I said that was absolutely untrue. I had never tortured Abuzabeta. or any other prisoner, I was the only person who was kind to Abu Zubedah. And he said, well, you're welcome to come on the show and defend yourself. So I said, I'd think about it. In the meantime, President Bush gave a press conference in which he looked directly into the camera and said, we do not torture.

[25:21] And I knew that that was a lie. And a couple of days later, he told another reporter. Can I just interrupt? How did you know it was a lie? Because I knew we were torturing prisoners. I was, in headquarters, I was the executive assistant to the deputy director for operations. I was seeing all the cable traffic coming back, not just saying we're torturing, but saying in very, very clear detail, this is exactly what we're doing to torture these prisoners.

[25:51] So a couple of days later. So all of the high command in the CIA would have known that. It was their idea. They came up with it. were the names. Oh, we're talking about George Tenet and John McLaughlin and Jose Rodriguez, several who are still undercover. But John Rizzo, I mean, the fix was in. George Tenet who wrote a whole book sort of justifying.

[26:21] Certainly. This is his legacy. He's gonna spend the rest of his life trying to justify this. He'll never come clean. So I go on ABC and I had decided in the days before the interview that no matter what he asked me, I was going to tell the truth. And so I said three things that night that utterly changed the course of my life. I said, we were torturing prisoners. I said, torture was official US government policy. And I said, the policy was approved by and signed

[26:52] by the president himself. And within 24 hours, the FBI began investigating me. Now interestingly enough, a year later at the very end of the Bush administration, the Justice Department decided that I had not committed a crime and they closed the investigation. Three months later, the new Attorney General, Eric Holder, ordered that the investigation be reopened. And so they reopened it and they were able to manufacture five felony charges against me.

[27:24] So, you know, I make a point about the Espionage Act all the time, between the time that the Espionage Act was written in 1917 until Barack Obama's election, three people in American history were charged with Espionage for passing classified information to the press, three people in American history. During the Obama administration, 10 people have been charged with Espionage for passing information to the press. I'm talking to John Carriaco who blew the whistle on torture in the CIA.

[27:57] You mentioned the official that really went after you. Was that some Dick Cheney type right? No. It wasn't a neocon nut. It's a liberal. Yeah. Liberal. That's right. A guy named Eric Holder who I actually met, believe it or not, not far from here at a dinner at Barbara Streisand's house. And Barbara Streisand, a good person. She had a small dinner party, and Eric Holder was there when Obama was first running. And he presented as an incredibly enlightened, pro-civil liberties, decent fellow.

[28:31] Right. Yeah, the bankers will tell you that he's quite enlightened. And yet, because he didn't go after them. Right. Yeah. But he went after you. Yeah. The guy who sat next to me at this dinner and was so reasonable and agreed with me on everything. He actually destroyed or tried to destroy your life. Yeah, I've not recovered. I'm not sure that I ever will. I'll tell you exactly the basis of these three espionage charges. I worked with an analyst by the name of Deuce Martinez

[29:03] who had never, ever been undercover, ever. And Deuce Martinez resigned from the CIA about a year after I did. We were friends and he was excited to tell me about his onward position. So we had lunch together and he gave me his new business card and it said, Deuce Martinez, Mitchell and Jessen LLC. Now Mitchell and Jessen were the creators, the architects of the torture program and I said to him, are you crazy going to work for these monsters? And he said, no, no, they're

[29:36] good guys, they're misunderstood. I said, you've got to be insane to resign from the agency and go to work for these guys of all people. There wasn't one other job that you could have taken. These are the psychologists? The two psychologists. When I went on ABC News, he stopped speaking to me, which was fine. But I happen to have his business card. Scott Shane of the New York Times. called me and said, I'm working on a story about Deuce Martinez. Do you know how I can get in touch with him? And I said, gee, I haven't talked to him in a long time.

[30:07] He stopped speaking to me. But you know what? I have his business card. So I scanned the business card and I emailed it to Scott Shane. I was charged with espionage for that email. Shane's article came out in the New York Times, a reporter for ABC News called and said, hey, do you know how I can get in touch with Deuce Martinez? I sent him the business card. I got a second espionage charge. And then the Justice Department made a big production out of telling the judge that I had passed top secret code word information to the press.

[30:41] And that information was declassified solely for the purpose of prosecuting me. And that information was that after the September 11th attacks, the CIA was trying to kill or capture Osama bin Laden. Top secret. Now, the judge threw out those three espionage charges. I hadn't committed espionage, but this is what Holder's Justice Department does. They heap multiple major felony charges on you, knowing that you're going to run out

[31:17] of money, that your friends and family will eventually turn against you, you're going to exhaust yourself, and eventually, you're going to take a plea just to make the rest of it go away. Well, I ran up legal bills of well over a million dollars. I still owe my attorneys $880,000 and we didn't even go to trial. If we were to go to trial, they told me we're looking at a three million dollar legal bill here. What do you want to do? Because if we lose, you're realistically going to

[31:48] get 12 to 18 years. The government's offering two and a half. So what do do you want to do? Well, I have five kids at home. So do I take the two and a half and an $880,000 outstanding bill or do I roll the dice for 12 to 18 years and a $3 million legal bill? The decision's an easy one when you put it like that. So the good guy puts you in jail, destroys your family life, destroys your economic situation. And you're in prison. We're not going to go into great detail. But you're in

[32:26] prison. Did you have regrets? Oh, no, no, no, no regrets at all. I would have done the whole thing again. Why? Because you can't have regrets. Otherwise you make yourself crazy. Now, the only thing I would have done differently is I would have hired an attorney before going on ABC rather than after. But in retrospect, I'm on the right side of history on this issue. It's the government that's wrong on torture. You got out of prison, you were on democracy

[32:57] now and then I interviewed you along with my producer, Josh Shear, we interviewed you. And you told me a story that wasn't the most sensational story of hardship, but I was really taken aback by it. A former colleague of mine from both the CIA and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee came over to congratulate me on my release, and it was great seeing him. And he said that he was bringing a message from a former boss of mine, who really both

[33:33] of us were friends with. But that boss had since assumed a very senior position in the administration. So he said, I have a message from our friend, congratulations, he's really glad you're home, he hopes you understand that he can never speak to you again. And I said, yeah, sure, I understand, I think he's a coward, but I understand. We have lectured the whole world about civil liberties, integrity, totalitarianism and

[34:07] so forth. This is really a 1984 moment, it really is, and that this person in a high position would just make you basically a non-person. That's what's happened. I'm a non-person. Yes. I've lost everything. They even took my pension, my federal pension from me, after 19 and a half years of proud federal service, I'm going to have to work until the day I die. And that's really part of the Justice Department plan. What do you mean it's the Justice Department plan?

[34:38] What does that really mean? What is an Eric Holder? After all, here's our president as a constitutional law professor, president. Here's Eric Holder, a man admired by many liberals. And you're saying the plan is to destroy someone who dared tell the truth? The only way to frighten anyone who might consider becoming a whistleblower or might consider disclosing something to the press

[35:11] is to make an example of the person who does. They tried that with Thomas Drake at NSA and charged him with something like nine counts of espionage for reporting waste, fraud, and abuse to the House Intelligence Committee, which is exactly what he's supposed to do. Jeffrey Sterling, a CIA officer, was convicted of seven counts of espionage and two counts of theft of government property. The government claims for reporting waste, fraud, and abuse to James Reisen

[35:43] at the New York Times. Jeffrey Sterling swears he never passed any information to Jim Reisen. I blew the whistle on torture. I was charged with multiple counts of espionage as well as other felonies. So this is what they do. They make an example of you so that if anybody else has in the back of their mind that they're gonna blow the whistle on something, on some wrongdoing that they have second thoughts and third thoughts. The only exception to this that we've seen is Ed Snowden.

[36:15] Ed Snowden told The New York Times in 2014 that Tom Drake and I inspired him to go public with his revelations. But he saw what they did to Tom Drake and he saw what they did to me And he concluded rightly that if he was going to blow the whistle on the waste fraud, abuse and illegality that he was seeing at NSA, he couldn't possibly remain in the country. And so he left. If you had not spoken, you are the only person who's rarely gone to jail over the torture. Yeah. Right.

[36:46] If you had not spoken, do you think the Senate Intelligence Committee would have come out with its report and has it actually hasn't even come out with its full report? Right. No, I don't. that is very disappointing to me is that it's been eight years since I went on ABC News and not a single additional CIA officer has come out and said I was an interrogator, this is what I saw, I was involved in the planning, I was involved in the implementation. Nobody has gone public

[37:17] and that's very disappointing to me. This is an incredible point on which to end because it turns it around it doesn't the question is not why is there John Caracure doing this or Edward Snowden or Thomas Drake it's how many people knew what you knew and have not told us how many how many I would put it in the in the several dozens no new and have not said a word never said a word and as you indicated earlier that goes to the people at the top ranks all the way

[37:49] to the top yeah well thank you for doing this you certainly are an American original unfortunately we know I have too many of them thanks for having me really thank you that's it for sheer intelligence my guest today was former CI agent and torture whistleblower John Kiriakou the producers of sheer intelligence are Josh Shear and Rebecca Mooney Mario Diaz was our engineer For more, check out KCRW.com. I'm Robert Scheer. Thanks for listening.
