Title: Tackling Torture at the Top John Kiriakou and Bradley Ol
Show: Robin Hensel
Date: 2015-11-14
URL: https://youtu.be/rFTwPrTyY2Q
Duration: 1:15:00

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[00:06] very pleased to see you uh make it out here and for all the students and faculty um this just this makes me so happy to see so many of you um able to attend during congo hour that we usually have so many competing events so um i just wanted to say uh welcome to everyone my name is laila de breeze i'm one of the sponsors from hamilton university i represent global studies and the model um program this event is also being sponsored by other departments at the university

[00:38] including political science and psychology and we are all thrilled to have our speakers here i'm going to hand the podium over to tim roth who will do the official introductions thank you it on hi i'm jim ron i'm a retired lawyer and i do some work in the area of torturing

[01:09] also human rights advocates for human rights victims of torture the women against military madness attacking torture at the top room minnesota peace project and a few others i've been asked to give introductions to our speakers today i'm going to introduce john kiriakou first brad olson is sitting immediately to my right i'll give him a longer introduction before he speaks but um john is a former caa analyst and case

[01:40] officer he was a former senior investigator for the senate foreign relations committee he's been a counterterrorism committee consultant when he was employed by the cia after 9-1-1 he refused to be trained in the enhanced interrogation techniques and he never authorized or used the techniques which we all now know is torture but i think he was one of the people on the front lines of discovering

[02:11] that and bringing it to people's attention in fact i think that he was the first former cia employee or officer to confirm that the cia had waterboarded detainees and he labeled waterboarding as torture so he was perhaps the first person to bring this to the public's attention

[02:42] anyway he was later subject to a government investigation and he was a he was a whistleblower but like other whistleblowers he was prosecuted because he revealed the name of a cia agent to a reporter the reporter never revealed it to the public but he had revealed the name to

[03:12] someone and so he was prosecuted for that he ended up making a plea bargain and serving some time but thank goodness he's out and can now spread the word to all of us again so i'd like to give you to give a very warm welcome to john thanks for having me um i'd like to talk about obviously about torture but i'd like to give you a little bit of background too

[03:43] um i spent about 14 and a half years in the cia first as an analyst later as a counterterrorism operations officer i got bored with analysis and after the september 11th attacks i became the chief of the cia's anti-terrorism operations in pakistan in that capacity i led a series of raids in which we captured a palestinian by the name of abu zubaydah who at the time we thought was the number three in al qaeda that turned

[04:14] out to not be true he was not the number three in al qaeda but our our orders were to capture him so we did we captured him took about six weeks but we found him he was shot very severely by pakistani police and uh and i sat with him for the first 56 hours of his captivity we talked about a lot of things in those 56 hours the september 11th attacks poetry religion all different kinds of things

[04:45] and and i told him and i didn't mean to you know to sound dramatic but i told him look i am the nicest guy that you're going to meet in this experience the nicest guy my colleagues are not as nice as i am so if i can give you any advice it's that you have to cooperate i told them your life is over but the rest of it can be easy

[05:16] or it can be terrible i said i don't really know what they have in mind for you but i can tell you because i know them it's not going to be nice and he said you seem like a nice guy but you're the enemy and i'll never cooperate so i said well suit yourself so after 56 hours he was flown to a secret prison and after being given six weeks to recuperate from his very grave gunshot wounds the cia started torturing him now this was after the fbi had spent

[05:49] those intervening six weeks establishing a relationship with him and establishing a rapport and he actually began providing his fbi interrogator with actionable intelligence the cia said that that wasn't good enough and so george tenet asked president bush to evict the fbi from this country where the secret prison was located and to allow cia officers to take over in the meantime i had returned to cia

[06:20] headquarters and a senior officer in the cia's counterterrorism center approached me and asked me if i wanted to be what he called certified in the use of enhanced interrogation techniques i didn't know what that meant i had never heard of enhanced interrogation techniques before so i said what do you mean and he said very animatedly we're going to start getting tough with these guys and i said what does that mean and he gave me this list of 10 techniques that were going to be used against prisoners beginning with abu

[06:50] zabeta i said man that sounds like torture you know you got to call it what it is it just sounds like torture it's not for me i said i have a moral visceral problem with it and i said but you know what let me think about it for a couple of hours and i went up to the cia's seventh floor that's the executive floor and i spoke with a very senior cia officer with whom i had had a relationship i had worked for him for for a little while in the middle east and i said what do you think of this they asked me if i wanted to do this and he said first of all let's call it

[07:22] what it is they can use whatever euphemism they want but it's torture torture is illegal and he said you know your colleagues you know what they're like somebody's going to go overboard and they're going to kill a prisoner in custody and when they kill a prisoner there's going to be a congressional investigation and then there's going to be a criminal investigation and somebody's going to go to prison do you want to go to prison i said no i don't want to go to prison i'm the only one who went to prison at the end of it and i said no i don't want to go to prison i went back downstairs i said i have a problem with this i think it's

[07:52] torture i don't want to be involved they had approached 14 of us two of us said no and one of the two changed his mind and said yes so they started torturing up as a beta a lot has been made about the issue of waterboarding i confirmed to abc news in 2007 that we had waterboarded up as a beta in addition to other things but the cia was using other techniques that i always thought were even worse than than waterboarding waterboarding is the sense of of drowning you have some sort of

[08:23] material burlap a cloth plastic whatever over your mouth and you're strapped to a gurney your feet are slightly elevated and water is poured on your face and it makes you feel like you're drowning it's very painful because your your body is is tensing and reacting and it's very painful especially in your abdominal muscles but there are other things that the cia was doing like the cold cell the cold cell is where a prisoner is stripped naked he's chained to an eye bolt in the ceiling and his cell is chilled to 50 degrees and then every hour somebody goes into

[08:54] the cell and throws ice water on it we killed people using that technique more than once we killed people but no one was ever prosecuted for that there was another technique sleep deprivation former secretary of defense don rumsfeld famously said that he got no sleep that he had a stand-up desk he didn't even have a seat at his desk and he would work for two or three days and he was fine so that was not torture but the cia wasn't wasn't keeping prisoners up for

[09:25] two days or three days it was more like 12 days or 14 days changed to that eyeball to the ceiling again well you begin losing your mind around day seven and in many cases as my friend and colleague brad here will tell you in many cases that that insanity becomes permanent we have prisoners now with whom we use the technique of sleep deprivation who are unable to participate in their own defenses that's illegal we have laws that prohibit this kind of thing

[09:57] we chose to ignore them so in december 2007 i gave an interview to abc news in which i said three things that utterly changed the course of the rest of my life i said the cia was torturing its prisoners torture was official u.s government policy and that policy had been approved by and signed by the president of the united states now george w bush had said earlier that week he had looked directly into the camera during a press conference and he

[10:27] said we do not torture i knew that was a lie and then a couple of days later he told a reporter you know if there is torture it's the result of a rogue cia officer and i knew that was a lie he had approved this he had signed it and so i went on national television and i called the president united states a bald-faced liar within two days i was audited by the irs which has continued

[10:58] every single year since 2007 the justice department began um an investigation of me which lasted until january of 2012. now interestingly enough the fbi determined in 2009 uh march of 2009 that i had not committed a crime uh by going on abc news and saying that we were torturing prisoners the obama administration told the justice

[11:29] department to reconsider that decision not to prosecute and so i was charged with three counts of espionage in addition to violating the intelligence identities protection act and making a false statement although i've never been clear on exactly what the false statement was supposed to have been it it was thrown out of media um but three counts of espionage now the three counts of espionage were for revealing top secret code word information that the justice department said was declassified solely for the

[12:00] purpose of prosecuting me and that top secret code word information that bought me three counts of espionage one of the greatest crimes an american can face was that the cia after 9 11 was trying to kill or capture members of al-qaeda this is right and they were going to be nice to me about it and they offered me 45 years

[12:30] yeah 45 years in prison for revealing this unbelievably close closely held top secret code word information that we were trying to kill osama bin laden after 9 11 after 9 11. so in any event like many defendants in america today i took a plea to make it go away i have five children at home it was the proven thing to do but my time is over i spent 23 months in federal prison it just made me

[13:01] more determined to fight this abomination that's torture this utter disrespect for our constitution for the law of the land you know like like people on both the left and the right i maintain that we are a country of loss we're a country that has a working constitution a living and breathing document as some scholars say and we need to respect that that document without the constitution and the resulting respect that we all ought

[13:31] to have for human rights and civil liberties what's the point in you know having a country it just doesn't seem to make any sense to me so anyway i promised brad i would be very short because we're going to try to take lots of questions thank you for having me please fight torture let me give a short introduction of grant too

[14:01] braz assistant professor of psychology he's involved in a lot of organizations he was one of the first psychologists to pursue the fact that the american psychological association also had kind of sinister connection with the enhanced interrogation techniques it was also covered up for a long time i don't he could give you the details of how long it was covered up and what

[14:31] actions they had to take to uncover it and do an investigation and prepare a report and try to hold some of the people accountable he's a community psychologist he's worked on a lot of human and civil rights issues um president of the psychologist for social responsibility co-founder of the coalition for ethical psychology and he's president-elect of the society

[15:03] for the study of peace conflict and violence and past chair of several divisions um of the apa the american psychological association and he's a professor at national lewis university in chicago so please welcome brad everybody should read their materials and consider joining this organization

[15:33] they are just uh feisty and committed and uh and they're they are what is going to stop torture in the future here and people like john i mean it's kind of uh funny for me i mean there are risks in academia to uh fighting torture it's a little bit uh you know fighting the american psychological association is not quite like fighting the cia within the inside side and we we have for a long time really admired john uh i mean john his bold moves in in in

[16:05] prison i mean writing to the outside world he is he's a courageous man and i told him that it was consider buying his book i mean it's uh it's incredible um so one more one more question for you so you're all gonna have to someone's gonna have to stop me after after 15 minutes but all of you have taken at least introduction to psychology

[16:36] courses probably so you know some of the fundamental the milgram obedience experiments and the um what what clinical psychology is zimbardo that we have uh ethical codes that clinicians are not supposed to sleep with their clients because we sort of have uh this this power um i you know i don't know if psychologists uh have a real power with our tools of psychology um we do have other forms of power in the

[17:07] in terms of respect and i think part of what gives us that power is our ethics that that we do believe that we have a moral code and that we will not violate it and so what i'm gonna actually talk about is is a little bit less about torture although it is about torture but it's more about the corruption of of civil society and so to have a profession uh like medicine psychiatry psychology uh being involved in torture

[17:38] uh that's you know that's adds another scary element to it when the people who are supposed to be healing mental health are actually reverse engineering those techniques as the techniques john talked about the enhanced interrogation techniques to torture using psychological pain creating post-traumatic stress disorder and uh and making it so these individuals cannot even uh be tried so john already gave a great

[18:09] introduction to that but basically in 2005 after abu ghraib guantanamo cia black sites all this information was coming out the cia and the department of defense needed psychologists they needed uh because they thought they could get more information they thought psychologists would be able to help with interrogations i actually think um someone with john's charm can can get information out of people better

[18:40] than a psychologist could uh but the psychologists were really used to legitimize torture so uh the definition of psychological torture the invisible form of torture was basically if you create post-traumatic stress disorder that is torture and we all know that there are many many sort of psychological and painful techniques that can lead up to that that can lead up to trauma and that no psychologist is able to say okay

[19:12] if you stop there ptsd will not occur but given this redefinition of psychological torture psychologists needed to be in these places i mean according to intelligence one one one cia document we found was that a psychologist was present in every instance of cia waterboarding basically to say stop because if you keep going it's going to lead to a permanent disorder so i mean it is like this is the dark side and this is the dark side

[19:43] of of our field of psychology and other fields as well so basically the american medical association american psychiatric association said there is no role for for physicians or psychiatrists to be part of these national security interrogations american psychological association came out with a task force that was made up of mostly department of defense people people we later found out were were in the chain of command in places where

[20:13] torture was occurring and this uh task force basically said psychologists will play an important role in the national security process through interrogations so uh behavioral science consultant teams psychologists would guide interrogations locate vulnerabilities they design detention punishment paradigms removal of toilet paper eventually originally this was psychiatrists and

[20:44] psychologists guiding these entire much of these interrogations and um eventually the department of defense said we're going to use psychologists over psychiatrists so this is not a sort of story about me but it's a story of i don't know there's there's five of us psychologists who were really brought together to to work on this issue and then there are maybe another 40 who have also really put pressure psychology

[21:14] the american psychological association is the largest body of psychologists in the world and uh what we suspected from the beginning but we didn't even know it was this bad that this pens task force that made this decision they were made they um these decisions were made by the cia and by the department of defense before that that essentially the the lessons or the the guidelines in those reports that report was created

[21:45] by intelligence in the military before this task force even started fortunately one of my close colleagues jean maria rigo was a whistleblower on that task force gave us information we were brought in physicians for human rights everyone who's speaking up about this issue they brought us together and since then we formed the coalition for ethical psychology and we sort of became investigative psychologists we i mean for the last 10 years

[22:17] 20 emails a day at least go back and forth us figuring out what's going on we did not have that outside information but using our psychological skills and google um it's amazing what we could find and what we can uncover and so we changed american psychological association policies by putting pressure on them through open letters through committees all sorts of events uh many people resign for the american psychological association thousands and thousands

[22:49] uh there's a group of a hundred thousand uh psychologists and eventually we put together a referendum because the internal council of apa wasn't going to do anything so we got the membership to vote on an issue and we won that referendum that basically said psychologists cannot be at any national security site that violates either the us constitution or international law but of course the american psychological association

[23:19] still fought guantanamo is not a violation of of us constitution or international law as john pointed out uh it is and so um it's just it's been a long long fight the apa has promised accountability they had names of psychologists who were engaged in torture they had the names of uh james mitchell who was an apa member um in 2006

[23:51] and is now being sued by the aclu an architect of the torture program um today the the apa has not done their ethics office had not done anything to um to look into these cases and we had very very clear clear evidence but eventually um a couple key pieces came out and i think this is where i played a little bit bigger role one was uh uh kevin kylie the surgeon general of the army was given was having a debate

[24:22] with physician for human rights at uh in chicago and i went up to kylie afterwards i'm like what do you think about these biscuits and he said oh yeah i talked to this uh donovan the other day they're great and it turned out that donovan deborah donovan was married to the head of the apa practice director and she was a guantanamo biscuit we later figured out and this head of the apa practice director i'm sorry there's a lot of names here but he basically influenced this pence

[24:54] task force from the beginning so what a conflict of interest he never mentions that his wife uh he controls his task force and never mentioned that his wife was a biscuit um a biscuit behavioral science consultant that's the psychologist who guides the interrogations so yeah no please jump in for clarifications i'm trying to go quick to uh to meet john's time here um because since i asked him to uh uh give me a little bit he didn't need to give me that much but

[25:25] the the happy news is uh so we found out that we found out ran the corporation had this really suspicious study that they were doing at guantanamo so i called someone i knew in the substance abuse research world and as it ran and said what's going on what is rand studying here with guantanamo he's like i don't know that's really creepy i don't i don't go down that hallway but i know a guy and so i called this guy scott gearware and he was just really enthusiastic

[25:56] young man really into to psychology and and um but he wanted to use it you know psychology for interrogations and uh he had also worked with with apa on a couple cia workshops but he basically um we lost him after a while a physician a guy from physicians for human rights hooked up with scott and then scott got murdered i'm sorry not murdered that that when a freudian slip

[26:27] he was hit by a dump truck on on his motorcycle um so forget the murder part um but uh but anyways uh his widow gave the his email um correspondence with the american psychological association to physicians for human rights we passed it on to jim ryzen of the new york times jim risen in his book came out with a chapter on the apa issue and uh and and wrote about in the new

[26:58] york times apa came after jim risen and that made to rise in mad which was not a good thing so that battle began and then the apa said we have to do something so they hired an independent attorney david hoffman chicago with sidley austin who wrote a 500-some page report that essentially at the end of it this was the good news um said that the critics understanding of the pence task force

[27:29] was correct apa officials colluded with dod officials loosened the apa ethics code and already added to the poorest legal constraints that already existed and had it gone differently psychologists would have had a more difficult time harming detainees and so he had a message to the field of psychology that uh that we do with psychologists have a special skill that can heal or damage and when the profession allows for the

[28:00] infliction of pain on those with an inability to resist the faith and the profession can diminish and so we as a field need to define for itself what is ethical and legitimate and uh and i'll stop there so we have a short short-term success here uh but changing that big institution of the apa is a little tougher

[28:34] speech about a law that is in the process of being inactive um it's actually an amendment to the national defense uh authorization act of 2016. um two and a half years ago after a group called the constitution project wrote another 500 page report it was a bipartisan kind of blue ribbon task force and they they wrote a 550 page report very comprehensive report i think the most

[29:05] comprehensive report as of the time about torture and it was a bipartisan group and yes they confirmed that the enhanced interrogation techniques were torture they interviewed hundreds of witnesses their investigation took over two years they had no access to the cia or any government records because they were they didn't have subpoena power they were an independent non-profit group but

[29:35] after they wrote that report i read it from cover to cover and then i talked to the lawyer for the group and i asked has anybody drafted a bill to deal with this and there already were the geneva conventions there was the convention against torture there was the u.s anti-torture act one would think that would have been enough but um i think the term that brad used was the poorest legal constraints

[30:06] there were some creative people who i i don't say they found loopholes they created loopholes in existing law and so far they've gotten away with it none of them have been prosecuted so anyway i looked at the fact that there did still seem to be some loopholes so i wrote yet another anti-torture bill and submitted it to the minnesota congressional delegation and it sat there for a while

[30:38] because uh in consulting with skyrim at the constitution project he said you're only going to have one chance at this and you have to wait until the stars are in the right alignment so we waited i mean we did take it back to the members of the minnesota congressional delegation from time to time and we talked about it but then we also knew that the senate intelligence committee was conducting its own investigation and unlike everybody else

[31:09] they did have subpoena power they were able to subpoena extensive cia records they couldn't get anybody from the cia to cooperate or testify but they got a lot of information and they finished a 6 500 page report and then it was classified so the senate intelligence committee had to decide whether or not they would make it public and so

[31:40] in april of 2014 the senate intelligence committee did vote that it should be made public but then it had to go to the cia and the white house for redactions some of us thought it would never get out of the cia in the white house but in fact in december of last year they released a 550 page executive summary and findings with redactions of course but that was a pretty revealing document

[32:11] the rest of it has not been released yet but there was also an uproar created because the cia was monitoring the senate intelligence committee while they were conducting the investigation but uh the cia denied that they were monitoring the senate intelligence ready the senate intelligence committee is supposed to have oversight over the cia but um john john vice versa john can tell you about who has oversight over who

[32:43] anyway dianne feinstein who was then the chair of the senate intelligence committee got upset and she's not a very good person to get on the wrong side of um in fact she's a terrible person to get on the wrong side of um if you pardon a language you know i sometimes like to say they [ __ ] with the wrong person well they did with her

[33:14] and john brennan who's the head of the cia basically called dianne feinstein a liar and that made her even madder and then uh it was basically real that surprise surprise it was john brennan who was a liar because it was proof that they were monitoring the investigators while they were investigating so now we decided the stars might be in the right

[33:44] alignment because they pissed off and feinstein and so i actually took the bill back to senator klobuchar and talked with her staff about it and her staff put me in contact with the senate intelligence committee and they were just starting to draft a bill so i gave them my bill and then they basically consulted with me about what the language was and they came up with

[34:15] a new bill they decided that in order to get it through the current congress it might be a good idea if they could convince john mccain to put his name on it john mccain of course is a famous torture victim from the vietnam era and currently he's also the chair of the senate armed services committee so they introduced the mccain-feinstein amendment to the 2016

[34:45] national defense authorization act in june and it was passed the house had passed a version of the national defense authorization act without any anti-torture language so it had to go to a conference committee the conference committee was headed by a guy named mac thornberry who is a republican from texas and he thinks that torture should be legal so you know at every just about at every juncture where

[35:17] you're trying to expose illegal torture there's somebody in authority who either is legal or needs to be legal but john mccain bullied mack thornberry enough so it did survive the conference committee and uh it has been passed by both the house and the senate president obama vetoed the national defense authorization act because of some funding provisions in it they were trying to sneak some money

[35:47] into the overseas contingency fund to get around the restrictions that were created a few years ago in the budget and a lot of people didn't like it including president obama so he vetoed it so they went back and they fixed that part of the bill and they repassed it it's passed the house it's past the senate it's soon going to be sitting on president obama's desk so we'll see what he does um that's kind of the good part the bad

[36:18] part is the provision to close guantanamo that has survived is basically a provision to not close guantanamo there are 113 prisoners left i think detainees there is a process for releasing them but it's a very torturous process if you'll excuse my wording um and this bill has actually made it worse so um

[36:49] and it's sitting on president obama's desk if you feel strongly about closing guantanamo you might want to give the white house a call and tell president obama to veto it again until they fix the guantanamo provision now i'll open it up for um questions um yes sir um back in the ideal days of my youth this would be like a huge story and i think and the tv stations would be

[37:20] here and the papers would be here but i bet they're not here and so my question for your distinguished guests is what's your theory about why our mainstream media just doesn't care very much about this kind of important story you know in january of 1968 the washington post ran a front-page photograph of an american soldier waterboarding a north vietnamese prisoner and the day that that photograph was published secretary of defense mcnamara ordered an investigation the soldier was

[37:51] arrested he was charged with torture he was convicted and imprisoned the law has not changed since 1968 the law is the same it was the same in 2002 as it was in 68 it's the same in 2015 as it was in 1968 so what's changed number one the patriot act the so-called patriot act which is which is monumentally unpatriotic if you ask me um and along with the patriot act and

[38:22] the shock of of the september 11th attacks the american people have incrementally given up many of their civil liberties and it's happened so so quietly that it's been it's it's insidious and we've gotten to the point where well daniel ellsberg told me we've gotten to the point where every dirty trick that the nixon white house pulled against him after leaking the pentagon papers is now legal because of the patriot act

[38:53] and i think that because the american people don't seem to be outraged the press really isn't outraged we can have a whole conversation about corporate ownership of the mainstream media which i think is also a problem but so long as we aren't in the streets you know in large numbers i don't think the media is really going to care about this information it's heartbreaking to me yeah i agree absolutely with everything john

[39:24] said just to add to that from a psychological perspective and the cia the u.s is always tortured but at least at one point it was underground with the bush administration it it was above ground and became acceptable due to fear due to our giving up of our of our um of human rights and civil liberties um and that's part of what activism is about is at least the very least to push it back underground to make it so that it is unacceptable to uh to praise and

[39:57] talk about and i also i'm also going to blame our schools i don't think we have the same sort of moral ethical uh discussions that we used to it's too much standardized testing and too little humanization of of of our country um so this is uh about i have a question about torture of people and

[40:28] who are mentally incompetent to resist so i'm uh 41 years old and in 1983 my dad was committed to saint peter mental hospital he was in a good state of mind when he left 11 years later he was in a very bad state of mind since then i've gotten the courage to go through his records from saint peter and it is the most disgusting thing i've ever seen he was deprived they had a deprivational program for him if he

[41:01] wasn't if he was delusional he was diagnosed with undifferentiated schizophrenia so they would isolate him for 90 of the time now what i'm wondering now it appears that in 1994 some law was passed what i'm not wondering now is that all these years later 41 years old this happened when i was eight i'm really mad and i have a master's degree in education and i want to do something about this

[41:32] and the general layperson you know the 550 page report i mean that's that's great information i'm glad that's there but the general lay person who wants to defend these people who are vulnerable vulnerable people you know whether or not they're in guantanamo bay or st peter mental institute it's the same dumb thing you know how can i help them you know what can i do because nobody cares nobody cares about you know the mainstream media doesn't care about people and mental hospitals so what can

[42:02] i do so i i so i would say that that many of us psychologists and and and the forensic psychologists who work at the the psychiatrists the psychologists who work in mental institutions the forensic psychologists who work in our prison systems uh who engage in in uh sensory deprivation um i think most of us sort of dissidents and activists in the psychology world uh see the linkages from these national security settings and this torture to what's happening in our

[42:34] prisons and um and in uh other institutions that are supposedly trying to uh create greater well-being and mental health and so many of us see this as as the exact opposite of what uh should be done and and i do think there's continuity i think we need to press that continuity and and not pretend that this torture that's going in guantanamo and cia black sites and elsewhere is completely separate from what's happening in our criminal justice system

[43:05] and in some psychiatric institutions so i'm making those linkages and uh getting the word out blogging um taking on some of these um psychological and psychiatric associations i mean i think all of that everything that that we've kind of been doing john do you yeah i'm going to add one more thing i gave a speech a couple of weeks ago north carolina and i always say when i'm speaking to uh to groups of young people that i'm a realist

[43:35] and i know that the cia is here to stay and the only way to change the cia is from inside so i encourage people to you know join the cia if you want to try to change the cia's culture and then somebody said to me you know i'm 72 years old and i want to make a change and i can't join the cia and i said that's a really good point that i hadn't considered and he said well i'll tell you what i'd like to do i'd like to sue the bastards and i got to thinking about that and i think that's a great idea we need to be litigious pricks when it

[44:07] comes to these issues because the mainstream media is not covering it congress doesn't take their oversight responsibility seriously enough so what can we do as citizens if we have standing we can sue if we don't have standing we can complain to licensing boards we can write letters to the editor we can write blogs like you said we can do podcasts we can do all kinds of different things to get the word out and i think that that most of us don't even really consider it i do this sort of professionally now and i hadn't considered it but there are a lot

[44:38] of things we can do we can make it difficult for the people who have made it difficult for others and i shouldn't have said nobody cares i mean people care but i just think people don't understand they think someone goes to the psychiatric facility and then they're getting they're getting help sure and they're not and same in prison and there are two drugs everybody gets in prison you can either have tylenol 800 milligram big tylenols or zoloft and that's it and the rest is up to you

[45:12] i guess the question that has been asked a lot is about the idea of prosecution for people who have been involved in the torture program and i guess there's several layers to it but how do you think prosecution could even go about is that even a possibility to prosecute and if so how do you determine who would be prosecuted and i guess there's so many things to determine about who to prosecute and how would you even go about it so i hope that oh i i think i can tell you who to prosecute okay thank you you know in all seriousness i

[45:44] mean my own personal belief is that george w bush and dick cheney and others george tenet uh donald rumsfeld are war criminals and in any other country they would be prosecuted and i understand if the president decides not to prosecute cia officers who believe that they were operating within the confines of the law right so if you're a ci officer in the field you're not an attorney you get a cable saying the justice department approved these

[46:16] techniques so they're legal so go ahead and do them if you have a problem in your gut or even if you don't have a problem in your gut i can i can understand if people believed they were acting legally but what about those people that we now know about from the senate torture report who killed prisoners in custody or who sexually assaulted prisoners in custody what did they call with the hummus they call it rectal rehydration using hummus that's not a recognized medical procedure

[46:48] that's that's rape is what it is why aren't we prosecuting those cia officers no one at the justice department ever told them that they could murder people in interrogations or or sexually assault them so that disappoints me greatly the president ought to be bigger than he's been and ought to insist that these officers be prosecuted the problem we're running up against now is the statute of limitations and this has been the idea all along you

[47:20] just delay this and delay and delay and delay and eventually the statute of limitations will expire and nobody's going to be prosecuted and that's what the white house has been banking on and in addition to the the legal prosecutions i mean there are other forms of accountability that have to occur so for instance the dean of depaul university who fought us tooth and nail all the way through these 10 years is now under a lot of pressure

[47:50] to step down from the dean position into a professorship and then the president just wrote a letter basically saying that he will not do anything so um there are licensing boards but but yeah i mean the legal pathway and it's tough i mean a lot of us are pacifists we want we're into forgiveness but there does have to be some accountability to prevent this from happening in the future i earlier you said that in effect 13 out of 14 people who were invited by management to participate in

[48:23] the torture program chose to and so i wonder how many people from what you know and what's happened since do you think would take that off for today and what kinds of things uh you know went into their decision you talked a little bit about your thoughts but i assume some of the others must have thought it over a little bit and maybe this relates a little bit to the idea of changing the cia from within too oh that's a really great question actually nobody's asked me that question before

[48:53] yeah i think that that for many of those other 13 officers the trauma of 9 11 was still so fresh that even if they had had moral qualms about doing this they set those aside and did it anyway so i think that i think that a lot of people especially in the cia were still shocked by 9 11 and wanted to at least feel like they were doing something to to make it right to make it good

[49:27] we also know from the senate torture report that there were officers already in the field who when they got orders to begin torturing said wait a minute i didn't sign on for this this looks torture and in at least a couple of cases that the senate select committee on intelligence documented uh they insisted on coming home rather than to remain in the field and torture prisoners one thing that does disappoint me though is um it's been almost eight years now since i went on abc news and talked about

[49:58] torture and in those eight years not a single cia officer has come forward and said you know i was part of the torture program it was wrong it shouldn't have happened nobody's ever said that and that's very disappointing to me as a psychologist what is it about your personalities you know i i like to i'd like to is there something wrong yeah i'll tell you one thing a cia psychiatrist told me one time and you and i have talked about this a cia

[50:28] psychiatrist told me one time that the cia actively seeks to hire people with sociopathic tendencies not sociopaths sociopaths easily pass polygraphs because they have no conscience right but people with sociopathic tendencies are comfortable operating in moral and legal and ethical gray areas so if i get a cable from the field saying hey go break into this house and steal this politician's file i say okay i go fly to whatever country

[51:00] and i break into the house and i steal the file because that's my job but you gotta draw a line somewhere right the cia doesn't teach ethics there are no ethics courses there's no instruction there's no advice there's nobody you can go to and say i've got this ethical dilemma what should i do you just have to carry it in with you you've got to have your own moral code and i was i was raised as part of what i like to call the christian left and um and my god there were things that are

[51:31] black and white right and wrong and torture is wrong and it was it was a very clear line for me just in response to the statute of limitations for the lawsuit there is no statute of limitations on murder correct and luckily for the law for the lawsuits there are the murders yes it's sad to say but at least we have the murders yeah uh it seems like the big enemy here is the military

[52:02] we are such a military society now uh it's not just the corporations that own the media it's the military corporations that own the media and they don't want peace because then they're going to lose profits the military is using the police forces around the country to experiment on techniques to give them military equipment and encourage the the sociopaths of the psychopaths to go way over the military finances the universities

[52:34] serving every sporting event every sporting military uh we need to cut the military budget down to about four dollars a year and then they won't have the money to infiltrate every aspect of our society what can we do to wake people up to the fact that the military is not helping me at this point it's ruining my society i had dinner last night with a dear friend of mine who um is a former

[53:04] assistant secretary of defense and he's left government and he's become something of a peace activist and he was an assistant secretary of defense during the george w bush administration and he's become a peace activist and he said you know he hadn't even really thought about it until recently but we've been at war essentially since 1990 when he and i met and he said we've gotten to the point where our entire economy is a war-based economy that if we stop fighting wars we're going to go into a recession and probably quite a prolonged

[53:37] recession because the country the country runs by financing the likes of boeing and lockheed martin and other major defense contractors and he said when did this happen it didn't even we didn't even realize that it was happening and this is a guy talking from the inside and the only thing we could think of to do was to really ride our elected officials i understand frank church is dead otis

[54:08] pike is dead those giants of the 1970s who took oversight very seriously are all gone but we need to demand and to insist that our elected officials exercise oversight which they which they don't do dianne feinstein i'm sure is a perfectly lovely person but dianne feinstein is one of the cia's greatest cheerleaders on capitol hill and she has her she has been for her entire career so for dianne feinstein to come out against john brennan was monumental i mean brennan

[54:38] really screwed her to make her come out on the floor of the senate and denounce the cia and john brennan but that was kind of a one-off we need to demand that our elected officials who are members of the armed services committees and the foreign relations and foreign affairs committees and the select committees on intelligence really exercise oversight and and bring these programs to a halt when they're no longer needed and we're not seeing that

[55:10] well for the people that you talk about prosecuting good lord what about the legal profession i mean the medical profession failed us the psychiatric profession failed us the nursing profession failed us but how about johnny sitting there in the white house office crafting a legal documentation with a straight face yeah for for all that so the george bush could say it's all legal see john you told me so and and he what does he end up with does

[55:41] he go to jail oh no he gets a slick professional the slick job in was it berkeley law school yeah i mean where is that profession they have you know here's this here's this 535 legislature legislators probably 80 of whom are lawyers um you know give me a break one of my 11 lawyers is jessalyn radak who uh

[56:12] who recently headed the national security practice at the government accountability project whistleblower.org and is now with exposedfax.org but jessalyn was the chief of professional ethics at the justice department in the immediate aftermath of the 9 11 attacks she happened to be on duty the the day that um american military forces captured john walker lind who became known as the american taliban so the fbi called from afghanistan jessalyn

[56:44] answered the phone and they said we just caught an american citizen in a fort during a gun battle with the taliban what do we do and she said you have to read him his rights he's an american citizen and he has constitutional rights you have to read them his rights they didn't a couple of days later attorney general ashcroft went on tv and said he was read his rights he waved them and he confessed that was a lie he had not been read his rights he had not waived them

[57:16] and he had not seen an attorney when jessalyn complained about this she was told to mind her own business she decided to make a copy of all the emails that had gone back and forth between the justice department and the fbi the emails had been purged right there were only two left so she took the two that were left and she sent them to newsweek to mike isikoff at newsweek mike isikoff who must have been half brain dead that day published the emails

[57:46] without blacking out jessalyn's name right she was escorted out of the justice department and fired for blowing the whistle on the fact that the justice department and the fbi had violated john walker lin's constitutional rights not only was she fired she was blacklisted from a firm that had agreed to hire her in the aftermath of all this and fired from that firm the justice department asked the dc bar to disbar her

[58:17] right interestingly enough for violating professional ethics and then just to make sure that it really hurt they put her on the no-fly list as a terrorist sympathizer this is the justice department that did this so sure we've got we've got john yu and we have uh bybee and with the others these guys are in up to their necks and and at the very least should have lost

[58:48] their law licenses for what they did but it's bigger than that it goes beyond those guys it's not just the ones who have who have twisted and bastardized the law to try to um to try to make a make a legal case for torture it's all these other ones too who try to to quash any dissent and it's not just at the justice department it's at the cia it's at the fbi it's at nsa you can't believe what nsa has done to some

[59:19] of their employees tom drake kirk weeby bill benny it's a it's a nightmare and it's government-wide how about a couple more questions do we have colleen is that where's colleen right here is that okay yeah i i don't know okay one one more question one more front till one and five oh yeah yeah okay we can take a couple more and then maybe if people are interested hang around and uh and signed book sign john with all the benefits of hindsight

[59:51] is there anything that could have been done or you might have done to make a great your message have a greater impact than it did yes um there there are two things one one is personal i should have hired an attorney before i won an abc news rather than after that was a personal mistake um but secondly i tried to i tried to be nuanced in my explanation

[1:00:23] of what was happening inside the cia after september 11th when i talked to brian ross at abc news i shouldn't have been nuanced because either the american people are too stupid to understand nuance or most people are so ideological that they just decided to ignore nuance and i learned that with a message like the message that i had that we're torturing prisoners and torture was wrong you really need to hit people over the head with it you can't say well you know we're doing this thing and there are these really smart people they disagreed

[1:00:53] you can't do that you have to say it's happening it's wrong it's illegal and the president should do something about it all right um i'm a former soldier i was stationed at fort benning um i found out what the soa is and what they were teaching there and i decided to vacate the military at that point in time fantastic and when i say vacate i mean i walked away i walked off base and subsequently i was you know kidnapping cage much like yourself but for a much shorter period of time and i

[1:01:24] wanted to let you know that you know you're not alone out there and there are people that that are standing up there thank you thank you very much i'm so glad you said something i'm going to put a plug in too for an organization that i that i became aware of when i was in prison called quaker house it's in fayetteville north carolina and they've been around since 1969 solely for the purpose of helping people like you who have had second thoughts about military service based on

[1:01:56] what they've seen in the military um thank goodness that there are organizations there aren't a lot of them but there are organizations like quaker house where you can go and get free legal assistance and free counseling and have people really help you sort through these things it was a very brave thing that you did thanks for saying something thank you i i don't know how to say this without sounding stupid

[1:02:28] but the american public is so willing to swallow fear tactics by our politicians our military etc is what can we do about that nothing like lemmings right over a cliff um somebody asked me the other day if uh if the cia has closed all of its secret prisons and torture sites and i said i i don't know

[1:02:59] this was a reporter and the reporter said but they but they say they have and the president says they have and i said but you know what from when this first started they have lied at every single step of the way every single thing that has come from the mounts of john brennan and david petraeus and leon panetta and mike hayden another war criminal and porter goss and george tenet has been a lie and then when they're caught in the lie they say well and general clapper is a

[1:03:31] prime example well it was what did he say it was less incorrect to say yeah less that's right it was less untruthful to say yes than no well actually when the answer is no then you're just lying so the third question is that we you know i mean hearing all of this i mean it's it's both energizing but it's also sort of sad and depressing just just how oppressive this system is but on the other hand we don't there is a lot of

[1:04:03] fear but we don't need to convince everybody we just need to have a big enough voice to push things to the other side to hold people accountable um to push for the laws that exist to push for new laws and uh and we can't do it and uh it's sometimes slow these campaigns take a long time and we can't do it alone but working together we can we can really make change one person back here that's had her hand up for a long time oh okay um so how

[1:04:34] about there there and then there who is this i have a question for you john you mentioned the various forms of torture um that exist in the cia and to be able to speak about them i'm assuming that means you must have seen these facilities or like seen this cool chamber room so i was just wondering what the turning point was for you to go and speak out about this um no i i didn't go to any of the black

[1:05:05] sites when i turned down the training that just ended it for me but the techniques were circulated among all of us who who were aware of this torture program the torture program in the beginning was very tightly compartmented and you you could count really on your fingers and toes the number of people inside the cia who really knew that this thing was taking place so when i saw the list of the list of techniques that's when i objected to it and as soon as i objected they cut me out

[1:05:35] with that said i still knew a lot of the guys who had said yes and so you know you run into each other in the hall or in the cafeteria or in the gym and you say hey how's it going and they start telling you their stories and that's how i was able to keep abreast of everything that was that was going on you mentioned that the 13 of the 14 of you who were asked to do this enhanced interrogation technique he said a lot of them probably

[1:06:06] did it out of a sense of shock of 9 11. and i'm wondering you know yes the the attack itself may have been a shock but what was the cia doing for the last 20 years that they were not aware of the sense of resentment building around the world about our empire and i wish you comment a little about what who is in the cia and what their perspective is of empire and all of that and at the cia

[1:06:36] you don't get very many free thinkers you know the they're very very bright people right the best schools in the country uh hard foreign languages but the the consensus is that you're there to take orders one man i used to work for very closely who rose to a very senior level um i'm not going to mention his name because he's already testified against me in the grand jury i'm sure he'd love to sue me

[1:07:08] but he said in response to a reporter's question about me that there was no such thing as whistleblowing what it was was institutionalized insubordination that's what he called it and i responded not to him but to the reporter isn't that what the germans said in the 1930s i was just following orders you know in nuremberg and 45 because you can't have institutionalized insubordination can you

[1:07:39] so i would counter that the shame is that they weren't all whistleblowers they should have all said wait a minute wait a minute we're all smart right we all went to great schools right we all can think for ourselves this is wrong this is illegal we shouldn't be doing it and that conversation never took place okay how about one more question and then we'll get to the book signing

[1:08:11] i'd just like to ask what you think of this idea everyone in this room has availability to go to their city councils and i'm thinking that there are enough people in america who have a conscience who would dare to stand up at the city council level and use the public forum to speak against what's happening in our nation and if this was done in a concerted effort with all at the same time in other words flood city councils flood county governments where we can actually

[1:08:42] get to to demand in a group kind of way some kind of change in our country is that uh doable and how many seniors would it take if that's what it took to sacrifice their lives to change our nation how many would it take that's a good question robin um in in north carolina there are some really terrific uh grassroots groups that have become acquainted with like north carolina stop torture now for

[1:09:14] example and they've been working for years to bring to account the employees of uh of a corporation called arrow it's a charter uh airline that actually shuttled prisoners between black sites who were shuttled prisoners for the purpose of extraordinary rendition to be tortured in third countries i can tell you that they've been working on this for 10 years and have gotten absolutely nowhere absolutely nowhere so i think really the

[1:09:46] concerted effort needs to come at the congressional level because that's where real decisions can be made decisions on funding decisions on investigations for example the senate foreign relations committee has in-house investigators the the senate armed services committee has in-house investigators what the heck are they investigating they're not investigating this when i tried to on the senate foreign relations committee a supposedly friendly chairman john kerry killed it killed it in the crib and told me

[1:10:16] we're not going to talk about torture so and and i'm going to say that that grassroots activism is going to i mean that local work does eventually radiate to the congressional level and yeah and we do need that i mean we do we do need that absolutely yeah no my point wasn't that we shouldn't have it my point is that we should look a little higher right okay how about one more question this is the last universal jurisdiction is their uh statute of limitations there and prospects for accountability for the

[1:10:51] highest ranking authorizers unfortunately there's still a statute of doctrine limitations universal jurisdiction is a very good doctrine and essentially it says any country in the world can prosecute anybody who's violated international law the geneva conventions the convention against torture there have actually been some countries who have started to investigate what i'm doing by u.s officials

[1:11:22] and in fact there was a prosecution of some cia agents in absencia in italy where like 16 people were were prosecuted the abu umar rendition okay so yeah there was a rendition in italy and uh there was a trial the cia agents didn't show up but the other interesting thing is that um there have been groups who have talked about prosecuting janey bush rumsfeld rice

[1:11:53] all the insiders and you know somebody asked a question about where are the lawyers there are groups of lawyers in these different countries there's a big group in canada and every time bush and cheney try to sneak into canada they try to get the local prosecutors to arrest them and in fact bush canceled a trip to switzerland one time because they were preparing papers to serve him

[1:12:25] and so um one thing that has happened as a result of this is that they have to be careful where they travel so um we've actually tried to get local officials to arrest uh cheney and bush and rice when they've been here obama you keep leaving out that's right i haven't had a chance to try to get

[1:12:57] president obama arrested in minnesota but we've tried to get these other people arrested when they came we've gone to the u.s attorney we've gone to the county attorney we've gone to the police department and i think that that some of the officers are kind of sympathetic but they all say they don't have jurisdiction but and you know they did bring ethical charges against you and della hunty and bybee in the states where they had uh

[1:13:27] licenses to practice law and they were all dismissed so it's not as though people haven't been trying to hold these people accountable there have been several lawsuits that have been brought in this country there um there was a lawsuit that was brought in canada um successfully the government of canada paid the guy 10 million dollars um it was actually uh harper who approved it surprisingly enough um but uh you know he he was actually

[1:14:00] captured in new york and rendered to syria he was a canadian citizen but you know that was kind of a famous case but he also brought a suit in the united states and it was dismissed most of these cases get dismissed on the grounds that there is a defense called national security it always gets involved in all of these cases and almost every judge will dismiss a lawsuit based on the defense of national security because if

[1:14:33] the case is prosecuted so-called national security secrets will have to come out into the open so they raise this the justice department raises the defense in every case and every single case gets dismissed and we need to keep fighting that narrative yeah well thank you so much everyone it's been great

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