Title: Ellsberg, Kiriakou & Rowley: Hail to the Whistleblower
Show: Live on the Fly (Randy Credico)
Date: 2021-11-27
URL: https://youtu.be/P7VpWZaer3I
Duration: 72:00

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[00:00] the vietnam war and the push for u.s involvement was a result of the gulf of tompkin incident a lie the iraq war famously is a result of lies wars in somalia are a result of lies the second world war and the german invasion of poland was a result of carefully constructed lies

[00:35] that is war by media let us ask ourselves of the complicit media which is the majority of the mainstream press what is the average death count attributed to each journalist

[01:23] that was uh julian assange at the very top at an anti-war speech in 2010 in london and of course um anton karis from the third man the theme song i'm randy critical to surrender critical live on the fly with a special assange countdown to freedom uh which will be played on various uh channels and you know websites and radio stations so we're not going to identify them right here

[01:55] except for to say uh we have a very special show today as we go into the holidays this is actually uh being recorded on the anniversary of the assassination of john f kennedy which i just now realized uh but we have uh and we're going to have ladies first we have uh we're introducing wise uh colleen rally who's been on this show several times she is a whistleblower former fbi special agent and a council and she's a recipient of the prestigious sam adams award uh john keriaku

[02:35] whose books he's written about 10 books also a whistleblower a recipient i think craig murray gave him the award in 2016. uh the sam adams award and uh john is uh going off to germany uh to present a book about whistleblowers and um certainly last but not least uh someone that we all admire and respect and and and you know he he daniel ellsberg has been so gracious

[03:08] and so generous with his time uh but there was a five year lapse where i was afraid to ask him because i know how busy he is uh to do this show i've done about 200 assange shows uh but uh he's joining us again from uh berkeley california and john let's start off because we're kind of free forming this how important is daniel ellsberg in this movement to uh free assange

[03:38] i i don't want to embarrass dan of course uh but i'll repeat what i've said publicly um dan is the godfather of modern day national security whistleblowing if dan hadn't done what he did with the pentagon papers none of us would have been able to do what we did later and the parallels between what dan did so long ago now 50 years ago and what julian

[04:10] did are striking listen julian's a smart guy uh julian knows history he's studied history he knew about dan and dan's uh heroic actions uh by releasing the pentagon papers i i know that dan was uh was a source of inspiration for julian just like he was a source of inspiration for all the rest of us i i'm i i'm honored to know him you know i still i still name drop dad with my friends

[04:44] hit like i know dan ellsberg and i consider him to be a friend you know i can't i still can't believe that i'm friends with dan ellsberg it means so much to me and uh and people people understand that they realize that because now they have a real appreciation for what he did dan knew what the consequences were and he did it anyway because it was the right thing to do and that has inspired so many more people to do the right thing the least of which is certainly

[05:19] not uh julian assange uh colleen as well uh you've known dance as you guys are friends um has you been an inspiration to a lot of people including yourself well yes of course um the one thing that i i find very unusual unsadly unusual about daniel ellsberg is he's a survivor you know whistleblowing is such a a traumatic and risky and uh in some way soul you know wrenching situation

[05:52] especially if you lose even your your own family and friends etc that you know he's one of the very few um who not only survived that experience and and actually was able to turn it into something good and use it but also he's the duracell battery yeah and he's he's never looked back and it's just been straight forward i think julian assange you know it's it's so difficult for him now in prison

[06:24] this way um but i think he has similar strength of character as daniel ellsberg and um and and maybe you know we could even say people like mandela you know who actually did go through that kind of a prison experience and were able to come out of it and and uh so i mean we have to cross our fingers right now but obviously this is what we're aiming for we're aiming for surviving truth-telling and then continuing on and it's never been so difficult as it is in the present time

[06:59] well dan let me ask you this uh you've inspired so many whistleblowers uh ed snowden john uh colleen julian who inspired you when you went forward i know uh there was an anti-war activist who has the same name randy keller i believe that that inspired you to go forward but what prior to that was it that subconsciously drove you to actually do it listen let me uh back off there

[07:31] for one moment because i didn't expect and that's not clear to me why we're starting this off with such a gratifying praise for my friends here but the funny thing is as i'm looking at this screen i'm looking at two people that i was talking about this morning i had a two hour zoom meeting with a class at umass amherst uh by run by professor chris appy in the course of that i had time enough to talk about heroes of mine here but i uh in two two contexts one that the example that

[08:09] the question arises as to when you should not only be a whistleblower but when you it is is simply wrong to uh prosecute a whistleblower the most obvious case would be when you're revealing criminality and the idea that you can be prosecuted for colleen is the lawyer here but the idea that you can be prosecuted for revealing crime by the government is something deeply wrong with that system well i was saying nothing in the world pretty much is as illegal as criminal

[08:45] as torture as i understand it uh it's known as juice or use colgans which is uh closely non-derogatory uh non-derivable uh criminality in the sense that no parliament no executive branch no court can make it legal uh it's uh like piracy or a few other things that are odd historic things that come in there but torture cannot be made legal and then you can argue about what is torture

[09:17] but then there's lots of things that are really beyond argument and that's what the us was doing uh in this case i said how many people hundreds at least a thousand more john would know better were aware that what we were doing was criminal not only in international law but in our constitution and in domestic law that there was no way to make it legal and of all the hundreds of people who knew that we were doing that one to my knowledge went to prison and that was the one who revealed

[09:50] inadvertently or otherwise revealed the name of a torturer a covert actor uh as i understand it he was not aware that the person's status at that time was still protected but anyway he was charged with with doing that and went to prison having in fact revealed somebody in the torture program and having earlier described the waterboarding as torture uh for which i think the cia will never forgive him as he probably says just as they will never forgive snowden they will never forgive

[10:23] chelsea manning for revealing that we were turning people over to torture under obama knowing there was for torture which is as illegal as doing the torture ourselves and uh so she spent seven and a half years in prison so anyway i was describing john in those terms as uh having been dealt with very very badly by his country and by his former agency but in general constitutionally by the president by everybody and uh in a way that should not happen in this country

[10:57] but i was also mentioning colleen as he's uh who is that i said the word fissile whistleblower was pretty much legitimized for the first time by a time cover with persons of the year that was not me whistleblowers colleen rowley's face on that cover and right here just yeah oh really okay well just between us uh not to not to derogatory anyway the two other women who were there very technically as i read their account for enron i think another one i'm not

[11:30] sure i would call them whistleblowers they were truth tellers but correct me if i'm wrong colleen my understanding is that they told the truth to their bosses and not to outside the agency uh the corporation which uh about which was giving incriminating information again tell me if i'm wrong but i think the other two who acted admirably within their organization did not take the step of risking their careers being ostracized being possibly even prosecuted

[12:03] by going outside that organization to hold it accountably and colleen did do that and uh and as i understand it not not to go into it too much i think she experienced the kind of not entirely but ostracism within her own organization the fbi that every truth-teller who is revealing uh wrongdoing by her or his own group is risking ostracism and most people will not take that risk

[12:34] so uh again as i say i'm looking at two people who very much do exemplify i would say the best in america the possibility of american citizenship which is too little observed john do you want to say something thank you for that dan um that that means a lot to me you know one of the things that dan uh taught me uh early on was that uh there's a greater good uh

[13:06] there's a greater good with whistleblowing uh one of the things that i learned from a recent study on whistleblowers is that there that whistleblowers have a much more highly defined sense of right and wrong than the general population this is something borne out in psychological uh studies and so when a whistleblower is considering blowing the whistle on waste fraud abuse or illegality or threats to the public health or public safety

[13:39] um he or she takes into consideration that that greater good and um you know eventually history is going to catch up with the issue and with everybody else uh you may be vilified the way dan was vilified the way julian assange is being vilified right now but eventually the rest of the world will catch up we've seen this happen throughout history and uh i think that's one of the reasons why

[14:11] julian has been so steadfast in in his belief that he did the right thing god knows the cost has been high we see what the poor man is is undergoing uh nils melser has said repeatedly nils mills are the the un special rapporteur on torture has said repeatedly that what julian has been uh experiencing is a form of torture we all know that that the way the united states practices solitary confinement is a form of torture we know that these cmus these

[14:46] communications management units that we have in our in our medium and maximum security prisons is a form of of torture but uh the government doesn't yet have an appreciation for the fact that that none of that matters julian is tougher than everybody gives him credit for being just like dan was tougher than everybody gave him credit for being you know dan stood up to

[15:17] a president arguably one of the the most powerful and corrupt presidents in modern american history julian has stood up to what three different presidents so far so there's this odd way that people have a tendency to underestimate our resolve and they do that i think randy at their own peril colleen uh jump in there i'll fly on the wall on this one

[15:50] well you know i think in any whistleblowers uh trajectory if you want to call it that from start to finish a lot a lot of times it begins with a certain amount of naivety where people are honestly believe so much in that there is right and wrong and that they it's really hard to believe that you can be in these situations like orwell you know i think orwell has a quote where you become a traitor telling the truth in an empire of lies

[16:24] and i mean that's really really i think um a telling thing right now in the empire of lies and you're a traitor to tell the truth but you know it's hard to think that at the start you don't think that um just outing torture for heaven's sakes you know everybody would think okay if you're torturing that's right you know very wrong and you can't believe that you can be the one that's later smeared for the being the one who told the truth about torture or other war crimes

[16:55] it's hard to believe that you know i know we're going to talk a little bit about the assange case and a little bit about the fbi's informant yes we're gonna do that in the second half here i'm just gonna jump a little bit ahead because one of the things that you know as the trajectory goes on long before 9 11 and all of this started a long before that towards the really you know after a lot of years in the fbi i started to see oh my gosh look what the what they're doing with

[17:26] these informants they're operating murderers in some cases you know and again you don't think that you think okay everybody's going to want to stop this as soon as we know that the fbi's operating murderers that will end because nobody will be for that and that's where again this kind of at this trajectory the scales come off your eyes and that's a real sad experience to find out that people are so easily misled on knowing right from wrong going back to what you

[18:00] said it's really a depressing thing to see how many other people can't stick to principles and can't stick to you know what's right and what's wrong in really horrible situations like an empire of lies which is where which is orwell's term but i think it's very fitting yes we're talking with colleen riley uh john kayaku and mr daniel ellsberg dan always say call you call your dan dan um i'm going to ask everybody a stupid question i'll start with you dan does anybody have any

[18:34] regrets for coming forward dan i haven't met a whistleblower and i've sought out many of them uh including both of you i've sought them out because they identify with them so much and i know what they've gone through i've been through that same trajectory which remember always is for us a trajectory because we got access to that information by having been loyal experience of the cause of the organization up till then or we wouldn't have gotten that access and

[19:06] so then as colleen says the scales fall from your eyes at some point they fall from a lot more eyes than people those of people who who know what's uh who actually speak out because it's one thing not to know it as i've learned and we've all seen in the last year especially anyone can believe anything and anyone can deny anything practically i mean look at what we're seeing in the country it's rather uh staggering to some extent but we all of us started we all started out believing

[19:43] and a number of other people with us i'm sure uh at least in the cases i know snowden for example know that other colleagues knew just as much just as well as because snowden's colleagues said this is wrong you know we're listening to everyone everything and this is wrong but what would they do about it and as is always the case i have children in college i have a mortgage on my house right we're all settled here in this community i just can't afford to break with all of that

[20:17] and that's understandable to a larger extent and the price generally is high i am one of the few as i think referred to lucky one but i am one of the few who in effect got away with it by virtually a miracle of uh you know convergence of circumstances that led to revelation of criminality by the president which actually led to dismissal of my case but very unusual nixon wanted to put me in prison for 115 years but didn't get it assange is facing 175 years

[20:56] which would come to much the same thing if they got us in but he is in prison now being held at this point snowden permanent exile john was a 30 month something like that in prison time and chelsea manning seven and a half years uh daniel hale right now uh 45 months ritter is at it i was referring to him this morning to these students

[21:27] the students today don't know his predecessor it's crazy enough i i'm you know his predecessor is nathan hale and it turned out i asked for how many people in that class knew the name i grew up with it of course and they don't uh but i think of myself and i have said this was his nathan hill uh daniel hill's actual ancestor and uh he was the first person prosecuted for giving information to americans true information on the second it turns out i am

[22:02] proud of that uh that heritage here he was hanged by the british for being a spy for washington and for a country that didn't actually yet exist you know in a recognized form what he was famous for as well as you and we know saying as he was about to be hanged i regret that i have but one life to give for my country and what country was that that colin was saying

[22:32] it was a country founded by traders like nathan hale and washington and every signer of the declaration of independence who are all liable like nathan failed to be hanged as traitors and several of them were traitors to george iii who of whom may have been loyal subjects just two years earlier or three years earlier and they found a new loyalty to a country that let's put it this way that doesn't have an official secrets act officially that doesn't make

[23:07] a traitor of someone who criticizes the leader the monarch the government that's that's our country supposedly so um uh it would be good if they know this this history more i you asked me randy who inspired me and i was thinking as i heard these wonderful tributes when when john was was saying we are inspired by i was looking i said i've never heard from colleen that she had me in mind and i i don't know it yet exactly either

[23:42] i was told by a biographer of julian that he had been inspired by me and i said how could that be i happen to know when he was born it was a week when he was born a week after my wife and i had spent 13 days eluding the fbi uh successfully by the way uh i don't know how how how you feel about that kali about your organization but at one point having eluded them for 13 days i asked my lawyer lyndon boudin what is the fbi actually good at

[24:20] and he said taking surrenders uh which which i did after 13 days but the point was that um julian had been born just after that so how could i have inspired him and the biographer said his mother was an anti-vietnam war activist in australia and she in australia had uh had told him stories of the anti-war movement in this country including my name so that was very gratifying

[24:52] to hear that it had been like that in my case um there was in addition to randy keeler who was uh as i've often told the story uh announced that he was going to prison and that struck me very very hard because i hadn't known he was on his way to prison but uh and and confronted me with the question all right what can i do to help in this war now that i'm ready to go to prison like him but just two days earlier another young man named bob eaton was being sentenced for draft resistance

[25:30] on craft resistance and i had stood in a vigil line uh at this conference uh and and i think john and and colleen will appreciate at that conference of the war resistors thing i was reluctant to go to that vigil because i was still working at rand and i thought if my picture is is in front of the philadelphia courthouse here uh standing in a line it not only people will think i've gone mad they will what a man who had access to these higher-ups you know and could give them advice

[26:05] is what could be less dignified than standing on a hot afternoon in front of the courthouse handing out leaflets but the change that made in my life was well i was about to say i didn't really want to go to that but i thought of saying that i was sick something and then i thought well the conference is still going on they'll see that i'm not sick so i had to go and uh then i found in the course of it that i wasn't made of sugar after all i wasn't dissolving at

[26:35] this indignity and i started handing out leaflets to people in the courts and that actually changed my life that was before randy getaway because it was like when you said when you step over a line in the recruiting office and that the marines that i had done uh you step over the line and for the rest of your career you're told you stepped over that line you know don't complain whatever happens you volunteer well in standing in a vigil for bob eaton i was stepping over a line i

[27:08] was joining a movement actively and that was a critical moment before that i had been reading for the last year or two because of a young woman that i met who was a ghandian and it introduced me to uh workshop gandhi barbara deming uh revolution and equilibrium joan bondurant conquest of violence and analysis of ghandian and in particular of martin luther king's stride toward freedom in particular where he tells about how he with some misgivings joined the boycott uh in

[27:43] connection with the buses in connection with rosa parks and why was he reluctant because boycott was something used by the white citizens councils and uh against to boycott anybody who integrated who allowed blacks to be in the restaurant he said can i use the same tactic here you know the thing and then he thought he remembered what gandhi had said in others that to be silent in the face of evil was to participate in it and that he had to put his body on the line there and tell the

[28:18] truth even when it did lead to great ostracism and by the way when he came out against the war in 1967 a year before he was killed or due to the day before he was killed sorry let me turn that out it's my wife um he he was ostracized almost every paper in the country denounced him for having hurt his standing with the civil rights movement by taking on this controversial controversial subject but as he said i feel an obligation to do it he said there comes

[28:54] a time when silence is culpability complicity and thank you dan we have to take a quick break here uh and for those listening in new york city uh you can hear all of this on assange countdown to freedom or next monday on a different network we'll be right back after a quick musical break

[29:33] do okay i'm randy critical random critical live on the fly here uh here on the um progressive radio network and uh on assange countdown to freedom speaking to three special very special individuals john kiriakou uh former cia intern whistleblower

[30:06] uh colleen rally former fbi special agent turned whistleblower truth teller and of course the um what can you say daniel ellsberg the great uh daniel ellsberg we are talking uh we're going to continue talking about now the assange case and by the way i want to ask you um this colleen when dan was around and maybe he'll get to this as well there was a lot more support for daniel

[30:37] ellsberg when he came out and by the way jillian's birthday is july 3rd 1971. his mother is colleen uh colleen uh no it's a christine assange she's been on the show three or four times as well and she was an anti-war demonstrator but let me ask you colleen why is it that julian doesn't have the massive support that daniel ellsberg had back in 1970 in this country um i've actually written an article about this and even though that was written uh five or six years ago

[31:12] it's entitled recipe concocted for perpetual war and i could not get it published in a mainstream paper i sent it to 15 different papers and eventually i it i put it on or it got put on consortium news and the difference between i tried to explain the difference between the vietnam war and the current post-9 11 wars perpetual wars and how they the the uh the ruling elite came up with a recipe that makes it nearly impossible for anyone to oppose it in the united states

[31:49] obviously people around the world oppose u.s wars but here in the united states we have very little of the peace movement that grew during vietnam so in vietnam it was just the opposite there was very low opposition initially but then the opposition grew and then it really grew after the pentagon papers look at what's happened here after the post-9 11 wars even with the afghan papers being published which were very very telling and before that with the wikileaks

[32:20] uh documents being published uh essentially support for war maybe little differences in what places to to to drop the bombs on now we want to go to war with russia and china and you know we're we're tired of afghanistan and iraq the middle east but now we've switched even bigger prize but do you you never see on the mainstream news you don't see anything like the cronkite moment where somebody says even after the really bad uh ending of the afghanistan war there should have been a

[32:54] cronkite moment there should have been uh a time where people said this this is very stupid what the heck are we doing let's look at this and never do it again well i'm in a group with danny shawson and some veterans that try to do this but again we can't even get published or if we do get published it just doesn't even make a difference so i think it is the fact that they came up with this recipe for perpetual war and it's really hard to dislodge this and of course now it's really hard to be a

[33:26] whistleblower because it's it's it's unlike even during vietnam where there was a peace movement what do we have left now we have a handful of people in church basements singing kumbaya there's hardly anyone who really is against war and the media the mainstream media sold out bought out you know whatever even progressive uh i hate to say this but even some progressive things they go for humanitarian war as long as you can say it's for human rights and democracy

[33:59] they're all for it too and and again i'm i'm very cynical about this fact right now that we we fell for this recipe for perpetual war and here in the united states it's just very difficult to be a whistleblower john yeah let me ask you you uh you know way back 10 years ago uh you came out there wasn't a massive movement in support of john kereyaku as well so i mean is there is there a feeling of loneliness oh boy isolation and hopelessness i i would

[34:37] i would defy you to to name one whistleblower who hasn't considered suicide uh in in his or her darkest days after going public and realizing just how little public support there is out there oh yeah and you know it's funny too because um after i made my my revelations i got so many death threats that i actually had to had to leave the country for for a

[35:11] couple of weeks my wife and i uh took our kids to mexico just you know the fbi recommended that we go on vacation somewhere that at least two of these threats were credible and uh we should just make ourselves um scarce and then i got an email from a retired deputy director of the cia saying and i'll never forget it i saved it he said you've chosen a difficult road

[35:42] but i'm glad somebody did i just wish i had had the courage to do it myself that translated into nothing for me no support at all no public support i was ostracized by my cia colleagues even if they were whispering very quietly among themselves that i had done the right thing but you know randy when the when the media is controlled by the big corporations where the big newspapers don't have an investigative reporting budget anymore so they

[36:17] rely on on press releases and friendly relations with the cia's office of public affairs or the fbi's office of public affairs and they just gist whatever those offices give them a whistleblower doesn't have a chance you don't have a chance because you don't have the same kind of access to this corporate media that the rest of them do you're on your own uh uh dan dan uh so going back to 71 i know you uh went to um you went to william fulbright and

[36:53] and you went to um another senator uh back then uh messiah george mcgovern george robert mcgovern and matthias also and then and then uh mike gravel finally read just up uh on the senate floor but but was it a lonely experience for you uh at that point in time uh did you feel the world crashing in on you that you were like in in a skateboard situation well there was a big difference there which the other here to know there was a movement there

[37:26] was an anti-war movement and it had come out of a civil rights movement and anti-house american activities a lot of people have been activists against that but then a big civil rights movement and then a big anti-war movement and i'm those weren't separate because and even the the women's liberation movement came out of that in part overlapping in part because the women got sick of being at the anywhere movement meetings and always making all the coffee and uh doing the [ __ ] work

[37:59] of various kinds of not being called on to be real decision makers and they started having women's meetings on that literally a lot of it came out of that out of resentment of the way they've been treated by us by the white male uh activists in that part but anyway you had a movement that people called it the movement they you know they emphasize one or another part of this that they come out of but to when we were finding people to give us place to stay

[38:31] when uh they're looting the fbi um for 13 days the person who was organizing that who was an asian woman who was a harvard janaki general her name just had to go to almost anybody who had long hair which in those days was is likely to be a man as a woman and you go to a young person in other words and say we have something here that might help shorten the war and it might be very dangerous legally are you willing to take part no one refused they did it so you had a very

[39:08] different situation there that's nothing like that exists today how could that be by the way and i as i was listening to you i thought of one big difference and that is that in those days 58 000 americans were in the process of being killed week by week day by day so everybody who family knew something was involved in that and that wasn't happening in afghanistan because they made that award we're all together i think only at 2400 well i say only because it's the same as

[39:41] 9 11. but over over 20 years that many died as opposed to 58 000 and the people who were dying were afghans or iraqis or sudanese you know or all over the place and the sad thing is uh that as senator goodell who was run out of the republican party in 1970 for having said to end the war he told me just before he left office dan american people don't care about

[40:18] vietnamese lives and i said charlie you might be right i hope you're not right because i think that nixon's strategy is to remove gradually american troops out of this and lower the casualties lower the cost and make it air war where you are killing vietnamese only not americans well i think that's what he did intend to do how long could he have kept that going the answer is afghanistan

[40:49] 20 years could have been longer how many vietnam how many afghans were killed americans didn't ask that question i think very few of them have ever seen an estimate of how many afghans were killed they don't care uh pilots well they're volunteers and drones no problem i'm sorry to say and i don't think it's only americans i think other members of empires i don't know of a case where there has been as much resistance as there was in vietnam or even some of these others

[41:21] but uh in terms of general acceptance of it that's the human situation we're dealing in and when you get a war like afghanistan now is john is involved with the torture campaign or something like that he didn't you didn't get the support it wasn't there yeah well i gotta tell you i was certainly moved by uh you know i was a draft age in 1973 but it was a standby draft and everyone around me

[41:52] was against the war and we came out of the civil rights movement my cousin was an sds speaker so uh that he had an influence over me and but i look at the that overall movement you had major support there julian assange right now does have very little you know it's it's the whistleblowers it's people in london is you know it's a scatter shot here and there where you see people on the street

[42:24] and you would think that this guy would have major support uh out there and if he did it would make his life a lot easier and make the prosecution's life a lot tougher and i want to talk about the prosecution in this case uh because we haven't spoken about that on this show and in particular gordon uh kromberg and uh the evidence that he has acquired uh to uh you know come up with these espionage act charges which are 17. dan you had 13 charges against you under the espionage act

[42:58] and you uh john had three i believe let's go to the groundwork where cronberg gets his information justice department uh colleen and talk about uh this guy ziggy thordenson i believe his last name is uh they're using a guy who has like it may as well be jeffrey dahmer that they got uh to be the key witness where do they get this why do they get people like that knowing what a terrible

[43:29] witness they will be uh they were grasping at straws that's the short answer they don't have any witnesses that can actually confirm any charge of the actual espionage act so they had to get this kid who's uh uh been already uh connected to sex abuse of of nine miners uh to various frauds all kinds of criminality and they had to go to this lowest level to get him to say

[44:03] make up a lie that uh assange told me to to to do some illegal hacking okay so complete lie now the fbi doesn't care for if they can make the this is the only way they can uh support those charges against the espionage act now they probably are trying to scramble right now because they don't have a witness their witness has gone completely south and when that happens typically the judge as daniel ellsberg will tell you when you have this kind of criminality

[44:37] involved in a case typically the judges dismiss the case you know and and of course there's the other thing with the spine on assange in the uh in the embassy as well i mean this this is on a terrible not only weak and thin case for the prosecution but now it's gone completely south so why this continues uh to be why biden does not go back to what the the prevailing thought was during the obama administration which is that you cannot prosecute a a member of the press without

[45:13] destroying freedom of the press for all of your mainstream press why he doesn't go back to that or come up with some excuse to dismiss the charges at this point because they don't have a case the the fbi unfortunately and siggy is not the first really bad criminal that the fbi has used to either entrap others there's a case right now in the supreme court where the informant out in orange county was told to spy on people in the mosque and the people in

[45:47] the mosque called the fbi and said there's a guy trying to provoke us into violence they they uh they actually tried to uh uh to rat out their the fbi's own informant he was so bad he was doing all kinds of terrible things and that's going to up to the supreme court right now let's hope that the supreme court can say we the fbi is not allowed to do this and of course if you also go back in history fbi operating organized crime murderers this wasn't a one-year thing they

[46:19] operate operated those with those top echelon organized crime murderers like whitey bulger and scarpa for two decades two decades and the only reason it went on was because of top secrecy and only because of a prosecutor a curious prosecutor and judge did they finally get into the files to see what was really going on the fbi does will never reveal those things they will never reveal because that you know what they're only rewarded for making cases and uh the

[46:53] case against assange is a big reward it's just like what organized crime was back in the 80s or uh or the uh communism during the 50s under j edgar hoover there's always a flavor of the day and when that's the top priority if you can make a case in that top priority your career is golden you will go right up to the top just like strzok and then others in the fbi you'll you'll rise right up and so there's a lot of incentives and as long as it's top secret until until

[47:27] siggy himself outed himself and said no i the fbi told me to you know got me to lie about this um how would anyone have ever learned and probably it would have even gone into court this way may i ask a question randy i'd like to ask uh colleen so colleen and i know of course that you're you're not an attorney in the uk but if you could give us an educated guess so here you've got this guy siggy who's a convicted pedophile and a convicted embezzler and a liar an admitted liar uh you've got uh the cia uh hiring this spanish company to

[48:08] to bug the ecuadorian embassy you've got now the leaked story that the cia and mi6 conspired to either kidnap julian or to murder him in the streets of knightsbridge judges aren't stupid right that has to play a role in whatever the the appeals court judges are discussing right now or beyond that the the british supreme court or even the european court of human rights does it not or do they or do they just keep all of that stuff out of their heads

[48:44] while they uh debate this case you know it goes back if if facts mattered if facts mattered in this orwellian world where we make our own reality unfortunately the judges right now some judges not all of them you have to cross your fingers that you know this judge could at least has a couple of uh you know conscience and some thinking points that they can go through the evidence i mean there's nothing there it's overwhelming yeah uh that how bad this case is but the judges have are

[49:19] influenced by other things and loyalty and heaven knows i mean we've had our officials threatening uh united nations officials to keep things secret and to do what they wanted and the united states does use some really terrible tactics at times and so who knows who knows what's going to happen uh but if you just cared about facts if you just cared about the facts this one this case would have been dismissed a long time ago because there's nothing there well let me ask you a dan

[49:53] uh you had the fbi director was j edgar hoover you had john mitchell as the u.s attorney you were facing attorney general i mean attorney general yes he was the attorney general so uh what kind of dirty tricks did the fbi play on you actually it wasn't so much the fbi the uh hoover apparently in his last year before he died wanted to leave a better legacy than he was praying up to be and according to g gordon liddy who had been in the fbi uh the white house needed its own

[50:30] criminals because he couldn't count on hoover to do it without nixon signing off on a petition a piece of paper actually literally we could go into this but when hoover when they wanted to get all the kinds of surveillance that they're doing now uh the houston plan so-called and every a lot of crimes provocative things and so forth and hoover didn't want to do it unless nixon would sign it personally and to draw back from it so the white house then did hire its

[51:03] own ex-fbi and xcia people howard hunt and then a dozen uh cia assets from the bay of pigs who came up with orders to on may 3rd 1972 to incapacitate daniel ellsberg totally and when i heard that from the special prosecutor with your mural i said what does that mean tell me and he said the words were to incapacitate you totally but you have to understand he said these guys never use the word

[51:36] kill neutralize terminate with extreme prejudice various euphemisms he thought their intent was to kill me but the important thing here is my trial was ended because those things came out john dean in particular started you know revealed that one to the prosecutor and others andy and the burglary to my former psychoanalyst so you know illegal wiretaps that i'd been overheard on all the things that have been used against julian so on the basis of that one thing after another day after day in

[52:11] the last wonderful two weeks of my trial after two years there one crime after another being revealed that wasn't that was a good time and in the end he had essentially no choice but to dismiss the charges people were around the country other judges were saying why is that trial going on and the reason was he'd been offered to be head of the fbi which had been his lifelong ambition since to replace jade gerhoover who had just died by that time as head of the fbi so they were heading that

[52:42] his life's desire in front of him if the ellsberg case came out all right so the trial kept going on despite all these trunks but in the end it did end now the point is here we have exactly the same stuff discussions of kidnapping not kidnapping me they had me with discussions of killing him as was true on may 3rd or incapacity illegal wiretapping illegal surveillance of his lawyer meetings in his doctor's meetings of course it should be thrown out plainly charged

[53:14] uh and i think if you could count on that you can't exactly count but the case is there bush could of course right now simply drop the appeal to extradite him just say okay it's over he should drop the indictment the first indictment of a journalist ever of course he shouldn't be doing that but this is the man this he wasn't the dog person uh back uh under uh under obama he was the vice president the doj i think was holder

[53:47] at this point who was a mixed record you know some good stuff some bad stuff but holder did not order indict him because it's so blatantly against the first amendment in my case and all the others it was a question of sources to the to the press uh here he julian was in a position like the new york times in my case well uh that's that is blatantly against uh freedom of the press at the same time bush as vice president was saying this man he was asked is he a high-tech terrorist

[54:22] yes he's a high-tech terrorist now think about that a high-tech terrorist for publishing true information what but this was vice president and the secretary of state was saying why don't we drone him and when that came out said well i was joking but other people there said it didn't seem to us as though she was joking and could she have meant that well her boss obama

[54:53] did drone american citizens without any due process no indictment no nothing anwar al-salaki signed off by the president to be assassinated by a drone program and then for reasons that have never been explained his 16 year old son trying to find him before he knew he was dead is also killed by a drone we've never really heard what what happened there and of course they haven't told us another american citizen by the way so uh when when snowden was uh

[55:26] in hong kong it turned out but when they were looking for him they didn't have him yet i said somewhere he was in danger of his life and somebody on the atlantic podcast something like ellensburg is off the wall here you know he's blown and he's it's crazy he said you're looking at a person if you're looking at me you're looking at a person who had 12 people brought up from miami in order to the white house to incapacitate me so i'm not uh i'm not making this stuff up and that's where we've come to

[56:02] as a country we'll come back to bush uh somebody in the uh right i'm sorry to assange bush is carrying out what he did as vice president he's still going ahead with it unlike unlike obama of course he should end this but here's a very here's a very concrete thing that might offer some hope i was just told by sulet dreyfus who was written with assad written books stuff the other day that i have to look into this i haven't that there's gonna be a summit

[56:33] on freedom of the press or freedom of expression i i maybe you know more about that but she says something's coming out on that which biden will attend and this would be a time to say if you're going to that summit this would be a good time to say don't extradite julian assange and if we could get some real pressure frankly his prospects are not good for getting out of jail for a very long time even if they don't extradite him on this our government bush will appeal

[57:10] outrageously outrageously to do that so if he's challenged uh with this thing coming up that may be a time we can do something to say okay you're talking about freedom of the press and this case yeah i think we should all be out there demonstrating when biden goes to this event and by the way dan uh you know what is the event do you know it i don't actually haven't heard exactly i don't i don't know what it is either but something that he's going to we'll find out here let's find out i i just want to uh mention that uh they unleashed the because of you

[57:44] the plumber squad the plumber squad went after you and they were they were organized strictly to go after you and then of course they went after uh the democratic headquarters that's what i say is the miracle yeah right that combination uh seriously you ended a war and ended a presidency in one fell through we're gonna take a quick break and come back uh if you guys would like to stick around for a little bit more can i get you to stick around we're gonna say goodbye to the folks at progressive radio network

[58:18] and uh after this musical break we'll be right back with this superstar guest list that we have so

[58:57] okay we're back i'm randy credico randy critical live on the fly with uh john kiriokou colleen rally and daniel ellsberg john has to leave us uh here in a minute just john uh quickly uh the three minutes the guy cromberg the gordon kromberg what drives this man why isn't he influenced by all of the things that yeah elaine talked about you know i i i hate to sound cynical but the truth is that that so many of these u.s attorneys or resistant u.s attorneys especially the

[59:30] senior ones like cronberg you know they see great futures for themselves as partners in a-list firms as congressional candidates maybe as candidates for governor someday there's always something bigger something better on the horizon and if they can pull a rudy giuliani uh and and prosecute a big name uh in a big case then the next thing they do is they announce their candidacy for for congress or they uh make a call to um you know aiken gump and strauss and say

[1:00:07] hey i'm available right now at 10 times what i make with the justice department so it's a selfish motivation it's all about self-promotion shameless self-promotion sean when you say you hate to sound cynical i agree at night with lily tomlins and who said in her show no matter how cynical you try to be you can't keep up with it

[1:00:37] i know you gotta go now we're gonna say goodbye to you and spend a few more minutes have a great night everybody thank you and thank you randy for the work that you do great to see everybody all right we'll see you john john kiriakou bye-bye my heroes uh whistleblower his book is coming out it's uh several whistleblowers 15 whistleblowers and uh we are talking with colleen rowley and with daniel ellsberg colleen uh let's uh these concluding moments uh an overall assessment

[1:01:09] uh what you've been watching in the assange case uh what is it at the heart of it that is driving you crazy uh the situation is driving i think not only me i i heard katie halper and it's like being in the twilight zone um again i i go back to karl rove's famous thing you know we can make our own reality and after 9 11 when when the uh when they saw how fear worked so well

[1:01:39] to be able to manipulate the public and how the donations to the media you know from all of these corporate sources and the war machine and uh you know that basically all they have to do is very easy job read the government press releases and you know the talking points that are given to them uh this makes for a world that you can hardly believe you're living in this situation right now so you know the assange cases is is a victim of this really i mean orwellian gets said a lot um

[1:02:16] but it's an it's an empire of lies where lemmings are just being led over the cliff and yet when the like that you know the emperor's new clothes the little boy yells out you know he's naked he's naked the crowd turns on the little boy and says uh no we support the empire we support the emperor i mean and and if you're watching this and of course having had some even personal experience in this in the beginning of the post 9 11 stuff it's really disconcerting i agree with uh with tomlin

[1:02:51] because you know i i find myself becoming so cynical that i i wonder if i can get more cynical at this point hardly believe anything uh off the the mainstream news and you are hard-pressed to search online for uh at this point a handful i'll put you randy in that group you know a handful of voices now that i can actually feel like okay that person has a little bit of integrity uh unlike you know the cronkite moment where we had sixty percent of the of the

[1:03:25] american population that did trust and you know cronkite might have had his bad moments too but there was that trust and i don't think now i i'm on greenwald writes about this all the time how can you trust anybody in the media who has these incentives these very perverse incentives so um wikileaks was an exception to that we somehow someway have to get back to that kind of ability to get some truth out and maybe it would be a good first step if we could put

[1:04:01] pressure on biden to have this extradition request uh dropped and maybe that would it would obviously just be the very first step but maybe that would be a step in the right direction of getting back to a little bit of truth right now all right uh dan uh i'm gonna ask you this uh if if you uh if you had a chance to talk to julian assange at this moment what would you say to him well i told his wife and i told celeb who's dreyfuss is in touch with him uh

[1:04:36] tell him i love him that was supporting him and that he has a lot of supporters out here as we've been saying he doesn't have the movement that existed in my day i was called a traitor by the president and by the vice president but uh there were a lot of people who didn't agree with that and i had i had a lot of support as well and uh and there are people i'm i'm struck by how many people do turn out in the rain and cold in london both when he was in ecuador at embassy and now it is striking how many people do come out

[1:05:11] more i think possibly over there than over here i'm not sure i have been in demonstrations over here for but uh not as much but i just wanted to know that there are people out here who who do support what what he stands for and he was telling the truth about uh about the war with publishing what chelsea manning was was giving him at that time and so both of them i think deserve great uh thanks for the american people for what i want to ask you both one last question

[1:05:45] and i'm going to go with you first colleen uh what's the consequences ultimate consequences if assange is brought to this country is convicted and sent to prison i i think one of the consequences which is end of all press freedom i mean it's it's really hanging by a string right now and you know i think you could argue that it's you know with the scissors you know ready to be cut that little thin string freedom of the press

[1:06:21] is the censorship you know government leaning on social media everything that's going on right now i think that for sure if this goes any further we will not have a first amendment uh in any meaningful sense we will not have a first amendment and if as snowden has said many many times tom drake snowden and many other whistleblowers once you lose the freedom of press that first amendment is i think thomas jefferson he made it

[1:06:52] first it's it's the number one thing and once you don't have any ability to dissent in a democracy no ability to get the truth out well the whole country will be like the informant files okay a locked skiff room that you have to have a key to go into there will be absolutely no ability to have democracy if we lose that first amendment and it's hanging by a thread right now and uh you dan uh in the closing you get to you get the andy rooney a moment here what would you say uh

[1:07:29] the consequences of an assange conviction oh that's that's very clear because he is the first time that a president has dared to use the espionage act or any other right against a journalist at this point as he is indicted and if he were extradited in the current climate i think his chance of being acquitted which was possible in my day with the judge who did recognize that it was unconstitutional what was happening there he put off a judgment on that until the end of the

[1:08:03] trial and then the government's criminality forced all that so it didn't get judged didn't get ruled on if he is convicted and that is uphill then the first amendment will essentially be nullified as far as national security so-called and of course what is this national security i've never asked this before let me put it this way which american who's died for his in uniform

[1:08:34] has done so actually for the national security of this country since 1945 in which of our wars was our national security actually involved and where they actually hate to say this to the families of people who have lost man mostly men some women now but to say their lives were wasted in an unjust cause they were fighting courageously in most cases in an unjust cause and the only way we know that largely is from the accuracy the honesty

[1:09:13] that has come through along with a lot of lies and a lot of emotions from the press so i go back to nathan hale the american revolution gave us a free first amendment eventually not at first uh free to impress england doesn't have that still they have an official secrets act and if we lose that first amendment and we will have in effect than an official secret sect and all you will have are government handouts and that will give us more vietnam more iraq's

[1:09:49] obviously the freedom of the press did not perform as it should have to keep us out of vietnam or out of iraq earlier it failed on that but uh we would have been in a lot longer uh and more without such freedom as there was so if we lose that uh the empire will be due even more evil than it is doing now and has done in the past well well said i want to thank both of you

[1:10:23] uh and john kiriakou uh colleen rally and daniel ellsberg three times in three weeks we've had the pleasure of having you on this show zero times in the first five years but really it was worth the wait because you have just been fabulous thank you for uh being so uh generous with your time and thank both of you for the uh sacrifices you have made in your lifetime and and uh for your support of julian assange god knows he needs it and he needs all he can get i'm randy credico

[1:10:58] this has been randy critical live on the fly with a special edition of assange countdown to freedom uh we'll see you uh next week thank you very much both of you everybody dice are knows everybody rolls with their fingers crossed everybody knows the war is over everybody knows everybody knows that the fight was fixed the poor stay poor the rich get rich that's how it goes

[1:11:39] everybody know everybody knows that the boat is leaking everybody knows everybody got this broken feeling like their father or their dog just died everybody talking to their pockets everybody wants a box of chocolates and a long stem room everybody knows
