Title: John Kiriakou - Tackling Torture at the Top (11-12-15 Hamlin
Show: Robin Hensel
Date: 2015-11-13
URL: https://youtu.be/I3TYrERiRMA
Duration: 10:00

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[00:00] background too i spent about 14 and a half years in the cia first as an analyst later as a counterterrorism operations officer i got bored of analysis and after the september 11th attacks i became the chief of the cia's anti-terrorism operations in pakistan in that capacity i led a series of raids in which we captured a palestinian by the name of aposta who at the time

[00:30] we thought was the number three in al qaeda that turned out to not be true he was not the number three in al-qaeda but our our orders were to capture him so we did we captured him it took about six weeks but we found him uh he was uh shot very severely uh by pakistani police and uh and i sat with him for the first 56 hours of his uh captivity we talked about a lot of things in those 56 hours the september 11th attacks poetry

[01:01] religion all different kinds of things and um and i told him and i didn't mean to you know to sound dramatic but i told him look i am the nicest guy that you're going to meet in this experience the nicest guy my colleagues are not as nice as i am so if i can give you any advice it's that you have to cooperate i told them your life is over but the

[01:32] rest of it can be easy or it can be terrible i said i don't really know what they have in mind for you but i can tell you because i know them it's not going to be nice and he said you seem like a nice guy but you're the enemy and i'll never cooperate so i said well suit yourself so after 56 hours he was flown to a secret prison and after being given six weeks to recuperate from his very grave gunshot wounds the cia

[02:03] started torturing him now this was after the fbi had spent those intervening six weeks establishing a relationship with him and establishing a rapport and he actually began providing his fbi interrogator with actionable intelligence the cia said that that wasn't good enough and so george tenet asked president bush to evict the fbi from this country where the secret prison was located and to allow cia officers to take over

[02:36] in the meantime i had returned to cia headquarters and a senior officer in the cia's counter-terrorism center approached me and asked me if i wanted to be what he called certified in the use of enhanced interrogation techniques i didn't know what that meant i had never heard of enhanced interrogation techniques before so i said what do you mean and he said very animatedly we're going to start getting tough with these guys and i said what does that mean and he gave me this list of 10 techniques

[03:06] that were going to be used against prisoners beginning with abu zabada i said man that sounds like torture you know you got to call it what it is it just sounds like torture it's not for me i said i have a moral visceral problem with it and i said but you know what let me think about it for a couple of hours and i went up to the cia's seventh floor that's the executive floor and i spoke with a very senior cia officer with whom i had had a relationship i had worked for him for a little while in the middle east i said what do you think of this they asked me

[03:37] if i wanted to do this and he said first of all let's call it what it is they can use whatever euphemism they want but it's torture torture is illegal and he said you know your colleagues you know what they're like somebody's going to go overboard and they're going to kill a prisoner in custody and when they kill a prisoner there's going to be a congressional investigation and then there's going to be a criminal investigation and somebody's going to go to prison do you want to go to prison i said no i don't want to go to prison i'm the only one who went to prison at the end of it but i said no i don't want to go to

[04:07] prison i went back downstairs i said i have a problem with this i think it's torture i don't want to be involved they had approached 14 of us two of us said no and one of the two changed his mind and said yes so they started torturing obazo beta a lot has been made about the issue of waterboarding i confirmed to abc news in 2007 that we had waterboarded opposite data in addition to other things but the cia was using other techniques that i always thought were even worse than than waterboarding waterboarding is the

[04:39] sense of of drowning you have some sort of material burlap cloth plastic whatever over your mouth and you're strapped to a gurney your feet are slightly elevated and water is poured on your face and it makes you feel like you're drowning it's very painful because your your body is is tensing and reacting and it's very painful especially in your abdominal muscles but there are other things that the cia was doing like the cold cell the cold cell is where a prisoner is stripped naked he's chained to an eye bolt in the ceiling and

[05:09] his cell is chilled to 50 degrees and then every hour somebody goes into the cell and throws ice water on him we killed people using that technique more than once we killed people but no one was ever prosecuted for that there was another technique sleep deprivation former secretary of defense don rumsfeld famously said that he got no sleep that he had a stand-up desk he didn't even have a seat at his desk and he would work for two or three days and he was fine so that was not torture but the cia wasn't wasn't

[05:42] keeping prisoners up for two days or three days it was more like 12 days or 14 days chained to that eye bolt in the ceiling again well you begin losing your mind around day seven and in many cases as my friend and colleague brad here will tell you in many cases that that insanity becomes permanent we have prisoners now with whom we use the technique of sleep deprivation who are unable to participate in their own defenses that's illegal we have laws that prohibit this kind of thing

[06:15] we chose to ignore them so in december 2007 i gave an interview to abc news in which i said three things that utterly changed the course of the rest of my life i said the cia was torturing its prisoners torture was official u.s government policy and that policy had been approved by and signed by the president of the united states now george w bush had said earlier that week he had looked directly into the camera during a press conference and he said we

[06:47] do not torture i knew that was a lie and then a couple of days later he told a reporter you know if there is torture it's the result of a rogue cia officer and i knew that was a lie he had approved this he had signed it and so i went on national television and i called the president united states a bald-faced liar within two days i was audited by the irs which has continued every single year since 2007.

[07:21] the justice department began an investigation of me which lasted until january of 2012. now interestingly enough the fbi determined in 2009 uh march of 2009 that i had not committed a crime uh by going on abc news and saying that we were torturing prisoners the obama administration told the justice department to reconsider that decision not to prosecute me and so i was charged

[07:52] with three counts of espionage in addition to violating the intelligence identities protection act and making a false statement although i've never been clear on exactly what the false statement was supposed to have been it was thrown out in any event but three counts of espionage now the three counts of espionage were for revealing top secret code word information that the justice department said was declassified solely for the purpose of prosecuting me and that top secret code word information that

[08:25] bought me three counts of espionage one of the greatest crimes an american can face was that the cia after 9 11 was trying to kill or capture members of al-qaeda this is a death penalty case we're talking about right and they were going to be nice to me about it and they offered me 45 years yeah 45 years in prison for revealing this unbelievably close closely held top

[08:55] secret code word information that we were trying to kill osama bin laden after 9 11 after 9 11 again so in any event like many defendants in america today i took a plea to make it go away i had five children at home it was the proven thing to do but my time is over i spent 23 months in federal prison it just made me more determined to fight this abomination that's torture this utter disrespect for our

[09:26] constitution for the law of the land you know like like people on both the left and the right i maintain that we are a country of laws we're a country that has a working constitution a living and breathing document as some scholars say and we need to respect that that document without the constitution and the resulting respect that we all ought to have for human rights and civil liberties what's the point in you know having a country it just doesn't seem to make any sense

[09:58] to me so anyway i promised brad i would be very short because we're going to try to take lots of questions thank you for having me please fight torture
