Title: Guest: John Kiriakou — CIA Whistleblower on America’s Secret Drug Wars
Show: The Free Thought Project Podcast
Date: 2025-05-19
URL: https://pdcn.co/e/mcdn.podbean.com/mf/web/55p2mvhe88ir2uet/JOHN_KIRIAKOU_PODCAST8utcv-z33sid-Optimized.mp3
Duration: 60:00

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[00:00] people should not be afraid of their governments government should be no matter what anybody tells you words and ideas can change the world world world world ideas an idea whose time has come cannot be destroyed by armies or governments it's too pervasive and we still have tools to spread the message welcome to the free thought

[00:40] project podcast a hub for free thinking conversations about the promotion of liberty and the daunting task of government accountability here are your hosts jason baszler matt agarist and dawn by jr hello again free thinkers welcome back to the free thought project podcast my name is jason baszler and joining me is the free thought project editor-in-chief matt agarist and tftp editor and writer dawn by jr well guys even though we've had quite a few returning guests

[01:17] back on the show this year i'm elated to speak with a first time guest who will be joining us on the show today and i'll get to that introduction shortly but first before jumping into a few quick announcements i did want to throw it over to matt and dawn briefly to check in with them and ask both of you guys how your liberty meter is doing this week you guys feel and optimistic about the direction of liberty this week or uh not so much it's all over the place man i mean if you look at one outlet it's looks like uh you know trumps finally getting on board

[01:48] with calling out israeli's control over america that he looked at the other one and it's and he's suspending habeas corpus so it's like where the hell are we i don't know man yeah i've been sort of in the same boat you know watching all this sort of stuff progress uh certainly keeping up with uh john whitehead's commentary over there at the rutherford institute seems quite bleak of the direction we're on but you know we shall see how things shake out yeah well there's a reason why we aggregate so many articles from the rutherford institutes

[02:18] because john whitehead has his finger on the pulse there and uh yeah i'm kind of between both of you guys it's it's been an interesting week and uh yeah i guess still have a another day and a half year left so we'll see where it goes but guys i do have three quick announcements before we jump into our introduction today as always i just wanted to share that we had an excellent conversation with journalists and longtime liberty activists carried weather last week it's definitely worth a listen we talked to kary about topics ranging from political hypocrisy and propaganda to the psychology of fear and how it actually transforms our brain now kary explained

[02:54] how manipulated fear responses constant crisis narratives and tribalism keeps us in a reactive state and in typical fashion by the end of the show we touched on some powerful points it was an insightful conversation and uh kary is definitely well spoken so download that episode and put it in the queue after this podcast free thinkers second if you've taken value from this show over the years please take a quick moment to subscribe rate and review this podcast we ask our listeners for help with this often because it's an easy no-cost way to help propel this podcast forward

[03:28] best thing here friends if you recognize just how important these conversations are please consider supporting us not only by subscribing and rating and reviewing as i just mentioned also by helping us with financial support there's three options the first option is a one-time donation and you could do that by going to the free thought project dot com and at the top you'll see a tab for a tft membership now you can make a one-time donation there or even more helpful you could sign up for a ten dollar a month subscription

[03:58] which ensures we continue doing this work for the foreseeable future otherwise if you need something back for a little financial support check out our children's book we just published last year teaching kids their constitutional rights entitled little free thinkers know your rights this book is a great resource for kids ages six to twelve and uh it gives them a foundation of knowledge and liberty now that can be found at little free thinkers dot com and would make a great gift all right so let's go ahead and get into this today's guest doesn't really

[04:30] need much of an introduction for anyone paying attention to the deep state and all of its dirty secrets he's a former cia officer a counterterrorism expert and the man who blew the whistle on the cia is a legal torture program adding him to a list of brave americans prosecuted for telling the truth so we're honored to welcome journalists author and whistleblower john caracou to the show so john thank you so much for joining us today thanks so much for the invitation i i can't

[05:02] believe we haven't done this before well yeah we've been trying we want to have you on i actually big shout out to a journalist in previous podcast guest of ours barrett brown for connecting us with you today because uh yeah we we had to do some seeking around to see if anybody had any contacts with you and in fact barrett was supposed to be on this podcast a couple weeks ago but unfortunately we had to reschedule that that that interview uh he will be joining us again in july but john you're somebody yeah you know i've wanted to you to be on the podcast for years now i

[05:36] want to have this conversation with you you're a former cia officer you're a whistleblower and uh you even spent time in prison for blowing the whistle on the cia's use of torture yeah and you know that's all stuff that we've been covering here at the free pod project for over a decade now including police accountability which has been something that's been in our wheelhouse for a long time now so i i did definitely want to get your thoughts about the prison industrial complex here in the states i know that's a topic we haven't really talked too in depth about with many guests over the years but i know it's something that you've written

[06:06] about quite extensively but before we get into that i did want to talk about some of the rhetoric coming from the trump administration over the past week because i believe your knowledge and your experience kind of provides a window of opportunity for some perspective here so recently trump's us homeland chief christie gnome said that the illegal immigration levels could warrant suspending habeas corpus and i'm sure our audience already knows you know what that is but basically guys habeas corpus is similar to due process it's basically a right to challenge unlawful imprisonment in a court of law and well now the trump

[06:42] administration is apparently not only considering that but it's willing to suspend it which is you know frightening its roots go back as far as the magna carta and could upend what little checks and balances the u.s. still have remaining so from what i've read basically only congress not the president has the power to suspend habeas corpus so john i was wondering you know as somebody who's kept a keen eye on injustices in us prisons and had your own experience dealing with the injustice system like what message do you believe this is intended to send to the people of the

[07:16] u.s. or do you think it's just more trump performative posturing to kind of appear tough on immigration you know i want to believe that this is performative posturing but when when trump is taking advice from the likes of steven miller i'm not sure it's performative you know i was i will admit to being surprised when this was first leaked and i think it was it was leaked just to try to gauge public opinion part of the problem that people like you and i are running into is most members of the public just don't know what habeas corpus is now legal

[07:50] scholars i think are generally in agreement that the only other time habeas corpus was suspended was during the abraham lincoln administration and that that was a terrible mistake i don't see any even remotely legitimate reason to even have a conversation about suspending habeas corpus right now we're not in a state of war let alone civil war and really i think the whole reason for wanting to suspend habeas corpus on the part of the trump administration is to make quick

[08:24] deportations easier i think that's it otherwise this doesn't make any kind of legal or constitutional sense at all yeah excellent points and you know i think you're right i think unfortunately just uttering those two words together there's not like a real sense of understanding that comes from the american public as to just the gravity of the situation when it comes to suspending habeas corpus and yeah we do have the historical reference there with lincoln but this kind of points back to you know the public education system and maybe the distractions

[08:57] that we have in our daily lives to that more people aren't speaking out about this you know and it's certainly a bad a bad president it is kind of questionable like why now what's exactly going on that makes this so critical now but i don't think it's too far out of line with some of the policies we're seeing coming out of the trump administration right now especially when we're seeing the trump administration pushing hard on cracking down on what he calls the antisemitic speech on college campuses and a lot of people you know regardless of where they fall politically are kind of worried about this setting you know a

[09:31] dangerous president once again and even if people don't understand what those two words mean and the full extent of it i think they understand that there's enough on the line here with traditional law that we've had in this country and respected in this country for eons you know so as somebody who has seen firsthand how government handles dissent and information like what do you make of all this like do you think these kind of efforts could have a chilling effect on free speech and press freedom in general and i guess on the flip side of this

[10:02] you know just so we're not getting too much on a negative tangent here like on the flip side like are you encouraged by the rise of independent media and the post-covid era with real alternative media yes and there's pushback from the establishment of course with with organizations like news guard for example that for a fee they'll put a red check mark or a green check mark in your url when you when you go to a an alternative media site that they don't like that doesn't fit into the the mainstream doesn't fit into the the political norm

[10:36] it's enough to drive you crazy but that's that's a whole other story that we don't need to get into today you know i i'm a two-time graduate of george washington university i have both bachelor's and master's degrees from from george washington and i went to some of the pro palestinian i call them pro palestinian human rights demonstrations when they were ongoing last last fall gw has overreacted since then in a way that i'm sure has made the trump white house

[11:07] very very happy and they've over at reacted by by silencing dissenting views and by limiting free speech and by expelling students whose speech they don't like i wrote a letter to the president of the university a new president i'm sure she never saw it but i needed to get it off my chest that i will not donate to a university that cracks down on constitutionally protected speech and if if we're not allowed as americans to point out war crimes or crimes against humanity when we

[11:45] see them then we don't have any freedom at all when it comes to our speech so it's not just it's not just columbia university shutting down and arresting students or banning students or suspending them it's not just harvard or nyu or yale or gw this is happening all across the country and it's not that they're so much cracking down on anti-semitic speech to tell you the truth i go to these demonstrations all the time and i go to these universities all the time

[12:18] and i've never heard any anti-semitic speech i hear lots of anti netanyahu speech and i hear a lot of pro human rights speech but now it seems like no matter what we say that is not exactly in line with either the biden or trump administration's view of benjamin netanyahu we are somehow anti semites and that has to stop yeah i i absolutely agree and unfortunately it looks as though you know

[12:49] it's it's this continuation of this egregious violation of free speech rights that we're seeing sort of shifted into this essentially turning rhetoric upside down in a way it's like anything that criticizes israel is tantamount to anything you know this is anti-semitic speech or anti-jewish speech which simply is not the case especially when you have groups like jewish voice for peace that are actively opposed to the israeli government opposed to this genocide and they are literally a jewish religious organization exactly the things of that nature one thing that i have noticed

[13:27] because i like to study history and of course i wasn't alive during the the time of like the vietnam era but with all of these campus protests and conversations about human rights conversations about war crimes it reminds me a lot of of from my research of looking at that time period of that time period of the college protest against the vietnam war and the ways in which say the the nixon administration was cracking down on on free speech and i'd like to get your opinion on that are you seeing parallels between those two states and then how would you compare

[14:01] the trump administration's current behavior in that regard compared to say nixon in the 70s you know it's the friends of mine both on the right and the left who are you know around my age are pining for the days of richard nixon and then we always get a laugh out of it because for so many years for for two generations really most of two generations richard nixon was seen as the clearest example of what not to want in a president in terms of

[14:35] freedom of speech in terms of foreign policy even some economic policies now nixon's policies are are quaint uh sure nixon nixon came down like a an iron fist on vietnam war demonstrators and encouraged others to do the same thing just look at governor rhodes in ohio and uh and the massacre at can't state that they all got away with but i just feel like the current situation is more dangerous because i feel like we have ceded our foreign policy to the israelis

[15:15] you know i it's amazing to me that benjamin etin yahoo could come to washington during the biden administration without an invitation from the state department just come like yon's the place and address a joint session of congress i i'm just gobsmacked by the whole thing and then you know we're seeing reports in in haritz now which is like the only one of the only believable and trustworthy israeli news outlets that net nyahu and those around him are gobsmacked because

[15:53] trump is not doing exactly as they tell him to do this is something actually i blame on nixon if i hope you don't mind that i get it a little bit in the in the weeds on this because i think it's important richard nixon said in 1969 that he was going to change us policy toward israel in that he was going to guarantee israel security no previous president from harry truman to richard nixon had said such a thing israel certainly was an ally johnson made it a major non-nato ally

[16:28] but richard nixon guaranteed its security now remember as early as the kennedy administration we were worried about the israelis developing a nuclear bomb the israelis are not signatories to the non-proliferation the international non-proliferation treaties and and have never even admitted that they have a nuclear program i've seen estimates of as many as 200 nuclear bombs but with nixon's promise to guarantee israel's security it it joined

[17:02] us at the hip with the israeli government whether we like the government or not whether we like whoever happens to be prime minister or not that's the policy well israel has changed dramatically in the last 30 years with the influx a gigantic influx of russian and ukrainian jews that influx has pushed the israeli body politic farther to the right than anybody could have imagined you know when i was in college all of my friends who were jewish would spend a summer on a kibbutz

[17:34] it was just a thing that everybody did well kibbutz kibbutzes are are socialists right it was it was the israeli labor party the socialist party that that created the the idea of a of a kibbutz system well now there is no viable labor party there's no viable socialist movement you're either right or far right or extreme right you know when you've got a minister of security who has been

[18:05] convicted of felony hate crimes against palestinians as a as a coalition partner when you have a minister of finance who has also been convicted of felony hate crimes by israeli courts against palestinians you have a serious problem and the israelis want to pretend that the problem doesn't exist and then are furious when americans stand up and say hey wait a minute we don't think

[18:36] we like the looks of this this looks kind of fascist or neo-nazi and why aren't you respecting human rights where did the human rights go and the israelis just don't want to hear it so i'm very worried about that we need we need president and i don't care from where whether it's the republican party of the democrats because frankly they're just two sides of the same coin but we need a president who's going to stand up and say that he is a president for the american

[19:07] people that he supports an american foreign policy and that he will do whatever is in the best interests of the united states and its citizens and vis-a-vis israel we just have never had that not since harry truman or john kennedy i agree man and it's uh it's weird seeing this play out it's you can make a comparison though like i think that americans are waking up right like during this whole woke era where people were like this whole woke thing ran away and

[19:41] it got really ridiculous like allowing women to play with men sports or men playing women sports and all that i think that the absurdity of the level of censorship when in regard to speaking out against israel has reached critical mass and people aren't buying it anymore right like you have prominent jews being labeled as as anti-semitic which is fucking crazy right there it's great let me interrupt you for one second if i may my college roommate and we were roommates for three years great friends has become not just a rabbi but quite an important rabbi

[20:14] and he was at a demonstration in support of palestinian human rights and somebody said are you anti-semitic and he said actually i'm very semitic i mean he wears a yamaka and everything and i'll give you another example i i spent five years teaching at liberty university which is jerry fallwell's evangelical christian far right wing university i taught intelligent studies there in the jesse helms school of government no less and i'm still on the listserv so these other professors

[20:52] in the government school write all the time about how we need to crack palestinian heads and we need to stop palestinian terrorism and who cares if women and children are killed they're just as likely to strap a bomb on themselves and you know walk up to an idf soldier as anybody else and if you're palestinian you're hamas and you're a terrorist and blah blah blah and i said what about the 14 women and children who were killed when the israeli's bombed saint porphyrios church the oldest continuously operating church in the world they just bombed it and

[21:30] killed everybody inside everybody's fine with that and and i said what about jewish voices for peace what about the enormous protests that we're seeing in israel what about the the conscientious objectors that are now beginning to be a problem for the military because there's so many of them and one of the professors wrote back and said those are just the obama jews and then i i wrote a note to the dean and i said listen i'm not a professor there anymore but you've got to talk to

[22:01] some of these guys because they know nothing about the middle east yet they're teaching courses on it and again you know i didn't get any response nobody cares well i i think that i there is a shift in sentiment and we can kind of see it right like right now with the trump allegedly showing his frustrations with netanyahu right these misdiplomatic visits and deals with different actors and that was supposed to be all exclusive to israel right and you know we're calling this

[22:31] like a sign of a fracture with the us-israel relationship but i think we could probably recall examples like this going all the way back to fucking bill clinton right if we look at it like i mean everybody has stated that they were quote deeply troubled by israeli settlement expansion in the 90s you know you can look back at even obama after public space with netanyahu he he claimed that they were cutting off like all this diplomacy and then right bam gave already yeah i gave him another four billion dollars annually anyway though right so it's like time and again american presidents express this outrage time and again and i told what from from 1994 to 1996

[23:09] i was the economic officer at the american embassy in bahrain bahrain's a little tiny country in the persian gulf just off the coast of saudi arabia two of the happiest years of my life the king of bahrain back then he was called the amir was sheh isa bin salman al-halifa about five feet tall sweetest old man you could ever hope to meet and generous and kind he had a palace he had many palaces but he had one palace that was on the beach and that palace was always open to westerners to swim if you were the role was if you were from a country that stared you couldn't go to the palace

[23:47] on the beach right like pakistan pakistanis just will stare at you and not avert their eyes just because it's part of their culture they just stare so on the weekends my wife and i would take our son he was very young at the time he was he was two now he's 32 but we would go to the beach and the amir kind of had a crush on my wife he would invite her over to drink tea and then a half hour later he would invite me over well when he was talking to my wife it was always you know little stuff and pop culture stuff when i would go over he would want to talk about

[24:19] politics especially as they related to the middle east and i'll never forget one of the things he said he said you know i will do anything the united states asks me to do we have your navy base here they're the home of of central commands fifth fleet and he said we love america and americans and we'll do anything but you have to do something about israeli settlements this war will never end if you don't do something about israeli settlements and then he said this

[24:56] he said we always have hope when a new american president is elected but the truth is that the last president who gave us a fair deal was george hw bush when he said he was going to cut off housing subsidies because of settler activity in the west bank by god he did it and nobody else literally nobody else has had the guts to stand up to the israelis since george hw bush

[25:27] well apparently trump is doing that now right and it seems that he is driving them crazy yeah and and it but i mean that's what i wanted to ask you right is like it seems like a genuine pivot in policy on the surface but do you think that this is going to be same as like the same theater that we've seen over the past three or four decades like symbolic gestures to placate all the public outrage or do you think that there's more to it you know i think i think this time there might be something to it for a couple of reasons first of all in trump's first term

[26:01] he did literally everything that american zionists wanted him to do right move the embassy to jerusalem declare you know that israel would be the first country to receive f-35s literally anything they wanted they got it but that's when sheldon adelson was pushing him and and jared kushner was in the white house whispering in his year every day kushner's not around and adelson

[26:32] died and his wife doesn't have the heft that he had she has the money but not necessarily the heft and now i'm wondering you guys know how how important face is for trump he's got to be the biggest the strongest the smartest the toughest you know etc etc sure and i wonder if now he's feeling that he was played by benjamin netanyahu and now he's going to do something for himself now couple that with the fact that the saudis and the gutteries genuinely love the guy

[27:07] now that the supreme court has said that essentially presidents can take as many bribes of whatever size that they want and still be within the law and i'm not just talking about you know the 747 that the gutteries have offered him i'm talking about the fact that his personal investment in the gulf has tripled since his first term i'm wondering if they're the ones whispering in his ear now you know i went to i went to saudi arabia a couple years ago when biden went i went to cover the biden visit and it was ugly there was zero warmth and when trump

[27:45] goes to saudi arabia i mean i've never seen the saudis act like this with with a world leader with any world leader ever not with any of them and god knows i've spent enough years in the middle east to see these kinds of things so i'm wondering if if the rumors that we've always heard that that trump takes the position of the last person who advised him i wonder if that actually may be the case and he's been talking so frequently with the saudis and the gutteries that that's the

[28:15] direction where he's gonna go now you know that's something that i have also frequently thought about and you know particularly with regard to you know trump always being you know he has to save face and and pr and you know it really plays into you know quite frankly his narcissism and that's one of the things that ironically has made me a little bit optimistic about certain aspects of our foreign policy because i don't think that trump wants to be the guy known for starting for

[28:46] example say a war with iran i think that he would just look at that and be like not that's gonna be do terribly for my reputation it would hurt his ego and narcissism too much so he might push back against it but the question that i wanted to ask you actually because you made this comment about the historic church getting bombed the oldest historic church in the world getting bombed by israel and it reminded me just a few nights ago on my other program the run down live i actually ended up going into a bit of a tangent for about five minutes because we were discussing these these

[29:17] topics as well and i went into a tangent talking about you know i was quoting scripture you know quoting zachariah and whatnot and saying i was like look i'm not even a christian i'm a very devout pagan i'm a germanic polytheist i follow odin and thor but i've read the bible i've studied theology for 20 years so why is it that you have to have a devout pagan sitting here quoting the book of zachariah telling you to do no evil because the israelis are over here massacring in large number innocent men women and children and you have christians over here in the united

[29:52] states in the west mostly but in the united states specifically who are okay with sitting by throughout two christmas isn't two esters now while palestinian christians are being bombed and murdered by israel and yet the christian zionists over here are seemingly just they're mute on it so i would like to get your damn that and and and they're the influence of christian zionism on this foreign policy oh man this is such an important topic isn't it again i i'm i'm gonna express great

[30:23] frustration with my former colleagues at at liberty university i mean these are genuinely good people i i enjoy their company i i like hanging out with them we may disagree on the issues but they're good people in their hearts and they are wrong wrong wrong about this issue on the one hand they're they're ignorant about middle eastern christian communities they just simply don't know on the other hand they are biased against original christians

[30:55] you know the orthodox and catholic faiths the the faiths that came out of the apostles i'm not criticizing anybody's faith you you can have any faith you want but for sure if your faith was founded in in you know somebody's basement in 1879 i'm sorry that just doesn't cut it for me and so you can't just you can't just make up this this analysis of the bible of scripture and conclude that nobody matters in the middle east except the jews because all of the jews have

[31:31] to return so christ can come back and we can all go to heaven with what they call the rapture which is never mentioned anywhere in the bible by the way and so they're blind they're blind to political realities i was like you know i said to one of me other day who's a good guy a really good guy and a loving father and grandfather and just a real sweetheart of a person i was like but how can you advocate for what is literally the definition the legal definition of genocide he said

[32:07] well you know we have to remove all of the palestinians from gaza that has to be the first step and then we remove all the rest of them from from the west bank and then the jews can have more places to resettle i'm like are you out of your mind that's literally the definition of genocide it never even occurred to him it's well you know christ commands us actually no he does not he commands us to love our neighbors as as we love ourselves so you know i don't know what you guys are doing advocating for f-35s and and missiles and armor piercing you know anti-tank

[32:44] rounds and depleted uranium all to be used against civilians how is that christian yeah excellent points john and you know we have sank our teeth into the israel conversation here a bit and i still have one last question but i kind of did want to shift to your time at the cia but i do feel like this this question here has some overlap so on the dandy jones podcast you're speaking about israel's influence over the us and you said israel is not a close trusted

[33:14] friend of the us in any way and you mentioned that on your very first day at the agency back in 1990 you had a briefing and were told that there were 189 undeclared israeli intelligence officers spread all over america trying to steal our defense secrets but the us couldn't expel them because they were israeli and it just wasn't worth the disruption politically or with foreign affairs to remove these individuals because of the blowback of consequences that it would create but with that said is there any other thoughts or stories that you could share with us to

[33:45] help illustrate this incestuous relationship between the us and israel over the past three decades sure you know what there was one that that i mentioned to julian dory on his podcast that seems to have taken on a life of its own in the podcast that you're talking about with dandy jones i said that in my very first briefing as a brand new junior cia analyst i briefed the israeli embassy mosad and shin bett representatives there were eight of us there that day and because

[34:17] i was the most junior analyst i went last and because i was an overt cia employee at the time not covert i used my real name so i sat down to give the briefing i everybody went in front of me and then i said my name is john kiriyaku and i'm here to brief you on saddam hussein's state of mind and the shin bett guy with his glasses down at the tip of his nose asked me to spell my name so i spelled it for him and then he says to me in front of everybody

[34:49] he says you are jewish and i pointed at him and i said i am not recruitable don't even think about it but that's how bold they are now a story another story that i would tell you along the same lines is when i was transferred to Bahrain as as part of this it's a state department analyst overseas position a colleague of mine and his wife i literally sat next to him at cia a colleague and his wife were transferred to jerusalem now they were both declared to the israeli

[35:23] services so no secrets they're not doing anything against the israelis the wife is going to work on palestinian political issues and the husband's going to go to language training at the university no big deal so they arrive in in in televieve and the station chief takes them to be introduced to the mosad chief and he said not these are my officers the one is taking a two-year sabbatical to go to the university the other one is declared to you and she's going to be doing political work on palestinians in in the embassy or in the consulate in jerusalem

[35:57] so everybody's on the up and up well the ambassador threw a party for them and they went to the party and when they came back all of their living room furniture had been rearranged and they were like great okay we get it we get it you can break into our house anytime you want there's nothing we can do okay so they reported it well at christmas that same year they were invited to the ambassador's christmas party as everybody is and when they got to back to the house somebody or multiple people had taken shits in all of their toilets well they always

[36:35] give us houses that are too big for us because you have to entertain a lot so they had like three or four bathrooms people had taken shits in all their bathrooms and left it in there it's just not cool now why are you doing that right but what do you hope to gain except to piss us off and make us hate you even more than we hate you right now then at the end of their two-year tour the ambassador had a going away party for them so they went to televieve had the big party they got back to the house their dog was whimpering under the dining room table somebody had cut its

[37:07] tail off and then wrapped the tail in in gauze and medical tape now why would they do something like that we're supposed to have this special relationship with the israelis they're such good friends so why the constant harassment why are they constantly trying to recruit us you know i was on the pierce morgan show the other day and i was debating allen dirshowitz and and an israeli general who used to be the head of mosad and pierce asked me if i thought jeffrey

[37:38] epstein was a mosad agent and i said absolutely yes i believe he was an israeli access agent and then as dirshowitz is constantly interrupting me and i have to raise my voice to get my point out i explained why i thought he was an israeli access agent and dirshowitz stupidly said well i was his attorney and if he had been an israeli agent i could have gotten him a better deal from the justice department and i said are you kidding yeah i'm kidding executed for espionage and i

[38:12] said but if i knew about jeffrey epstein then what i knew now i would have targeted him on my very first day at the cia and then pierce said does the israeli mosad recruit americans and he said oh no no no not since jonathan pollard we got burned and we never did it again and i said well jonathan pollard was in 1984 and in january of 1990 the director of security for the cia told us that the fbi

[38:46] had identified 189 unilateral israeli spies all across america trying to steal defense secrets so one of us is grossly misinformed or lying and it's not me right and boy those examples you gave really does kind of show the demented kind of deceptive flex i guess by the real powerplay yeah powerplay exactly and i actually watched that pierce morgan interview that you did i thought you did great i was getting a little frustrated with dirshowitz as well interrupting you but i felt like you held

[39:22] the line and you made some great points as i mentioned there though i do want to shift to some of your time in the cia and i know we already talked about nixon a little bit and guess question regarding the the drug war this also stems from another antidote from an interview i watched with you jon because there's a lot of viral interviews with you going around the internet yeah i guess they're all i have one of you all a lot but yeah well you're well the knowledge man you got it you got a lot of information to share so obviously i won't get it into the cia's role too much with 9 11 even though we do know in 2023 that declassified

[39:55] wantonimo court filings found that two of the 9 11 hijackers were closely monitored by the cia and even could have been recruited by langley but i heard you speak on the strategic research podcast about how when you went to afghanistan to do a study on heroin poppy crops i mean you mentioned on the show that i as far as i could see and i guess it's lashkar lashkar gah lashkar gah the capital of helman province yeah it was just full of poppy fields like as far as you could see and you

[40:26] talked to a poppy farmer and uh he basically said he was claiming that he was given permission for the americans in 2001 to grow all the poppies he wanted and apparently around that same time he was sharing this information with you your military handler wanted you out of there like he said that there was some trouble coming and you guys had to flee the scene and then i guess later on you got a tip from someone else that there was a secret dea facility that you went to visit and when you got there you were basically told that you were in over your head and that very

[40:56] powerful forces wanted that poppy cultivated we are now this theory has been floated around for as long as i've been doing this work but any clarity or insight would be appreciated because you know everything that we've seen after decades with the devastation of the drugs have caused in american cities and the decades long destructive failure that is the drug war do you believe that what you witness represented an intersection of the drug war and the war on drugs and more specifically do you think the war on terror wasn't just about like the geopolitical

[41:27] dominance but also just to control the global narcotics flow as a tool of power because when you think about that like those implications are pretty deep and it's pretty damn disturbing how much larger of an agenda that be pointing to right oh yeah yeah you know i i frequently find myself guilty of wanting to believe in my government i i i think and i hope you know what i mean what you're talking about is something that i have

[41:59] thought about for years in in 20 i guess it was 2011 i was the senior investigator at the senate foreign relations committee and i went to afghanistan to do this study on the heroin poppy crop and i went i took a helicopter to lashkar ghar and and to kandahar but in lashkar ghar like you say it's miles and miles of nothing but poppy you know it reminds me of the first time i ever went to north dakota where i drove for six hours and for six consecutive hours

[42:34] i didn't see another car and all i saw was a never-ending field of sunflowers it was the same thing it all you see is poppy and then when i went into the fields to talk to a poppy farmer and an actual poppy farmer he told me that quote unquote the americans told him in in 2001 that if he told them where the arabes were hiding that he could grow all the poppy he wanted now remember the year before the september 11 attacks

[43:10] literally no poppy was can was cultivated in afghanistan that is a post 9 11 crop that is a post-us occupation crop and i said i see what americans told you you could grow poppy and immediately my military handler said we're under threat meetings over and physically pulled me back to the jeep and we drove back to the prt and then flew to toboggan but that's not even the more the most interesting part of the story the most interesting part of the story was and you alluded to it

[43:41] when i i went out to this secret dea facility to talk to my my two dea contacts out there i was telling them all this and one of them said you know you're never going to get this paper published right and i said why and he said because afghanistan produces 93 percent of the world's heroin and all of that heroin goes to iran and russia and we want them to be addicted to heroin it weakens their societies and we want their societies to be weak and i said my god that's

[44:14] terrible well the reason i think about it all the time is because here we are all these years later and we are beside ourselves with this influx of fentanyl it's coming from china it's coming from china through mexico it's coming from china through canada across the border why because the chinese want us to be addicted to fentanyl it makes our society weaker and you see when you play with fire you're likely to get burned this is one of those conversations or it's

[44:48] one of those topics rather that i have you know it's been a considerable amount of time looking into and it's it's just so it's so pervasive and which obviously you know i'm speaking to the choir here you know because i'm sure you're you're quite aware but you know so we we've seen just post 9 11 you know like right as as the war begins this huge boom of heroin all throughout the united states along coinciding with the production of poppy

[45:20] and the exact same thing for for people that have studied military history the exact same thing happened just after obviously the Gulf of Tonkin Falls flag and then the the the the invasion of vietnam and the proliferation of the golden triangle in in lousy cambodia which was at that point the world hard drugs super highway i mean it is what's right most of the heroin in the world came from we have reports obviously from gary webb talking about how you know

[45:52] iran contra and you know the production of cocaine central america and you know all all of these sorts of things and it it really leads to this it paints this very destructive picture of things that our government has done and it's one thing and this is the point of my question here i sort of want to get you to elucidate a little of a little bit more upon this for a lot of people that

[46:22] don't know or don't remember if they haven't studied like late clinton era us foreign policy and even early bush era in 2000 prior to september 2001 the united states was working closely with the taliban on anti-drug policies a lot of people don't remember that yeah it immediately flipped post 9 11 so i'd like to get to expand upon that a little yeah that's absolutely right you know we we could sit here and talk all night about how

[46:55] the taliban are the worst thing that that you know humanity has ever produced but there's there's one fact about the taliban that we have to admire and that's that they were absolutely positively anti-drug they wanted specifically afghan farmers to to cultivate crops that had two separate growing seasons like like onions or tomatoes or peppers or pomegranates for example you can you can cultivate them twice and until the early 1990s afghanistan believe it or not was

[47:32] a net food exporter it exported most of its most of what it grew to to bachstan as well as to iran and to jikistan and it was bekistan and a couple of other places they were a net food exporter and then they converted everything to poppy as soon as the americans took over it's it's inexcusable yeah i can't i can't even think of a of a reason you know for for a culture society to do something like that because god knows that the money didn't trickle down to the afghan

[48:03] people you know they still had no electricity and their children had no shoes and and they were no longer a food exporter but an almost total food importer because all of their cultivable is that the word land was being used for poppy you know and when you're when you're flying over afghanistan especially if you're flying in a helicopter so you're low enough to see most of the country is just this really dull gray it's it's just it's just dust and rock

[48:36] but then there are these very narrow veins of green as poppy is hugging either streams or underground water sources that's how precious water is there's almost no water in afghanistan and what little water they have they're using to grow poppy and so i'd like to get your take really quick so obviously we know that you know the the integration of the war on terror and the

[49:07] war on drugs and and the way that our government has very clearly tacitly played a hand in the production of you know heroin and cocaine and all all of these sorts of things you know and it's crazy to even sit here and say but i mean you know the the war in afghanistan has been going on for 20 years now i mean more than that and even the intervention in afghanistan long before that obviously there were coups and then you know involvement in the you know the 70s and the 80s and things of that nature of course operation cyclone with obl being a cia asset

[49:43] and all these sorts of things but with the current conflicts going on what in your opinion is sort of like the modern equivalent of that because obviously we have things happening with the ukraine russia proxy war you know all this stuff with taiwan and then even you know trump's threats of of you know going into mexico or some republicans talking about potentially bombing cartels which of course again to my previous point we know that the cartels have been propped up by the cia you know we know guys like el chapo guzman his son literally

[50:17] was like yeah my dad worked for the cia yeah you know and so you know what what what's what's your take on you know the some of the current conflicts and how they play into this broader spectrum of of you know these two inner intertwining topics oh yeah man where do you even begin you know i say all the time that the netflix series narcos one of the reasons why i loved that series so much it was about of course well season one was about the killing of was about popular eskibar the second season was about the cali cartel and then you know in in each of

[50:52] the seasons just as the dea guys are ready to pounce and to grab the the leader of the cartel and take the whole thing apart the cia guy steps in and just completely kills the operation and the reason why i love that so much is because it's absolutely true it's true because the cia didn't give a shit about drugs we know that because of gary webb or thanks to gary webb for example but we we also know it because of the declassification of first person

[51:25] cia documents the cia was obsessed with communism they didn't care about drugs and so if the government is seeking to fight against the the communists in medellin and and cali and the cartels are willing to help the cia in that fight then the cia is going to ally itself with the cartels which means making sure that the cartels are well armed and well stocked and the dea was

[51:57] nothing more than a nuisance sad but true yeah man certainly and it looks like we're uh we're wrapping out of time here i don't know if anybody jason or don wants to has another question but if not i have i have a question i'd like to ask i don't know if you're familiar with our format of our podcast but we always like to end on a positive note sometimes these uh these discussions yeah yeah sometimes these discussions can go down rabbit holes that seem kind of bleak and and and you know but there's always solutions and that's what we that's what we focused on at the free thought project that's right that's yeah so john like man thank you so much for joining us today

[52:33] you know your your courage and continued dedication to truth and accountability are they're pretty fucking inspiring man and like truth is often treated like a liability and you know whistleblowers are punished as we've seen so often they like yourself instead of praised and that sucks that we live in a society like that man but you know it's easy to become cynical on this line of work you know especially like this turn on the tv and you see like intelligence officials openly calling for censorship right or or government agencies patting themselves in

[53:03] the back for the transparency that they promote while actively prosecuting people like you right who actually provide transparency so i guess my question is this you know so despite everything like the risks the betrayals the political theater what gives you hope right now do you see a new generation of whistleblowers or independent journalists who might finally like turn the tide or do you see the tide turning at all and after what you've endured all those months you spent prison for doing what you do or doing what you did do you still believe that truth is worth the

[53:35] cost oh my gosh yes that's that's that's a hard yes definitely forgive me if i'm if i'm preaching but you know there's a legal definition of whistleblowing it's bringing to light any evidence of waste fraud abuse illegality or threats to the public health or public safety it really is that simple and so thanks to people like tom drake and and ed snowden and daniel ellsberg who passed away two years ago they're they're the people who inspired and who continue to inspire me i i'm very

[54:13] very proud to have played a role in passage of the mccain feinstein amendment thanks to thanks to john mccain he knew what i did and why i did it and said that there wouldn't have been a mccain feinstein amendment had i not said something his words were had i not told the american people what the government was doing in their name and so you know sometimes the price can be high but i saw that as a test and you know you have to think about it hard and you have

[54:47] to be able to look your kids in the eye and be able to sleep at night and be able to be proud of yourself and so i'd do it again i wouldn't do anything differently except maybe hire a lawyer a little bit earlier but but i would strongly encourage people to to seek the truth and you mentioned a second ago alternative journalists man first of all what would we do without john whitehead number one i can't tell you i can't tell you know i'm i i read government of thieves

[55:22] twice in prison and just continued to be inspired by it i think he's a giant and then you have people like max blumenthal or ken clippenstein or oh my god there's so many i almost have trouble naming them alexander mercoris there are so many with with the new media now with with traditional media failing and not being able to support itself even with paywalls i think more and more americans are

[55:52] going to turn to alternative journalism people used to laugh at me when i said that i got 75 percent of my news from twitter well now i get closer to a hundred percent of my news from twitter and i like to think i'm one of the best informed people out there and i'm not getting it from the likes of of cnn and fox and the washington post i'm getting it out i'm getting it from people who are not in journalism for the money they're in journalism for the truth and i think we should all do that here here man well green you know john you mentioned edward snowden there and i

[56:26] actually just learned today that edward snowden was inspired by you to actually blow the whistle so uh you're no slouch yourself and and big credit for that he's a sweetheart you know he he went public when i was in prison and one of the other prisoners woke me up at two o'clock in the morning to say there's this whistleblower out there they're not sure who he is but he came out with this incredible information and then a few days later but his name was finally made public well his dad came to visit me at prison and and i said i'm gonna write an open letter to ed

[57:03] but would you carry a private message back to him and so i gave him the best advice that i could based on you know my own whistleblowing and the mistakes that i had made in my whistleblowing and and we've been friends ever since that's awesome man hey free thinkers this is matt agarist and i'm gonna take a quick pause to remind you of something really important first off apologies for the interruption but if you're still here that means you're resonating with what we're doing and we need your help to keep it alive independent platforms like ours don't survive on corporate

[57:34] sponsorships or mainstream media funding we survive because of you if you're finding value in these unfiltered conversations and real solutions the best way to support us is by liking subscribing and sharing this podcast with your friends and fellow free thinkers it's a small act but it's a powerful one it helps us break through the censorship and algorithms designed to silence voices like ours this isn't just about supporting a podcast it's about standing for freedom exposing corruption and building a movement that inspires real change and if you want to go

[58:07] beyond liking and sharing we'd love for you to become a member of the free thought project just head over to the free thought project dot com and click on the tftp membership link at the top of the page as a member you'll be directly supporting our mission and helping us to stay independent your support is what keeps this platform alive and fighting so thank you for being part of this journey for sharing these ideas and for standing with us look before we go can you tell our listeners what you're working on right now where they can support you

[58:37] or you know how they can uh follow your work oh thank you very much for that everything i do i put on sub-stack it's just under john kiriyaku or loud and clear with john kiriyaku i think is what i what i called it and i do two podcasts right now i have deep focus with john kiriyaku on youtube and then i do one with ted ral a couple times a week called deep program and yeah books and articles and i write at consortium news and covered action magazine and reason magazine and a couple of other places but i put it all on on sub-stack and i also have an online tv show called

[59:13] cia declassified where we take declassified cia documents to explain major historical world events and that's at unified television unifyd well you sound extremely busy so i want to tell you once again thank you for taking the time out of this extremely busy schedule that you seem to have and uh and coming on my project podcast man it was awesome thanks so much oh i really do appreciate the invitation thanks for having me oh yeah thank you john thanks john thank you thank you for listening

[59:51] to the free thought project podcast and please don't forget to rate review and subscribe free minds free people
