Title: CIA Whistleblower John Kiriakou: GOP won't do real intel oversight
Show: Useful Idiots
Date: 2023-01-20
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjpxB9P5WbE
Duration: 0:34:00

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[00:04] hello and welcome to useful idiots I'm your host Katie Halper and I'm gather host Aaron mettek this week we're doing a special interview only show but don't worry because it's such a great interview it's with the wonderful John kiriaku and we're also providing you with the Thursday Throwdown which we like to do every week that's for our subscribers at usefulas@substack.com what we're doing is we're doing a Thursday Throwdown about uh zielinski and Sean Penn so make sure you subscribe usefulas at

[00:35] subsect.com and here is our interview with John kiriaku so excited to have on John kiriaku he's a former CIA counter-terrorism officer and a former senior investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee John became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama Administration under the Espionage Act a law designated to punish spies he served 23 months in prison as a result of his attempt to oppose the bush administration's torture

[01:06] program he also has a new sub stack called loud and clear welcome John thanks so much for having me it's good to see both of you so John what we want to ask you about let's start with uh among the new victories that these Rebel Republicans won for holding out their vote for Kev McCarthy was the creation of a new what's being built as a church committee a new church committee to investigate the investigators the intelligence agencies what do you make of this investigation do you think it can avoid being strictly partisan as

[01:38] some Democrats are alleging it will be and what would you want to see this committee focus on oh great questions I I actually don't think that this committee can be non-partisan for a couple of reasons the most obvious being that it it appears that the Democrats aren't going to participate uh we don't really know yet who uh the members are going to be but I was talking to somebody who's associated with this new subcommittee this morning as a staff member uh he told me to expect Congressman Thomas Massey the

[02:10] libertarian republican from uh from Kentucky and he also warned me that what Jim Jordan the the new subcommittee's chairman um has already begun doing is begun he's begun Staffing this subcommittee with CIA officers who are going to be on loan from the CIA on detail to then go after the FBI so you know we've got we've got partisan problems in that it's going to be not

[02:42] just a republican subcommittee but a very conservative uh what's the word uh the freedom caucus conservative uh subcommittee and it probably won't even include any Democrats and then besides that Aaron you know how much the CIA and the FBI have hated each other over the decades over the generations uh we can go back to the creation of the CIA in 1947 they've hated each other since then and now you're going to have CIA officers under the guise of

[03:13] congressional oversight going after the FBI and and listen I'm the last guy on the planet who is going to be out there defending the FBI but this may be like professional wrestling in that there's just no good guy this reminds me of when uh Hulk Hogan wrestled The Ultimate Warrior at WrestleMania 6 and that was it was a hard time for me because I did not know I don't I did not want to pick sides and the same case here I have to pick a side between the CIA and the FBI and of course for me personally I'd have to pick scrutiny of the CIA because they

[03:44] I think are responsible for more misery around the world than the FBI is the FBI is uh uh oppression happens at home uh in the US pretty much where the ca is global Farm to tape Farms table but but John since you mentioned maybe you want to tell us briefly why you have no love for the FBI uh based on your experience as a whistleblower who blew the whistle on torture at the CIA who then got prosecuted by the FBI and just to clarify fine no one's gotten in trouble for the torture program right the only

[04:16] person who got in trouble related to the torture program was you who blew the whistle on it yeah I was the only one who went to to prison and there was a guy that I worked with in the cia's counterterism center by the name of Glenn Carl um Glenn was was the headquarters officer in charge of the torture program thinking in the beginning that this was legal and it was legit and then when he saw exactly what people were doing at these secret sites overseas he flipped against it at headquarters and was fired

[04:47] from the CIA he was never prosecuted but um but he lost his job he lost his career because he he went up the chain of command and said this is unethical and it's it's uh immoral and probably illegal so but yeah I'm the only person that went to prison uh why do I hate the FBI it was Peter strzok uh who put the cuffs on me and um and took me to jail and charged me with five felonies including three

[05:17] counts of Espionage for giving an interview to ABC News and a subsequent interview to the New York Times and you know the funny thing is that when I blew the whistle on the cia's torture program in December of 2007. as you might imagine the CIA filed uh what's called a crimes report against me with the FBI the very next day and from December of 2007 until December of 2008 uh the FBI investigated me and then in December of 2008 they sent my attorneys what's called a declination

[05:48] letter saying they were declining to prosecute me because their um investigation had concluded that I had not broken the law now the the issue there is that it is illegal it's actually a felony it's on the books it's never been prosecuted before but it's actually a felony to classify a crime so if somebody in government is committing a crime it's illegal to make that program classified for the purpose of keeping the information away from the

[06:20] American people and that's what they determined this this was so they declined to press charges three weeks later Barack Obama's inaugurated as president and he names John Brennan an old Nemesis of mine as the deputy National Security adviser for counter-terrorism he tried to make Brennan the CIA director in that first term and progressives were up in arms because because Brennan was in up to his neck in the torture program and

[06:50] everybody knew it what I did not know was that as soon as Obama was inaugurated Brennan asked the justice department to reopen the case against me secretly and I didn't know that the FBI then for the next three years had tapped my phones they were intercepting all of my emails they had teams of FBI surveillance officers following my family and me they followed us to church

[07:20] they followed us to dinner they followed us to Target and then in January of 2012 I was charged with uh with these five felonies so you know not only has the FBI raided my house which they did in in January of uh of 2012. but they've rated my house twice they did it again uh two and a half less than two and a half years ago so I actually have Federal

[07:51] um I have a federal suit Federal litigation against the FBI right now in the eastern district of Virginia so that's why I personally hate the FBI now it actually even goes back a little bit farther than that on the night that we captured Abu zubaida in faisalabad Pakistan this was late March of 2002. we believed we all believed the CIA the FBI the White House we all believe that Abu zubaida was the number three in Al Qaeda he wasn't he was a bad guy but not bad enough to you know put in Guantanamo for the rest

[08:23] of his life with no trial and then when he dies you just you just cremate his body and throw him in the Caribbean but the night that we caught I was a beta it was a joint team of CIA officers and FBI agents and I was the the leader of this group of 36 people one of the things that we grabbed that night besides Abu zubaida and his bodyguard and dozens and dozens of other people was that was about his cell phone so in the chaos and the commotion of

[08:54] capturing him an FBI agent took the cell phone threw it in an Evidence bag and sealed it and as soon as she did that it started ringing so I grabbed the bag and she said stop and I said Jen it could be can I swear on this show I got my exact words it could be [ __ ] Bin Laden calling and she says it's evidence

[09:24] I said evidence of what the guy's never been charged with a crime if we can answer the phone and all the while it's ringing if we can answer the phone and it's Bin Laden or zawadi or some other guy on the FBI's 10 most wanted list don't you think that's what the White House would want us to do in the meantime the circle formed around us CIA and FBI all watching to see how this was going to play out and she said to me if you open that bag I will arrest you and I will charge you

[09:57] with obstruction of justice and then the phone stopped ringing and we never knew you've done if you if you if it picked it up or what would you have done would you have given it to zubaida to pick up or what would you have done had she you not been threatened with the rest if I had been able to answer the phone I would have tried to engage whoever was on the other line in conversation my Arabic was absolutely fluent absolutely excellent and if you can just get a second or two on the line NSA is able to grab it

[10:28] and in many cases they can geolocate where the other person is so we speculated afterwards that word had gotten around Al Qaeda very quickly that we had gotten him and somebody in a position of authority was calling to see if he was okay but we'll never know was this just a power play absolutely absolutely and I can explain to you why it was just a power play because overseas the CIA always uh takes the leadership role

[11:00] domestically the FBI always takes the leadership role but 911 was still an open criminal investigation and so while this is a CIA operation the FBI liked to think that they were in charge and they were going to take leadership because eventually they're going to have to use this information in court which of course never ever happened nobody was ever charged with a crime so yeah it was a power play just about three weeks later

[11:32] it's this is kind of a funny story funny and sad at the same time three weeks later the spokesman for the Taliban Embassy in Peshawar Pakistan uh gave a press statement and I happen to be watching this press statement with a guy who was on loan to the American Embassy from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey he was a detective and he was a very close contact of mine in fact he just called me day before yesterday he said look at

[12:02] the son of a [ __ ] the balls that this guy has he just goes on TV like he's taunting us and I said uh I said yeah that drives me crazy you know this is like the only country left in the world that actually recognizes these guys and allows them to have an embassy and he said we should break into that place and steal everything they have and I said you know what we should that's exactly what we should do and so I sent a cable to headquarters and I said listen I'm gonna put a team together and we're

[12:34] going to drive to shower Pakistan in the middle of the night and we're gonna break into the Taliban Embassy and we're going to steal literally everything and they said go with God so we went I actually have pictures of it we went and we filled and I mean to the to the roofs three passenger vans full of documents and computers and equipment so about a week later this detective came up to the CIA

[13:04] station and he said Hey listen something important he goes that was all fun and stuff and we can tell you know our kids stories about it but something important there's a file that has phone bills in it and these phone bills show dozens of calls to the United States going right up until September 10th and stopping and then they start up again on September 16th Buffalo New York Kansas City Boston

[13:36] All Over America so I cabled headquarters and I said be advised this is what we found and they said okay turn it over to the FBI it's their investigation but make photocopies for our files so I made copies gave a copy to the pakistanis sent a copy to CIA gave the originals to the FBI two years later I resigned from the CIA I happened to be in a shopping mall in

[14:07] Suburban Virginia and I ran into one of the FBI agents that I had worked with in Pakistan hadn't seen him in two years hey I said how's it going hey I said whatever happened to those phone bills and he said oh you know what we never did anything with those because we couldn't find uh Pashto linguist to take the time to go over them and I go Pashto linguist they were in English that's how I knew

[14:39] what they were I don't speak Pashto they were in English he's like oh sorry I think we may have [ __ ] this up and then another year later but even if they had been in passion they could find a linguist I mean it's a double find a linguist exactly what there's not like Italian language not one past two speaker anywhere in America that you can trust enough to to translate some telephone bills

[15:10] you know so a year later I I talked to my detective friend and I said whatever happened to those phone bills I'm really bothered by this and he said oh man it's right out of the final scene of uh Raiders of the Lost Ark he said they boxed it up they sealed it and they sent it to Greenbelt Maryland and it's sitting on a shelf somewhere in an FBI storage facility and nobody ever looked at those bills that's why I hate the FBI

[15:41] so John quickly because I want to get back to the the issue of this new committee but is that incompetence or is that a deliberate cover-up yeah you know at the time I thought it was incompetence and in the intervening years I think I've come to believe that it was a cover-up because it's not like they didn't know it's not like nobody told them right there's cable traffic out there that people can get now through the Freedom of Information Act they knew exactly what they were receiving

[16:12] so I think somebody made a made a decision that they're just not going to touch this you know were those FBI numbers that were being called were they FBI informants were they terrorists I don't know and I can only conclude that it was a cover-up so going back to this new committee the Republicans have formed to uh investigate U.S intelligence agencies among the people who I have no doubt they're going to scrutinize is the FBI

[16:42] official you mentioned Peter strzok the guy who put the handcuffs on you because Peter strzok is also the senior FBI agent who formally launched the Trump Russia probe and we know now what a scam that was and there's a lot more I think to come out on that that I think would be the subject of legitimate oversight but you've already given us reasons to question that this probe that this community will be legitimate because it involves CIA staffers who will have their own Grudge to pursue against the FBI when it's a CI itself that should be

[17:14] just as equally the subject of oversight so they're given all that given all that going back to my earlier question of let's say this was a legitimate committee with uh you know nothing but good intentions what kind of oversight would you want to see what would you want to see this committee look into oh yeah you know um Jim Jordan the subcommittee's chairman gave a floor statement yesterday and he said that the committee is going to look at any governmental organization that collects information on Americans well that's pretty much every governmental organization at least in the

[17:45] intelligence and federal law enforcement communities so I would like to see that be true but I wouldn't want to see it relegated just to the FBI and just to the FBI agents and leaders who went after uh Donald Trump you're a hundred percent right there was no such thing as Russia gate it was all made up right there was never any evidence uh and Peter strzok made a career out of it I mean the guys got 200 000 Twitter followers he's making a ton of ton of

[18:15] money you know appearing on TV and and uh he gives speeches all over the place he's a liar and a fraud he's a liar and a fraud and he shouldn't be held up as an example of what we want our governmental authorities to be so I would love it if the subcommittee would go after the FBI and people like Peter strzok but at the same time go after the CIA and NSA you know we've known for for 20 years and we've been certain for eight years since Ed Snowden

[18:47] came out that NSA was um spying on Americans right warrantless wiretapping not only is that a violation of federal law it's a violation of nsa's Charter the charter that created NSA said specifically that NSA could not intercept the communications of U.S persons that's any American citizen or anybody in the country on a green card they can't and they do it anyway I'd like to know also what the CIA is doing against Americans because thanks

[19:18] to Josh Schulte and the Vault 7 Revelations we know that the CIA is capable of taking over our cars by hacking into their computer systems that the CIA is able to turn our Smart TVs into listening devices even when they appear to be turned off to listen to what we're saying in in our private Communications the cia's never answered for any of that so if Jim Jordan were serious this wouldn't be an

[19:48] investigation into the just the FBI based on uh the the anonymous uh testimony of 14 so-called FBI whistleblowers it would be the entire intelligence and federal law enforcement communities and by the way John going back to the issue that you were imprisoned for blowing the whistle on which is the cia's torture program what happened when the Senate tried to conduct oversight of that culture program yes CIA under John Brennan who

[20:19] you mentioned earlier spied on the Senate and got caught for the first time in American history the CIA hacked in to the Senate intelligence committee's computer systems to try to see what it was that this that the intelligence committee investigators were collecting on the CIA you know Dianne Feinstein a complaint that I've had against uh Dianne Feinstein Aaron for many years is that she was little more than a cheerleader for the CIA especially when she was the chairman of

[20:50] the Senate intelligence committee what she did was to go onto the floor of the Senate right unannounced as soon as she learned that this had happened she condemned John Brennan by name and then she filed a crimes Report with the FBI asking the justice department to investigate John Brennan and the CIA in the end nothing happened there was no investigation uh the justice department elected to just ignore the fact that this had happened

[21:21] and now John Brennan is on the board of Fordham University and he's a talking head on MSNBC trying to convince um progressives why they should be you know neoliberals and support all the things that the CIA supports it's a travesty January 11th marked the 21 year anniversary of the opening of gitmo can you talk about the significance of this yeah um you know this is a dark stain on American history uh I I've believed this

[21:52] from the very beginning I'll tell you the first time I ever heard of Guantanamo in the context of it being a prison in in April of 2002 we had captured so many Al-Qaeda fighters in Pakistan that we had filled the Rawalpindi jail this is what we would do because rawa Pindi um Ro Penny's a big city that's right next to uh to Islamabad and they had a new jail that was pretty much empty they were still using an old jail and the Pakistani intelligence service told us look you can just put all these people

[22:23] at Raul Pindi and then we'll figure out what to do with them later we said great so in just a matter of five weeks or so we filled the jail and the pakistanis came to me and said we got to start getting these guys out you have to talk to your people the Jail's full we got to get them out and they were afraid frankly that that the fact that there were so many Al Qaeda Fighters there would make the jail a target for a jailbreak or an attack or something like that so I cabled CIA headquarters and I said what do I do

[22:54] we've got hundreds and hundreds of people that we captured and the pakistanis want them out so what should I do they said put them on C12 cargo planes and fly them to Guantanamo and I wrote back and I said Guantanamo Cuba why would we send them to Cuba of all places and the response that I got back made perfect sense to me they said we decided to hold them at Guantanamo for two or

[23:24] three weeks until we can figure out whether to charge them in the eastern district of Virginia the federal district of DC the southern district of New York or the federal district of Boston um and I said oh well that's that's a great idea so we loaded it took four planes and uh we loaded all these guys on on planes and this was tough you know it's not like we have hundreds of of sets of of handcuffs sitting around right so we used flexi cuffs and you have to put a

[23:57] diaper on them and tie them down we had one incident where a Saudi um had uh broken his flexi clefs and was caught trying to gnaw through the hydraulic Cable in the back of the plane to crash the plane into the ocean this is how serious these guys were and how afraid many of them were about what was going to happen to them well as it turned out the Bush Administration and especially Dick Cheney who was really the one in charge of all this never intended for any of

[24:28] these people to go on trial never they were already preparing arguments to be heard in federal court for not sending these guys to trial right well we're going to start using the term enemy combatants for example and Guantanamo isn't really the United States it's a foreign country it just happens to be an American base so if they're still in a foreign country they don't get Congress or constitutional rights well you know that was open for debate unfortunately the Supreme Court

[25:00] said you're right they don't get constitutional rights and so here we are 21 years later and where there were almost 800 people in Guantanamo at one time almost all of whom were innocent by the way of any crime and we can get into that if you want we're down to 35. and these 35 are supposed to be the worst of the worst in fact they're not three or four or maybe five of them are the rest of them are just people who don't have countries to go back to

[25:30] you can't some send somebody who's yemeni for example back to Yemen right the country's in the midst of a war and a civil war concurrently they'll be killed if they go back there and others third countries just don't want to take them because we've already imposed on all of our friends and allies to take other prisoners you know we we captured uh we captured six uyghurs for example uh who were innocent of any crime and we couldn't send them to China they could be killed there so we sent two to

[26:02] Switzerland two to Albania and two to Tahiti well we can't impose on people like that anymore and so there are people who have been cleared for release at Guantanamo that have been sitting there still for years one guy has been cleared for seven years and is still being held at Guantanamo now for these other ones people like Khalid Sheikh Muhammad for example the The Mastermind really of the 911 attacks um Abu zubaida is another uh abdrahima nashity The Mastermind of the uh of the

[26:34] embassy attacks in Africa Ramsey been a shib who masterminded the USS coal bombing if these guys are the bad guys that we say they are and we have this wealth of information and intelligence then we need to charge them with a crime we need to put them on trial and allow them to face their accusers in a court of law that's the American way you know I I sound like a broken record Katie but I say all the time either we're going to be that shining Beacon of

[27:04] Hope for human rights and civil rights and civil liberties or we're not we can't pretend that we are and then do something opposite I'll give you another example when I was stationed in Bahrain I was on rotation to the state department in the 1990s and I was the human rights officer there and I would have to go into the the minister of uh of the interior's office and say your highness you can't pick up a 15 year old boy for marching in a pro-democracy

[27:36] demonstration beat him to death and then call his parents to come and pick up the body you can't do that that's a crime against humanity and I'm gonna have to put that in the human rights report and I'm going to have to inform Congress which then may impact the next arm sale to your country okay but then what happens when the CIA station Chief goes in an hour later and says don't listen to the human rights guy we want you to open up a secret prison that only we'll know about and we'll

[28:09] torture people there or better yet you torture them there and you just give us a transcript of whatever it is they say and we'll take care of the arms sale thing don't worry about it so what are they going to do they're going to listen to the human rights guy are they going to cooperate with the CIA station Chief and that's why we're in this predicament so what should what should be done with these these Mo inmates are countries um so the gitmo inmates that can't be

[28:39] returned to their home countries I would say one of two things should happen for the for the few the handful the fewer than a half a dozen who really are the worst of the worst they need to be put on trial if they if they really did commit the crimes that we're accusing them of having done they have a right to a to a jury of their peers and a trial by that jury whether we like their politics or not this is the system that we've given ourselves now

[29:09] we tortured a lot of these guys maybe all of these guys and so the information that they provided the incriminating information that they provided under torture it's inadmissible and so if we're not able to prosecute them legitimately they need to be released um and and we've learned a lesson a very painful and Powerful one the other ones you know I would go so far as to say ought to be released into the United States

[29:39] Congress um a very cowardly Congress in in um the 2000 odds uh passed a law which which George W Bush dutifully signed and then it was re-passed and re-signed by uh by Barack Obama it forbids any prisoner from Guantanamo from entering the United States ever for any reason there's a situation now where an Iraqi prisoner who has a deteriorating spinal condition

[30:11] they couldn't operate on him there because they didn't have the equipment so they flew the equipment from Miami to Guantanamo and when they were unloading it they dropped it and they broke it right so they don't have the equipment necessarily necessary for his operation and they didn't even have a working MRI they said they got to fly into Miami for the operation but lo and behold we have this law that says no you can't fly him to Miami so he didn't get his operation and now he's permanently paralyzed

[30:44] because we [ __ ] it up right there's no reason you know we've got dangerous people in prisons Across America we had the blind Sheikh Omar abdulrahman for example he was so dangerous that we put him in supermax what you think Guantanamo is going to keep us any safer than super max is there's no reason why these guys can't be if they're guilty why they can't be imprisoned in the United States none it's just cowardice on the part of both Congress and successive white houses

[31:17] and to hear the rest of the interview please go to useful idiots.subsack.com [Music] any more [ __ ] use do you want to share no I will say how much I admire the work that the two of you do um I I follow both of you everywhere and it's just so much fun to sit down and have a conversation the time has flown and I just want to thank you again for having me this was really a lot of fun yeah thank you you so much for coming on

[31:47] and where can people find you and tell us just briefly about your sub stack oh thank you yeah sub stack I I just now migrated over to substack you know I write for covert Action magazine and Consortium news and the sheer post and I've got a daily radio show with uh at Sputnik and now I'm doing a TV series uh it's a it's a weekly thing called the whistleblowers with Rebel media so I put everything all in one place it's all on my sub stack page it's called loud and clear with John kiriakou so uh and that's that that's a John cariakou.substack.com which we will link

[32:19] to that is it thank you so much I appreciate that thank you thank you John and good luck on the on the pilots I appreciate it [Applause] foreign guests he's got stories for miles and he's lived so many different lives you know CIA officer uh Hollywood screenwriter whistleblower president mate yeah um which we didn't even really get into and

[32:49] so we could have him on I'm sure we will have him back online very soon if you want to understand what we're referring to with Hollywood uh screenwriter uh make sure you join the sub stack at uh usefulas.subset.com uh John kiriaku spills the tea about not only Alec Baldwin but also uh Keith olberman and he tells us about how he exchanged some fighting words with both of those guys so definitely for this week you'll definitely going to want to join the the

[33:20] subsec usefully obsessed subsect.com all right and we'll see you next week bye everybody hello thank you so much for listening to and watching useful idiots for full episodes and extended interviews Please Subscribe at useful idiots.subsack.com you can subscribe on YouTube at youtube.com useful idiots for Clips live streams and full episodes also subscribe to us wherever you find your podcast follow us on Twitter at useful idiot pod and use the hashtag useful idiots pod join us Mondays at 10 A.M for the useful

[33:51] idiots Monday Morning Show where we discuss the Sunday morning news shows so you don't have to watch them [Music]
