Title: #GreenSocialist Notes #23: Whistleblowers with John Kiriakou
Show: Howie Hawkins
Date: 2021-05-12
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CeOdsHdUUNw
Duration: 1:07:00

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[00:04] hello everybody this is howie hawkins and we have a special guest tonight john kiriakou who is one of the significant whistleblowers uh and we will get to that in a minute i first have to report some sad news many of you met an activist here in syracuse named nikita slade when we had her on this live stream angela and i to talk about organizing and we're really in shock here in syracuse

[00:35] and around the movement because she died suddenly last week from a heart attack she was only 32 and she's somebody who is active in our syracuse green party here she was on the staff of my 2014 campaign for new york governor she was an advisor on policing and racial justice issues for our presidential campaign and she was a key leader in black lives matter syracuse and she also did a queer women of color

[01:06] podcast that was one of angela's favorites she was a union millwright but to me she was the best activist i have met from her generation um you know she was one of the most well-read activists of any generation i had many conversations with her on social theory and organizing and she'd read a lot of books that i i haven't found anybody else to talk to about so i'm gonna miss her for those

[01:36] conversations as much as her energy and commitment to the movement and we were blessed for the contributions she made while she was with us and we're just so sad that uh she's departed and uh she had a lot more to give so you know that's the sad news and uh angela and i wrote a little remembrance on the website if you go there under the updates you can you can read about it there's some pictures there's links to the interviews i did an

[02:07] interview with her after a black glass matter demonstration here in syracuse and you'll see how much she was giving and it's you know how sad it is that she's not with us anymore so that's uh just sad news to report so what we want to talk about tonight is the war on whistleblowers and i'm wearing my ralph nate i'm ralph nader t-shirt from 08 if you can see that uh ralph coined the term whistleblowers as we understand it today

[02:40] he had a big conference and a a book you know trying to promote people in government and in corporate sector to release information that ought to be in the public domain in the public interest and he had a big impact um you know that became part of the ethic of people that wanted to you know do good and eventually one of the last piece of legislation is that able to help shepherd through congress was the whistleblower's protection act in 1989

[03:11] although that has been uh weakened by court decisions particularly with respect to people releasing information that's in the national security realm so most of the uh war on whistleblowers that we're familiar with now are people charged under the espionage act except they're not doing espionage they're releasing information that they think the public ought to know but the espionage act was

[03:43] enacted in 1917 during world war one to go after the anti-war movement and one of the really debilitating repressive features of it is if you release information you can't defend it as in the public interest that's not permitted under the statute which makes whistleblowers for a charge for espionage which they're not working for any foreign government uh it puts them in a real bind and

[04:14] so back in 19 around world war one uh they charged the antiwar radicals emma goldman and alexander berkman the anarchists were deported to russia three socialists were charged under it one was a member of congress victor berger another was a philip randolph who we know as a civil rights leader later in the century and then eugene debs who was actually sentenced to 10 years for an anti-war speech he gave in canton ohio i wrote a remembrance of that uh

[04:47] on the anniversary i think last year uh he ended up spending three years in jail and then he was pardoned by president harding who invited him to the white house very different than the treatment our whistleblowers are getting today you know harding took the place of wilson it was rarely used for the rest of the century a couple espionage cases the most notable is the rosenberg's case uh and while julius may have been uh giving atomic information to the russians it seems evidence shows that

[05:18] his wife ethel was not but she was executed as well but then it was used for the first time against whistleblowers by richard nixon going against daniel ellsberg and anthony russo for releasing the pentagon papers and they were not convicted because of fbi misconduct and then it laid dormant again until the administration of barack obama and he went after eight different people for leaking

[05:48] information mostly about our military and intelligence operations and you've heard of some of these people chelsea manning who released all informations including that infamous collateral murder video which showed this guy in a helicopter gunship killing civilians asking for permission seemed to be you know excited about it reminded me of the first vietnam vet i talked to back in 1964

[06:19] he's the older brother of a little league league teammate who was bragging about how he was just killing random people from his helicopter in vietnam um and that massacre not only killed civilians but it killed some reuters journalists and so chelsea you know has spent time in prison for that they've still uh you know asked her to do more and she's spent more time in prison in that same first group of eight under

[06:50] obama edward snowden is probably the best known he's somebody his book on uh what do you call it uh oh forget the name came out in 2019 it was the most impactful book i read that year and i was saying during the campaign i would uh drop the charges and bring him into the administration because i felt he had the right values he was for democracy against authoritarianism and had a handle on how to do you know

[07:20] proper intelligence without violating people's constitutional rights and you know if i was president i would need somebody who knew how to do that and then another one is our guest tonight john kiriakou who revealed to journalists uh information about the cia's torture program during the early 2000s and then uh obama i mean trump continued uh obama administration declined to prosecute

[07:50] julian assange trump has gone ahead and biden has continued and there are a number of other cases going on right now that we'll probably talk about tonight like daniel hale and then the last thing i want to say before i bring on john kiriakou is that it's not only the espionage act we have a case with stephen donziger uh his he had a trial opened up yesterday and this is a man who worked with 30 000

[08:20] farmers and indigenous people in ecuador and won a 9.5 or 8.5 billion dollars in damages from chevron for environmental and health uh damages in ecuador in 2011 and right away chevron uh sued in this country and uh they charge them with things like saying he extorted and bribed and so forth the process in ecuador and so

[08:52] by 2014 uh he didn't get a jury trial he just had a judge rule that uh the ecuadorian uh ruling should be vacated and fined uh donziger 800 000 and uh then uh in the appeal uh the judge asked for you know his phone and computer and whatnot which don said that's attorney-client

[09:22] privilege so they charged him with contempt the court which led to his disbarment and house arrest now march this year the second quarter of a circuit court of appeals vacated some of the sanctions against donziger i included house arrest because of this uh contempt of court charge so that went to trial yesterday and already a couple of the chevron lawyers have dropped out because in cross-examination the lies they've been giving would be

[09:53] exposed that's that's what the theory is um so now it's be in in the prosecution is being done by a private prosecutor because the southern district of new york the us attorney said there's not a case and refused to uh to prosecute so there's a lot of shady stuff going on here and uh progressive democrats just sent a letter to mayor garland to look into this case

[10:24] it's got a lot of attention uh people are wondering where barack obama is he went to law school with steven donziger they play basketball together obama's been silent ralph nader had a podcast that's worth listening i think in late march with stephen donziger but you can see what the issue is here he won a big judgments again against the corporation and they went to the u.s courts which acted like they're lackeys and basically took this man's life from him

[10:54] and you know he's fighting to get it back in court and it's a case we should all be following so that's what we're talking about with whistleblowers it's really difficult to be a whistleblower you put your whole life on the line and uh that book by uh ed snowden his permanent record uh so i had forgot that so let's let's bring john kiryaku on and he can talk about his experience as a whistleblower and he

[11:24] knows a lot of these whistleblowers we haven't named all of them but we'll get to them as we go through this discussion so welcome john thank you howie thanks very much for having me and uh hello everybody i'm uh i'm very happy to be here i've got a story to tell you and i'll tell the story and i'd love to take whatever questions you might have uh so i i spent 15 years at the cia the first half of my career was in analysis just sort of sitting at a desk thinking the

[11:56] big thoughts writing papers that nobody would read and i got bored with that and i made a very unusual transfer into counter-terrorism operations as it turned out i was the only person in the entire cia who was fluent in both greek and arabic and they made a determination that it was a lot easier to teach a linguist operations than it was to take an operations person and teach teach them how to speak greek and arabic so i went into counter terrorism

[12:26] operations in 1997 and in the immediate aftermath of the 9 11 attacks i was named the chief of counterterrorism for the cia in pakistan so in that position high stress dangerous position i led a series of raids in march of 2002 that resulted in the capture of

[12:57] well i'm not allowed to say the actual number still but it was many dozens of al-qaeda fighters including one by the name of abu zubaydah who we believed at the time was the number three in al qaeda he was not the number three he was actually never even a member of al qaeda he was certainly a bad guy he uh assisted al qaeda in terms of logistics you know if if you were tired of the fight and you wanted to take it home abu zubaydah would get it for you abu

[13:28] zubaydah created and ran the two al-qaeda training camps in southern afghanistan he formed the uh what was called the house of martyrs safe house in peshawar pakistan so bad guy but not a member of al qaeda and certainly not the number three in al qaeda but on the night of march 22nd 2002 we we caught him and a pakistani policeman shot him three times with an ak-47 in the thigh the groin and the stomach and he was very severely wounded

[14:00] my orders were to sit next to his bed 24 7. george tenet told me 24 7 cia eyes on he said do not leave his bedside and so i i sat there 24 hours after we caught him abu zabeda came out of his coma and the first thing he said to me was he asked me to kill him he asked me to take a pillow and smother him and i said i said oh no abu zubato

[14:33] we've been we've been looking for you for a long time nobody's going to kill you in fact i said you're going to get the best medical care that the american government could provide he cried a lot he said that he would never know the touch of a woman he would never know the joy of fatherhood and um and we talked a lot about religion uh he recited poetry he asked if i would pass a message to his mother

[15:04] and finally i said listen i'm going to give you some advice i am the nicest guy that you're going to meet in this experience my colleagues are not nice like i am so if there's one thing that you do it's that you have to cooperate there were 50 000 people in those towers that morning i said you're not the victim here and he said to me you seem like a nice man but you're the enemy and i'll never

[15:34] cooperate so another well altogether 56 hours passed i was with him for 56 hours and um and uh a cia plane flew in to pick him up and take him to what turned out to be a secret prison that none of us knew about we we didn't have a need to know and we weren't read into the uh into the compartment so he asked me to hold his hand three fbi agents and i carried him out

[16:04] to the plane on uh on a gurney and uh we we tied him across the luggage rack at the back of the plane and i leaned over and i said remember you have to cooperate good luck i told him and i squeezed his hand never saw him again three months later i've returned to cia headquarters and um certainly abu zubaydah was not cooperating but i was in the cafeteria one day standing in line to get lunch and a

[16:35] senior officer from the cia's counterterrorism center stopped me and said hey very casually hey i'm glad i ran into you do you want to be certified in the use of enhanced interrogation techniques i had never heard that term before this was our this was sorry may the sixth two thousand two i still remember the date so i said enhanced interrogation techniques techniques what does that mean and very excitedly he he said we're going to start getting rough with these guys

[17:07] and i said well what exactly does that mean and so he explained to me these different techniques and i said man that sounds like a torture program i i've got a i've got a moral and ethical problem with that besides the fact that torture is illegal the fact of the matter is we have something in this country called the federal torture act of 1946 which specifically outlaws specifically outlaws exactly those techniques that we used against al qaeda prisoners

[17:39] besides that we were signatories too and the drafters of the united nations convention against torture now in 1946 we executed japanese soldiers who waterboarded american pows that was a death penalty crime to waterboard somebody in 1968 january 11 1968 the washington post ran a front page photograph of an american soldier waterboarding

[18:09] a north vietnamese prisoner on the day that that photo appeared secretary of defense mcnamara ordered an investigation the soldier was arrested he was charged with torture and he was sentenced to 20 years in prison well the law never changed we changed so something that was a death penalty offense in 1946 something that called for 20 years in

[18:40] prison in 1968 was not just okay by 2002 it was actively encouraged and supported by both the justice department and the white house and then carried out by the central intelligence agency i said this was illegal it was immoral and it was unethical and i wanted no part of it on august 1st 2002 the cia began to torture abu zubair and they began with the technique of waterboarding which was one of the the harshest

[19:12] uh techniques that they had certainly there were people inside the cia who objected to this but the key phrase here is inside the cia nobody said anything publicly nothing not a word i was promoted at the time because i had caught up with a beta and so i became the executive assistant to the cia's deputy director for operations and in that capacity i saw literally every cable that was coming

[19:42] into the cia from around the world and so i was reading the reporting coming back from the secret site where abu zabada had been taken and cia officers went far beyond what had been authorized by uh by the justice department there were a couple of techniques that they were using that i believed at the time and still to this day that were worse than uh than waterboarding one was sleep deprivation now sleep deprivation

[20:15] sounds like no big deal right they keep you awake but it's not that simple what they do is they they chain you to an eye bolt in the ceiling so you can't sit or kneel or lay or get comfortable in any way they have industrial power lights on you 24 hours a day and they're blasting music over and over and over the same song over and over again 24 hours a day now we know from the american

[20:45] psychological association the apa which has done studies on these kinds of things that people begin to lose their minds around day seven with no sleep they begin to die around day nine and that's because your organs begin to shut down from lack of sleep the cia though was authorized to keep prisoners awake for up to 12 days now we killed people with that technique of sleep deprivation there was nothing in the justice department's opinion that said we could

[21:16] murder people but they did it anyway um the other one was was called the cold cell the cold cell was an absolutely horrible thing they chain you to that eye bolt in the ceiling again they chill your cell to 50 degrees fahrenheit they strip you naked and then every hour a cia officer goes into your cell and throws a bucket of ice water on you we killed two more prisoners with that technique so this was ongoing and

[21:49] at the same time the cia was collecting literally no intelligence from any of these prisoners you know certainly they were babbling on about whatever it was they thought the cia wanted to hear just to get them to stop the torture but they were not able the the analysts and the collectors were not able to collect any actionable intelligence at all nothing i resigned from the cia in uh early 2004 and um

[22:22] i i was waiting for somebody to say something because i i just assumed that you know this was so heinous and there were certainly other people inside the agency that were opposed to it i just expected somebody to come out and say something nobody said a word finally in december of 2007 five and a half years after i got home from pakistan and more than five years after we started torturing abu zabeda

[22:54] i got a call from brian ross at abc news and he said that someone had told him a source had told him that i had tortured up zubaida i said that was absolutely untrue i was the only person who was kind to abu zabeda i have never raised a hand to a prisoner in my life i said your source is either mistaken or he's lying and i came to the conclusion later that the source was

[23:25] lying because it turned out the source was at the white house so i decided that now was the time to come clean that the american people owned this information the american people had a right to know what their government was doing in their name besides the fact that it is illegal it is a felony to classify a crime and what i mean by that is if you are doing something that is a

[23:56] crime whether in the united states or under international law it is illegal to make that operation classified by definition because it's a crime it has to remain unclassified and so on december 11 2007 i gave a nationally broadcast interview with brian ross at abc news and i said three things that just changed the course of the rest of my life i said that the cia was torturing its prisoners i said that torture was official u.s

[24:27] government policy it was not the result of a rogue cia officer as president bush had said disingenuously and i said that the torture program had been personally approved by the president himself as you might imagine within 24 hours the cia reported me to the fbi they filed something called a crimes report saying that i had leaked classified information to the media the fbi investigated me for a full year from december of 2007 until december of

[24:59] 2008 and then they sent my attorney something called a declination letter declining to prosecute me they said that i had not violated the law four weeks later barack obama becomes president and he appoints john brennan an old nemesis of mine to be the deputy national security adviser for counterterrorism i had no idea that john brennan secretly asked the justice department to reopen the case against me

[25:30] and so for the next three years my phones were tapped my emails were intercepted and teams of fbi agents followed me not all the time but followed me periodically wherever to the grocery store to church to a restaurant with my family they followed me to my to my mom's sister's funeral in ohio i actually didn't know it was them um and i reported it to the fbi thinking maybe it's a terrorist maybe it's a

[26:02] criminal you know who knows here it was the fbi and i reported it to the fbi so in january 2012 this all came to a head and i was arrested and charged with five felonies including three counts of espionage now as howie pointed out espionage is one of the gravest crimes with which an american can be charged and in many cases it carries with it the

[26:32] death penalty i knew in my heart i hadn't committed espionage talking to abc news or really talking to the american people via abc news is not espionage and so i hired a team of a list nationally known national security attorneys here in washington and we decided we were going to fight now let's talk about that espionage act for a minute howie mentioned that the espionage act

[27:04] was was written and passed into law in 1917 the the stated purpose at the time was to combat german saboteurs during the first world war uh it was never used against german saboteurs it was used against progressives and anti-war activists but between 1917 and 2009 the espionage act was used to prosecute three people who had spoken to the media right

[27:35] how we mentioned correctly that it was used against other political opponents of whatever uh president happened to be in office but three people were prosecuted for speaking to the media just under barack obama eight americans were charged with espionage for speaking to the media barack obama had what i would describe as a nixonian obsession with leaks the new york times said that the point

[28:07] of my prosecution was not even really to prosecute me it was not even really to punish me it was to frighten every other person in the national security apparatus from going to the public from going to the press to discuss waste fraud abuse illegality or threats to the public health or public safety which is the definition of whistleblowing the legal definition and certainly scott shane at the new

[28:37] york times told me that on the day of my arrest every single one of the new york times national security sources went silent and stayed silent uh it's kind of a long story but i'm gonna skip a lot of it and we could talk about it in the questions and answers what ended up happening was this i was facing 45 years in prison in my first meeting with the justice department that's what they offered me

[29:08] 45 years and one of the justice department's lawyers said take the plea mr kiriakou and you may live to meet your grandchildren i said i'm not doing 45 minutes later on they came down to 10 years on a monday 10 years they said take a guilty plea to espionage and do 10 years i said i didn't commit espionage and i haven't done anything to be ashamed of on wednesday

[29:38] two days later they came down to eight years and then on friday they came down to five years my lead attorney was a giant by the name of plato caceres and plato said these were his exact words i've been a practicing attorney in washington for 52 years and he said i've never seen them come down in time he said usually they'll offer you 10 if you turn it down they offer you 15 if you turn it down

[30:09] they offer you 18. and i said well why are they coming down in time with me and very quickly he said because they have a case and they know it's so i said well what do we do he said we fight and we go to trial you didn't do anything wrong the truth of the matter is according to propublica which did a study published in november of 2012 the federal government wins 98.2 percent of its cases almost all of those are a result of two

[30:42] techniques that the justice department uses one is called charge stacking and the other is venue shopping now venue shopping is easy they charge you in the federal district where you are most likely to be convicted and where you are most likely to get a long sentence that's why i was charged in the eastern district of virginia it's called the espionage court because no national security defendant has ever won a case there that's where they charge jeffrey sterling that's where they charged

[31:14] chelsea manning that's where they charged well chelsea manning was military but her um her contempt was eastern district that's where they charged ed snowden and julian assange the other one i said is charge stacking so what they'll do is they'll charge you let's say maybe you did do something wrong but they won't charge you with one crime they'll charge you with 10 20 felonies and they'll wait until you go bankrupt and then they'll come and say all right listen we'll drop all the charges if you

[31:45] plead guilty to one felony well what are you gonna do i had five kids at home i knew that they won 98.2 percent of their cases i was facing 45 years in prison they're offering me now their final their best and final offer was two and a half years i do 23 months so i hired o.j simpson's jury consultant who happened to be the uncle of my best friend's wife uh no eastern district of virginia

[32:17] is in alexandria virginia uh in response to one of the questions so i hired the jury consultant and he came up and we got him we got him a security clearance because all my lawyers had to be cleared he went through all 15 000 pages of discovery and then we all met in this big conference room and he said if we were in any other district in america we would win this thing he said but the eastern district of virginia your jury is going to be made up of

[32:48] people from the fbi the cia the pentagon intelligence community contractors and their family members he said you don't have a prayer just take the deal the night before i had to give the justice department an answer my wife and i stayed up all night long i was only the second american ever charged with violating the intelligence identities protection act of 1981 and so we went over there was no case law but

[33:20] uh there were several um law review journals from harvard law school and we concluded that i just hadn't done anything wrong i hadn't broken the law and so i emailed my attorneys at six o'clock in the morning and i said i've been thinking about it all night and i decided i want to go to trial thinking stupidly that once i got in front of a jury they would see how ridiculous this was they'd see that it was political they would see that i had done a public service and my lawyers

[33:53] called me and said or one of them called me and said put on a pot of coffee we're on the way over they came over to my house they told me you can't turn this down you have to take the deal if you're convicted you're seriously looking at 12 to 18 years just take the deal i still didn't want to take the deal and then one of the attorneys the one who i liked and respected the most um pulled me aside and said listen this can be a blip in your life or it can be the defining

[34:23] event in your life make it the blip and so i took the deal um it's funny that that the deal the case itself made me far better known than i ever would have been before i mean when i blew the whistle on the torture program it was a story for a few days a week but my but my prosecution made me a martyr for human rights it gave me

[34:53] a a venue a soapbox with which i could speak to the american people i'm on tv all the time thanks to these idiots at the at the justice department otherwise you know nobody would even remember that there was a guy who said anything about the the torture program i was very pleased one day when i was sitting in prison it was it was december of 2014 and i was

[35:24] reading a four-day-old copy of the new york times they would of course go through my new york times and cut out articles that they didn't want me to read but there was an interview in there with uh with ed snowden and ed said that he had watched my case and he had watched tom drake's case tom drake the nsa whistleblower and neither one of us backed down despite the the enormous pressure that we were under and so we had inspired him to go public with his revelations and i gotta tell you that

[35:56] and one other thing that also happened in december of 14 made it all worthwhile the other thing was i'm sitting there in my cell one day and a guy walks in and says hey buddy you're on tv i said oh okay i got up i walked over the tv and it was john mccain standing on the floor of the senate saying that without my revelations the american people would never have known that there was a torture program and that they were torturing people

[36:27] in the name of the american people he said even though i was in prison that i deserved the thanks of the american public and he was happy to do that from the floor of the senate that completely changed the way that i saw myself you know cnn until the day before i went to prison called me cia leaker john kiriakou they changed it to cia torture whistleblower john kiriakou the day before i went to prison fox for whatever odd reason probably

[36:59] because i was prosecuted by obama always called me cia torture whistleblower john kiriakou msnbc which was you know pretty much the obama network called me cia leaker john kiriakou or john kiriakou who styles himself a whistleblower which still makes me angry to this day but um you know this is just the way it is now what what's happened since i got out of prison in february of 2015 is

[37:32] uh all of us obama-era whistleblowers have sort of banded together along with some absolutely amazing attorneys like jessalyn radak for example formerly of the government accountability project now of what's called the whisper program the whistleblower and source protection program uh tom drake ed snowden the godfather of whistleblowing the great heroic daniel ellsberg uh there are a bunch of us and we're like brothers and sisters and

[38:02] what we do now and i'm and i'm happy to do it and i do it several times a week is to advise other would-be whistleblowers so that they don't make the same mistakes that i made or the same mistakes that my other whistleblowing colleagues uh have made the truth has to has to get out there and this is one thing about the truth is it always eventually sees the light right you can't keep you can't keep the truth uh under under wraps you you can't

[38:35] trick the american people over the long term it's just not possible and so i'm happy to be a part of helping people get their truth out there remember there's a legal definition of whistleblowing bringing to light any evidence of waste fraud abuse illegality or threats to the public health or public safety i'm going to close by saying one thing at the cia the culture is such

[39:06] that they always taught us that everything in life is a shade of gray that is not true some things are black and white some things are right and wrong when i stood on my first day at the cia with my hand in the air and i swore an oath to uphold the constitution of the united states and to protect it against all enemies foreign and domestic i meant it i'm sorry to say that of the 300 people in the room that day it appears that i was the only one who

[39:36] meant it but i meant it and so government is better when government is honest government is better when it's transparent we're right and they're wrong and we have to make them pay when they violate the law so thank you very much i kept it to 30 minutes just like i promised howie and i am happy to take whatever questions you might have for me oh we can't hear you howie

[40:10] said thank you john i think a lot of people hearing the details in the sequence just brings it home thank you because most people they maybe read something in the press and you know when you string it together you realize how uh how oppressive the government is toward people that tell us what's going on that we ought to know about yeah and that is a huge problem i mean it reminds me we call ourselves a democracy reminds me of

[40:40] what gandhi said when he was asked about western civilization he said it would be a good idea and uh we we have a lot of things to correct yes we do indeed so i've seen some questions in the chat there we go so santino musto my question to john did it rattle your nerves and or mentally scar you've seen people being tortured and murdered did this have anything to do with you deciding to become a

[41:11] whistleblower that's a really good question you know it's funny i've been answering these questions for you know 14 years and nobody's ever asked me that um the easy answer is yes it did scar me um when i came home from from pakistan well let me back up i've got a friend who i worked with in the cia we go to the same church and um he just happens to be a former brigadier general and he's also a psychiatrist

[41:41] and um he mentioned something to me about a year ago that i it just had never crossed my mind he said i said you know i was a star at the agency until until i i left and he said that's not true they turned on you in 2002. i said what are you talking about i was a star in 2002 i went up to the seventh floor i was the executive assistant and he said don't you remember they used to call you the human rights guy i said yes he said that wasn't a compliment they were talking about you behind your

[42:12] back because you weren't willing to torture anybody or to kill anybody and another truth of that time and i kept this to myself um was i came back from pakistan with with ptsd you know i was i was surprised at how willing my colleagues were to kill people you know these are guys

[42:42] that i used to get together with on the weekends we'd have a barbecue our kids would play together our wives were friends and then they would go on their week-long missions and and kill people and come back there was one guy there was one guy that i worked with i sat 20 feet away from him in the cia's counterterrorism center and every morning i'd say hey man how you doing and every morning he'd say hey buddy how you doing i was never really clear on exactly what he did in the office you know we don't

[43:12] have like name tags or anything with your job description right so i asked a colleague i said you know i'm unclear exactly what he does here he travels an awful lot and my friend said john he works for the special activities division what do you think they do and i thought wow you know what i hadn't thought of that because he's such a nice guy he's so easy going he brings bagels in on fridays and coffee and

[43:46] he was an assassin and you know when when public opinion polls show that the american people are in solid support of the cia and other intelligence agencies killing people who they believe might perhaps maybe someday pose a threat to the united states i mean where do you go from there you're really crying in the darkness but um yes to to answer uh santino's question uh yeah that was not my thing it

[44:19] bothered me very much i'll add one other thing a cia psychiatrist a different one once told me that the cia actively seeks to hire people who have sociopathic tendencies not sociopaths sociopaths are impossible to control because they don't have a conscience they blow right through the the polygraph exam but you just can't control them because they're unable to feel remorse or regret but as you might imagine sociopaths slip through the process

[44:51] because they can't feel remorse because they don't react on a polygraph well just like in corporate america those same sociopaths rise to the very top of the cia's leadership and that's why we've got assassination squads and that's why we have teams of people who overthrow governments or who do international kidnapping you know that's why we need robust congressional oversight which we haven't had since the the 70s frankly good question thank you

[45:21] santino jason justice asks hi john do you know how many publicly known quote intelligence agencies there are follow-up why do we need so many when they seem to be asleep at the switch yeah promoters of u.s imperialism yes you're absolutely right in every aspect of that question jason um first of all there are no secret intelligence services anymore um not since nsa finally went public the cia of

[45:53] course was secret in the beginning nsa was secret like into the late 70s uh but what you see is what you get i think it's like 19 of them now some are still so secret that we don't really know what they do like darpa for example at the pentagon we know that they develop futuristic weapon systems and stuff like that but beyond that we don't really know what goes on inside darpa uh why do we need so many of them we don't we don't this is empire building on the

[46:25] part of different components of the us government primarily the pentagon like the pentagon is in ultimate charge of most intelligence agencies so why do we need army intelligence navy intelligence marine corps intelligence air force intelligence uh dia uh nsa belongs to the pentagon why do we need all those they're duplicative they all do the same thing and then they try to one-up each other and better each other all the while the

[46:57] cia's making fun of them about how terrible they are and how amateurish but the final part of your your question is um they seem to be asleep at the switch and promoters of u.s imperialism yes you're exactly right they are asleep at the switch and listen i'm telling you from first hand experience the cia which is supposed to be the quote-unquote best and brightest has missed literally every major international development since the creation of the cia

[47:27] in 1947. they missed everything from from the building of the berlin wall to the fall of the berlin wall and everything in between they they blew the collapse of the uh of the soviet union they blew the collapse of the shah's regime in iran the the directorate of operations completely blew uh democracy in iran by overthrowing prime minister musa on behalf of british petroleum bp

[47:57] seriously kermit roosevelt for uh teddy roosevelt's son who was in charge of that operation for the cia later said that it was the gravest mistake he had made in his life uh my dear friend and attorney bruce fine he's he's one of the most important uh constitutional scholars in america uh has been talking about writing a book about the cia's analytic failures we all know about their operational failures they're terrible operationally but the analytic failures

[48:28] are even more dangerous or have been more dangerous through history because it's that analysis that our policy makers rely on to make foreign policy and frequently the cia has been so wrong that foreign policy has been a disaster a disaster so excellent question thank you for that yeah i would just add that there was a book came out several years ago by william arkin and dana priest called top secret america yes fantastically an expose in the

[48:59] washington post it it describes department of homeland security and the intelligence agencies have become like the military industrial companies an intelligence industrial complex yes building bureaucracies they got so much money they're spending it you know before the end of the year so they can get you know refunded and there's a lot of waste and while they're playing with all this money they're not collecting intelligence yes you know let me ask you

[49:29] a question and this is not a rhetorical question why does the department of agriculture need an intelligence agency why does the department of commerce need a fully staffed intelligence agency what possible intelligence could they be collecting or analyzing or contributing to it doesn't make any sense to me you know it's like the department of education has has an armed uh police unit that also collects intelligence it's the department of education

[49:59] although they're not members of the the i capital i capital c intelligence community why do they even call themselves intelligence this doesn't make any sense to me yeah it reminds me of another book came out in 80s about uh they called it guard labor one quarter of the workforce security guards police the intelligence apparatus is watching the three-quarters of us i mean it's an enormous waste

[50:31] and really not in the public interest yeah so yeah that's right you know ed snowden we wouldn't have any idea really the extent to which nsa spies on us if it hadn't been for ed snowden i think he's a bonafide american hero i really do and let's let's think about this for a second what nsa does first of all nsa was not created by an act of congress it was just arbitrarily created by the pentagon and just foisted upon us uh the pentagon denied its

[51:01] existence until 1978. and now what they do despite the fact that in nsa's charter they are prohibited prohibited from collecting information on what are called u.s persons that's a u.s citizen or any person in the country on a green card a permanent resident alien that's all they do now right they have access to every phone call every email every text message that every american sends and receives

[51:33] every single day and they have enough space memory at this new facility that they just finished building in utah to collect information from every american for the next 500 years that's not what they should be doing they should be collecting overseas to protect us we are not the enemy here but that's what it's come down to i see rob rich has a uh question about julian assange i'm proud to say that i'm on the julian assange defense advisory committee

[52:05] and um julian is suffering mightily right now but i think actually that he has the upper hand in that the justice department has to prove to the british supreme court that the the way the u.s practices solitary confinement is not a form of torture now the reason why that's going to be impossible is that the united nations

[52:36] has already declared it to be a form of torture and two other british courts have blocked extraditions to the united states of prisoners who would be subject to solitary confinement here because it's a form of torture so there are three separate precedents that are serving right now to protect julian assange now the british are being jerks about it and they won't let him out of belmar's prison pending this this appeal but honestly i don't see how

[53:07] the us can win this appeal they're gonna have to let julian go hope so let's hope so z kramer do you think it is realistic to remove the institution of the cia thank you for that the answer is yes and i'll i'll tell you why um i mentioned a few minutes ago that much intelligence work is duplicative uh in the cia's case that's especially true uh the cia's depart or directorate of

[53:37] intelligence does analysis well the same literally the same analysis is done by the state department's bureau of intelligence and research inr the directorate of operations at the cia collects human source intelligence human source intelligence is also collected by the defense department's defense human services dhs the cia's directorate of science and technology develops new

[54:07] new weapons new systems new ways of interception just as both nsa and darpa do so literally everything that the cia does is also done somewhere else in government and at least in the case of the state department and darpa it's done better than it's done at the cia um the cia in my view has become a rogue organization especially after 9 11. and congress just is unwilling or unable to exercise

[54:40] legitimate oversight and so i really don't believe that we need a cia it doesn't contribute anything to the national security it it hasn't saved us from anything protected us from anything i mean it was the cia's failure that we had 911 in the first place so no i i don't think that we need to have a cia deborah souza oliveira john yes what can americans do to protect whistleblowers

[55:11] what a great question that is um and and it's hard the answer is difficult it's it's um it's something that's going to take a long time and what we have to do is to ride our elected officials uh to to not just you know come out in support of whistleblowers but the laws need to be changed how he mentioned in his his introduction or maybe you didn't maybe how he before we started we were talking about it uh and that's the fact that whistleblowers are

[55:43] not permitted to present an affirmative defense you know i talked to ed snowden a few months ago and we were talking about the possibility of him coming home and he said that that he's willing to come home and he's willing to go to prison right if he can get up in court and explain to the judge and to the american people why he did what he did that's called an affirmative defense yes i did it but i did it for this reason well the espionage act does not allow an

[56:13] affirmative defense and in my own case my judge said not in a million years could i get up and explain why i did what i did because the affirmation is irrelevant so what we need to do is we need to very seriously amend and you know what i take that back not amend we need to scrap the espionage act and we need to start fresh again the espionage act is so old that it doesn't even mention classified

[56:44] information why because it was written 40 years before the classification system was even invented it mentions only national defense information and then it doesn't it doesn't identify what national defense information is it doesn't define it and so it's up to each individual judge in each individual federal district to define what national defense information is

[57:16] well how's that just how is that fair so that's what we need to do is to really ride our elected officials now i'm not stupid i know i know that there's no member of congress who's gonna say oh you know what i should do to really win lots of new votes i should make it more difficult to charge someone with espionage but you know let's be adults here and grab the bull by the horns that's exactly what needs to be done the whole law needs to be scrapped and

[57:46] rewritten and not be used against people that aren't doing espionage that's right listen the espionage act should be used to prosecute people who commit espionage against the united states if you're working for a foreign government china russia cuba israel whatever then you should be charged and prosecuted under the espionage act but whistleblowers no uh eugene debs because he was against the

[58:18] war no that's not what it was meant to to be or that's not what it was supposed to be anyway diana m 16. john do you see gitmo ever being closed talk about cowardice huh i'll tell you a quick story diane um when i caught my first group of prisoners it was in january of 2002 and we locked them up temporarily in the

[58:49] pindi jail just because it happened to be the nearest jail to us and i called cia headquarters counter-terrorism center and i said listen i caught four guys i don't know what to do with them and they said oh we're gonna fly in a c-12 just put him on the c-12 i said oh you're going to take it back to the u.s for prosecution they said no we're going to send him to guantanamo and i said guantanamo cuba yeah i said why would you send them to guantanamo cuba and the response was fascinating the

[59:20] response was we're going to use guantanamo as a clearing house so that we can charge them in the federal districts in washington dc and the eastern district of virginia the southern and eastern districts of new york and the eastern district of massachusetts right so this is where the crimes were committed they're only going to be in guantanamo for a matter of weeks until we can figure out which district to send them to for their trial and i said oh that's a great idea

[59:53] well nobody ever came to the united states for trial almost nobody was even charged with a crime uh you saw how the republicans completely flipped out like crazy people when obama said during the 2008 campaign that he wanted to shut guantanamo down and in fact they passed a law over his veto threat that prohibit the president united states from closing down guantanamo there was an article in today's uh

[1:00:23] washington post saying that the last um minor prisoner is being released from guantanamo he's an afghan that leaves only one afghan left at guantanamo he's one of 70 people and at its height it had something like 789 people 70 people well some of them are you know truly bad guys like muhammad the mastermind of 9 11. but my god even khalid muhammad has constitutional rights so either charge him with a crime

[1:00:54] or let him go same with abu zubaydah same with ramsay ben and shib same with all these guys if you're not going to charge them the crime you have to let them go they have the same right that you and i have to face our accusers in a court of law to face a jury of their peers and if we're not going to allow them to do that then they have to be released with that said i don't see guantanamo closing down until either two things

[1:01:24] happen these prisoners eventually die and you know that that happens with some frequency usually by suicide uh or somehow the government is able to charge them in a civilian court but the reason that hasn't happened yet is because the cia tortured them all and because they were tortured literally nothing that they said can be used against them and without their own admissions then there's just nothing to hold them on

[1:01:55] it's a quagmire tom violet uh please comment on the recent hack of colonial pipeline yeah um so the government i think is saying that it was um it was russian i the first report i heard was that it was indians indian hackers uh now they're saying it's russian i've got a friend at the fbi who says that they're pretty confident that it's not russian government it's you know

[1:02:25] probably a handful of guys in their parents basements or whatever uh but uh this is this is bad right this is bad where a couple of hackers could shut down the east coast's major pipeline main pipeline and essentially cut off the supply chain of gasoline to a half a dozen states along the east coast but this comes back to the notion of what nsa should be doing why didn't nsa protect us from this

[1:02:56] right they're supposed to be the the geniuses in this in this realm where was nsa i'll tell you where nsa was they were busy reading your emails and my emails and listening to our phone calls and trying to decide who's un-american or less american than the next guy but this is exactly what nsa is supposed to be doing protecting us from electronic enemies and they they drop the ball

[1:03:34] well we've come upon our hour i don't see any more questions popping up excellent so uh i really appreciate you coming on john howie thanks for having me it's always a pleasure i've been a big fan of yours for a long time so i was very happy to do it thanks for having me likewise you know i've been following your case for a decade now and thank you um this whistleblower issue is so important and you know we don't have an administration now any more than under trump no that is

[1:04:04] going to deal with it i mean fusions of julian orange and daniel hale are going forward this is bipartisan biden is just as bad as trump and trump was just as bad as obama and may i say one last thing um there's a very important whistleblower out there right now by the name of daniel hale dan is the drone whistleblower who went public with the fact that we were murdering civilians women children the elderly in our drone program he

[1:04:36] was scooped up by the justice department last week and he's incarcerated right now at a federal holding facility in alexandria virginia of course the eastern district of virginia and um the poor guy is terrified he's on suicide watch right now um i posted on facebook and on twitter his address so you know if if you've got five minutes send him a letter send him a postcard just tell him that he's not forgotten he's really going through some dark days

[1:05:06] right now yeah i hope everybody will take a minute to do that thank you so i don't have any closing comments you're going to be on a podcast with uh jessalyn radak who's a whistleblower herself and a lawyer for whistleblowers yes next week you want to tell people when that's happening sure actually let me look at my at my calendar on my phone jessalyn radek i mentioned a few minutes ago was one of my attorneys one of my 11

[1:05:36] attorneys and um she is an absolute genius when it comes to these these whistleblower issues she's a whistleblower herself she blew the whistle on the fact that the justice department had um had denied access to an attorney for john walker lind who was known as the american taliban uh that's gonna be at 12 noon eastern uh go to covert action magazine's website uh 12 noon eastern on tuesday may 18th

[1:06:11] okay good so if people didn't get enough of you tonight they can get more next week jessalyn's more interesting than i am and so is tom drake yeah tom drake was one of the first to be prosecuted and uh yes you know he's uh he's a hero too he is thank you so so that's it um we're going to move our live streams to saturday at 3 p.m starting this saturday because my running mate angela walker's driving that dump truck and they've got her

[1:06:42] working 14 hours a day season up so she hasn't been able to make these tuesday nights so you know check us out on facebook and twitter we'll be here three o'clock on saturday and uh hope everybody can join us so have a good evening everybody
