Title: John Kiriakou — Whistleblower Protections, Torture, and Ju
Show: Revolutionary Change
Date: 2020-11-23
URL: https://youtu.be/b7Uq2aYrR5w
Duration: 54:00

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[00:01] [Music] hi also i am here with john kiriakou who i have known about for years a lot of people listening to this probably don't and that's why i'm doing this because i think this is an important issue for just regular people to know about not just people that are informed so john was a cia analyst for years he'll tell his story and is a whistleblower about the torture that we've committed and probably still are committing we'll

[00:32] get to that and so would you just just give give like a brief introduction for the people who don't know um what the basis of your case is and and where this started sure i'm john kiriakou i was a cia officer for 15 years the first half of my career was in analysis the second half was in counter-terrorism operations i was the chief of cia counter-terrorism operations in pakistan after the 9 11 attacks and uh in that job uh in march of 2002 i led

[01:04] the capture of um i'm not allowed to say the number still but many dozens of al qaeda operatives during a series of raids including abu zubaydah who we believed at the time was the number three in al qaeda he wasn't the number three but he was a very bad guy and um after i returned to headquarters abu zubaydah was moved on to a secret prison where he was tortured i objected to the torture i was the only person of 14 who were asked

[01:35] if they wanted to be trained in torture techniques who declined i said that i had an ethical and moral problem with it and um and finally in december of 2007 i blew the whistle on the cia's torture program in an interview with abc news okay and and i mean for for most people and i know for myself what we remember is hearing about is waterboarding right um although we'll get into that there's a lot of other things as well that are a problem besides just

[02:05] waterboarding but i want to also talk about the difference between what you were charged with but what they were really wanting to uh punish you for because those are very different things from my understanding yes indeed uh and that's actually something that's quite common when the government when the federal government is going after someone in the courts so uh when i blew the whistle it was in december of 2007 the very next day the cia filed something

[02:36] called a crimes report against me with the fbi saying that i had divulged classified information the truth is that you you are not legally permitted to classify something if it's a crime and so the bush fbi the bush justice department investigated me for a year from december of 2007 to december of 2008 and then issued something called a declination letter to my attorneys declining to prosecute me they said that i had not revealed classified information and they closed the case

[03:06] three weeks later when barack obama became president john brennan who was an old nemesis of mine at the cia uh was named deputy national security advisor he later became the cia director and he asked the obama justice department to secretly reopen the case against me and so they investigated me for three more years from january of 2009 to january of 2012 this was pertaining though to you outing them for torture right this was what they were

[03:38] investigating at the time this is what they were investigating at the time and and they charged me with five felonies finally three counts of espionage for for the interview and with this and for a subsequent interview that i gave to the new york times and then they charged me with one count of violating the intelligence identities protection act of 1981. i was only the second american ever charged with that crime and they charged me with making a false statement my attorneys were never exactly clear on what the false statement was supposed to

[04:09] have been well the truth is that i i hadn't committed espionage as i said it's illegal to classify a crime and eventually all three of those espionage charges were dropped and um and the false statements charged with a five-year felony um that was also dropped i eventually took a plea to violating the intelligence identities protection act because the threat was this the threat was if you don't

[04:41] take a plea we're going to re-file espionage charges and we're going to add to obstruction of justice charges and we're going to ask for 45 years in prison so you can go to prison for 23 months and give them a victory uh or roll the dice well propublica you know propublica the the investigative journalism website they had just done a study in november of 2012 in which they found that the government wins 98.2 percent of

[05:11] its cases do you you roll those dice knowing that you have a 1.8 chance of winning or do you just take the deal and make it go away i was married i had five kids so i took the deal right but this was regarding naming someone who you didn't even really name no right like like right so this is where it gets so interesting i'm an attorney so when i hear these things i have to dig further into it and yeah so apparently somebody uh

[05:42] somebody presented you with lists of names and they already knew who the people were and you simply like had confirmed the id of somebody but ultimately isn't that what you were sentenced for yeah that's what i was sentenced for so this was the this was a journalist who was writing a book and he sent me a list of a dozen names and he said can you introduce me to any of these people so i can interview them for my book and i said i don't know any of these people i can't help you he sent me a list of another dozen names

[06:13] and asked me the same question and i said look you clearly know this issue better than i do i really the kidnapping he was writing a book on kidnapping i said kidnapping was not my thing i i don't know any of those guys i can't help you then he said in a third email what about i'm gonna say john doe right you me john that you mention on page whatever of your first book and i said and this was the crime i said oh you mean john doe

[06:43] i don't know whatever happened to him i said he's probably retired and living in virginia somewhere that was it they got me now he never revealed the name the name was never made public but uh they came down on me like a ton of bricks so let's let's talk about that i think that there is this misunderstanding amongst the general populace that certain administrations are more gentle than others and some administrations like there is definitely this this

[07:13] theory that the blues are much nicer than the reds right like that's the kinder gentler version of us but i want everyone to understand that this all happened to you under the obama administration yeah and it wasn't just me uh you know the espionage act is usually not or it historically has not been used as a weapon uh between well let me let me tell you a little bit first about the espionage act it was written in 1917 to combat german saboteurs during the

[07:45] first world war between 1917 and 2009 it was used three times in that almost a century to charge americans for revelations to the media just under barack obama from 2009 to 2017 january to january he charged eight people almost three times all previous presidents combined with espionage for speaking to the press

[08:16] so it was very much used as an iron fist to crack down on on he would say leaks i would say whistleblowing because again if something is illegal it can't legally be classified but yeah i think that's an important thing that people don't understand and they think that they do use terminology like a leak instead of a whistleblower because it just sort of criminalizes it as opposed to reveres it you know and someone like me

[08:47] thinks we should be building monuments to you know ed snowden yeah so you know so it's it's just it's very interesting how they how they do that and obviously it's to mislead the general population so that there's no support and real knowledge of what's going on um so have things changed from one administration to the next regarding our torture policies and regarding what we are doing um if you could talk about that like what you saw as a transition between maybe different administrations to where we are now that's a tough

[09:20] question um and it's because there are so many ethical gray areas involved in it it was during the bush administration of course that we had a formal torture program and that we had a formal system of secret prisons this archipelago of secret prisons spread all around the world um that was supposedly shut down um after my revelations john mccain at least said on the floor of the senate that because i had gone public

[09:50] the the cia ended the program and shut down the prisons between 2005 and finally 2007 when i went public uh the the deal that was eventually worked out between uh congress and the obama administration was then to have even civilian agencies like the cia like homeland security follow the army field manual so if it says in the army field manual you can't

[10:22] torture you can't waterboard then you can't torture and you can't waterboard the problem is that's an executive branch document it's not necessarily a legal document and so all anybody would have to do if they want to reinstitute a torture program is to just change the army field manual that's all you have to do you don't need congressional approval for that you don't even need a presidential finding for that you just do it so this band that we have on torture now is tenuous with that said we're still seeing reports um

[10:53] not a lot but enough to be worrisome that uh cia officers uh homeland security officers military uh personnel are torturing prisoners we we get these reports mostly from afghanistan sometimes from syria somalia elsewhere and they're not being punished for it why not where are the congressional oversight committees why isn't the intelligence committee looking

[11:23] into this or the armed services committee or the homeland security committee if we have these laws on the books banning torture then let's ban torture by god right american people guess at it and let's let's talk about another thing which is which is you know also very important to this is that it doesn't work so so that's that's the thing that that that that amazes me is that it's not even effective so if this were an effective method and it saved lives and it

[11:55] it's still ignorant but it doesn't even work no the the cia has an army of psychiatrists and psychologists on staff not just contractors although there are contractors as well but there's an army within a group called the office of medical services oms at the at the cia and and like dr mengele these guys and and women were going out to secret sites to ensure that the prisoners didn't crack that the torture stopped just at the point where they were going to crack so that they could rest a little

[12:27] bit and then be tortured more later right well you can't do things like that the hippocratic oath begins first do no harm we know that we know from declassified uh cables and from the senate torture report that there were physicians and psychologists and psychiatrists who were objecting to the torture and then some of them electing to return to headquarters but nobody went public nobody said anything finally what they did say

[12:58] to the senate intelligence committee was that the torture just simply didn't work a victim of torture will tell you literally anything that they think you want to hear just to get you to stop torturing them you know our own prisoners during the vietnam war have talked about this that they were being tortured and when asked to give names for example they would they would name the starting lineup for the green bay packers or they would make up the names of ships

[13:28] and make up locations for these ships in the south china sea just anything to get their torturers to stop well that's what happened with us and that's not even going into the fact that so many cia officers went over and above what they were authorized to do by the justice department causing permanent damage to prisoners i mean like brain damage to the point where these prisoners are unable to participate in their own defenses and let's be clear that a lot of these people might not have even been guilty

[13:59] of what they were charged with that's the dirty little secret of this whole program is most of them actually were not guilty of anything you see we had this program in afghanistan in the immediate aftermath of the 9 11 attacks that we would pay a bounty for any al qaeda person who a local villager could turn over to us well the thing is is if i don't like you or maybe if i borrowed money from you and i don't want to pay it back i just go to the americans and i say hey there's a there's an arab over there

[14:31] you might want to take him and then i get my 500 and you get sent to guantanamo and it's three or four years before they figure out that you're actually not an al-qaeda figure you're just some guy who owed who was owed money by this other villager who turned you in yeah i think people don't realize that and i've been saying this for a year and specifically about gitmo and the amount of people that are still rotting away there that have never been formally charged never given translators never given a defense

[15:01] and very likely are people that were just disliked for whatever reason you know abu zubaydah i think is probably the best example of this he's been incarcerated since march of 2002 so 18 and a half years now we're coming up on 19 years he's never been charged with a crime ever with any crime and when we were going after him we thought not only is this guy the number three in al qaeda but he is so incredibly dangerous that just to save

[15:31] the nation we have to grab him well as it turned out that wasn't the case at all joe hickman and i joe hickman was a was an army whistleblower uh from guantanamo joe hickman and i wrote a book about abu zubaydah called the convenient terrorist and it turns out that what the truth was was that there were two first cousins both named abu zubaydah and if you put in one file what both cousins were doing they look like a terrorist superman excuse me

[16:04] a terrorist superman well they were both moderately bad guys but not 19 years in prison bad guys right now one of them escaped he was actually in the united states he was in montana and when he realized we were looking for either him or his cousin he didn't know we didn't know he fled to jordan we never never heard from him again but abu zubaydah in pakistan had opened um an al-qaeda safe house called the house of martyrs in peshawar

[16:35] and he had opened and managed both of al qaeda's training camps in southern afghanistan and kandahar province he was a logistics guy if you needed a fake passport to get home if you needed money or a ticket he'd be the guy to get you out if you wanted to come and fight the americans he would be the guy to send you to the house of martyrs and then vet you but he never joined al qaeda he was never a member he never pledged loyalty or fealty to osama bin laden

[17:07] and after 19 years in prison and three of those years of being mercilessly tortured he still hasn't been charged with a crime my position is whether we like his politics or not he is entitled to the same constitutional protections that the rest of us are and if you're not going to put him in front of a jury of his peers and charge him with a crime then you need to release him yeah i've been saying that since 9 11 and we started rounding everybody up and and i had heard stories of people

[17:39] stuck in um incarcerated and they weren't even given translators so then you know i can't even imagine how horrifying that is especially if it is someone that really has nothing to do with anything and they just get swept up in this so then why if we know that torture doesn't work right why why is it being done why are people like gina haspel still able to just sort of be out there and doing what they're doing you know because it makes us feel better uh it makes us feel like

[18:11] first that we're getting something done and second it gives us a sense a sense of of vengeance where we've we've avenged those three thousand deaths um we haven't it it uh it's a burden on us a torture program it cheapens us and it uh it makes us less of a of a people of a nation i believe uh but then you know i'll tell you a funny little anecdote i was friendly with a cia psychiatrist

[18:42] we're still friends and he told me once that the cia actively seeks to hire people who have sociopathic tendencies not sociopaths sociopaths are impossible to control right because they don't have a conscience they blow right through the polygraph exam uh because they don't feel guilt about anything the problem is that because they don't feel guilt because they blow through a polygraph exam it's almost impossible to prevent them

[19:13] from making their way through the process and so the cia is full of sociopaths i would venture to say and i'm not a psychologist but i'm not a psychologist but i'm not an idiot either i would venture to say that there are a good number of psychopaths at the agency as well and we know from psychological studies on u.s business leaders uh most prominently in the book the psych the the sociopath next door that

[19:45] people who are sociopaths are comfortable climbing to the top on the backs of the people around them and so just like in a fortune 500 corporation the sociopaths and psychopaths at the cia claw their way to the top and so they're the ones who come up with the idea of a secret prison system and a torture program and water boarding and sleep deprivation and cold cells where people freeze to death

[20:15] and you know they're the ones that implement these programs yeah it's um it's really horrifying but i sort of see that as the same way i see law enforcement in that there's there's like these policies that are definitely in law enforcement it's more racist policies i guess in you know international it's just you know we're the big bad wolf of the world policies and then they find people that are so willing to impose those policies they find people that are drawn to these things to be able to do that

[20:47] um so it just keeps it going is what it seems like you know to me i couldn't agree more i think that i think we do see it in not just police departments across the country but we see it among prison guards prison guards remember don't get me started on this tangent no i have a whole segment for you about criminal justice and immigration who couldn't cut it uh in the local police academy they're the the bottom of the barrel of the so-called law enforcement group so they're they're basically the

[21:18] sociopaths that couldn't cut it with the big boys that's right so they get yeah i mean i always thought of that too and also like highway patrol those are always the people that i think of is just could not quite make it in law enforcement so this obviously for me brings up thoughts of when we talk about whistleblowing about julian assange and what he's going through right now and to me i've viewed this for a long time that if we actually do extradite julian assange and try him for espionage we're basically ending our

[21:49] first amendment like that's without a doubt this is like yes without a doubt and shame on the washington post the new york times the wall street journal and others for not leaping to his defense because they're next yeah if julian assange is convicted he's going to be tried in the eastern district of virginia if he's extradited if he's convicted then every working journalist in america is going to be a target yeah it's extremely scary and it's and not only are they not covering it it's almost like they're covering it up yeah i i have noticed that for years

[22:21] i've been very well versed in what's going on with julian i've been following this for probably eight or nine years now and it's just out of control what's going on with him and it's similar to what happened to you in that what they're really wanting to get him for is not how this all ended up getting wrapped up for him he ended up i mean they charged him with like sexual assaults that were bogus and like ridiculous thoughts yeah that's the strategy uh they they they do that now it's a strategy that they've developed after after i was arrested and tom drake was

[22:53] arrested and and uh chelsea manning and ed snowden they developed this this policy where they um will charge you with sexual impropriety of some sort look at people like matt de hart for example um or the vault 7 whistleblower what they'll do is charge you with let's say child porn or or sexual assault in the case of julian and then when they come up to trial they drop it and they say oh

[23:24] oh no our bad there was no child porn on the computer that we made a mistake that's what they did with matt to heart they incarcerated him because they said they found child porn on his computer there was no child porn completely made up completely and totally made up now they're telling us that that we should believe that there's child porn on the vault seven whistleblowers uh hard drive or that julian raped two swedish women and then ah now that falls apart but you know he's a really bad guy otherwise you know he leaked all this information

[23:56] i still can't figure out how you can charge somebody that's not a us citizen um under the espionage act nor do i isn't that i mean is it julian's an australian national um and so how can he be i mean as far and i'm an attorney so i look at this and i'm like how does he have any responsibility yes to protect our country even if it even if he was doing what they said i mean why is he even why why do we have any say so about

[24:27] what julian assange does yeah that's right he's under no legal obligation to protect national defense information none none whatsoever in fact the journalist he's won journalistic awards and that's why i say if he's convicted then every national security reporter in america is going to be a target you know interesting enough too as you mentioned julian is an australian uh citizen i've given many interviews to australian

[24:58] journalists about julian and his case and no one ever asks me about the efficacy of a prosecution using the espionage act it's like nobody's thinking about it nobody's talking about it he should never have been charged in the first place now chelsea manning was charged with multiple counts of espionage that's different that's different yes that's different and and the fbi and the cia maintain that julian solicited the information and then chelsea and hacking into the system

[25:29] there's no evidence that that ever happened no i mean i mean they held her for how long trying to get her to basically say oh assange is who guided me to do this because they want and she's tough she didn't she's that's another one that i just i feel like as a citizen in this country we can't pay her back enough like i i don't know how people can have anything but admiration for for her and yet mad respectfully i i know chelsea relatively well not not

[26:02] very very well not like you know tom drake or ed snowden or some of the others but um but chelsea is disarming because she's very soft-spoken she's very down-to-earth she's not an imposing figure in any way and then she is tougher than 99.9 of the men that i know yeah will not buckle to the justice department i have crazy respect for that

[26:32] most people would would just cave if they say look just testify against julian or you go to prison her response is lock me up yeah i'm not saying a word and puffs it out until the bitter end it's crazy so what finally allowed why did they finally release her this time the the only reason they released her there was a lot of public pressure it wasn't the public pressure that got her released it was the fact that was two things one the judge finally came to an understanding that

[27:04] she really was not going to testify period she just wasn't going to testify and the other thing was that um they the prosecutors were not going to add any more charges against julian for which they would need chelsea's information to support and so finally the judge said just let her out it's just unbelievable but without that they really don't have anything which then i i still don't understand how they're going to have a legitimate case against him no um there's got to be

[27:34] one juror out there who is going to have the the fortitude to stand up and say this i hope so you know what though i'll tell you a little another little anecdote about my own case my best friend um my best friend's wife has an uncle who happened to be o.j simpson's jury consultant [Laughter] that's random okay totally random washington's a very small town yeah so god bless him he flew up here

[28:07] from dallas we got him a security clearance he went through all the the paperwork i had 15 000 pages of classified documents that that we were using for my defense and then we all get to get got together for a meeting at the attorney's conference room and he said look if this were any other district in america besides the eastern district of virginia he said i'd say let's go for it we're going to win this thing you haven't done anything wrong but the eastern district of virginia

[28:38] they call it the espionage court for a reason because no nationals no national security defendant has ever won a case there so he said look at your jury your jury would be made up of people from the cia the pentagon the fbi the department of homeland security and a myriad of intelligence community contractors or their relatives he said you don't stand a chance yeah just take the deal and start

[29:10] the yeah no and we railroad people for everything all the time so it's not it's not even remotely surprising to me and i'm coming from a criminal defense background this is not this is not uncommon by by any stretch what can what can we do to for whistleblowers what because obviously there's beyond blackballing and ghosting from mainstream media and you know independent media does a decent job i mean i you know obviously i've seen you on shows and i've seen good coverage of

[29:41] julian and there are things out there but is there anything you know or think of that we can do so that more people can understand what's going on here that's a very tough question it's far tougher than it sounds um and people ask me all the time and i don't really have a perfect answer so i'll tell you what i what i generally tell people it's incumbent upon all of us to constantly be out there talking about these issues this show this topic is a public service people

[30:13] need to hear these issues because they're important to all of us they're really critical number two we have to ride our elected officials we have to call them and write them and email them and demand that they support national security whistleblowers we have to demand real congressional oversight of organizations like the cia and nsa and the fbi and the rest of them yeah otherwise just by their very nature they run rampant roughshod over our civil liberties and

[30:44] let's let me let me explain to people that because a lot of people listen to this are probably newbies to a lot of this stuff and that is what we refer to as the deep state for for people that um are listening when i say deep state we're talking about these executive branch federal agencies that have no accountability to the american people and basically they have been in charge for a very long time this goes back 60 years already at least with with those in terms of just complete running amok and no president

[31:14] that in my lifetime has even attempted to really reign that in yeah no president and you made a point when we first started the show first started talking uh that it doesn't matter if it's a red administration or a blue administration you know george w bush killed four people with the use of a drone in his last month as president barack obama killed 424 people with drones in his last month as president so this isn't exclusive to the

[31:45] republicans the republicans aren't the ones who decided they're going to be jerks to whistleblowers and they're going to use the espionage act this is most certainly bipartisan in nature you know i i gave an interview to a to a chilean newspaper the week that donald trump was elected president and they they interviewed me they interviewed tom drake from nsa and they interviewed ed snowden and um and they asked all of us if we thought things would be better under donald trump or worse under donald trump for national security whistleblowers

[32:16] i foolishly said that i was cautiously optimistic because they couldn't possibly get any worse than they were under barack obama never say that i it was a stupid mistake because of course things got worse almost instantaneously yeah we have reality winners serving five and a half years uh she's nsa whistleblower we have terry albury uh who actually is getting out of within a week from today um the fbi whistleblower uh and there are

[32:46] we know from from uh jeff sessions the former attorney general and his big mouth that there are 123 active national security investigations going on right now so it's far worse than barack obama yeah the sentences are longer than they were under barack obama so how do you how would you foresee what do you anticipate that we're going to see under a joe biden administration regarding some of this and our foreign policy um obviously i see him as obama's point 2.0 right out of my

[33:18] mouth i see kamala as hillary in a kamala suit yep yeah imagine the thousands of lives that she ruined by sending people uh to prison for long stretches for having you know personal use drugs so you don't have any high hopes for the for the biden administration for anything no i don't let's talk about that since we're talking about prosecution because this sort of brings us to i mean i i see you as a very unique source for a

[33:50] couple of reasons because i see you as someone who has experience with obviously whistleblowing and what's going on with um our cia in the military but also a real inside um side view of what it's like to be incarcerated in this country and see from inside what the criminal justice system is here and i can't help but see parallels between when you talk about like torture that we do to um people across the globe i can't help but draw parallels to how we treat our

[34:20] inmates that are incarcerated in a lot of cases and so i i was i was wondering if you could talk about um examples of that you might have seen or that you know of where our system here in this country is what we would consider to be acting a morally in how we treat our incarcerated citizens we don't have time for that conversation no okay i'll give you a couple examples um right is that if there is a parallel

[34:50] like it's the same thing you are 100 right so listen the united nations has declared our use of solitary confinement to be a form of torture right international standards are that someone can't be held in solitary confinement confinement for more than 14 days we have prisoners who have been in solitary confinement and i mean solitary no contact with another human being for more than 40 years

[35:20] 40 years you lose your mind after a couple of months yeah i think to me when you say 14 days i think that you know to me two or three days would feel like 14 days if you're you're sleeping on a on a steel slab with a small sink and a toilet uh your room is six by ten feet and all you can do is walk in circles you know they say that you are allowed one hour of exercise every day that it's 23 hours of solitary that's nonsense

[35:51] what that one hour of exercise is that there's a steel door at the back of your of your cell and it leads out into a cage that's another six by ten feet and so you can walk in a little circle outside for one hour and that's it it's still solitary so you have people losing their minds constantly and don't forget that that psychological studies that have been published as recently as as a year and a half ago uh have found that 85 percent of incarcerated

[36:23] americans suffer from some sort of mental illness most commonly um antisocial personality disorder so you're already kind of on the edge besides the fact that everybody in prison is depressed lots of people are bipolar some are schizophrenic we used to have this thing called zombie pill line where you know if you need if you need insulin you get in line at six am and six pm and they give you your insulin but if you're insane

[36:54] you get in line at 7 pm and you get your pills that turn you into a zombie and so we called it zombie pill line there was a guy in solitary confinement in my prison who had been in for so long and was so desperate to get out that he smashed the window of the cell and ate the broken glass and then he called for help and he said i ate broken glass and they told him tough luck well the glass shredded his stomach and he ended up bleeding to death and that kind of thing happens all the

[37:26] time i'll give you another example um when i first got to prison i went to my case manager and i said listen i've got a master's degree in middle eastern studies uh policy analysis i i did my phd coursework in international affairs i'd be happy to teach a ged class uh if if you want me to can i swear on this show absolutely and he looked at me and he said kiriakou if i want you to teach a [ __ ] class i'll ask you to teach a

[37:57] [ __ ] class and they made me a janitor in the chapel that was my job i think a lot of this a lot of this also goes to the privatization and the profit motive um in private prisons this was a federal prison so this was government but you're right the private far worse because of the profit motive the only way they can make a profit is to cut back on food and on medicine remind me of that i'm going to come back to that in a moment

[38:28] so um i was in the um in the chapel and every day i would walk past this one guy's cell he was an older italian guy and i liked him i liked all the italians so he was kind of doubled over one day and i said hey man what's wrong he said man my back is killing me like really killing me i can't sleep or anything and i said oh you should go to the uh you should go to the the medical unit he

[38:59] goes down there and they did what they do for everybody no matter what your complaint is they gave him tylenol and then i saw him i don't know a couple weeks later and he had a walker and i said is your back that bad and he said i feel like i'm paralyzed and he said every time i go to medical they give me a they give me tylenol so a couple of more weeks pass and i see him in a wheelchair so i went to the chaplain and i said chaplin you've got to do something about this

[39:31] they're not paying any attention to him at medical and something is clearly wrong with him so the chaplain to his credit weighed in the chaplain was the only decent human being i met in in the entire system and um so he went and he said something to medical and finally after like six weeks medical took him out to a hospital for an x-ray and he had stage four spinal cancer and he applied for a compassionate release

[40:03] so that he could die at home the warden went to his cell and told him that if he would sign a paper saying that um that they treated him appropriately in medical they would let him go well he knew he was a dead man he only had a couple of days left and he wanted his wife and his children to be able to sue the system for killing him which is what they did and he refused to sign and they wouldn't let him go he died in his bunk and and that's typical of what's going

[40:35] on there yeah i think and and a lot of it is um racially motivated in our criminal justice system from start to finish i mean um most obviously we have higher amounts of incarcerated people of color than percentage of people of color so it's very disproportionate and that's something i think that i i see it at every level um is that something that you experienced when you were without a doubt my prison was typical of the demographic breakdown in the federal prison system it was it

[41:06] was roughly 50 black uh 30 hispanic and 20 white and most of the whites were pedophiles so that that was that was absolutely typical of of the entire system it's you there how how does someone like you get on there i mean clearly you're not a typical you're not the typical inmate although with the amount of whistleblowers that do get i mean you might start to have more company in there but yeah someone like you you're very nice you're pretty

[41:36] you know you're you're not you don't strike me as a prison material so how that's 23 months is a long time it's a long time a long time i said to one of the italians before i answer your question we were we were on a walk together and he was a senior captain in the banana crime family and had been in prison much of his adult life so we're walking around the track and he asked me how much time i had and i said i said two years feels like 20 years

[42:07] and he said two years you could do that standing on your head and i said i don't know man i don't know how i'm gonna get through this i had only been in about six weeks and he said let me give you some advice if anybody asks you how much time you have you tell them five years because if they hear that your sentence is so short they're gonna kick your ass and so i began telling everybody that i had five years and then when it came time to leave i was gone what happens is when people see on the checkout sheet that you're leaving the next day a gang of people

[42:37] will come into your cell and just beat the [ __ ] out of you just be jealous that it's not them yeah yeah you asked me how i got into that prison there's a story there so when i agreed to take the plea and was sentenced my lawyers asked the judge if she would send me to a minimum security work camp well minimum security camps are always across the street from a higher security prison because when there's a riot it's the the campers who then go across the street to the main prison and they do the cooking and the laundry

[43:09] and the sweeping and scrubbing the floors and stuff like that so uh the judge uh asked the prosecutors any objection they said no no objection well the thing about the camp is there are there are no bars on the windows the doors are unlocked there are no fences you're free to come and go as you please you're on your honor not to abscond and frankly most of the prisoners work in town at the local college you know as janitors or whatever so it's like a work release like you get papers yeah you sleep in the prison but you

[43:40] work outside okay so uh the prosecution had no objection and she said you know so ordered so i i go prison is the oddest thing you just drive up to the prison and knock on the door and turn yourself in so that's what i did i uh a documentary film crew one of my lawyers um and my cousin and his son all drove me up there and uh i went to the camp and they said you have to go across the street to the main

[44:11] prison first and check in and then come back over here i said okay so i went over to the prison and uh said i'm john kiriakou i'm here to turn myself in and they put me through the metal detector and frisked me and then the cop starts to lead me around to the back of the prison and i said no no i said i'm supposed to be over here at the uh at the camp and he laughed at me and he said not according to my paperwork you're not and i told myself take it easy there's

[44:41] nothing you can do if you raise a fuss they're going to put you in solitary so i didn't say a word it took me five days before i got access to a telephone and i called my lawyer one of my 11 lawyers the one who i liked and trusted the most and i said hey they put me in the actual prison with the the mafia dons and the drug kingpins and the and the perverts i said what do i do and he said oh my gosh well we could

[45:11] file a motion but it'll be two years before we get a court hearing you'll be home by then he said i'm sorry buddy you're gonna have to tough it out and so i decided you know what you're trained for this you've lived in far worse places than this far more dangerous places than this i said i'm gonna fall back on my cia training and i'm going to make sure that i remain at the top of the heap i actually wrote a book about it that won one of the country's most prestigious literary awards it's called doing time like a spy

[45:42] how the cia taught me to survive and thrive in prison and i use these these 20 life lessons that the cia taught us in training to make sure that i was safe and i was at the top of the social heap and nobody messed with me and i'll tell you in 23 months nobody messed with me so getting out when you come out of there i mean now you have obviously a felony on your record which is a big deal um especially for someone

[46:12] who's coming from an academic and professional background that's not the kind of thing that you normally would have to deal with so where do you where do what do you do with that well that's a really great question and it it was a very difficult thing you know people don't realize that when you have a felony there's no such thing as having paid your debt to society you're always a felon you can't vote you can't hold a professional license like how that has anything to do with professional licenses i have no idea

[46:43] you can't ever own a gun again i don't know what it has to do with voting to be honest i've never understood the connection nor did i although i had i had kind of a good experience with that i can tell you about in a minute but um you get out they put me they didn't put me in but they assigned me to a halfway house i i so angered the the warden by writing a blog and smuggling it out of prison that uh that i didn't get any halfway house time not a single day i had to do my entire

[47:14] sentence not a single day off so they assigned me to this halfway house called hope village which has since been closed we used to call it either hopeless village or abandon all hope village 140 men they had one job posted on the job board and it was uh to work at a car wash for a hundred and forty men so you get out and they say you have 90 days to find a job and if you can't you go back in back in for the next

[47:45] seven months and you can't find a job because how can you possibly find a job you're a felon how are you going to find a job so i was lucky i was luckier than the other 139 guys in there because i was kind of famous and so i had a uh a think tank a progressive think tank that reached out to me and said um we can't pay you much we can only pay you minimum wage but it's a job so i took that and then after six months i had to raise

[48:16] the money for my own salary so i was doing like gofundme and all this silly stuff just to make minimum wage well minimum wage didn't put food on my table you know and so i sort of bounced around from job to job i ended up getting a job as a radio host which was a good fit for me and gave me the best health insurance i ever had in my life but it wasn't enough money to really make a living and then finally my wife said screw this i'm out of here

[48:47] and she took off so you know i i here i am i'm in my mid-50s and i i had to start all over again what really saved me and this is unique to me this is not i'm far luckier than than any other oh yeah far lucky yeah but i am a i'm a national hero in greece when i when i first got in trouble the greek uh ambassador approached me and he said what can we do to be helpful and i said you could give me greek citizenship and

[49:17] he did so here on this guy this you know this the greeks are fascinated by the cia they always have been so here's this greek american cia guy who made good and blew the whistle and took it on the chin because he wanted to do the right thing and tell the truth and so um the greek government hired me to write a new whistleblower protection law for them so i went to greece five times in 2015 we came up with the whistleblower

[49:48] protection law and we presented it to the european parliament in brussels so i testified twice in brussels before the parliament and they passed it into law and then the greek parliament passed it into law and now it's the law of the land for the entire european union well this was covered in the news in greece oh here's john kiriakou again i'll tell you a funny story i arrived i arrived at the airport and i hadn't shaven and my hair was like this because i was flying coach and i get off and i come out of the doors

[50:20] from customs and they're all these camera crews with their cameras right and i turned to look to see oh there must be famous on my plane and then they run up to me and i i actually started to laugh like you were like what is this yeah i look terrible and why would you want to talk to me well they wanted to talk about this whistleblower protection law because there was a big scandal a whistleblower blew the whistle on the minister of defense he had taken bribes from siemens and and it was the first time

[50:51] that the law was actually being used in court so um after that i got so much press coverage from that that a consortium of greece's four wealthiest families um put together a private equity fund like a hedge fund and they asked me to run it and so i've been doing that since august and i finally like made it in life and uh you know made my big comeback but i'm still a convicted felon here yeah no i still get happy you're greedy

[51:23] it's a good thing you're greek huh good thing i'm greek because if i wasn't greek i'd still be making minimum wage someplace right so the greeks that they saved you yeah they did they saved me how can we get some sort of thing like whistleblower protection here how do we get here great question so we have a whistleblower protection lot was written by chuck grassley the the senior senator from iowa but it exempts national security whistleblowers from its protections it exempts them so if you work for the

[51:53] department of agric agriculture then go ahead blow the whistle you know go ahead go for it you're gonna get a reward you're gonna get a nice write-up in the post but if you work for cia nsa nsc dia you better keep your mouth shut or you better know exactly what you're doing and have your eyes open going into this thing so what we can do again is we have to demand of our elected officials that they include national security whistleblowers

[52:23] in the protections of the whistleblower protection act yeah that could be on my new mission my new to-do list very good i i'm like acquiring like a little bit of a to-do list as i go and and coincidentally i also am acquiring a fairly long burn list as i go too so those are happening in tandem it's kind of exciting so i don't want to keep you i appreciate this so much you are i've i watched you i cannot remember the first time i saw you i want to say it was like four years ago or so

[52:54] and i actually wrote your name down and this was long before i ever ran for congress or anything and i started acquiring you weren't the only person whose name i wrote down so anytime i would see somebody on one of my shows that i thought was a valuable source of information i would write their name and what they knew about and i ended up after months with like this four page source list of people which is pretty impressive i must yeah it's awesome and so you were one of the first people on my on my source list and this was like four years ago

[53:24] and then how i knew who you were aside from that was i have a facebook friend that's one of your real life friends really yes you have a friend in real life who i've never met in real life but she's like like my sister from another mister on facebook okay off here you have to tell me who it is okay i'll tell you i'll tell you um but anyway so i actually had reached out to her and i said do you think do you think he'd be interested and she's like sure just send him a message and i had messaged you before about something else i think

[53:54] having to do with do you think jeffrey epstein's really dead you're on resourceless if you're on my source list and i have a question i'm coming you know like that's what that's part so i'm like okay i don't think he's dead i think if he were dead we'd be watching 24 7 of clinton porn um he would have that all out there but you made me feel pretty s sure that he is in fact deceased i i think he is i think he i think he was ugly the way he went and i think that there's a lot of bad [ __ ] behind it i think he's dead

[54:27] like i'm not we're not going to talk about the method of death right but yeah i i do think he's dead yeah all right well thank you so much john for coming right now i'll end the recording so i could i could talk a little bit but i really appreciate it to everybody we will attach at the bottom we will attach um links to um the books that were referenced in this and so please feel free to check that stuff out and thank you john karaoke thank you for having me
