Title: Real News — Reality Asserts Itself
Show: Reality Asserts Itself (Paul Jay)
Date: 2023-04-25
URL: https://youtu.be/Sh5MxKJ1cWY
Duration: 24:00

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[00:01] [Music] welcome back to reality asserts itself on the real news network we're continuing our series of interviews with john keriaku the former cia officer who spent 23 months in jail and as we record the interview it's got about 36 37 days left under house arrest because well really because he went on television and said that torture was official u.s policy he was charged with giving a reporter the name

[00:32] of a cia officer who the reporter actually never published and as far as i understand it the name was out there anyway but they wanted to get them and we'll get in that story more in detail further into the series but now we're going to carry on we had in the last episode talked a lot about the iraq war but a year before the iraq war more or less john is posted to pakistan and thanks for joining us good to be here now anyone who knows the situation in afghanistan knows

[01:02] that and i don't think anybody disputes that the pakistan army intelligence the isi to a large extent was some saudi cooperation and money helped nurture and create the taliban yes pakistani intelligence services created the taliban with saudi money with saudi money and start to spread wahhabism which is not the religious cultural traditions of afghanistan the the taliban and all the links with

[01:32] al qaeda and osama bin laden clearly the pakistani intelligence are not only fully aware of it the taliban works in collaboration with the pakistani isi so the osama bin laden in afghanistan is done in some ways under the auspices of the pakistani intelligence service i always believe that the and i was told that in kandahar and there seemed to be no disputing it so you go to pakistan in 2002 you're the counter terrorism

[02:04] chief cia opera official in pakistan so what do you what is this relationship with pakistan the pakistani military intelligence is involved in creating the taliban they've got to know about the connections with al-qaeda and bin laden we give them what i can't remember the number but it's hundreds of millions of dollars in military support and it's it's much somewhat like the saudi relationship but you have clearly a dual game going with the fact that absolutely absolutely a dual game the the

[02:34] pakistanis that great champion of democracy and human rights benazir bhutto created the taliban and the original reason for creating the taliban was to protect pakistani truck traffic as it drove across afghanistan to deliver goods in iran because the country was in chaos the country was in utter chaos as a result of president carter as a big neb brzezinski and ronald reagan's policy of sucking russia into a new vietnam they correctly destroyed the place that's right it was literally destroyed

[03:06] so the taliban began by protecting the trucks then they began setting up posts in villages along the truck routes then they took over the villages then they took over the regions then they took over the states and the next thing you know they took over the whole country and and from what i know and i was there and i made a film there and spoke to a lot of afghans in the early days it was quite popular even amongst the secular modern afghans in kabul because the place was going to [ __ ] that's right and at least in those early days of the taliban people weren't being

[03:37] killed in shootouts in the street or or having your relatives kidnapped and lynched because of a property dispute they really did bring law and order in those early days and they did protect pakistan's truck traffic but then everything spun out of control and uh the next thing we know there's a militant theocracy in afghanistan i believe that even after things went bad in afghanistan with the taliban that the pakistani government continued to

[04:09] support them continue to fund them and continue to give them safe haven when they needed it uh which led to no end of problems including probably the september 11th attacks so you're you're now head of counterterrorism for the cia and pakistan you're working with pakistani authorities and how does this work within pakistani authorities some of them are off here playing ftse with the al-qaeda and the

[04:40] taliban and the other ones are working with you that's a great question uh and the answer is is uh kind of complicated the pakistani authorities who were assigned to work with us almost entirely army officers all had been educated in the uk trained in the uk or the u.s solidly pro-american and i can honestly tell you with a completely straight face that i never asked them for anything

[05:10] that they didn't give me anything i needed it was done and i mean from the lowliest private all the way up to the brigadier general who was in charge of the program well not everything you must have asked them where bin laden was they didn't with that said there were certainly other very powerful elements of the pakistani uh government specifically the pakistani military that were solidly pro-taliban in many cases pro-al-qaeda and

[05:43] did not just nothing to help us but actively tried to to stop us from making inroads against al qaeda even in the abu zabeta operation we never told the pakistanis who we were going after we called him mr fish because we had told them that he was a big fish so the night that we hit okay give some context we haven't told that story yet sure uh just after my arrival in pakistan we got word from headquarters that abu zubato was somewhere in the country and at the time

[06:14] we thought abu zubaydah was the number three in al-qaeda that turned out to not be true not only was he not the number three khalid sheikh muhammad was the number three but abu zubaydah had never actually joined al-qaeda he created and ran al-qaeda's two training camps but he never pledged fealty to osama bin laden he was an independent operator so we were afraid that the people that we were dealing with on a daily basis would tell somebody in their organization who the target was

[06:46] and that word would get out and abu zubair would be tipped off so we never told them until we actually had him in custody who it was we had been looking for where'd the intelligence come from that he was number three oh you know he get bits and pieces from various human sources you get liaison sources reporting to our liaison officers overseas you might get some intercepts press reporting you put everything together

[07:17] and you try to come up with this structure for al-qaeda and the best information we had in 2002 was that he was number three don't forget in in february of 2002 we didn't know who khalid sheikh muhammad was we we had no idea not only that that he was a major player in al qaeda but that he had masterminded the 9 11 attacks that's how bad the intelligence was back then okay so you grab this guy now you're in on organizing the mission to

[07:48] grab this guy how did that go we had we had never hit more than two sites simultaneously uh before in pakistan we would my first day on the job i went into the senior cia officer's office and i said what exactly do you want me to do here and he said i want you to come up with a modus operandi for taking down a terrorist safe house we've not done that yet i said okay so i remember sitting at my desk with a legal pad and a pen and and

[08:18] thinking well if i was going to take down a terrorist safe house how would i start well i would do it at 2 a.m because they would most likely be asleep by 2 a.m so i wrote 0-200 at the top of the paper and then i just tried to come up with this step-by-step plan of how i wanted to do it so finally i went to him and i said i think i've come up with a plan i'm ready to give it a try and he said well we got this little bit of information that there's this house here's the address and there might be an al-qaeda guy in it i said all right i'll get a group of

[08:49] guys together and uh we're going to hit it tonight at 2 and you know wish me luck and you've never done this i had never done this before and i understand this i i would have imagined the cia had these specialists take down houses specialists and in they fly in jack bauer shows up that all came later because of september 11th but before i mean it was it was sad sacks like me it's cia's been doing ops for since they founded the thing but not like this though this was different so uh i came up with a plan i got a

[09:20] couple of the guys together we called our pakistani uh counterparts and i said listen why don't we meet up at 12 i'm gonna brief you on this operation that i want us to do tonight so we did and um i planned it so that we were about a block away from the house at 1 55 a.m and then at 1 57 we were going to get out of the car and then we were going to walk to the house and then right at o200 and we synchronized our watches we're going to use a battering ram to

[09:51] break down the door of the house pakistani is always going first it's their country we're going to grab the guy and take him into custody so that's what we did o200 we broke down the door with the battering ram and we caught this 19 year old tunisian kid who had just escaped across the border from afghanistan and found refuge in this house so i said hey success well let's try it again in a couple of nights and the second time we did it we caught

[10:22] an egyptian who had been a member of egyptian islamic jihad he was actually wanted in egypt had been charged with crimes there and had escaped to afghanistan and i thought okay well this is pretty good once or twice we did two in a night we would set up two separate teams and do it and almost every time we did this we would catch somebody and they were almost exclusively low-level nobodies usually teenagers they would just start to cry they wouldn't resist in any way you know what happened with them uh we would send

[10:52] them usually back to afghanistan or in some cases to guantanamo remember the whole purpose of guantanamo in those early days was just to have some place to put them until we could figure out where to put them on trial if they should be tried in the u.s or flown back to their home countries to be tried there guantanamo was never ever supposed to be a permanent uh some of the people you picked up and sent to guantanamo you didn't know they'd actually done anything other than they're in this house correct correct but my position back then was if

[11:23] you're in arab in pakistan with no money no job no passport and no plausible explanation for what you're doing there and how you got there you're al-qaeda and you're going to go to guantanamo until we can figure out what we what we are going to do with you there were so many people we had to go after there was just no time to to really go into things with them to decide yes this is really who they are this is why

[11:53] they're here and another thing is many of them most of them had been briefed in advance on what to do and what to say if you're captured so everybody told us the same exact story and the story was that they had gone to pakistan to learn arabic they were going to take arabic classes which is odd because nobody speaks arabic in pakistan they speak or these were mostly afghans they were all arabs but how could they go to learn arabic

[12:23] precisely so they flew to karachi and they were so happy to have arrived safely in karachi that they decided to take a taxi to the grand mosque to thank god for their safe delivery well there is no grand mosque in karachi the grand mosque is an islamabad and they accidentally dogged on it left their passports in the taxi and that's why they have no passport and so they didn't know where to stay where to live so they went to the local arab

[12:54] coffee shop there is no arab coffee shop in any of these places and they met some arabs there from their own country and the arabs said oh not to worry i'll put you in this house and you wait there until i can get the embassy to replace your uh your passport okay so no matter what country they came from they all told exactly the same story so these are just you think young naive recruits that didn't know they were nobodies so then you go and

[13:24] you go after what you think is the number three it was more complicated than that we we got this message from headquarters saying that abu zubaydah was in pakistan and we had to catch him but pakistan is the size of texas and it has the population of california so to say just go catch him it meant nothing to me so we flew an analyst in from headquarters what was then called a targeting analyst somebody who isn't thinking the big thoughts to write an article in the president's daily brief about you know

[13:54] a country's next election but somebody who's focused on pouring through raw data to try to locate someone who we have as a target and it took him about i'm going to say two or three weeks and finally he came to me and said i've narrowed it down but only to 14 possible locations well we had never hit more than two spots before in a single night so the prospect of hitting 14 simultaneously was daunting i cabled headquarters and i said

[14:27] i'm going to need help so you you go after the guy who's number three and you get the guy and this begins a chain of events which actually winds you up in jail really and you can date that chain probably from around here yes because some of your colleagues go off to question this guy and what happens abu zubaydah was very severely wounded when we captured him a pakistani policeman shot him three times with an

[14:57] ak-47 and he nearly died in fact the doctor at the emergency room where we took him that night told me that he had never seen wounds so severe where the patient lived so we flew abu zubaydah to a nearby military base and i sat with him for almost 48 hours actually it was more than 40 i had eight hours i thought it was 48 hours and then in discovery in my case i learned it was 56 hours so i just sat at the foot of his bed just quickly when

[15:28] sorry john says my case he means when the cia charged him that's right and they were going through all the back and forth of discoveries that eventually led to his conviction and and go back to earlier and you'll find out he was in jail for 23 months and is now under house arrest and we're going to tell this whole story in the next segment or two so i sat with him for 56 hours he was in a coma for most of that he drifted out of it a couple of times at one point he asked me to smother him with a pillow uh he asked me for a glass of red wine

[16:00] which i thought was just a delusion but then later on the next day he was a little more aware of what had happened and we talked about the 9 11 attacks briefly we talked about christianity and islam he told me that he enjoyed writing poetry he cried he said he would never know the touch of a woman he would never know the joy of fatherhood and i urged him repeatedly to cooperate and

[16:31] he said no that he he wasn't going to cooperate he told me at one point you seem like a nice guy but you're the enemy and i'll never cooperate with the enemy so did it did he say why you're the enemy well i was an american it was it was as simple as that he did say that that he didn't want to attack the united states on september 11th that that was bin laden's decision he wanted to attack israel um but bin laden overruled him and said

[17:02] no that they were attacking the united states but he never there was no ambiguity or qualification from him that 911 was bin laden oh no no no none at all 9 11 was bin laden most definitely so um his wounds like i say were so severe he really needed to be treated uh formally treated not just patched up so the cia sent a private jet with a trauma surgeon from johns hopkins university medical center

[17:33] uh they flew to the military base and uh three fbi agents and i loaded him onto uh onto a gurney and carried him up onto the plane we laid him across the luggage rack at the back and he took off he went to a so-called secret location and i never saw him again now you heard about the interrogation what did you hear yes i heard when i got back to headquarters i heard that he had been uncooperative that he had

[18:06] been subjected to waterboarding one time and that he had cracked and after he cracked he gave us actionable intelligence that saved american lives that turned out to be a complete lie he had not been waterboarded one time he had been waterboarded 83 times in fact he was cooperative when he was being interviewed by the fbi we know from the fbi agent who was interviewing him that he was cooperative and this fbi agent ali soufan

[18:37] had made real inroads in this relationship with abu beta what happened then was the president ordered the fbi out the cia in and the cia began torturing him using several different methods and culminating in waterboarding how do you know is the president that ordered it well that's what came out over the course of the investigation later on that these these uh tactics had all been approved by the president and that the white house was

[19:08] unhappy with the pace of the interrogations they wanted information more quickly see bin laden said right after september 11th that he was planning another attack that would dwarf what happened on september 11th so many cia officers were convinced that abu zubaydah had that information and they were determined to get it out of him that's why they got rough so quickly okay there's a lot of discussion in the media and there was in political circles and so on about

[19:38] torture and the waterboarding and the pakistani connection with the taliban and all the rest but what do you think of the bigger picture the overall policy of allying with essentially what more or less is a military close to has been a military dictatorship in pakistan and when it's not a straightforward dictatorship it's behind the scenes military rule just beneath the sort of political structure aligning with warlords in

[20:08] afghanistan allying with uh you know a dictatorial monarchy in saudi arabia qatar go on and on and on that in that in order to maintain america as the hegemon in the region we have to we we said earlier you know do bad things supposedly for good reasons ally with the the worst kind of forces you could possibly dredge up yes i think as a country we're going to have to make a decision at some point and that decision is going

[20:38] to have to be whether we are going to be this beacon of human rights that we'd like to think we are this shining city on a hill that everybody looks up to where everybody wants to move or are we going to be the biggest toughest bully on the block because we can't be both at the same time you know i was i i happened to be on the state department's website the other day and i clicked on the link for the bureau

[21:09] of democracy human rights and labor and right at the top of their website they have a link to the universal declaration on human rights and article 5 of that declaration says that no person shall be subjected to torture or to humiliating treatment okay this is a joke congress mandates the state department every single year with producing a human rights report on every single country with which we have diplomatic relations

[21:40] i was the embassy human rights officer for two years in bahrain when i was living there and i can tell you that when you go in to to a host government's foreign ministry and you dress them down for disrespecting human rights but then you have a cia officer going to see his counterpart in the afternoon and telling him telling the the foreign intelligence counterpart we want you to take this prisoner and we want you to really lean

[22:10] on him but just be sure to give us a transcript of what he says you completely undercut your entire policy so while we have these these laws that are supposed to protect human rights and supposed to mandate the protection of human rights overseas it's really little more than a bad joke because we don't respect human rights i mean we we had under george w bush our own justice department doing

[22:42] backflips to try to figure out how to legally justify torture and they contorted themselves in such a way that they did endorse torture and we go through life saying okay well then if the justice department said it's right then it must be right so we can go ahead and torture it makes no sense it's been non-stop since world war ii it's been non-stop since world war ii you know i'll tell you another thing in the course of my my research since

[23:14] i've left the agency i found a picture that ran on the front page of the washington post in 1968 and it was a picture of an american soldier waterboarding a north vietnamese prisoner when that picture was published the pentagon began an investigation they court-martialed the soldier they charged him with torture they convicted him and they jailed him so why was torture wrong in 1968 but then it's right in 2002 and it's right in 2015

[23:45] and nobody's prosecuted for committing torture it's it's it's the ultimate in hypocrisy to me all right thanks for joining us we're going to continue our series of interviews with john kiriakou on reality asserts itself on the real news network [Music]

[24:37] you
