Title: An Interview With John Kiriakou (CIA Whistleblower On Th
Show: The Darkened Hour
Date: 2022-07-23
URL: https://youtu.be/ULlvbl5ym8E
Duration: 57:00

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[00:00] we'll intervene whenever we decide it's in our national security interest to intervene and if you don't like it lump it the problem with america is not that we go around rotting around the world imposing ourselves the problem with america in the last 10 15 years since the end of the cold war really in the last 60 years is that we've been too slow to get involved i don't know how many iraqi civilians were killed but i can assure you that the number is the absolute minimal that it's possible in modern warfare

[00:30] every nation in every region now has a decision to make either you are with us or you are with the terrorists that land over there is yours you'll go back to it one day because your fight will prevail and you'll have your homes and your mosques back again because your cause is right and god is on your side welcome to the darkened hour

[01:03] welcome to another episode the darker dower and i'm your host adam fitzgerald with me today is a very special guest john kiriakou is a former cia case officer former senior investigator for the senate foreign relations committee and former counter-terrorism consultant for abc news he was responsible for the capture in pakistan in 2002 of abu zabada then believed to be the third ranking official in al qaeda in 2007 kariaka blew the whistle on cia's torture program telling abc news that the cia tortured prisoners that torture was official u.s government

[01:35] policy that the policy had been approved by then president george w bush became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the obama administration under the espionage act 2012 kiriakou was honored with the joe a callaway award for civic courage an award given to individuals who advanced truth and justice despite the possible the personal risk it creates he was later named peacemaker of the year by the priests and justice center of sonoma county california he won the penn center's usa's prestigious first amendment award

[02:05] in 2015 and is the author of the reluctant spy my secret life in the cia's war on terror while alsoing authoring other books such as the convenient terrorist surveillance and surveillance detection of ci's insider guide in doing time like a spy how the cia taught me how to survive and drive in prison john kiriakou welcome to the show thanks so much for having me happy to do it you know you you mentioned in your book that you were actually recruited into the cia by a graduate school professor at george washington university who have

[02:36] been himself a former cia official tell us tell us more about this encounter yeah i was in graduate school at george washington university this is uh 1988 and i was taking a class called the psychology of leadership it was taught by an eminent psychiatrist by the name of dr gerald post he was very unusual in that he had a phd in political science a phd in psychology and an md and and was a practicing psychiatrist so he

[03:09] was he was teaching this course absolutely fascinating course on the psychology that foreign leaders exercise to implement their policies their foreign policies and to get what they want uh looking at for example why the yalta conference at near the end of world war ii was in yalta why wasn't it you know in washington or london or tehran or whatever um and it's because that stalin knew

[03:40] that roosevelt was sick and so roosevelt had to go all the way around the war through africa and then iran to go up to yoda and by the time he got there he was exhausted and he wanted to go to sleep and stalin insisted that the talks begin immediately and just to be able to go to bed roosevelt gave up poland and so you know things like that we don't normally talk about the role of psychology in the execution of foreign

[04:10] policy so i did really well in this class and um he gave us an assignment one day where he wanted us to shadow our bosses for a week and then write a psychological profile of our bosses i was working at a labor union at the time the united food and commercial workers union at their international headquarters here in washington and um i was a little afraid of my boss he was he was a big mean uh union organizer he had had his back

[04:42] broken during a riot by scabs and he was just a mean old-school badass and so i'm spending the week with him and halfway through the week we get into an argument and i called him a racist which he was he got so angry he balled up his fists and i i put up my hands to protect myself thinking uh i went too far this time here it comes and he looks at me and he says my penis is bigger than yours

[05:14] and i said what and he said it again and i said you know what you're nuts and i quit and i walked out i quit so i i went back to my dorm and i wrote this paper i told the story in the paper and i said he's a sociopath with psychopathic and possibly violent tendencies and then using the texts i gave examples of of these tendencies a week later i get the paper back i got an a

[05:44] and in the margin dr post wrote please see me after class so class finished and and i went to see him i said dr post you wanted to see me he says come to my office so i go down to his office a couple of floors below the classroom and he said look i'm not really a professor here i'm a cia officer undercover as a professor here and i'm looking for people who might fit into the cia's culture i think you would

[06:16] be a good cia officer are you interested in joining the cia and the truth is i had given it you know five minutes of thought just like the foreign service or maybe capitol hill um but i was getting married in like six weeks and i didn't have i had a job lined up but it wasn't a career lined up so i said sure i'd be interested in joining the cia and he started the process for me i i did all the the testing and the background investigations and all that

[06:47] it took quite a while took about uh 16 months but um but i found myself in the cia and this is by the way just to follow up on that gerald post also did a biography on bin laden and al qaeda is the same general post by the way same gerald post he was extensively published he he was i mean i used to see him on tv all through all through my cia career and after my cia career i'd see him on tv all the time discovery channel national geographic cnn

[07:18] he must have written two dozen books and they were on you know bin laden and saddam hussein and gaddafi and all these all these foreign leaders with whom we had difficult relationships you know we have this odd default in our country where where we just default to the notion that someone that we don't agree with is crazy oh saddam hussein oh he's crazy no he's not crazy

[07:48] he's actually quite sane he runs his country like a mob boss runs his family but it was incumbent on us at the cia to understand that to understand what was going through his mind when he was making these decisions and then how do we get what we want based on what we think his decision-making process is going to be so yeah post post was all about psychology and leadership so when you when you get to the cia did

[08:18] you were you instituted into middle east uh yeah my bachelor's degree was in middle eastern studies and um i ended up getting hired into the office that dr post had created at the cia the office of leadership analysis okay so there were several components in in leadership analysis one of them was the political psychology division which he had also founded whose job it was just to do long-distance psychological profiles on foreign leaders so it was a

[08:49] perfect fit for me uh with my middle east background and what year was that by the way 1989 1999 uh because in 1996 uh david cohen actually helped to create the bin laden issue station which was code named dalek station after michael shaw's son which sure was the chief of station and one of your one of the um co-employees who was the initial hires at the uh alex station was when he um uh who was hired at the same time as you was alfreda and pakowski

[09:19] uh what was your overall assessment prior to bukowski becoming situated alex nation i spent the first seven and a half years in the directorate of intelligence first in the office of leadership analysis and then in the office of near eastern and south asian analysis went overseas i went into arabic training for a year and then i went overseas to the middle east for two years came back uh working in nisa again on iraq and then i got bored to tell you the truth it's

[09:50] just iraq iraq iraq iraq it was clear to me that the clinton administration was just going to maintain the status quo and i thought you know i i could be here for another 20 years working on iraq and writing the same things so i decided to do something different and i switched to um counter-terrorism operations very unusual move but as it turned out at the time i was the only person in the entire cia who was fluent in both arabic and greek and so i went through all of the operational

[10:20] training mid-career and then uh went to athens as the ctc representative at the same time alfreda began working in in alex station so when i got back from athens it was the summer of 2000 let me think i went back to ctc and i headed a group that did training for middle eastern intelligence services to do counter-terrorism operations

[10:53] uh 9 11 hit i went to pakistan to head counter-terrorism operations there and then when i went back they reassigned me uh to alex station and i was the chief of counter intelligence there looking for moles and probes and double agents and stuff like that and then then i went up to the uh seventh floor well i'm glad you mentioned this because i didn't know where to put it into questioning and whatnot was there there wasn't many arab linguist speakers at cia was it 16

[11:26] 16. mm-hmm out of how many uh the the actual number of employees is classified but it is it's uh well into five digits into wow 16 out of five all right that's a problem and um that was something that was something the fbi later on actually complained about john o'neill the late john o'neil head of the counter-terrorism in new york basically complained that ali sinfond was the only arabic speaker and that they didn't spend enough funding into getting arab

[11:56] linguistic yeah the the fbi and the cia had the same problem with this lack of arabic speakers and in fact it was it was actually worse in the in the fbi because they treat linguists in the fbi as second-class citizens so you can rise up as an fbi agent you know up to gs 15 and then you go into the senior executive service but if you're a translator most everybody's going to be stuck at the gs12 level and then if you go into

[12:27] his supervisory position you get it get up to 14. well here's ali soufan who's who's interrogating the the most important high value target that we had captured up to that point and this guy's a gs12 nobody who will never get the respect that an agent will get even though the agent doesn't speak a single word of arabic and is unable to participate in these interrogations that's why ali left the fbi and opened his own firm

[12:58] and he's been wildly successful yes he has um and really i think it uh i think it defies belief john to think that during that time when bin laden and al qaeda was getting the attention from the cia and the fbi that they wouldn't have hired more arab linguist speakers why do you think that what that's a good question and it's a difficult one to answer pre-911 they used to say

[13:30] that you know the ones that really are fluent fluent like level five educated fluent in arabic um are arabs they're naturalized citizens and can we trust a naturalized citizen from syria or iraq or egypt or a palestinian like can they really get get cleared six levels above top secret and and have an s-i-t-k gamma clearance

[14:03] so they tended to keep people like that at arm's length i'll give you an example uh when i when i went away to arabic training uh for that year um three cia uh employees were my teachers uh one was born in lebanon uh a woman and then there was a man and a woman who were born in egypt and they were you know full-time cia employees but i had a blue badge saying showing that i was cleared to the

[14:34] sitk gamma level they had yellow badges which showed that they were cleared to the secret level well why we're all working for the cia we all go through the same background investigations we all go through the same polygraph exams why am i cleared at seven or eight levels higher than they're cleared and it was because they were not born in the united states that changed after 9 11. um but but they they did it wrong after

[15:06] 9 11. after 9 11 they went out and sought people like that uh but then they ended up hiring like an army for example of lebanese catholics well lebanese catholics hate muslims and so their analysis was often skewed it was unreliable it's like well how do you how do you come to this analytic conclusion well you come to this analytic conclusion because you hate muslims

[15:36] right or we hired a whole bunch of iraqi christians from up north well iraqi christians are going to be just as biased we hire coptic egyptians who are also christians so they just went about it in this weird way and then and then you send these christians out to secret sites to interrogate al qaeda and they're they're as cruel as mitchell and jessen were so it was a problem they they realized that they had made a

[16:07] mistake of not hiring arabic speakers all these years and then they they doubled down on the mistake by hiring the wrong kinds of arabic speakers after 9 11. you you actually became a counterterrorism operations officer and worked in athens greece on uh euro communist terrorism yes and then and then in 2000 you returned to cia headquarters but by june of 2001 the cia knew something big was about to happen yet in chapter nine of your book

[16:38] you had not focused on al qaeda prior to this no um however there seemed to be some inter-agency infighting between the fbi at the station regarding information concerning khalid al-badar and waffle hobby what are your thoughts surrounding that oh this these fights between the cia and the fbi were epic yeah you know the the problem between the two organizations goes back to the creation of the cia in 1947. um this was a close vote in in congress to

[17:09] the this i'm talking about the national security act of 1947 which created the national security council and the cia and the reason why it was a close vote is because j edgar hoover the long time director of the fbi long time 48 and a half years long director of the fbi um he didn't want to see the creation of an intelligence service that focused on foreign intelligence and so president truman told

[17:39] hoover that the cia would be a division of the fbi and so hoover lifted his objection and it was enough to flip a couple of votes in congress that the bill passed and it was only after it passed that hoover realized he had been tricked and that the cia was going to be an independent agency it was not going to be a division of the fbi and so hoover ordered his people not to cooperate with this new organization

[18:10] and you know the fbi always thought that they were better than the cia and then the cia thought they were better than the fbi because the cia's budget was bigger and the cia didn't have to answer to congress and and i mean things just just remained bad between them through the the 50s through the 60s and the vietnam war even though they did cooperate on some things through the 70s i mean you know we got to the point where where the cia was looking for a couple

[18:41] of hijackers that we wanted would-be hijackers that we wanted to recruit not having the idea not having the the understanding that they were already in the country and the fbi was surveilling them well the fbi wasn't passing the information onto the cia the cia never passed its information onto the fbi the cia knew that they were going to hijack planes but didn't know where they were the fbi knew where they were but didn't know that they were going to hijack planes and so it was because of this

[19:12] bureaucratic infighting that we even had a 911. yeah when i interviewed anthony schaefer it was he said something similar to what you said then and he said he naively thought that everybody would be on the same page right so did i right so and so did yourself oh yeah right and so right because because we're all one team right right exactly our job was to protect the country it wasn't to fight with each other to see who gets credit for protecting the country it was to protect the country

[19:44] and then you know we've got 2 000 americans dead in one day because we couldn't do our jobs what was it basically just because of the information wall or was there something more in your estimation uh yeah there was something more um this is something that george tenet and dick clark dick was the uh the senior adviser of the president for counter-terrorism at the uh at the nsc they used to call him the counter-terrorism czar uh dick and and george were

[20:16] george's words shouting from the rooftops that something was was gonna happen something terrible um they were going to the white house all the time talking to cheney and connie rice and you know everybody who would listen and cheney was the worst them all in that he was more interested in china uh and the threat from china than than anything else

[20:47] well a couple of uh this handful of illiterate uh arabs is a threat to us come on they have no money they have no weapons they're in afghanistan they can't get here what threat could they pose to us and george kept saying it's not that simple right this is a serious threat to us and cheney just wouldn't hear it when you when you were with uh alex station at the time you actually noticed

[21:19] the sheer division between the fbi and the cia was this basically just the bureaucrats or was it right down to the case officers themselves straight down to the case officers we were ordered not to cooperate with one another and it's like nobody even needed to issue the order we weren't going to cooperate with one another anyway right and and also too you also had the nsa to deal with because at the end of time they're going to say actually was monitoring a house in yemen which is owned by ahmed al-khada and meanwhile they're collecting signals intelligence the ci doesn't do signals to tell they

[21:50] do but the the nsa is the primary agency for that yeah but they weren't they weren't sharing information with you guys either so yeah it's funny at nsa i gotta be careful what i say here but you're absolutely right uh you know nsa they'll they'll intercept something and it'll be so sensitive so highly classified that they don't tell anybody well then why bother to intercept it if you're not going to tell anybody right right you got to tell us you got to tell the fbi and you got to tell the nsc

[22:22] you can't just you know show each other at nsa look at this incredible piece of intelligence it's so it's so crazy we can't share it with anybody that that doesn't help anyone if you don't share it you don't disseminate it you know i used to get calls from nsa every once in a while it was crazy we were all supposed to cooperate right we're all working together so i go to over to nsa and spend a day how you doing we have lunch then they would come over to cia and we'd take them to the gift store and we'd have lunch and

[22:54] briefings whatever because we're all supposed to be on the same team and then they would they would call i'll never forget this my green phone rings and i answer and it's nsa i was like oh hey how you doing good how are you i said yeah i'm good what's going on we've got a really hot piece of intelligence i said okay about what well i i can't tell you i'm just i'm just calling to tell you that this is something that you're gonna wanna find out about and it's it's really uh

[23:25] it's really hot it's really sensitive i said well how the heck am i supposed to know then what it is if you won't tell me well we're gonna we're gonna send a hard copy by courier and they're going to put it in a safe in the director's office i'm like are you freaking kidding me so what we had to do they would send a copy of the director's office to copy the operations center so i'd have to go up to the operations center and say i'm told that there's an intercept in and then i have to see it

[23:57] they're like yes you have to sign the log book i have to sign it i sign my name and the the date and the time and the title of the report and then i'm not allowed to touch it or to take notes on it so you have to stand there like i would always stand like this some people would stand like that and you read it and then you're like okay thank you but you can't touch it you can't copy it

[24:28] you can't take notes on it and because you can't take notes on it you can't put it in the president's daily brief right right because then the the pdb editor is going to say well where's the original copy we can't just tell the president here's this information just take my word for it right right right you gotta attach the original way the original copy is you know hands off eyes only well that's not that's no way to run an intelligence uh community

[25:00] if you're cleared you're cleared so so would it would that come from the director hayden himself oh yeah yeah yeah hayden was trouble from the get-go sure you know it's the one agency i've i've concentrated on in my studies for 911 because the nsa had run two wiretaps one was on bin laden satellite phone and the other was the house in yemen i said you know if they had any information it would be them they would and according to schuyler later on he would later say the

[25:32] nsa was the goldmine for all intelligence yeah regarding that and i've i said i a had zero sources zero literally nothing yeah they're just going by on the ground but i asked for signal intelligence i mean they heard everything and according to the former senior executive thomas drake he would later on say that the the nsa had so much metadata regarding al qaeda and bilateral that if they shared it yeah with other intelligence they could have stopped 9 11 themselves just just themselves and i said wow i can only imagine what

[26:02] was being said on those lines by these al qaeda operatives yeah and i i you know it leads me to believe that you know all this information is basically classified i mean i don't even know yeah for sure and you know i i don't know if this is apocryphal or not but um on 9 11 or 912 or orrin hatch the republican senator from uh from utah was giving an interview on cnn and he mentioned the fact that nsa was on bin laden's cell phone and then bin

[26:33] laden never used a phone ever again he stopped in 98 19 is that what it was in 1998 yeah and washington folks broke a story and then later on they they said that was the reason why but the reason why he just dislodged the phone was that because um you had the east africa bombings and the trial came out and muhammad al-awali actually gave the number to the yemen hub in that trial and it was public and i said you know that's astounding that the yemen hub

[27:04] number was named in the trial and they still use that number oh my god and i can only imagine you know but bin laden ditched the phone in 1998 but that didn't stop him from other al qaeda operatives using other satellite phones so i like i said i can only imagine what the nsa collected but it's only led to the imagination yeah because we really don't know it's got to be astounding but we don't know you're right exactly so listen after the september 11th attacks you were actually named chief of the counter-terrorist operations in pakistan

[27:34] and then of course uh you know the biggest story at the time was march 28 2002 yeah faizal bad pakistan and you were behind the raid to capture the biggest name in al qaeda's time abu aveda yeah arguably the most important day of my life was it really yeah it certainly changed the the course of the rest of my life yeah tell us about it yeah it's uh it's a very very long story so i'll give

[28:05] you the very short virtue um we uh we had intelligence that that abu zubato was somewhere in pakistan um we tracked him to both faisalabad and lahore he kept going back and forth back and forth there's a there's a turnpike a toll road that connects the two cities but you know there are 12 million people in lahore and there are seven million people in faisalabad and it's really tough to to narrow it down so we were able to narrow it down to his

[28:36] location down to 14 possible sites which later became 13 possible sites we brought a big team in half fbi half cia and we hit all 13 sites simultaneously and um and we're fortunate enough to to get him in one it was it was a fierce firefight during it you know it actually wasn't i i told everybody before the raid began before we kicked off we we actually went our separate

[29:06] ways at 10 p.m the night before and i said listen there's only one rule here our orders are to take him alive he's got to be taken alive and as soon as the operation started this one pakistani policeman just opened fire and and he killed one guy who was with abzu beta he was a bomb maker he almost killed abu zubaydah by shooting him in the thigh the groin in the stomach with an ak-47 and then he

[29:36] shot abu zubaydah's uh bodyguard now they were unarmed there was no reason to shoot them like that but the guy got carried away yeah he suffered some injuries now um that was that was at the time that was huge because and it's incidentally enough also i wanted to get your thoughts on this you know what's funny because in the 1993 world trade center in 911 a lot of the co-conspirators behind these two terrorist attacks were captured in pakistan yes ramsey yusuf ramsey khalid

[30:11] was the isi could they be trusted in these operations and um the the short answer is yes the long answer is maybe um yes in that there there really were two isis there was counter-terrorism and then there was everything else which really means cashmere and india

[30:42] so the counter-terrorism guys to a man were all trained in england all of them went to sandhurst so these guys were pros down the line i i literally trusted them with my life literally is that right i did and they were heroes but you go to isi headquarters and you see lots of guys with really

[31:14] long bushy beards these are the guys that were you know that created the taliban that were funneling weapons to the kashmiris and to the pakistani terrorist groups the jaish muhammad right the ansar allah i mean there were countless terrorist groups uh you'd get the stink eye from them they don't respond to salamu alaikum so there were two isis

[31:45] the ones that i worked with were amazing the other ones i would fear for my safety around them sure another a notable terrorist who actually had who's a british citizen is omar ahmed omar saeed sheikh yeah that's right um right so all right abba's debate is captured uh did you ever get to talk with apples of adam what was he like as a person i spent 56 consecutive hours with abu zabeda at his bedside

[32:15] and uh my orders came from george tenet directly 24 7 cia eyes on he said do not leave his bedside and it's the longest i was ever awake in my life um to the point where you know it made me sick nauseous to be up that that long and i was afraid that he was going to try to escape so i tore up a sheet and i tied him to the bed by his wrists and his ankles so he couldn't move but he was so severely wounded he wasn't going he wasn't going

[32:45] anywhere they were pumping they had an actual pump to pump blood into him and as quickly as they could pump the blood in it was just leaking out and there was this enormous pool of blood under the bed he was soaked the sheets are soaked we had blood all over us i mean it was it was like a scene out of a horror movie it really was so he was in a coma the first 24 hours and then finally he woke up and um and he asked me to kill him it was the first first thing that he said when he

[33:16] came out of the coma um first he was delirious and he asked me for a glass of red wine and then when he got his bearings um he he asked me to kill him he asked me to smother him with a pillow and i said no i said nobody's going to kill you i was a veda um you know at first i i when he first motioned for me to come like this next to the bed i moved his oxygen mask and i said to him what is your name and he shook his head so i said it again

[33:48] and he said to me in english i will not speak to you in god's language and i said that's okay i was a beta we know who you are and then he started crying and he said please kill me brother kill me take the pillow and kill me and i said nobody's gonna kill you we've been looking for you for a long time i said uh i said you're going to get uh you're going to get the best medical care that the american government can provide so i mean we we spent a lot of time together he he cried constantly he said

[34:21] he would never know the touch of a woman he would never know the joy of fatherhood and i said listen you're not the victim here there were 50 000 people in those towers what did you think we were going to do did you think we wouldn't try to hunt you down and and and hunt bin laden and i said come on listen i told him i'm gonna give you some advice i'm the nicest guy that you're gonna meet in this experience i told them my colleagues they're not nice like i am

[34:52] so if there's one thing you do it's that you have to cooperate and he said you seem like a nice man but you're the enemy and i'll never cooperate i said well suit yourself i said i told him your life is over what remains of it can be easy or it can be terrible it's up to you he didn't care sure because afterwards he became it

[35:23] became very terrible very terrible we talked about you know we we captured his his diary uh when we raided the house and um it was more it was more than a diary it was he he would write poetry in it he would draw doodles and and sketches he would he would write these letters to himself as a young man like he's writing to the 14 year old uh telling him not to make the mistakes that he ended up making

[35:55] um he was extraordinarily bright uh very creative we talked about the differences between christianity and islam we talked about our families and yeah it was it was a surreal experience okay you you actually end up resigning from the cia in 2004 and um you became a terrorism consultant for abc news in 2008 and you actually stayed pretty active outside from the cia

[36:25] and you actually gave an interview to brian ross in 2007 describing the capture of abu zabeta and during this interview you mentioned that a former cia employee said to you that the beta had been waterboarded now we do know that the cia would have boarded 83 times um what happened after this interview yeah the the whole weight of the u.s government fell on my head is the easiest way of saying what happened i i made i said three things i said that

[36:56] the cia was torturing its prisoners i said that torture was official u.s government policy and i said that the policy had been personally approved by the president so within 24 hours the fbi began investigating me for leaking classified information they investigated me from december of 2007 to december of 2008 and in december 2008 they sent my attorney a declination letter where they were declining to prosecute me they said that um i had not revealed classified

[37:26] information so three weeks later barack obama was inaugurated as president and he named john brennan the deputy national security advisor for counter-terrorism john and i went back to my hiring date at the cia we never liked each other and uh brennan was one of the he was one of the creators of the torture program he was the number four at the cia he was the deputy executive director and so he's he asked the justice department to secretly reopen the case

[37:57] against me i had no idea that for the next three years my phones were tapped my emails were being intercepted um groups of fbi agents were surveilling me and then in january of 2012 i was arrested and charged with five felonies including three counts of espionage coming from that abc news interview and a subsequent interview i did with the new york times [Music] you got the similar treatment to um

[38:29] give counterparts to the nsa thomas drake yes um kirk j weeby and yes and ed and bill binney and bill benny that's right these guys and they basically just you know didn't say anything that was classified just like you you didn't share any classified information but yet the agencies that they what's incidentally enough it was the same agency that brought down the hammer of the justice upon you um i can only imagine what you were thinking at the time because there was nothing that you said that was revealing

[39:00] what we what we what we everybody knew everybody right exactly everybody already knew you know human rights watch had already issued a report saying the cia would was torturing its prisoners amnesty international said cia's torch against prisoners um the international committee of the red cross said cia is torturing its prisoners so then john kiriakou goes on tv and says the cia is torturing its prisoners and i get three espionage charges yeah i i when i read your case wow while back i remember when you actually

[39:30] mentioned that even if you reported torture would actually be fruitless because the congressional intelligence committees were already aware they were all in on it that you know people ask me all the time well you shouldn't have gone to the media you should have gone through your chain of command my chain of command created the torture program right oh you should have gone to the oversight committees the oversight committees secretly approved and then financed the torture program so no i couldn't go through the chain of command and i couldn't go to the congressional oversight committees they were in on it

[40:02] was this basically now thomas drake says this because he went to the media and bill benny says the same thing is it because that you weren't talking to the media that's the reason why no in fact i i had never spoken to a journalist before in my life i mean that's off limits right it's out of bounds when you're at the cia but brian ross had called me and said that he had a source who said that i had tortured abu zubaydah and i said that was absolutely untrue i was the only person who was kind to abu zubaydah

[40:34] and he said well you're welcome to come on the show and defend yourself well i didn't know that that was an old reporter's trick and it turned out that he did have a source at the white house who said that i had tortured i was a beta and i said to my wife i figured it out that it was at the white house and i said brian ross's sources at the white house and they're going to try to pin this on me i said i've got to defend myself and so i decided i was just going to tell the truth that whatever he asked me i'm just going to tell the truth

[41:08] what i'd like to get your thoughts on something that has been bothering me for a little bit is that the cia had actually tortured ramsey ben also khalid sheikh mohammed and the guantanamo who are connected to the 9 11 attacks this seemed to be a huge huge mistake because even if even even by telling the truth the public and the court system have to now take into account that they could be manufacturing lives or it could be

[41:38] saying something because we'll never know the actual truth you are correct you're correct and i i would i would add to that even more importantly let's assume that they did tell the truth right which they didn't torture never gets the truth it gets whatever they think you want to hear just to get you to stop torturing them but let's say that they did give us something that was actionable we can't use it in court and they can never be prosecuted so we've demeaned ourselves as a country

[42:09] we're supposed to be this shining beacon of hope for law and order and human rights and civil rights and civil liberties and it's all nonsense because we did exactly what we make other countries promise they won't do and we ruined whatever cases we might have had against them anderson so you know last week when biden was in uh saudi arabia and he told the crown prince you know hey you killed

[42:39] jamal khashoggi and this is a human rights violation and it's a violation of international law and blah blah blah and and muhammad bin salman said well let's talk about abu ghraib let's talk about guantanamo and he's right so we we only hurt ourselves with this cockamamie program now i don't i don't i i'll be hard-pressed uh to assume that you know the answer but

[43:10] i'm going to ask it anyway wouldn't the cia have already known that by torture they're going to create this scenario in the first place sure but they didn't care you know there are a couple of elements at play here one is the the need for revenge 911 was the greatest intelligence failure in american history and it was preventable and so there was this desire for revenge to show the american people we're gonna

[43:42] hit them back ten times harder than they hit us right number one secondly it comes back to that fundamental difference between the cia and the fbi where the fbi is constantly trying to build a criminal case and the cia doesn't care about any criminal case they just want to take the bad guy off the street and if that means that you disappear him or you send him to cairo or damascus or somewhere else and they disappear him

[44:12] well you know that's life in the fast lane when i interviewed ken williams of the fbi in phoenix i once asked him i said do you think there'll ever be a trial and he said no no definitely i'll ask you that question absolutely not there will never be a trial what do you think would happen from hero well they would have to they would have to close whatever courtroom this thing would take place in because literally everything out of everybody's mouth the cia is going to

[44:44] jump up and down and say is classified but more uh more importantly i think uh whatever the defendants would have to say would would expose the cia to uh to its own criminal charges listen it's a felony to clap to classify something for the purpose of keeping it from the public right so if you are uh committing a criminal act like torture which is

[45:15] against u.s law against international law against the international uh convention against torture and and inhumane punishment or inhumane treatment it is illegal to classify that and the whole thing is classified the whole program so it's this is far more complicated than just did they do it or did they not do it right sure that's why i don't think there will ever be a trial you know carol rosenberg

[45:45] at the new york times what did i say no carol rosenberger yeah she she's the only person who really writes on this issue there's a possibility that um sheikh muhammad abu zubaidah ramsay beneshib and abdulrahman eshri might take guilty pleas yes i've heard this before yeah right and it's the craziest thing in that all they're asking

[46:15] is to not be sent to florence colorado they want to spend the rest of their lives at guantanamo because it's tropical right you got the ocean right over here the weather's usually decent it's hot but florence colorado in a six by ten foot concrete cell where you never see the sun again for the rest of your life they just can't bear the thought no so she's the only one reporting on it that these talks are underway

[46:47] that we we might end up with a handful of guilty pleas but again coming back to your original question there's never ever going to be a trial for any of these guys yeah i absolutely agree and when i interviewed ken williams again i he actually said that the deal actually is that they're going to take the death penalty off the table yeah but they have to plead guilty to 9 11 all together and the truth is we could never sentence him to death anyway you know is that right is that right right oh yeah they haven't been tried no no court has

[47:18] has levied a death penalty against them right is it i mean to to me it's it's such a paradox because they they their their evidence can't be used against them and i think the government knows that unless they're willing to declassify classified information which i think like with you i agree with you they're not going to do that but they would they would this is the reason why the trial hasn't started in 20 somewhat years so actually now i heard uh 2024

[47:48] um well i think what they're hoping is that they just die in prison yeah well well you remember seeing in the in the senate torture report uh what little of it we were able to see that the plan for abu zubaydah and we would have to assume that this was the plan for the others too was uh they just wait until he dies and then they cremate him and throw his ashes in the ocean you know it's steadily enough you bring this up with babies of beta i read um [Music] in the senate torture report as well

[48:18] which i'm posting on twitter from time to time excerpts of it um that when the cia got hold of the debate they actually put them in a coffin like prison for 24 hours and put beetles and bugs in there or whatnot and uh it was longer than 24 hours was it was it longer yeah they kept him in there for two weeks they would just open the coffin up long enough to change his diaper and throw some food in always two weeks okay i i i mistake with those 24 hours and i heard that they they took out the uh concrete of a cell

[48:50] put in uh wood for walls so they could wall him and whatnot and i said what these these some of these torture devices even didn't make sense um some just some of the uh excerpts i like you know bruce jesse and ivan's um basically defended themselves saying that we were trying to protect the country by getting information from them yeah they keep repeating that maybe someday they'll convince themselves right i think that's exactly you know let me interrupt you for one

[49:21] second yeah sure you talk about mitchell and jessen you talk about george tenet and steve kappas and and jose rodriguez and gina haspel and all these people the reason they keep and and john brennan the reason they keep repeating this lie over and over and over again that this was the right thing to do is the patriotic thing to do is because they know that this is their legacy the other 30 years of their career doesn't matter

[49:52] and when they die and their obituaries are written this is what it's going to say that they were responsible for torturing other human beings in some cases to death and so they're trying in whatever time they have left on this planet to convince the american people that this was the right thing to do and it wasn't you after you get sent to prison you had a lot of people speaking up for you and

[50:23] one of them was bruce riedel who i'm very familiar with and he tried to commute your sentence before um barack obama yes um you end up being released on february 3rd 2015 and you know include incredulity abound you even remarked immediately that you would end up doing this all over again to expose the crimes of torture and that this was never about leaking classified information you still stand by that statement 100 100 percent in fact you know i gave an

[50:54] interview to the bbc back then too um it's it's their version of 60 minutes it's it's kind of um it's kind of a famous show because the uh the presenter attacks it's constantly attacking right and he he finally said um well you don't seem to be too upset by any of this and i said well you know it's water under the bridge it doesn't help me in any way to to uh to focus on the events of the past and i said you know if martin luther

[51:25] king can forgive the people who wronged him and nelson mandela can can forgive the people who sent him to solitary confinement for 20-plus years i can certainly forgive people who wronged me and sent me away for only 23 short months and he said i don't believe that for a second and i said but it's the truth and he asked me if i had any regrets and without missing a single second i said absolutely not and i said listen i know

[51:56] i'm gonna take a lot of heat for saying this but i have zero remorse for what i did this was the right thing to do i said i'm a patriot i'm a patriot and i hate to think that on the day that i put my right hand up in the air and i swore an oath to protect and uphold the constitution of the united states against all enemies foreign and domestic that i was the only person in the room that day who actually meant it so i said no i would definitely do it

[52:26] again what are you hoping now john um you wrote you wrote you know a couple of books been authored behind a couple of books here what do you want to do from this point forward for uh the future in my life you mean yeah i'm doing a lot of i'm doing a lot of different things right now you know it's funny i i i still feel like i'm 20 years old but i'm not i'm i'm going to be 58 in a couple of weeks and for the first time in a very long time

[52:59] i'm happy and i'm enjoying what i'm doing i've got a radio show every day here in washington from 12 to 2 terrestrial radio i've got three columns i write for consortium news the sheer post at usc and um covert action magazine i just sent in the manuscript for my eighth book and i'm 61 pages into my ninth book now so i enjoy writing books and in the next couple of months i'm going to start doing some some lobbying i've got a

[53:29] master's degree in legislative affairs that i never really used outside the senate foreign relations committee so um you know in an experience like this you really get to see who your real friends are sure and who they're not and in some cases you might even be married to them and uh i think i finally figured it out after 58 years the last question for you i just want to

[54:01] get your opinion um [Music] the latest conflict in ukraine actually uh we spent billions of dollars in military aid are we making a similar mistake as what we saw in 1979 afghanistan um i think so yes you know i am i've taken kind of an unpopular position on this war uh unpopular with both sides

[54:32] because i'm opposed to the russian invasion and i'm also opposed to this unlimited aid to uh to ukraine uh i would oppose i would oppose the war no matter who the parties were if the united states had invaded ukraine i would oppose that let the diplomats do their jobs at the same time you know we've got bridges falling into the rivers below them we've got highways that are international embarrassments

[55:03] we've got rate schools and second rate hospitals you travel and you see the airports and some of these other countries where we should be embarrassed by our airports we should be embarrassed by the condition of our schools but we seem to have unlimited funds for weapons and weapon systems and aid to ukraine let's spend the money here in the united states we have a larger defense budget than the next eight largest countries combined

[55:34] do we really need that i don't think so just to follow up on that too um [Music] it seems that we're getting pressured from our foreign lobby institutes of the gulf in israel to engage a war with iran yes and um you know i've i've tried to speak as unbiased as i can report as honestly as i can regarding this very tumultuous situation

[56:05] what would be your opinion about uh a potential complicated iran do is that even possible um at this point yeah oh it's it's definitely possible and i'll tell you we came very close to attacking iran in the final weeks of the george w bush administration uh benjamin netanyahu has dedicated his life to dragging the united states into a war with iran um bush thought the better of it and then obama wasn't even vaguely interested in iran

[56:35] uh now i fear that joe biden is doing the israelis bidding again there were two reasons to go to saudi arabia one obviously was to ask them to increase oil production but the other was to ask them to participate in this regional defense idea that the israelis have come up with so so far it's israel jordan egypt morocco bahrain and the united arab emirates uh the israelis asked us if we would try

[57:05] to draw in the saudis and the iraqis why what good does this do for the united states we have to stop doing the israelis bidding right again let the diplomats do their job we should have jumped back into the jcpoa and we should have told the israelis we will not fight the iranians for you there's no reason to do it we get nothing out of it as a country and can you imagine what it would do to the global economy if we went to war

[57:37] with iran so we we've got to stand up to the israelis enough is enough john kiriakou former case officer whistleblower against the program of torture and author of my the reluctant spy my secret life in the cia's war on terror thank you very much for coming on tonight my pleasure thanks for having me
