Title: Revolutionary Change
Show: Revolutionary Change
Date: 2021-03-26
URL: https://youtu.be/iyeT6AAK4lA
Duration: 10:00

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[00:00] let's start with you john if that's okay sure how you see yourself and how you see assange and what both of your cases reveal about the treatment of whistleblowers oh sure and also can you set up your story in case people don't know about it certainly uh and and before the hour's over remind me to say something about the effect of calls to members of congress i spent years on capitol hill and they really do have an effect oh well we can all do that i'm not even kidding we can do that now okay yeah listen i worked on the

[00:33] house side and the senate side the senate's a little tougher but in the house you know sometimes they jump too with just one phone call or one letter they're very responsive to constituents on the house side so by all means email call do whatever is easiest for you because they'll they'll respond and react to it on the senate side they have usually interns or young staff members who just collate all the calls and the emails coming in so if there

[01:05] is a number of communications coming in on an issue that will make its way to the senator so this is not a waste of time this actually works i would encourage everybody to call their their members okay we have both numbers we have both numbers the only difference is there was something different if john if you can remind me there was something different about the thing with the representatives that obviously you have to know who it is and there so but we have all the numbers we have everything there and you can call

[01:37] 202 22431 which is the capitol hill operator and if you don't know your member the operator is trained to identify who that is and refer your call to the right office can you say that number again i'm just going to put it in there wait it's on our phone script you see it on our screen it's at the top of the script yeah but i just want to put it in the chat so they oh okay okay so 202 you bet it's 202 uh 2 2 4 three one two one

[02:10] great okay now we have it there okay excellent so uh my name is john kiriakou i'm a former cia officer and uh to make a very long story very short i uh blew the whistle on the cia's torture program in 2007 i was prosecuted by the obama administration in 2012 and facing 45 years in prison i ended up taking a deal that sent me to a federal prison uh for 23 months where where i had the fabulous

[08:51] single one of us that that's my guess number one yeah is is personalizing it number two and i'll say it again especially on the house side those members of congress jump when their constituents write letters because most people don't write letters or in today's situation emails but um most people don't take the five minutes to write and express an opinion so when they get

[09:23] an email or 10 or 100 on an issue they react to it i can't tell you how many times we would get a letter saying you know please co-sponsor hr12345 just because i'm asking you to and we would read it and say well what the heck is hr one two three four five okay yeah well if this constituent wants it sure we'll co-sponsor that and we would we'd co-sponsor it now on the senate side when i was working for john kerry in the senate

[09:54] foreign relations committee one call is not going to make a difference but 10 or 20 calls are going to make a difference at the very least it's going to push the issue onto his agenda and so imagine what a hundred calls could do or 500 calls i mean that's real activism right there i just want to say that for um anybody who it doesn't necessarily feel comfortable leaving a message

[10:24] but we have a longer form of our script that is also available that you also you could use the script as an email as well so if people do feel comfortable sending an email but they don't really feel comfortable calling please feel free to copy and paste thanks for watching if you want to support our mission to transform politics into service please like this video subscribe follow us on social media and consider joining our patreon where you'll get early access to our interviews as well as other exclusive content links are in the description

[10:54] peace out
