Title: Why I Was Targeted (RAI pt 9, probe dup)
Show: Reality Asserts Itself (Paul Jay)
Date: 2023-04-25
URL: https://youtu.be/yh7Ujo6BsEs
Duration: 26:00

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[00:01] [Music] welcome back to reality asserts itself i'm paul jay and this is the real news network we're continuing our series of interviews with john kiriakou we're at his house as i've said before he's continues to be under house arrest as we do these interviews john was the first cia officer to officially confirm that there was in fact a waterboarding torture program he's also the only person that went to jail for anything to do with a water

[00:32] boarding torture program and that was because he was the first person to officially confirm there was a waterboarding torture program unfortunately the people who were actually doing the waterboarding and ordering the waterboarding aren't didn't go to jail and never kept him any company in jail thanks for joining us thanks for having me so let's pick up our story from that why did the cia target you the cia never forgave me for confirming that it was waterboarding and otherwise

[01:03] torturing prisoners that that torture was official u.s government policy and that the policy was approved by the president never forgave me where did you say this and how did you get to it i said this in december of 2007 on abc news and it it started uh oddly for me i got a call from brian ross let me just back up one sec because we've been kind of doing your story chronologically now we're kind of jumping okay so if i understand correctly you left the cia in one year 2004

[01:34] 2004 and you did some consulting you did consulting for abc and that not yet i i left the ci in 2004 and i joined deloitte and touche which is one of the big four uh public accounting firms okay so first of all why did you leave the cia i left the cia as funny as it might sound to spend more time with my children i had gone through a very acrimonious divorce my ex-wife had moved to northeastern ohio with my two sons so that she could be closer to her parents and i knew that

[02:05] my career was going to take me back overseas again in short order and to some place not family friendly iraq afghanistan pakistan yemen something like that and so i decided i had had enough and i had a friend who had a friend at deloitte touch one of the big four accounting firms they were looking for someone to head um counter not counter intelligence but competitive intelligence in their washington dc office and uh i applied for the job

[02:37] and uh a couple of weeks later was made an offer i resigned from the cia and the very next day went into deloitte touch why does deloitte tuschwan a cia guy well i was actually the fourth cia guy that deloitte and touch had hired they had created this this group called the competitive intelligence group with the idea being that they would hire former cia officers or other people with experience in intelligence collection and they would pair those people

[03:08] with the analysts the corporate uh research analysts to collect and analyze intelligence on their competitors so my job was to collect first person human source intelligence on ernst and young kpmg pricewaterhousecoopers and a myriad of uh consulting firms like ibm and accenture and others and we would collect this information sometimes they were tips

[03:39] for example well for example we tried to to steal their pricing models or how they determine discounts or interestingly at least to me we tried to figure out which of their partners were disgruntled so we could steal them provided that they were top producers and i i'm assuming they're all doing it back to deloitte too absolutely to each other they all have the same groups now i will say that deloitte no longer exists uh it went away during the recession but the other the other consulting firms yes they do have similar groups and and

[04:11] they're looking are they looking for dirt on individuals or this is more about recruitment it's it's much more about recruitment and it's it's also about undercutting pricing if you're going to go into to a bid with a with a price of 24 million dollars let's say we want to know that so we can go in with a bit of 20 million dollars and and win the win the the job because a 20 million dollar contract of course is better than a zero dollar contract and and so they're all

[04:41] doing it to each other they're all so every this is a lot about the bidding process then trying to get someone to spill the beans on a bit yes the bidding process recruiting a double agent yeah it's the bidding process it's discounts uh it's disgruntled partners like i said it's plans to expand um service lines or offerings anything that might give you a corporate leg up and were you successful wildly in some cases really all right that's we'll do that another

[05:12] day uh okay so then what deloitte touch what point do you start uh consulting for abc uh not until after i went on tv and talked about torture uh i was at i was at my desk at deloitte one day and i got a call from brian ross at abc news and brian ross told me that he had a source who said that i had tortured abu zubaydah i said that was absolutely untrue that i was the only person who was ever kind to abu zubaydah and i said i never have laid a hand on

[05:44] anybody least of all abu zubaydah and he said and i learned later that this was an old reporter's trick he said well you can come on the show and defend yourself in the meantime that same day the day before the same week whatever it was president bush was telling the press that we do not torture we do not torture we do not torture this government does not torture people you know we we we we stick to u.s law and our international obligations

[06:16] thirdly there are highly trained professionals questioning these uh extremists and terrorists notice we got professionals who are trained in this uh kind of work to get information that will protect the american people and by the way we have gotten information from these high-value detainees that have helped protect you i knew that was a lie and then later he said that we don't torture but if there is torture it's the result of a

[06:48] rogue cia officer or a rogue operation i knew that was a lie so i went on abc news and he never even asked me on camera if i had tortured i was a beta he just went straight into the torture and at the time i've i felt that waterboarding was something that we needed to do and as time has passed and has as september 11th has has you know has moved farther and farther back into history um i think i've changed my mind and i think that waterboarding is

[07:19] probably something that we shouldn't be in the business of doing why do you say that now because we're americans and we're better than that but at the time you didn't feel that way at the time i was so angry and i wanted so much to help disrupt future attacks on the united states that i felt it was the only thing we could do and with zebedee you think that was successful it was and we have reported that khalid sheikh muhammad was also waterboarded i was out of it by then but it's my understanding that he was that he was also water but those

[07:49] were really the only two to the best of my knowledge yes and bottom line is to sit here now do you think that was worth it yes did it compromise american principles or to save american lives or both it i think both it may have compromised our principles at least in the short term and i think it's good that we're having a national debate about this we should be debating this and congress should be talking about it because i think as a country we have to decide if this is something that we want to do as a matter of policy i'm not saying now that we should but at the very least we should be talking about it it shouldn't be secret it should be out

[08:20] there as part of the national debate in that interview i essentially called the president of the united states a liar in fact the next day at a press conference i am saying that the united states does not torture the president has been if what was done in this case was not torture in your opinion i'm saying the united states does not torture well you have a former cia officer john kirkown now saying that waterboarding was used since you're saying the interrogations were legal he's saying on the record now waterboarding was used in at least one case you're saying

[08:52] waterboarding is legal and i'm saying i'm not commenting on any specific technique i'm not commenting on that gentleman's characteristics of any possible technique i've given you a very general statement about interrogations being legal uh limited and is not legal within the legal framework yes every day so water boarding is legal i'm not commenting on any specific techniques and you can ask me all sorts of different ways and we can go back and forth but i'm not going to do it then well immediately the cia filed what's

[09:23] called a crimes report with the justice department alleging that i had violated my secrecy agreement by leaking classified information the fbi investigated they watched the tape and they concluded that it was already common knowledge that we were torturing prisoners human rights watch had come out with a report amnesty international had come out with a report so i had added nothing technically to the debate but what i had done was i had become the first

[09:54] cia officer current or former to actually confirm that we were torturing prisoners and that torture was our policy now when you first talked about it you defend torture do you not is that there's a point where you say he's been torturing a waterboard a lot of people think that i i was defending it in fact i was trying to be nuanced and i failed at being nuanced i was trying to present it as two questions two separate issues one did it work and two was it right and i

[10:25] said it wasn't right it was wrong morally and ethically it was torture and that i was opposed to it in fact i had been asked by a senior officer in the counter-terrorism center if i wanted to be certified in the use of these so-called enhanced interrogation techniques and i declined i said i had a moral problem with it on that first question did it work the cia officers in the field who were torturing prisoners were reporting back that it was working and that abu zubaydah for example had cracked after one session one waterboarding

[10:56] session and that he had given up actionable information that saved american lives and that's what when when you're on television that's what you need at that time that's what i knew with that you conclude that it was done once and it worked correct although it was wrong it had worked we didn't know nobody knew until the cia inspector general report was released in april of 2009 that said that no he was waterboarded 83 times and khalid sheikh muhammad was worded waterboarded 147 times so they were even

[11:27] lying to each other internally to try to justify this thing so i i told brian ross what i thought i knew as facts but i was i was wrong so what what's the next big beat for you when is it the inspector general's report well yeah um in that year 2008 to early 2009 i ended up consulting for abc news and frankly what i had done is i called brian ross and i said you ruined my life the least you could do is throw me a little bit of work and so abc brought me

[12:00] on as a consultant in early 2009 john kerry offered me a job as the senior investigator on the senate foreign relations committee so i was under the impression that he actually wanted me to investigate things and i ran into even more trouble with the cia in that job now between going on tv and acknowledging that there is torture they open a file on you um and and the inspector general's report and

[12:30] kerry's job how actively are they pursuing you and how aware are you of it i was unaware of any investigation aimed at me targeting me it turned out that they never stopped investigating me from december of 2007 until my arrest in 2012. prior to you going on television was there any sense that cia wasn't happy with you oh no none on the contrary when i was at deloitte and touch they

[13:01] were preparing to bid for a job in the cia's counterterrorism center i still had an active security clearance at the time and so they asked if they could add me to the list of cleared individuals that that might participate in this contract i said yes and i called the security officer at the counterterrorism center and she said yeah that's great with us um and i ended up not doing it because my boss was willing to give me up for six weeks but they wanted me for six months until the contract really got going but i had no

[13:32] problems whatsoever with the cia intelligence because you'd think you'd think if they had no issues with you and you say this one thing on tv they would say oh look this guy's been a stellar agent all this time and never and so on you know and everyone already knows it's happening we could just like ignore it right like by targeting you they're making it a hundred times more an issue even in the public eye eventually it's gonna go public i mean look where it's led to all these interviews well that's why i maintain the cia

[14:02] uh is the organization that made me a human rights activist it's the cia that's made me uh uh want to you know take to the streets to defend our civil liberties otherwise i wouldn't have given it two minutes of thought but you're exactly right and even if they were angry there are other cases of cia officers current cia officers exposing classified information and what happens to them is they get a letter in their file and they don't get promoted for a year they don't get seven felony charges or

[14:33] five felonies so i go back to my first question why target you in this way i think that the targeting came from inside the counterterrorism center it wasn't necessarily the cia as a an organization as a whole it was ctc ctc was run by cowboys and and hard asses and i think that they were so furious that what i had done was unforgivable uh that that they are the ones who asked

[15:04] the justice department to go after me ctc is this thing we see on this tv show 24 right that's i mean does it bear any resemblance to reality the 24 room no the room no no that's all hollywood the the uh okay so let's jump ahead the inspector general's report comes out you find out that it wasn't once it was 83 times right and in fact the intelligence wasn't actionable so what does that do to you and what are you doing well it makes me look like a fool at the time i was working for john kerry

[15:36] i had only been there about a month maybe six weeks but it made me look like a fool but i issued a statement saying i gave the facts as i knew them i think that the inspector general's report shows that the cia will lie to its own staff officers um i had no regrets two years had gone by so why does this eventually lead to a charge i don't get i mean how much while i was at the uh

[16:08] senate foreign relations committee i decided to do some real investigations so at first i wanted to investigate what was called the dash delete massacre this was an incident in in northern afghanistan on november 30th and december 1st of 2001 where the northern alliance had captured as many as 2 000 taliban soldiers and wanted to incarcerate them well there

[16:39] were no jails in afghanistan big enough to hold two thousand prisoners all at once so what the northern alliance decided to do was to load these men onto container trucks and take them out into the desert deep into the desert and just hold them there until they could figure out how to get them to different jails around themselves this is general dostum and his men who's now a vice president vice president or deputy prime minister one or the other uh so nobody had

[17:09] put any air holes in these containers and there was no food and there was no water so after an eight hour drive into the desert how many people are packed in a container two thousand two thousand people in a series of containers so after eight hours drive into the desert one of the witnesses who survived told us that when they opened the back of the trucks that bodies fell out like sardines out of a can so almost everybody died by our account there were 18 survivors out of 2000. the

[17:40] reason i was interested in this is because i had taken a call from a human rights activist who told us that he had a witness who was a boy at the time and didn't go onto the truck and he said that the boy saw two white men wearing jeans and black t-shirts and speaking english at the box up well who's going to be in mazari sharif afghanistan speaking english wearing blue jeans on november 30th 2001 so i interviewed everybody at the state

[18:14] department at the time who mattered from 2001 i interviewed several human rights activists and i sent a letter to the agency asking for some clarification within a couple of days the uh deputy office director or staff director is what he he's called at the senate foreign relations committee told me that the that the investigation was dead and to drop it just just quickly just coincidentally i happened to have made a

[18:44] documentary called return to kandahar in afghanistan in the spring of 2002 and we interviewed general doston so here's a few seconds of that just to give you a sense of who who who we're talking about

[19:36] foreign [Music] in the 90s when these guys fought each other over a million people died and half of the city of kabul was destroyed that's not a football game so that's general dustin now general dustin clearly is a is was is a war criminal you had

[20:07] uncovered evidence that proved it and it gets shut down why i think that i was poking the hornet's nest at the time and i'm not sure if i was doing it subconsciously or if it just worked out that way but i wanted to know if cia officers were present at the box up now i know cia officers were present 20 miles away because the box up was the same day as the uprising at khalati jangvi where uh was was killed in in the taliban al

[20:40] qaeda uprising that took place in that prison so i know they were in the area i wanted to know what this was another slaughter it was another slaughter yes so i dropped that investigation and then i got a call from a reporter who told me that he had some information that seemed to indicate that the cia was taking its torturers and putting them under state department cover let's back up on set just to close the loop on the previous story if you had in fact found that there were cia at the box up they would have been implicated in a war crime correct

[21:11] correct and that war crime would have been detailed in an official report from the senate foreign relations committee okay so i moved on to another investigation a reporter called me and said that he had information that the cia was taking some of its torturers and placing them under state department cover which was a violation of the cover agreement between the cia and the state department so i sent the state department a letter asking for clarification weeks passed something like five six

[21:42] weeks passed and finally a colleague of mine comes into my office and says oh you got a response to your letter from the agency i said i didn't get any response he said well they classified it top secret and you're not cleared for it i said well what'd they say and he smiles and he says they said go [ __ ] yourself so that was the end of that investigation so how long after all this do you get charged well it was another uh three years there were other investigations too

[22:13] at which i was poking them uh they even called my wife into the cia security office and threatened her no your wife my wife was a cia officer his or her was was was that you met at the cio we met at the cia so they called her in and what well i had written an op-ed in the los angeles times in which i said that we need to be very cautious about iran's inroads into latin america we need to improve our relations with latin american countries because the iranians are improving theirs and i wrote one sentence

[22:46] in that in that op-ed dealing with iranian travel to latin america now i got that op-ed cleared by the cia so finally they call my wife into security and they have a camera on and the security guy says this is not an investigation it's an inquiry but we're going to tape it what do you think should be done with people who leak classified information totally loaded question she said what are you talking about

[23:18] well your husband wrote an op-ed in the los angeles times and she said he got that op-ed cleared let me ask why would you have to get it cleared you're no longer working i have to get anything i write dealing with intelligence cia foreign affairs government anything for the rest of my life cleared by the cia's publications review board what about this interview or the other interviews you've been getting well these are written written products uh articles books magazine articles you know op-eds interviews are

[23:48] okay interviews are okay all right go on so she said well he got that cleared by the publication's review board and the the guy tells her and we really appreciate that but there's a line in there that is top secret and she said well that's impossible my husband doesn't have access to top secret information and he says but you do so she said i think i've said enough and she got up and walked to walked away

[24:18] what was the line it was that iranians no longer need visas to travel to bolivia what so she was top secret she was very upset and she called me and i told her take it easy i said do you know where i got that information and she said no i said i got it from the bolivian foreign ministry's website it's on the website and why on earth would it be secret anyway i told her one thing that you may want to tell them is number one apparently nobody in the cia speaks spanish

[24:49] first of all secondly they apparently have a source who's selling them press and calling it intelligence so they were upset about that well they're out to get you at this point at that point they were out to get me uh but i didn't think that this would result in any kind of criminal charges it's almost sounding like the the the when you go public on the torture issue they open a file yeah it's this stuff where they really decide we have to shut this guy up well it got

[25:20] much much worse toward the end of my stay at the senate foreign relations committee there was an incident that i'll tell you about part of my job was to have okay hang on yeah this is going to be a cliffhanger you got to join us for the next part to find out what happened next on reality asserts itself on the real news network thanks for joining us [Music]

[26:16] you
