Title: John Kiriakou on the Government's Dangerous Reaction to the Capitol Storming
Show: Scott Horton
Date: 2021-02-12
URL: https://scotthorton.org/interviews/2-12-21-john-kiriakou-on-the-governments-dangerous-reaction-to-the-capitol-storming/
Duration: 30:00

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[00:00] Alright, so welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute Editorial Director of antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Arendt. Time to end the war in Afghanistan and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.

[00:31] You can also sign up for the podcast feed. The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show. You guys on the line, I've got John Kiriakou. He fought the terror wars for the CIA and then they put him in prison for confirming the identity of some CIA torturers, the only person to be punished for George W. Bush's torture program, you know, above officer level anyway, and certainly the only CIA officer

[01:05] who was punished. And now he's an antiwar guy, I think pretty much, fair to say, and writes great articles about lots of important things. Welcome back to the show, John. How are you? Thanks, doing well, thanks. Good to talk to you again. Yeah, man. So, boy, there's a lot going on right now and you got this piece here, a terrible take on the capital storming. And that is in reference to a former associate of yours, former CIA officer Robert Grenier, who readers of Fools' Air and will remember was the station chief in Islamabad at the

[01:41] dawn of the terror war. And he gave an interview to NPR News saying this and that about Al Qaeda and the Taliban and the capital mob and the American right and some things. And I wonder if you could explain a little bit here, maybe even read the quote if you've got it about what it is he was getting at there. You know what? I'm going to pull up the quote. What he talked about in an op-ed in the New York Times two weeks ago today, as a matter

[02:12] of fact, was the fact that we need to treat events, insurrections, like we saw on January the 6th here in Washington, as insurgencies. And with insurgencies come counterinsurgencies. And I said in my piece that, you know, I've known Grenier at all for a very long time and what he means is we need to be killing people. Well, killing people for what reason?

[02:44] I say in my own piece that I was as sick and as everybody else was on January 6th. I was as angry as everybody else was. But we had a demonstration of some 15 or 20,000 people. And we had, what, 500 to 800 that actually went inside the capital and were violent. And most of them were unarmed. I think that there are accounts of three people who we know definitively were armed.

[03:15] And you're in the New York Times saying that we need to treat this as a counterinsurgency. Now, what happens in counterinsurgencies is you go door to door and you bust down the door. Sometimes you breach the door with explosives. You grab everybody inside. You zip tie them or cuff them. You take them to some sort of an interrogation center and then you just sort it all out later. Well, we've got this thing called a Constitution and you can't do stuff like that.

[03:48] So, you know, in whatever little way that I could, Scott, I wanted to lay down a marker and say this is wrong. This is anti-American. This is a violation of our constitutional rights. And we've got to put a stop to it. I was disgusted that the New York Times gave him a platform to even spout this nonsense. Yeah. You know, and I'm so sorry I've been so buried. I got the new book out and everything. I'm going to send you a copy. I got enough now. You're on the list. What?

[04:19] Thank you. But... Galatian. I really... Oh, thank you. I appreciate that. I hope you like it. I'm pretty sure you will. I know. But... Oh, I know. So, my apology was I didn't even read the New York Times article and I forgot there even was one. I read in your piece that there was one, but I never got around to reading it. I only read the NPR interview after the fact. And then I just got stuck on this paragraph. I just don't know what to do about it. And here's what's so funny, John. And, man, I can't wait to hear what you have to say about the giant mess of a question

[04:53] I'm about to unload on you here, okay? First of all, here it is. She says, oh, so you were station chief in Islamabad on 9-11. So what are the lessons from the war against al-Qaeda there? And you know, me, I wrote the book about Afghanistan and I'm all hung up on this point. And there's a part in the book where I talk about how Grineer had Grunye, whatever, had organized with the Pakistanis to prevent friendly fire in case in the event that Bush allowed Delta Force to chase after bin Laden when they crossed the border into Pakistan, which

[05:25] never happened. That's kind of part of the role he played there. But anyway, and that's according to his book, 88 Days to Kandahar, where he writes about all that. But then it's so funny the way he says this, John, he goes, and yes, and you know, even at the seeming height of the crisis immediately after 9-11, there really weren't that many members of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. And the thrust of our campaign there was, yes, to hunt down al-Qaeda, but primarily to

[05:59] remove the supportive environment in which they were able to live and to flourish. And that meant fighting the Taliban. And I think that is the heart of what we need to deal with here, hunting down people who are criminals. This is something which the U.S. law enforcement is very well capable of doing and doing while preserving fundamental civil rights. And in some ways that's the easiest part of the problem. The difficult part of the problem is affecting the environment within which violent elements

[06:32] otherwise would be able to thrive. So now please allow me to unzip a couple of things here. First of all, I'm stuck on what happened at Torah Bora. And this son of a bitch is saying that everything that I said was right. First of all, there were only 400 al-Qaeda guys in the country at the time as Cynthia Storer, former CIA officer, maybe an old friend of yours, I don't know, confirmed to me on this show. And then he says, even then, he says it, even at the seeming height of the crisis immediately

[07:03] after 9-11, al-Qaeda was a side project. We decided to go after the Taliban instead. Okay, so there's that and I want to let you talk about that for 20 minutes if you want. But then there's the other whole thing where he's not even talking about that. He's just making a stupid metaphor. And he's saying that the guys that bum-rushed the capital are al-Qaeda. And the American right are the Taliban.

[07:34] Yes. What the hell? So talk about the first part first though, man, please. Yeah. You know, when I was on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff, we had Grignet testify and we had the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and I forget who the third person was. But Senator Jean Chahine, a Democrat from New Hampshire, asked a question and it was very direct and very pointed.

[08:04] She said, and this was in the spring of 2009, how many members of al-Qaeda are in Pakistan? Easy question, direct question. The answer was 25. So by 2009, there were 25 members of al-Qaeda in Pakistan. We set out to destroy al-Qaeda in October of 2001. And man, they were destroyed. So what were we still doing there? What we were doing there was the dawn of the Pakistani terror war.

[08:36] That was when Obama and the CIA were just starting the drone war there. Just starting. We hadn't even had yet debates over refueling the drones, for example, in Baluchistan that became so controversial. You're exactly right. So we decided that we were going to pick a fight, essentially, with the Taliban, with which we had never had a beef, right? Well, we didn't have diplomatic relations with them, but we don't have diplomatic

[09:06] relations with a lot of countries. Well, in Bill Clinton's government, I mean, you were in the CIA at the time, right? Isn't it not the case that Bill Clinton supported the rise of the Taliban? Absolutely, absolutely, because the Taliban were anti-communist. They were anti-Russian. And yeah, I mean, it was good for our sphere of influence. And so this is just five years later, right? Bill Clinton and the Saudis and the Pakistanis helped them take Kabul in 1996.

[09:36] So this is five years later, we're pretending like I don't know these guys. In fact, let's pretend that the Taliban knocked the towers down while we're letting bin Laden go. I mean, he even used the word primarily immediately after 9-11. Our primary objective was to go after the guys that didn't do it and let the guys who did do it get away. John, that is exactly what happened. That is exactly what happened. happen. Grignet writes in this New York Times piece, and this is exactly what you said a moment ago, overrepresented among the ranks of angry but ordinary citizens who stormed

[10:11] the Capitol on January 6th were others, hardly ordinary, committed to violent extremism, the Proud Boys, the Three Percenters, the Oath Keepers, Christian national chauvinists, white supremacists, and QAnon fantasists, among others. Okay, listen, all those groups are nuts. I agree. All those groups are nuts, they're all extremists. But who says that they were committed to violent extremism? I'd like to see what his sources are for that.

[10:43] Right, or that they oppose a threat to the American legal order at all. Right, I mean, is there a 3% or caucus in one state house out of 50 in this country? No. Come on. Ridiculous. Ridiculous. And like I say, what I said in my own piece is I've known Grignet for many, many years, decades. And this is CIA code words for using violence, extra judicial violence

[11:13] against Americans. Hey, y'all, Scott here. If you want a real education in history and economics, you should check out Tom Woods's Liberty Classroom. Tom and a really great group of professors and experts have put together an entire education of everything they didn't teach you in school but should have. Follow through from the link in the margin at scotthorton.org for Tom Woods's Liberty Classroom. Look here, you and I both know that what you need is some libertarian institute things, like shirts and sweatshirts and mugs and

[11:45] stickers to put on the back of your truck and to give to your friends too that say libertarian institute on them so that everyone will know the origins of your oppositional defiant disorder and where they can listen to all the best podcasts. So here's what you do. Go to libertosbella.com and look at all the great libertarian institute stuff they've got going there. Find the ad in the right hand margin at libertarianinstitute.org. Libertosbella.com. Okay, so what are they really thinking? Okay, so here's another part of this thing that they talk about in the interview is he says, and this is just great. You

[12:20] know this guy for decades, you explain this to me then, translate this for me Kiriakou. He says, here's an important element we haven't talked about is what I refer to as insurgent leadership. The fact of the matter is that the most violent elements that we are concerned about right now see former President Trump as a broadly popular and charismatic symbol. He is their charismatic leader, whether he chooses to acknowledge it or not. You know, just as I saw in the Middle East, that the air went out of violent demonstrations

[12:55] when Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was defeated and seemed to be defeated. I think the same situation applies here. The fact of the matter is that Mr. Trump has lost. It's very important that people see that he has lost is a private citizen. But I think it's extremely important that his potency as a symbol for the most violent among us is somehow addressed. In other words, we're to somehow perceive Donald Trump as sitting at Mar-a-Lago leading a continuing

[13:26] insurgency against the Biden government and an attempt to overthrow it. But we haven't heard a peep from him. And he hasn't said a word after he hasn't put up any kind of actual fight of any substance since January 7th. That was the end of that as far as that goes. And then again, with the analogies here, remember that time, John Kiriakou, that they captured Saddam Hussein and then the next day America defeated the Sunni-based insurgency because they gave up? Is that how you remember the year 2004, 2006 and 2007 and 2008?

[14:02] You know, that is not how I remember it happening. And he knows better. You know, Bob Drenier is a very smart guy, and he likes to bill himself as the consummate moderate. But I want to reread what you just said here. Mass demonstrations in Pakistan in support of Osama bin Laden fell into dull quiescence when he was driven into hiding after September 11th. To blunt the extremists, Mr. Trump's veneer of invincibility must similarly be crushed. Now, to me, Scott, that that means to take him out. You know, take him out however

[14:41] you want to politically, legally, judicially, whatever. But some people are going to read that as just taking him out, if you know what I mean. Okay. So now, so what is going through these people's head that they're, they must be just pretending to believe that Donald Trump is about to what? Raise up a brown shirt army to overthrow all the governors of America and take over the country or something? Give me a break with this stupidity. This isn't even a comic book.

[15:13] Well, it says a lot that as soon as this thing was published, John Brennan just jumped right into the fray on a in an interview on NPR saying that Bob Drenier is, you know, a genius and brilliant. And this was a brilliantly written piece. And we need to stop Donald Trump. And he's a danger to the Republic and all the usual garbage that John Brennan spouts. This was the plan. I mean, Greg and Brennan have been friends for 35 years. So of course, Brennan was going to come out and take a cheap shot at Trump. That's what

[15:47] we saw happen. But the scary thing is, you know, a lot of people in the CIA believe this kind of thing. They believe that they're smarter than everybody else. They're smarter than you are. They're smarter than I are than I am. And they are going to they're going to put this out there in the newspaper of record for all the world to see. And they're going to show how the how the deep state is going to make this whole thing right. I mean, but at the same time, they're tapping his phone and they know he ain't doing a damn thing. So this is all just make believe Donald Trump. And look, if

[16:21] let's say Donald Trump was trying to get real brave right now, all they have to do is send your replacement down there to have a meeting with him where, hey, now that you're a private citizen again, you think we were hard on you when we were framing you for treason with Russia will cut your throat. Shut up. They'd say that right to his face and he would say, OK, I get it. Maybe that's already happened, right? I mean, there's he's not doing anything. I guess it's possible he could run again for the nomination and election under our laws in another four years. But other

[16:55] than that, I think it's completely ridiculous. What's he going to do? He's going to see South Florida with what armed force? You know, what are we talking about? Donald Trump is like David Koresh is about to march on downtown Waco and sees it. No, he's not sitting at home when you guys showed up. He is more concerned right now about the Palm Beach City Council asking him to leave than he is about any kind of insurrection or or raising a standing army to attack Michigan or, you know, whatever it else he's being he's

[17:28] being accused of doing right now. OK, but so here's the thing. These guys know they're lying. This isn't about Trump. This is about picking on the right. It's about kicking the right wing off of the Internet. And as John Brennan said, even libertarians. Oh, yeah. Which libertarians ever insulted John Brennan? I don't know. I'm sorry, guys, if I got us all in trouble. I saw. I chuckled when I read that. Yeah, well, it's not that funny really. And, you know, antiwar.com has already been deranged by Google. They rounded us up with the worst of the right and the left from their point of view back a few

[17:59] years ago. And they've kicked some of our best allies completely off of Facebook and Twitter and all kinds of things. And it seems like it's really only just starting here. But here's let me go ahead and get kind of kooky on you a minute here for just a second. This is the CIA and you're they say former CIA, John. I don't know. That's the law. They put you in prison. I'm pretty sure if there's a former CIA officer, you're one of them. You and Ray. OK, but so aren't aren't you guys sick and evil and devious enough that this is all deliberate? Because in fact, you're not just trying to

[18:31] kick not you. They are not just trying to kick the right wing off the Internet. They're trying to turn them into a radicalized force. They're trying to make things worse. They're being provocative because they're trying to radicalize the right to have more and more of an excuse to crack down on them. Yes, that's exactly what we're seeing here. You know, it's funny to me that that the Democrats think that they're ascendant right now. And so they're overreacting just like so many of us predicted that they would. But the thing is, this this is always

[19:04] cyclical and it's going to come back and bite them. And then they're going to be delisted and then they're going to be thrown off of Twitter and Facebook and Instagram. And they're going to jump up and down and say how unfair it is and how un-American it is. And then we're back where we started again. Yeah, I mean, assuming someone can find their way around Silicon Valley and all their restrictions now. I mean, it sort of seems like no, we're actually a few miles down the slippery slope from where we were before. In fact, someone interviewing me yesterday said,

[19:36] doesn't it seem like yeah, for those of us, you're a little bit older than me, but for those of us who grew up in the 70s, 80s, 90s and even 2000s that that America's over. There's a whole different era now. Our internet, what we thought the internet would be, for example, which looks kind of wide open space of blogs and retweets and whatever you got is becoming much more like a Chinese style internet and they're going for it. And in the name of this, the danger of the white supremacist, which is apparently the right half

[20:06] of all of American political culture. And it's very dangerous. It's very dangerous when, and in the meantime, we've got these people like Bob Grenier and like James Clapper and John Brennan and these other former intelligence people coming out and professing to be the moderates, the right thinkers, the ones who are going to protect us and save us.

[20:36] And if anything, they're causing damage to the constitution. And you know what's hilarious about all this? Is this, I don't know about the role of Grenier here, but I know that John Brennan was the leading backer of Jabot al-Nusra in Syria. Absolutely right. This guy's idea of, right-wing radical terrorism is we ought to help these guys shoot some tow missiles at some tanks and see what kind of money and guns and breakfast

[21:07] and training and whatever else we can give them so they can fight better. Yes, absolutely right. We can't forget that it was John Brennan who decided to ally the CIA with al-Qaeda, which just changed its name to Jabot al-Nusra in Syria. We were actually fighting on the side of al-Qaeda, if you can imagine such a thing. Yep. Thanks to John. And this is the same guy talking about

[21:38] how you're a traitor and I'm a traitor. Right. And every, and you know what? This is exactly what happened after Oklahoma City, right? The Pactcon operation, which one way or the other, it's not definitive, so I won't go out on a limb. It may have been a deliberate provocation. In fact, I guess I should ask you what you know about that, but there was Andre Strossmeyer, seems like he was not really a Nazi. He was a cop infiltrating this group and helping provoke them. And then they did the Oklahoma bombing. They blamed it on one or two guys and let the rest get away. And then they blamed the entire right.

[22:11] First of all, it was actual Nazis that did it, but then they pretended that they ignore the actual Nazis, the literal individual men who were Nazis who did it. And instead, they pretended that all militias are Nazis and smeared all militias that had grown up after Waco in response to the Waco massacre. That you're not gonna do that around here. We'll show you kind of thing. And they said, no, no, no, these guys all worship Hitler and hate Jews and kill babies now after the Oklahoma City bombing.

[22:43] And they essentially accused Rush Limbaugh, who to me is the center right. The absolute, not very far right at all. And it was Rush Limbaugh and everybody to the right of him. Every white man in America owns a gun, did the Oklahoma bombing and slaughtered those babies. And Bill Clinton bragged, the Oklahoma bombing saved my presidency as everybody rallied around and support the flag and lay a wreath in memory of the people.

[23:13] Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. So, you can see how dangerous this kind of thing goes where they wanna try. I mean, it's just like with the Muslim terrorist entrapments too, right? There's been, Trevor Aronson has documented, there's been between 250 and 300 outright entrapment cases by the FBI of mostly harmless idiot Muslims in America. Loners, people with sick mothers in desperate need of money and whatever trapped into saying the wrong thing on tape

[23:47] and locked in jail. And they can do that same kind of thing. In fact, the new law that they're proposing, John, what I read of it, the only thing that it did, I don't think it created any new crimes that I saw, at least the version of the bill I saw, said what it does is it creates a new domestic terrorism agency inside the Department of Homeland Security and inside the FBI. Permanent new agencies to focus on the radical right, which is, again, the entire right.

[24:19] That's been discussed since the early 1990s. On my very first trip to London as a CIA officer, I'd been to London many times, of course, but in my first trip as a CIA officer, we talked with MI5 about their duties as a domestic intelligence service. MI6 is famously the foreign intelligence service. MI5 does only domestic intelligence. They don't have the power to arrest, but they don't need to arrest anybody. That's what Scotland Yard is for.

[24:50] And the discussions way back then, I mean, this must have been 1992 or 1993, we were talking about setting a similar thing up in the United States, either parallel to the FBI or as a part of the FBI that would just spy on American citizens and then provide that intelligence to the FBI to affect arrests. And here we are all these years later, 30 years later, and it looks like it's gonna come to pass.

[25:23] And then, but so, yeah, again, it seems like a step. Back to Cynthia Storer, the former CIA analyst who I interviewed on the show. We were talking about radical Islam and such. And she said that, you know, she essentially confirmed that what she called the CIA's framework for terrorism, for understanding terrorism, what causes it and how to prevent it and how to short-circuit it and all these things. It doesn't include religion at all. Religion is Islam, the Mohammed,

[25:53] all that has nothing to do with it whatsoever. She said it's disenfranchised people who feel like they have tried everything and there's no accountability and no redress and their voice is silenced and they're really pissed and then they resort to, if they're crafty about it, not just violent revenge attacks, but attacks designed to provoke political reactions and move change forward one way or the other, sometimes into deep chaos before we get

[26:25] where we're going or this kind of thing. But that's what it is. And she was talking, I think she was sort of, I don't even think she explicitly talked, maybe she was referring to Assad at the time, that Assad really could have nipped this thing in the bud a lot better if he'd been a lot nicer, which I'm not sure I believe that because there was so much foreign intervention going on, it was too late for his ass anyway and I think he knew that too. But she was saying, people were just coming out protesting and then they got met with real hard violence and then they really reacted badly to that

[26:55] and then it's a cycle of violence but whether we're talking about Syria, whether the CIA's intervening or whether we're talking about anywhere else, that's basically how it goes. So then I'm saying if these guys have all read the same framework that she's read, then this seems like early steps in trying to create a crisis, trying to provoke some kind of massive violent conflict that'll lead us to what at the end? I mean, it's like they're gonna be able to outlaw the right wing party in America or something like that

[27:27] and suspend elections from now on and force us all to submit to Kamala Harris under the new order or something. So if that's right, that they're reading that same framework the same way and we're on a John Brennan plan for implementing this thing and making matters worse deliberately in the shorter medium term, to what end? Other than just, oh good, we get to have a new agency and exercise some more power which is fun and cash checks

[27:59] and not have to get real jobs, I understand that. But do they have something in mind for what America's supposed to look like after the end of four or eight years of this or worse? You know, I don't think they do. I think that for them, the end game is power and authority and all that matters to them is that they remain in charge when this is all over and what you do, one of the things that they taught us, Scott at the CIA and from my first week on the job, I learned this little bit of office politics,

[28:33] is that in order to make yourself as important as you possibly can, you have to constantly work at expanding your realm, right? You've got to be the king of as many people as possible. And so people, managers at the CIA were constantly trying to expand their authority. But when you get up to that level, that senior level of the John Brennan's and the Bob Grenier's and you want to expand your authority, that expands then into other agencies.

[29:03] I remember in 2002, John Brennan was in a feud with Jim Pabot, it was the deputy director for operations. I worked for Jim Pabot and Brennan wanted to be more important than he was. He had been the deputy executive director. And so they created this new organization that at the time was called the TTIK, the Transnational Terrorism Information Center. It became the National Counterterrorism Center.

[29:35] And Brennan was the first head. Well, he wanted the TTIK to break off from the CIA and to become its own agency. So he could be the first head of this new intelligence agency. Not for any other reason, not because it would have streamlined the information, the analysis would have been any better, just because he wanted to be in charge of his own little. fight them. And Pavitt blocked that. Well, as it turned out then, Brennan was the only

[30:08] person in 2008 from the CIA to join the Obama campaign. Everybody else either went to Hillary or to McCain. And when Obama won the election, Brennan was able to call his own shot. He became the deputy national security advisor and then the CIA director. And then until the Biden campaign, I mean, he was telling everybody in Washington who would listen that he wanted to be the secretary of defense. The only reason he didn't become secretary of defense was

[30:41] because Biden was committed to elevating women and minorities into these senior positions. So it's all about power. It's all about individual authority. It's all about being as important as you can possibly be in Washington. And the American people be damned this whole time. If that ain't the theme of the 21st century, I don't know what is. That never even enters the conversation. Yeah, like that. Not even be damned, but just not even brought up

[31:12] to be damned. Yep. Yep. That's it. By the way, you're in the CIA during the 90s. Tell me what you guys know. Tell me what you know about the Oklahoma bombing from back then, John. Anything? No, not a not a single thing. Not a single thing. Of course, I was overseas at the time. I was stationed in Bahrain at the time. But but this was this was as great a FBI fuck up as, you know, as there's ever been in American history.

[31:44] You got that right. Got that right. We got a book coming out. I'm not writing it. I'll be proud to write the introduction to it. A new fellow at the Libertarian Institute, Richard Booth, who's put together the ultimate Oklahoma City bombing document archive at Oklahoma at Libertarian Institute.org slash OKC, by the way. He's writing a book about it that I think is going to be the masterpiece. And that's going to be we're going to be publishing that this year. So that is great. All right. Well, listen, thank you so much

[32:15] for your time. I'm sorry I'm late. I'm supposed to be talking with Danny right now. But thank you so much for coming back on the show. I really appreciate it. And listen, please stay focused on this and writing. I know that you understand how important it is that you have former CIA officer after your name and that that means that you can get people to listen to you on a little bit higher level. And it is important as you recognize and as you've already taken the lead in doing, you get right out there and say, I contradict my former friend here. Absolutely not. It's so important to counter this narrative with people like yourself on your level of

[32:50] credential in media terms, you know. Thank you, man. I appreciate that very much. Oh yeah. Thanks, John. Appreciate it. Thanks. You take care. All right, you guys, that's John Kiriakou. He is at consortiumnews.com.
