Title: A Good Place with Ella & A
Show: A Good Place with Ella
Date: 2019-03-04
URL: https://youtu.be/GygbALerANE
Duration: 106:00

---

[00:00] you're listening to revolution radio freedom slips comm 100% listener-supported radio and now we return you to your host [Music] well hello and welcome to whistle blower nation here on revolution radio and I'm your host Ella thank you for joining me again this week first off what is a whistle blower a whistle blow is a person who makes public disclosures of

[00:31] wrongdoing corruption and crime these courageous people often suffer retaliatory actions because of her disclosures and I'm here to celebrate these people and give them a platform because shining a light on wrongdoing wherever it occurs plays an important role in keeping society peaceful free and just so with me today I have a returning guest I have kollene rolly-polly no do we have you there yes no race I'm going to give you guys a little bit of background about her she was here last week as I mentioned and and we were able to do an hour interview and we talked a little better background

[01:02] and some of the some of the circumstances around her whistleblowing but this week we're not going to look more detail about the circumstances that surrounded the disclosure in the events around that so first off a little bit about her again kollene Raley is a retired FBI special agent on former Minneapolis division legal counsel who taught constitutional law and law enforcement ethics to FBI agents and other law enforcement then became a whistleblower about the FBI's pre 9/11 of failures testifying to the Joint Intelligence Committee inquiry the Senate Judiciary

[01:33] Committee and the inspector general staff of the Department of Justice she was named along with two other corporate whistleblowers as Time People magazine's Person of the Year in 2002 and she was also on the cover in early March 2003 she warned FBI director robert muller of further problems including his going along with the Bush administration's deceptive plan to launch war on what would become the counter-productive war on Iraq a country that had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks sadly enough despite all facts

[02:04] to the contrary the Bush administration was able to fool 70% of the American public into believing that saddam hussein was behind 9/11 since retiring from the FBI rally continues to write and speak out about the perpetual global war on terror that has exponentially increased terrorism worldwide and made the situation far worse i guess you would agree with that correct colleen yeah that's that's it in a nutshell and it's not over where we're heading into the 17th year now of perpetual war as well as

[02:36] reduced civil liberties and really adherence to the law which there should be a lot more whistleblowers about because it just seems to get worse and worse yeah I definitely and so to go back a little bit we'll touch upon some of what we talked about last week you know you were a legal person in the FBI and you were an ethics teacher and you had just given him like a PowerPoint presentation one way prior to 9/11 and so ethics to you were the highest of importance and holding the Constitution was what you were taught to do and so

[03:07] then some things were brought to your attention and can you tell it can you tell the listeners what happened exactly well beginning you know this really wasn't brought to my attention that much I was aware a little bit of it but beginning already in spring of 2001 and throughout the summer of 2001 there was a lot of intelligence flowing into all agencies of the intelligence community not just the FBI of course the CIA and

[03:39] the NSA had even far more intelligence that it an attack was going to occur that they didn't share they did share everything with the FBI but the FBI also had its own intelligence coming in and so there was a lot in if they you know afterwards that they said if they would have connected the dots they could have prevented 9/11 essentially these officials in all of these agencies were not reading the intelligence either we're not reading or after 9/11 they

[04:11] they they denied having even received those memos that United even having seen them or read them or anything they denied sharing the information with other agencies with other officials in the same agency and they didn't act on the intelligence and so but you would never have known that after 9/11 of course they used the shock and awe that kind of a the trauma of 9/11 was exploited very opportunistically on

[04:43] several levels one level was to begin war that they had wanted to do these these Warhawk think tanks neocon think tanks had been plotting to start war on on the Mideast essentially but beginning with Iraq they've been plotting that for years before and they said if we got a new Pearl Harbor well they used 9/11 then as their new Pearl Harbor Harbor and there's in the books that have come out where people have written their biographies people in the cabinet and Bush's cabinet they said that even

[05:15] within days short day after they were already saying oh now that we had the attack happened look we can use this to to gin up war on on Iraq so but that was just one thing the other thing that was very serious here and it really deals with my legal background was that they basically commissioned John you a junior attorney in the Office of Legal Counsel who partnered up with a senior fellow and they began then to write dozens of

[05:46] memos that essentially said the Constitution no longer is in force and they didn't say it in that in so many words I'm I'm really kind of uh what's the word I'm I'm telling you what the the memo said but you got pages and pages and pages and they basically were very what's the word convoluted hard to read but they said that the Bill of Rights the the freedom of press freedom of speech freedom against warrantless searches not based on probable cause

[06:19] freedom against self-incrimination ie torture they they went through the laws in the series of memos and basically said now that we're in war we don't have to follow the Constitution anymore and again there was a whole series of them it's not just one were hundreds of pages and very few people have even read these at this point the ACLU has looked at some of them you know some some attorneys have looked at some of them but almost nobody has read them all but they think they constructed a under the

[06:53] law of war it's you can establish a form of martial law martial law is a misnomer it mean the absence of law it's you know Lincoln tried to do this in the Civil War way when he had editors rounded up for writing things that were critical of the Union so this happens in wartime and it began it was one of those opportunistic things that began right after 9/11 a whole series of illegal actions and like I said now were 17 years out right into

[07:25] our 17th year out from that start and essentially nothing has been fixed if anything it's been rubber stamped now by the Congress and you know the public has gotten desensitized to almost all of it we just assume we're going to be in perpetual war forever and we've and we like we've been accepting of the fact that we're going to be under surveillance Americans will be under surveillance will have harsh interrogation tactics and and will

[07:57] launch wars in foreign countries I mean all these things that we've just come now after all these years to accept little by little it's it's pretty frustrating you know you know there's a something said about whistleblowers if you go back there's that old myth of Cassandra that she was doomed to keep warning about really horrible things that were gonna happen but people would not pay attention to her and then the worst would happen that was this old myth of Cassandra and and you know it's

[08:28] it's a horrible thing to to warn about some something that even threatens Public Safety and then you know have people all well it does who cares blah blah blah and then have it happen and now what can look in the person you know Warren you can say oh I told you so when people are you know millions of people have died that doesn't work and it's it's just a real sad situation to have so few of the public educated enough in understanding of the

[08:58] framework of the law enough to care and try to put some pressure on their elected government in order to return you know if you use the framework of 9/11 there were the color codes the green yellow red and of course they've been people thought after after a few years I think it took about six seven eight years before someone said well that's kindergarten to say we're in yellow were in yellow alert or orange alert or red alert you know red alert by the way is

[09:30] Armageddon so they said well that doesn't make any sense and by the way we can never go back to green Green was normal you know Green was considered to be normal I think that's we do have to try to get back to what we had where we had a government that was at least trying to follow the law and that was you know not doing these terrible things but it's very very difficult right now because people are afraid and they'll believe anything yeah and then do you mind going

[10:01] back into your particular story cuz I want to hear about your memo and I know you were up all night and you were gonna go the next day and share it can you maybe expound upon that and I'd love to hear about it and you know I want to keep this about you and what you actually it so I would love that well if anyone is really interested in this history of on 9/11 there's a site on the web called history Commons it's kind of like Wikipedia and if you put in Mousawi history Commons you will find

[10:34] pages and pages and the the factual statements are just like Wikipedia they're all footnoted and linked to whatever news article or authority and so maybe not all of it is correct of course because it will depend upon the underlying news report that was the the source of authority for that statement but I just happened to review that the other day and over time when they first started history Commons it wasn't that

[11:05] accurate because it's like Wikipedia when wikipedia thing just starts heaven knows if it's accurate but over time public source you know people open source works because people go in there and correct this and correct that and so if you're really interested in the history of the terrorist suspect that was detected in Minnesota in August of two you should read that whole long pages of Mousawi on history Commons it's quite accurate and even I was shocked to see

[11:37] how much information later was was discovered that of moussaoui's different earlier terrorist actions in Europe and in Chechnya and whatever but but in August there is a there are two calls that come from whistleblower flight engineers and flight instructors in a flight school in Eagan Minnesota and these two flight engineer instructors do not even know they were calling there

[12:07] were whistleblowers because their bosses told them to keep quiet about it and so they both call the FBI two different places and they say we've got this unbelievably most suspicious a student we've ever seen and we think he could be you know planning some kind of terrorist attack whatever one of our agents then who it really was probably the best agent equipped in the office to follow up on that lead because he himself had been in navy intelligence and he had

[12:38] been I think he was either a flight what do you call it a pilot or else a flight person that helped son Navy Navy flights he's the person that engine you know that locates or whatever but he was an agent and that very day within hours he and another I NS agent went out to interview Mousawi who was this Moroccan French Moroccan flight student in Eagan and they interviewed him they were first by the way they interviewed his own

[13:09] flight instructor who also said oh yes he's the most suspicious student we've ever had and gave those agents literally pages of facts about why he was suspicious the agents went back to the office oh I should back up they took Mousawi into custody after interviewing him because they were so afraid that he was in the midst of planning a terrorist attack and be also because his visa had lapsed so

[13:41] they took him into custody along with his personal effects and laptop I&S dead by the way because of his visa then the agents put Dahl all those facts down into an emergency request for a FISA this is ironic because now today there's a memo released by the Republicans staffers about all of the irregularities and false information that went into the FISA application for one of the Trump

[14:11] campaign volunteers and of course that's created huge news that this that the FBI misled the FISA Court on its surveillance of Carter page one of the Trump campaign people calling him a Russian spy all based on specious what they called the dossier etc so that's all over the news our agents back in two thousand of 2001 requested an emergency FISA on Mousawi so that they could search his personal

[14:42] effects and laptop and they are headquarters and then also they sent out leads to France and the United Kingdom and so they did all this very quickly and what happened was our headquarters then over the course of a few days basically blocked that request from going to the Department of Justice even from from even going to their superiors inside the FBI they didn't even they took it up one

[15:13] level but they did not take it up any further than one level and they didn't take it over course to the Department of Justice and certainly not to the FISA Court and so our agents were pulling their hair out in August trying to think of any of all kinds of other ways they called to the CIA in the meantime this this info that they had gotten initially was briefed to George Tenet who was the director of Central Intelligence he got briefed already on August 23rd and was briefed I think more than once

[15:45] and no one knows if he briefed the president and about it or not but we know that Kennedy himself knew can it a people didn't understand this because they thought no one was in charge of the 16 intelligence agencies and that's why they all had to have created a new office of director of intelligence afterwards that was a lie they they already had somebody in charge it was the director of Central Intelligence which was George Tenet and he didn't want to take responsibility so they made it seem like there was no one in charge but he was he

[16:15] received this information on August 23rd there was all kinds of things like that that were being covered up after 9/11 and they covered up the Phoenix memo they covered up all these part of the problem for the FBI was the CIA had not shared critical intelligence about a meeting that had been monitored by the CIA like two years before in Kuala Lumpur and two of the people act that

[16:46] al-qaeda meeting in Kuala Lumpur came to California and they they turned out to be the pilot hijackers they were part of the group the group of terrorists hijackers but the CIA never told the FBI so there were all these things that were being covered up and still to this day even though my memo did lead to a Inspector General report if you read the 9/11 Commission you'll see sites to the

[17:16] inspector general report I think some of it is also on the history Commons history common sight and so some of the information eventually it took a long time couple of years even for you know some of the information to come out but to this day there's been cover-up of a lot just last year they finally uncovered 28 pages that they had blocked which showed that Saudi Arabia which

[17:48] should have been no surprise because 15 of the 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia but there was a lot of investigation that showed Saudi Arabian officials had helped or some in some ways aided the hijackers and that was covered up until last year it's pretty incredible or in all these wars with countries that had nothing to do with 9/11 and to this day our intelligence people have covered up a lot of the truth about 9/11 that if

[18:21] we know all those things they could have been fixed an easy fix for instance to some of the problems of not reading and not reading the your memos that come to you not sharing the information well that but that kind of stuff is a lot more easily fixed you can put in accountability mechanisms to ensure that people read what when their name is on it they basically have to have some way of initialing off to show that they've read it and then of course if afterwards something bad happens that person is not

[18:54] able to deny that they ever that they did see that memo so that's a very simple thing to fix very simple to fix a major problem people denying that they got memos very easy to fix also the sharing of info that's easy to fix a lot easier than killing millions of people in countries that we that had nothing to do with the 9/11 hijackers and in fact covering up the country they did have something to do with it so it's it's a it's a mess you know if we were

[19:26] from another planet and we were looking down on this you would just have your your mouth would be open because you wouldn't believe that you could do these things but because we're all part of this partisan blind loyalty you know kind of this this manipulation that goes on from the politicians on down of both parties we're really in the dark to a large extent theme Americans really have not ever figured out that they've been bamboozled for a long time and it's it's

[19:57] a sad and dangerous extremely dangerous moment that we're living through now you know it seems to be so but I was reading some of your previous interviews and in 2008 you stated that you had taken a copy of a bombshell memo to the media that have probably saved your job can you elaborate on this a little bit lab right on this a little bit yeah I did not take it to the media um so I don't know what yes not exactly true but when eight months after 9/11 when the Joint Intelligence

[20:29] Committee was finally convening they had I don't know 30 staffers that they divvied up and assigned to FBI CIA NSA and others I think FAA maybe so they had different investigators that they are staffers that they assigned so the FBI had five or six that just dealt with FBI problems and then they had some with NSA that started eight months eight and a half months eight well no it started before

[21:00] that started about six months seven months after 9/11 but it really got going where I got a call eight months later and so I had to go to Washington DC and because I was afraid that I would forget some of these details because again it's kind of it's a complicated thing I started jotting them down because I said you know when you're talking to somebody you know you always leave things out and I said you know I want to be very complete and tell everything I knew about this Mousawi case I didn't

[21:33] know very much by the way when you look at the whole scheme vast amount of stuff out there the Mousawi is just a small portion of it so and I only knew about the most solid case but I'm still I wanted to jot it down but as I jotted it down I had about a three-day leap lead time before I had to go to DC I started to write it into more of a memo form and I finally decided that I would take this memo directly not to the media but

[22:03] directly to the members of the Joint Intelligence Committee and anything yeah and you know stretchers Shelby and Diane Feinstein is that correct that's right they weren't the heads Diane Feinstein later became a head of the committee but at the time she was just a member and the reason I I I got their names from a newspaper article where I saw that they were asking questions that we actually were a little more astute questions then that most by

[22:34] the way most of Congress didn't even know any this at the time they were in the dark completely in the dark and so their questions of the of the FBI director for instance didn't even make sense because they didn't know any of this so they're asking questions that were just out in left-field well I saw a cup with one bite Feinstein and Shelby that you know they were a little bit more you know getting closer to the truth I thought so I put their names on one was a Republican and one was a Democrat and the reason I thought I would take the

[23:05] memo directly to them was that I thought there was maybe a possibility that the staff itself hired by again this Joint Intelligence Committee staff was being guided by some retired officials that had themselves been accused in Prior inquiries one was a retired FBI attorney who had been accused of withholding information from the John Danforth inquiry of Waco you know what they start

[23:37] what you start talking about this it is a real twisted thing because these agencies always want to put the best face on bureaucrats careerists want to put the best spin on really sad you know terrible mistakes that have occurred in the past and rather than just blurt out the truth and say we're sorry this went wrong whatever they almost always tried to put the best spin on it and so this this our former FBI attorney had been

[24:08] accused of not you know telling the full truth to the Danforth that inquiry I actually knew him a little bit and I thought to myself that it probably wasn't true exactly I didn't really believe that he had withheld information but I thought there was enough chance that he you know could still you know he had the power to anything I sit in that interview didn't have to go any further and so I thought well I'll just make sure that this memo then I'll put it in a memo form and I'll make sure it goes

[24:39] directly to they probably won't read it I actually did not even have hopes that the Senators would read it I had it in an envelope that said confidential and I took it to their office in the Senate heart building kind of a kind of a funny story because when I got done being debriefed by the by the Senate excuse me the joint intelligence committee staffers which took place in FBI space and we were minded you could really

[25:09] speak freely because I had FBI officials listening in to everything I said to those staffers and and they could even stop me from talking if they wanted to they didn't but they could have they were mine they call it minding your being minded when you talk and this is even to Congress this is this is what I don't think the American public understand maybe they do now with this kind of real partisan wrangling and that's going on but this has always been the case secrecy is power and so you

[25:40] know people don't want the truth to come out and they will do everything they can anyways at the end of about to our interview where I told them you know most of what I remembered the they said to me is there anything you know have you left anything out is there anything that you I want to make sure we know and I said well if there is anything I left out it's in this memo and then I pulled out this this 1213 page memo that I had written and as I handed in the memo they kind of looked at me like whoa and I

[26:11] walked out and so I gave him this memo and then I I took a copy of the memo to the director FBI director's office because of course he's the the buck stops here and he's the firt it was directed it was directed addressed to the director it these offices are hard to find in the FBI because it's a real the J Edgar Hoover Building is just as tangled hallways and it's very hard to find things yeah it's just they have

[26:45] color lines on the hallways so people you're supposed to follow these color lines to go oh my gosh it's like a mess Jagger Hoover was kind of a say a sadist because he doesn't have MIT there's no windows in that building and it's just like a tunnels it's almost like tunnels it's a mess all right so so I found the directors office then I also took a copy to the Office of Professional Responsibility which is the internal affairs for the FBI so that they could you know see if

[27:15] they wanted to investigate this and then I got a cab and I went to the Senate heart building at the time the Senate heart building you couldn't get into it it was a huge long line because the anthrax letters had been sent to the Senate building and people had been exposed to anthrax and so they had top security and you couldn't really get into the Senate heart building so I I talked to a security guard and I said I

[27:45] showed him my credentials and I said I have to get to two Senate offices with this confidential memo and so that guard escorted me to both of those offices and I you know left a copy not even hope just hoping that they might read it and basically be able to finally at least ask some more intelligent questions because they were didn't even understand what had happened and this is again eight-and-a-half months later they

[28:15] really really had no idea so after I left those I caught a I caught a plane right back I took the cab to the airport and flew back here and in about two days later is when someone from the probably someone in Congress I don't know staffer somebody must have then called CNN New York Times and said you know there's there's a lot more to a lot more to 9/11 here we got this memo and that's when it

[28:46] started to leak I see and then what happened then were people inviting anyone to interview at that point cuz I know you did some fairly large interviews well yeah there are a lot of there was a media short you know wherever they want to call it a media frenzy for a couple weeks I had the Time magazine photographer and reporter down in my driveway they didn't even leave at night they were hoping to like take a picture you know of me

[29:17] and out of my driveway my house has a back way in and so I went up the back way and he never kind of basically cheated them out of a picture and stuff they had they found an old picture that they put on their magazine just from their old footage of something because I didn't even stop to get a picture and then they yeah New York Times called and other other reporters were calling me at the time and I didn't really talk to any

[29:51] of them they the memo within gosh another day or two maybe the day or two after the media heard about it they didn't actually have the copy and so the FBI maybe DOJ tried to keep it from leaking further by classifying it secret and they they've used a pretext of like one word and the memo the word French was classified so they used that as a

[30:21] pretext to classify it to try to keep it from leaking but in fact Time magazine and some others within a couple of days got the entire memo and then yeah for for a little while there was a bit of a media frenzy and I didn't really I didn't really talk to the media at all I got called within another couple of days by senators Leahy and Grassley who were the heads of the Senate Judiciary Committee because of course they have

[30:54] oversight over the FBI and if in all of these things you know dealt with their their role as as trying to conduct oversight the the Senate Judiciary was conducting its own investigation of 9/11 and then I also got called by the two minnesota senators i don't know if i got called by them because i don't remember talking to either one of them but they at the time was Wellstone and Mark Dayton where the two minnesota senators and what they did all four of them wrote

[31:26] letters to the Attorney General and to the hi director asking that I not be fired and the combination of four senators letters that I not be fired worked and Muller said pretty quickly that no she won't be fired Ashcroft was a little more cagey about it and he didn't really he didn't really promise I wouldn't be fired he kind of you know just was gave a vague answer back but the agents

[31:58] association knew just you know because this wasn't about me personally this was about the agents in the office that our office had been you know sorted by headquarters and so the agents association obviously took the side of the agents that had been you know that there should have been respected and they should have their information was credible etc etc so that that

[32:28] whistleblowing did not stand me in good stead with headquarters personnel they were very angry about it and and the other group that was angry were the retired agents retired agents were under the old Hoover rule that no one speaks out of school so-called no never embarrassed the bureau was Hoover's rule and so you can never ever tell the truth about anything that had happened that was illegal or wrong or or public safety issue you know

[33:00] Hoover would you know would not like it and so that old rule you know some agents were still in that mode and they you know wrote me some letter saying you know you should there's a old loyalty hmm there's an old loyalty poem that Hoover had this was before my day because Hoover died in 72 and I did not join the FBI until early of early nineteen eighty one so you know and but

[33:31] in the years that Hoover ruled he had this old I think its Elliott Hubbard poem about blind loyalty and I used to be able to recite it I don't know if I can right now I've forgotten some of it but it's if you you you can never criticize the organization if you work for it there starts this way if you work for a man then you know keep your mouth shut and never criticize because if you

[34:01] do the first high wind that comes along will blow you away and you may never know why it that you can google it it's Elliott Hubbard poem and the title is loyalty and for Hoover blind loyalty was the top virtue and so if oil T is the top virtue then then integrity is you know way at the bottom you know that's it that's a that's a lesser thing and a lot of people still have that ethic they think loyalty matters more than than integrity and

[34:33] truth yeah we'd have a perfect world if integrity was the number one priority in my opinion it just but you know integrity just you you really do I think in this day and age you know especially there's so much information out there and if you have it and it's something that needs to be disclosed I encourage people to do so I mean you'll still you know I know there's always backlash and I guess that's I wanted to see if you were affected in any other way as well because we know there's backlash from sometimes speaking out and you've kind of indicated a little bit like people

[35:04] unhappy at the bureau in certain departments but you know you know you were regarded as a hero it seems to be and I one of the things to kind of go off in different topic I said like I believe that the landscape of whistleblowing has changed dramatically over the years but it you may have a different opinion you know what your experience was but in - mm - you were kind of allowed it as a hero for whistleblowing and in the past few years whistleblowers seem to have been targeted smeared blacklisted and been potentially murdered and put in prison

[35:34] so it has definitely been a big change in attitude and maybe a little bit down the road when we're speaking here you can kind of tell me why you think that is and what has occurred in your opinion that's kind of created that shift yeah I I think that that Time magazine of 2002 which was called the whistleblowers they're the persons of the year were the whistleblower I went a long way towards making people think that it was good and right to tell the truth it was it wasn't just the FBI

[36:07] case that was an run and worldcom these big corporations where everybody went up goes along with the lies from the top on down until the whole thing crumbles and there and all the shareholders and all the employees and investors and everyone loses everything right those big debacles are lessons and so for a short while at this this moment in 2002 the mainstream media and the publican and you know people and power

[36:38] weren't necessarily cool with it all but but but a lot of people understood the need for truth-telling I always thought it was funny that people weren't more understanding of the need for truth helling because in the FBI as the investigators of for instance corporate fraud healthcare fraud you know even defense military fraud I mean all the frauds that the FBI would investigate over the years guess what required

[37:09] there's no way the FBI knows these things they will never be able to figure out a Bernie Madoff 10-15 years they'll never be able to figure that out on their own they absolutely require a whistleblower to come in write them a letter and say you know I want to get this off my chest I've been the bookkeeper for Bernie Madoff and he has cheating lots of people you know it requires that kind of whistleblowing and so in the in the FBI like I worked on mafia and mob stuff in

[37:40] New York City and the only way that we could make an inroad into the organized crime was if we got information from you maybe not a whistleblower you know could be an informant or our cooperating witnesses they're all the same by the way these are all interchangeable except that in some cases informants have their own incentives etc but and so you have to be aware of different motivations and things but but the if you get you have

[38:11] to have that information from somebody that tells you the truth and so it's pretty odd that an agency that recruits and who and encourages whistleblowing and encourages people in the public to tell the truth about stuff would then turn and say but we don't want to know anything about ourselves I guess it isn't so incredible but this is people will like it if it's if it's the airing the dirty laundry of somebody else they'll be fine but if it's there themselves their own institution and

[38:44] this can be everything from the Catholic the Catholic hierarchy you know it's it's good otherwise good people get locked into this groupthink in blind loyalty of their own group and they think that their goals and their mission of their entity is more important than the ways in the process it's always ends justify the means you know the the people who are covering up for the pedophile priests thought well

[39:14] our religion is more important maintaining people's faith and trust in Catholicism is more important than telling the truth about these pedophile priests and so people are always doing this they're making an ends justify the means especially the people who are in power in these in these various groups and and what happened is after this 2002 moment passed for instance in my own case I didn't stop of course things got

[39:45] worse after 9/11 they used the exploitation of it was even worse than the failure to that allowed it to happen the there were 3,000 people that died on 9/11 you know how many people have died since millions of people have died it's horrible and so this thing just got worse and worse and nobody opened their mouth about any of that there was there was a roundup of innocent people in in New York City after 9/11 and everybody kept their mouth shut for a couple of

[40:15] years about that they started to torture take people to black sites Muller Muller at the top of the FBI who now has considered this pinnacle of Eggar t he never made a report that he knew of that people were being tortured that's completely violates both domestic constitutional and an international law to torture and Mahler you know he just swept it under the rug he told us a person you're the second person he was kind of at your caliber who's mentioned

[40:45] molar is how he chooses his integrity and the best bit in the best and I hate to say that because I do like him but you're the second person who's mentioned something very similar he uses it depends as long as it's not gonna affect him there you go that's exactly I wrote an article about Muller and call me both of them because they got this reputation now because of the partisanship on the on the liberal side and it's really hypocritical because the Liberals we're

[41:16] always criticizing the FBI and the CIA but now they thought think that these leaders who by the way worked under the Bush administration and in really signed off on all kinds of highly illegal things but but you know they're very careful they're very good politicians and they know how to pick and choose what will make their reputations you know burnish their own reputations and in fact if you really look at the facts of Muller and Comey they are involved in all kinds of different the

[41:49] same you know line of scandals the anthrax the the targeting of the wrong person in the anthrax case that they ended up having to pay five million dollars to Muller goes all the way back to the Whitey Bulger cover-up in Boston where the FBI was operating this murderous Irish mobster for 20 years and in Muller probably knew about it he had a role in that anyways I I wrote a whole memo detailing

[42:20] some of these factual things about Muller and Comey some of the problem is that leaders who rise up to these positions have learned the art of compromise they've learned the art of almost kind of manipulation etc because that's what into their leadership and a lot of people just fall for it they they want to believe so hard and in a you know their group their groups leader that they they don't really are not objective

[42:54] it's almost reminds me of Billy Graham you know you know how Billy Graham could get all those people to believe that he was healing them and you know thousands or thousands of people all Roberts there's been a whole bunch of these because the people in the group are so inclined to want to believe their faith their blind faith they were so inclined to put their trust in this person at the top and that was with this the case with J Edgar Hoover but it's also the case with Mahler and call me and and he'd before them Louie free and a whole and

[43:26] the press sometimes presidents depending on on your partisanship whether it's Clinton or whether it's George Bush it's it's very strange now that some of our George Bush for instance who really started all of this no post 9/11 stuff is now being lauded as a good guy by liberals you'll see here interviews now and there's even a book out that I saw an interview on NPR where he's being

[43:57] touted as this great guy and of course oh you're so much better than Trump and all the rest and that's that's nonsense he's one of the people who started this he fueled terrorism it's it's it's incredible how little critical thinking there is in the public and again it's frustrating to have been a whistleblower and to have seen how this is all one thing's led to another and then of course they have children and grandchildren who are facing the consequences of this this really very

[44:29] dangerous stuff that has occurred you know increasing terrorism and confronting nuclear-armed countries now and it's just really scary yeah it seems to be so we have about less than 10 minutes so kind of like going on to about what you're doing today and also maybe go in into I know that you ran for office and you didn't succeed but is there plans to maybe run again and in what capacity when I retired from the FBI I initially thought I would you

[44:59] know I was only 50 and the one of the remedies from the 9/11 Commission report three of their 40 recommendations were to create a civil liberties oversight board so this is all before anyone knew Snowden or NSA whistleblowers no one knew all of them they didn't even know about torture in in 2004 the 9/11 Commission the 9/11 Commission by the

[45:31] way some of them knew about torture so they had recommended that a privacy and civil liberties oversight board be formed and I thought well that's great I'll get on that that will be a way that I can really contribute here you know basically not only on my legal background but you know I thought I could do something and I actually was able to get I think eight of our 10 Minnesota Congress persons to recommend me to Bush at the time to be a member of

[46:02] that and Bush though did not want to he did not want to have any oversight of course no oversight at all over what was going on so he made sure that the privacy and civil liberties oversight board was under him in the White House and he dragged his feet but eventually there were four Republicans and one Democrat put on this board and after a year or two not very long the I think the Democrat wrote a report

[46:34] saying you know we're being thorton we can't do anything we're not being allowed you know work we're completely being restricted and he said I resigned and so that that and they didn't have subpoena power or anything so it went into limbo for several until Obama got in and when it all excuse me went into limbo until the Congress changed its a majority to two Democrat and when that happened they actually passed an

[47:04] independent private cien civil liberties oversight board and in the meantime I had run for Congress as a Democrat in Minnesota and lost and so when they reconsidered this privacy and civil liberties oversight board I again went to all of ours you know Congress person's here and I with the exception of one that was a Republican who of course said oh you are a Democrat I can't support you but the rest of them I still got five or six to support me in a bid to be named Obama though however

[47:38] even though this this board was reconstituted he didn't want it either you know the the notion that one one party is better than the other is completely nonsense my experience is that the the power is making these people it's not the opposite and so he did the same thing he drugged his feet it took years and years and finally of course I was not once elected he finally got it he finally had five people on this board

[48:08] they did not have their first meeting until after the Snowden disclosures that was the first time from like 2004 when the law passed until about 2013 or so I think it was I don't exactly remember when they had the first meeting it was a lot years and years and years from a recommendation of the 9/11 Commission and it that's a pretty good interesting point just to compare with how quickly the Bush administration said we gotta go

[48:39] to war in Iraq we got a torture all those things happen within days after 9/11 the the one fix that would have made sense which was oversight over this our to control illegal stuff that was going on took years and years and years to get into place but that's what I really wanted to do I was never picked for it and running for Congress the only good thing about it I used to just say it was like a march into hell for a heavenly cause because you really see how corrupt the whole electoral process

[49:13] is people know Bernie Sanders complained you know the the Sanders supporters complain the system was rigged and Donna Brazile has written a whole book about some of these highly irregular funding but the but it it even before citizens united because I ran in 2005 to 2006 it was already really corrupt the big money there is no way a normal good person who does not want to sell their soul actually in the first

[49:45] week it to get these millions of dollars that are required even for a congressional race it's a minimum of of at least two to three million dollars for just a congressional race for a Senate race it's somewhere around 20 million dollars so unless you're an independently wealthy you know if you're if you're you know Bill Gates or somebody like that or obviously Trump says thought City had money but if you have to be independently wealthy or you

[50:15] have to be willing essentially to sell your soul I think if the public was more knowledgeable about the process the electoral process they would have the stars in their eyes that they have and they would be more they would be more capable of judging these these Congress persons and Senators because really they have to sign off on things especially to these the defense industry to you know obviously to the to the gun and the

[50:47] weapons industry but to of the American Israeli public affairs committee all of these huge special interests now these big funders that pick that essentially they are picking the candidates the people are not picking them big money is picking the candidates so it's impossible to run unless I always told people if I won the lottery or something I would I would definitely think about how did if I had if I had several million dollars but I can't you can't do it on your own absolutely impossible Joe democracy okay well that's good

[51:19] information and what about advice for other whistleblowers advice for them I'm the best there is one way that is more likely to get a result and and you have a better chance it's the queen time process it does you have to fulfill some requirements there has to be a false statement in like a grant you know where it's a tax money that is funding a national grant let's say

[51:51] healthcare for instance if you knew or know about a doctor who's fudging their their scientific results and they are getting a federal grant and it goes back to the False Claims Act in the Civil War because in in during times of war there's a lot of defense contractor fraud so let's say you were making toilet seats for them for the Pentagon and you found out that they were overcharging $1,000 per toiler $10,000 per toilet seat if you knew that you could file a qui tam lawsuit under seal

[52:23] and and you would be the whistleblower and then the the Department of Justice has a chance to review those lawsuits in some cases they may actually take your side by the way it's a small percentage of cases the same question so I but it's really important to reiterate that did you need links or anything you would like to anything you want to share with the public you know I've written two articles one is on the intelligence

[52:55] ethics issue and it's on the war on terror if they put in Coleen Rowley the false promise of the war on terror I think is the title that's one of my better articles and the other one is WikiLeaks in 911 what gangs there we go and you know what you mentioned torture earlier so that's a great segue to introduce my next guess I have the John Kerry aku and a man the highest character has served jail because he refused to participate toward her so we'll be back after this break guys

[53:25] [Music] Thank You Colleen okay bye good luck Ella thanks so much thank you hello and welcome back to whistle blower nation here in revolution radio again i'm your host ella and who I have with me now is John Kerry aku do I have you on the line John oh you sure do oh great so everything went on hands great to hear so I'm gonna give them a little bit

[53:56] a little bio about you I'm gonna start with one of your quotes there are some things we should not do even the name of national security I really like that quote that is your quote correct yes ma'am you never know so much so what John is a former CIA analyst and case officer a former senior investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and former counterterrorism consultant while employed by the CIA he was involved in critical counterterrorism missions following the terrorist attacks of September 11th in 2001 but refused to

[54:29] be trained in so-called enhanced interrogation techniques and John never authorized or engaged in these techniques after leaving the CIA he appeared on ABC news in an interview with Brian Ross and during which he became the first former CIA officer to confirm that the agency waterboarded detainees and label waterboarding is torture and Kuryakin interview revealed that this practice was not just the result of a few rogue agents but this was official US policy approved by the

[54:59] highest levels of government and the government started investigating John immediately after his media appearance five years later the government finally succeeded in piecing together enough information to criminally prosecute him he became the SEC's whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act a law designed to punish spies by the way not whistleblowers and so John is the sole CIA agent to go to jail in connection with the u.s. torture program despite the fact that he never tortured anyone rather he blew the whistle nasur rific

[55:30] wrongdoing so what a pleasure to finally have this opportunity to interview you oh thanks for having me okay so as you know I mentioned to you this is kind of a tribute to you so you we have close to an hour so maybe if you want to add a little bit to that like share a little bit about your background if you like and and your educational background and maybe your life before serving our countries sure I was born and raised in western Pennsylvania a small town in in a rural part of the state about an hour north of Pittsburgh

[56:01] and I left just as I was turning 18 to go to college at George Washington University here in Washington I got a bachelor's degree in Middle Eastern Studies and then I was working on a master's degree in legislative affairs it was just before I finished my master's that that I was recruited into the CIA by one of my grad school advisors who was actually undercover as a grad school adviser he was really a CIA officer acting as what used to be

[56:34] called a spotter looking for grad students who might be a good fit in the CIA's culture so after I graduated with my masters I joined the CIA and started working as an analyst I spent my first eight years as an analyst working on Iraq and served overseas a couple of times in the Middle East I was in headquarters by 1998 and I switched to

[57:04] counterterrorism operations went through the operational training went back overseas again after the September 11th attacks I became the CIA's chief of counterterrorism operations in Pakistan and and led a series of raids one night in March of 2002 that resulted in the capture of Abu Zubaydah who we believed at the time was the number three in al-qaeda that was incorrect but we believed he was the number three and we caught I'm not allowed to say the number

[57:35] but we caught many dozens of additional al-qaeda fighters that night I returned to headquarters by the end of May 2002 and as you noted in your introduction I was asked if I wanted to be trained in what they called the use of enhanced interrogation techniques it was a torture program I so at the time I declined I'm sorry to say that of the 14 people that they asked to be trained I was the only one who said no and and I'm glad I did

[58:06] I have no regrets I left the CIA in 2004 and went into the private sector and then in 2007 I gave that interview to Brian Ross at ABC News in which I blew the whistle on the torture program so it's been an odyssey really since 2007 I was investigated for a total of four years by the FBI but it wasn't the Bush administration that went after me it was the Obama administration and I

[58:36] gave the I gave the interview as I said in December of 2007 the FBI investigated me from December o 7 to December 8 and then closed the case and sent my attorneys a declination letter declining to prosecute they concluded that I had not committed a crime a month later Barack Obama was inaugurated and the CIA asked Eric Holder to secretly reopen the case against me which he did I had no idea I was still under investigation and for

[59:08] the next three years they tapped my phones they intercepted my emails they had surveillance teams on me and then finally in January of 2012 I was charged with five felonies coming out of that interview including three counts of espionage what was going on through in your head when you heard that when you heard that sentence what were you thinking oh that I would jump in front of a subway train ah I can't I mean I'd plant plain and plain and simple yeah I

[59:39] how do you come through something like that I was I was facing 45 years in prison I knew in my heart I hadn't done anything wrong espionage that was that was ridiculous on its face and by the end of the year those charges were thrown out but it becomes an economic decision I'm glad we have we have some time I'll explain how this how this all played out in my attorneys first conversation with the Justice

[1:00:10] Department they made an offer and they said take a plea to an espionage charge and you do 10 years and I said I'm not gonna do 10 minutes I had I've not done anything wrong well what the government normally does if you turn down that first offer they'll come back with an offer of of 12 years and then 15 years but when they came back with their second offer with me it was 8 and then the third offer was five and one of my attorney said I've

[1:00:41] been an attorney for 40 years and I've never seen them do this before and I said well why are they coming down in time and he said because they have no case and they know they have no case so finally they came down to three and a half and they said best and final offer and I decided to to turn it down and so they they said that if we were to go to trial they would seek 45 years which was

[1:01:13] a death penalty I'm 53 years old I was I was 40 48 at the time it's the death penalty and and I knew from a study that was released right around that same time by ProPublica that the government wins ninety eight point two percent of their cases and besides that I had hired OJ Simpson's jury consultant he happens to be the uncle of my best friend's wife

[1:01:44] and he volunteered his very very expensive services so he flew up he flew up from Dallas and and he got a security clearance from the Justice Department and we went over the entire case and finally he said to me look if we were in any other district in America I would say let's go for it we're gonna win this thing but you're in the Eastern District of Virginia they call it the espionage Court because no national security defendant has ever won a case there he said they would convict

[1:02:15] a bologna sandwich if the government asked them to he said look at what your jury is going to be your jury is going to be CIA FBI NSA Homeland Security Pentagon intelligence community contractors and their family members you don't stand a chance take the deal and so we went back to the Justice Department and we proposed a year they came back with two and a half and we decided to cut our losses you know one of my attorneys said

[1:02:48] to me because I was gonna I was gonna turn down the two-and-a-half and he said you just don't understand you think this is about justice and it's not it's about cutting your losses and finally another one said if you were my brother I would beg you to take this deal he said this can be a blip in your life or it can be the defining event of your life make it the blip and so I took the deal and and

[1:03:18] I guess you know then you went into the system and how did you cope what was it like was it different than you expected and where there was an opportunity to just spend time to educate yourself and really I'm sure someone sitting in and if in the system like that that gives you an opportunity to start doing research you know yeah yes and no yes and no you're not allowed any computer access so research is difficult but here's how how this worked my attorneys

[1:03:50] asked the judge to send me to a minimum-security work camp now in a work camp there are no bars on the windows the doors are not locked you're free to come and go as you please you're on your honor not to abscond and most people work in town at a local university or whatever and minimum security camps are generally attached to high security or higher security prisons so the the prosecution had no objection and the

[1:04:22] judge ordered that I be sent to a minimum security camp so I was assigned to the prison camp at Loreto Pennsylvania and I turned myself in on February 28 to 13 I drove up to the up to the prison and you just you literally knock on the door and say I'm John Kiriakou I'm here to turn myself in and so they put you through the metal detector and then the corrections officer began began to lead

[1:04:53] me around to the back of the actual prison and I said no no I'm supposed to be at the camp across the street and he laughed and he said not according to my paperwork you're not so I told myself take it easy there's nothing you can do if you flip out they're gonna put you in solitary so I just remained silent right and to tell you the truth I was probably in shock too so I was processed and it took me

[1:05:26] five days to get access to a telephone and when I finally did I called my lead attorney and I said hey they put me in the actual prison with the pedophiles and the murderers and the drug kingpins so what do I do and he said oh my god well we could file a motion but it'll be two years before we get a hearing and you'll be home by then I'm sorry buddy you're gonna have to tough it out and so I decided that day that I would rely on

[1:05:56] my CIA training to make sure that I remained safe and at the top of the social heap and what I ended up doing I ended up writing a book and I won one of the country's four top literary prizes for this book I won the pen First Amendment award and I called the book doing time like a spy how the CIA taught me to survive and thrive in prison the Patriot Act how it's supposed to be for spies and yes exactly and so I wrote

[1:06:32] down these 20 life lessons that the CIA taught me and I showed how I used each one of these to stay safe right well that's great and so that worked out for you and to time go did it go fairly quickly once you were there and you really you don't it did once you get into the routine it goes very quickly in the beginning well you know what I was walking around the the yard one day with with a captain

[1:07:06] from the Bonanno crime family he was a he lived in a cell across the hall from me and he said to me how much time do you have anyway and I said thirty months and he said oh you could do that standing on your head I said you know what it feels like thirty years and he said I'm gonna give you some advice don't tell anybody that you have thirty months because most of these guys are here for 10 15 20 years and if they hear

[1:07:37] that you're here for two and a half your safety is gonna be in jeopardy so if anybody asks you you tell them you have five years and so that's what I did I told everybody that I had five years and then on the day of my release you know the the the cops put up a sheet every every day at four o'clock that lists the next day's meetings and one day it said Kiriakou R&D Bo's 700 that's receiving

[1:08:07] and discharge and somebody son said are you getting out tomorrow and I said why because you're on the it's called a call-out sheet you're on the call-out sheet for our D I thought you had five years I said yeah I have five years I'm just mailing a package that's all okay yes and I walked out it's just hard for me to even understand how someone you're so different like compared to you know

[1:08:39] people I know I've talked to other whistleblowers who have served time in different capacities at least a couple of them and you're such high character and you served your country and you have such high integrity and to being there with like real criminals I mean that I'm sure that was thank you and you know the prison is fully a third pedophiles and other child sex offenders which made it even more difficult because you just want to you just want to kill every word I'm sure that's just disgusting but you made it through and

[1:09:11] and you know what let me interrupt you for a second sure I made it I made it through but not without some challenges and I want to tell your listeners about one challenge in particular because it's a lesson for all of us right especially especially in America of 2018 one of my attorneys told me he said I'm gonna give you a bit of advice that I know from other clients who have had to go to prison don't trust anybody and I mean literally anybody

[1:09:42] he said the FBI is upset that you got off so easily they really wanted you to go to prison for 45 years so don't trust anybody they do this to organized crime guys all the time they're upset because these organized crime guys have short sentences and they set them up while they're in prison and I said ok and I filed that in the back of my head so I had been in prison about six weeks and a guy who lived in my housing unit he was an Afghan American he was a pharmacist

[1:10:13] who had a bad oxycontin problem and was doing eight years and very very nice guy lovely guy he just happened to have a drug problem and he belongs in rehab not in prison but anyway he came up to me and he said hey John there's a new guy here that wants to meet you and I said yeah who's that and he said he's the former spokesman for the Taliban and I said the former spokesman for the Taliban you know what I remember that case it was from like

[1:10:44] 2003 he was in on a gun charge but he had been the Taliban spokesman inside the United States and they got him on a Terrorism conspiracy and a gun charge and I said no thanks I don't want to I don't want to talk to him I don't want to meet him he said okay I'll tell him well a few days later I'm out on the yard just walking the track by myself and this very obviously Afghan looking man with a long she beard walks up to meet with his hand outstretched to shake my hand I put both

[1:11:17] of my hands in the air because I immediately assumed that either the cops or the FBI were in the woods with their long distance cameras to take a picture of me embracing this convicted terrorists so I put my hands up in the air and I said back off and he said oh come on man we have a lot in common I said we have nothing in common I spent my career trying to kill people like you oh no don't be like that he said and I said look I'm not gonna be

[1:11:49] able to say it in any more clear language believe me alone come on let's just talk I said leave me alone before I do something that both of us are going to regret and so we walked away well the the main point of this story is this guy had been in in my prison for three days and two days later he was released so why in the world would this guy have been in my prison for five days on a conspiracy to commit terrorism with a

[1:12:19] gun charge because he was planted there by the FBI to entrap me and that's what the FBI does wow they really had it out for you it really really did you had Colleen on your show earlier correct Colleen really gave me some great great advice I relied on Colleen and on other colleagues of Colleen's to just make sure that I was pointed in the right direction whenever whenever I had a

[1:12:51] question about tactics like the story I just told you I knew I could rely on Colleen and she would give it to me straight yeah she's a straight shooter she's the best interview so so you spent your time there and you you know you wrote a book and then you're out and how did that go I don't want to go to too much personal life without your permission oh no you had to I know you had to get back into the world and readjust what did you do when you were released well you know most people when they're

[1:13:22] released from prison they think they can just step back into their lives again and everything is gonna be fine and that's just not true it's far far more stressful when you first get out because you're assigned to a halfway house now I didn't have to spend any time in the halfway house I checked in I was there nine hours and they sent me home so I was under house arrest for the next 87 days but house arrest is very difficult because it means that you literally cannot leave the four walls of that house you can't walk to the curb to pick up

[1:13:53] your paper you can't go sit on the deck in the backyard you are inside the house for the next 87 days and the halfway house calls you constantly during the day and by god you better pick up the phone because if you don't then two cops are coming to the house to get you and take you back to prison in the mean time the only time you are allowed to leave the house is to go to the halfway house to be drug tested to be harassed you have to promise that you're looking for a job and you have to outline all the

[1:14:24] different jobs that you're looking for well that's ownerís in and of itself and I'll tell you another thing too they have these mandatory classes at the halfway houses there are 16 mandatory classes and if you don't take them they violate you and you go back to prison but these classes are nonsensical for somebody like me suicide prevention I said don't you think you should have given that class before I went to prison I'm thrilled now that I'm home I don't

[1:14:56] need the suicide prevention class now it's kind of like closing the barn door after the animals have already got now another one was how to write a resume thank you very much I know how to write a resume how to conduct yourself in a job interview again I appreciate the thought but I don't need your help to get through a job interview so I don't know if it was anger rebellion arrogance maybe I didn't sign up for a single one of the classes and so I get a call one

[1:15:27] day from the director of the halfway house come in immediately so they wouldn't allow me to drive the halfway house is literally seven miles as the crow flies from my house but it would take me two hours to get there because I have to walk a mile to the subway take the subway to Capitol Hill and then get on a bus which takes me to literally the worst neighborhood in the worst quadrant of Washington get off the bus there and walk another mile to the halfway house so it was quite an ordeal so I got there

[1:15:59] two hours later and everybody's there the director and deputy director of the halfway house a representative from the Bureau of Prisons in Baltimore had driven all the way to Washington my case manager of the drug counselor and a social worker and I go in and they all have their angry faces on and the director said we're discussing whether or not to violate you I said okay you haven't taken any of the mandatory classes what do you have to say for

[1:16:30] yourself and I said and this is exactly how I said it did you ever see that episode of The Simpsons where Homer has to take a parenting class and he goes a couple of minutes late and when he walks in the instructor is saying put a garbage can lid on the garbage can people I can't stress that enough is that what you're gonna teach me in your mandatory classes to put a garbage can lid on the garbage can I said I don't need your stupid mandatory classes it's a waste of my

[1:17:01] time and of your time I would rather be spending that time finding a job because you people consistently harass me because I haven't found a job well guess what it takes me two hours to get here two hours to get home an hour that I have to do your stupid drug tests and waste my time talking to you that's five hours that I could be out looking for a job and they're all just looking at each other step outside please so I step outside so 45 minutes later they call me back in they said okay

[1:17:33] we've waived the classes and I said okay and another thing I want permission to drive I'm tired of taking the bus I'm tired of wasting my day coming up here all right you have permission to drive and once I laid out those markers I was okay they knew that they couldn't push me around because I wasn't afraid of them you know just like I told the warden one day and I put this in my book too he was trying to threaten me because I had been writing this blog from prison and it was the blog that led

[1:18:04] to the pen First Amendment award and he wanted to put me in solitary he was threatening me and I said warden with all due respect I have gone nose-to-nose with al-qaeda with Hezbollah with the Iranians and I'm supposed to be afraid of you and you're solitary I said please you've never served in Yemen I can do solitary standing on my fingertips and

[1:18:34] then he backed off they always do because if you show them that you know the rule is better than they do and that you know that you have not given up your First Amendment right to freedom of speech they always back down sounds like it well you put them in their place I tried it was risky but I but I succeeded well that's the important thing you know and you do have to take a stand and we need already been through so much as well and it seemed to have worked out for you so

[1:19:05] I guess there's a few things I wanted to go into in delve into a little bit more at some point and whatever or do you care you choose but like I wanted to go into the acts of terror or the acts of torture and some of the laws surrounding that and what that entails I'm very interested in that and then you know what you're planning on doing in the future which work you have lined up and then maybe going to whistleblowing in general as well as I close out to kind of give a space or to talk about what we need to do to protect people like you so

[1:19:35] this doesn't happen to them this is unacceptable people I talk to a lot of people and you people I don't know if you know this people Revere you surprised how many people know you and they Revere you and your character yeah they say only the kind of things about you I think so much yeah I mean that was my impression when I talked on the phone a year ago you just sounded like such a sweet wonderful man I think bill made he somehow suggested you or mentioned you or something those are giants oh he is

[1:20:06] so what you know the reason why I do what I do is because of him if I interviewed him on a different podcast at one point and he is a hero in talking to him and Curly role model yes I mean for Edward Snowden and and you know he did what he did because of Bill Benny was his hero and so speaking with those two men changed the course of my life you know all of a sudden I had this interest in people like you and then working with you know other people other human rights activists and people who are also you know being tortured or

[1:20:36] being subjugated by the government in different capacities so you know it was very concerning to me so here I sit because of those two men wonderful yeah they're really delightful people so anyways um yeah so I guess whatever what do you want to you know approach those questions sure well let's start with with torture you know when I was first approached it was kind of an odd experience I was in the cafeteria at the CIA I had just gotten back from Pakistan and a senior officer of the CIA's

[1:21:08] Counterterrorism Center came up to me and he said hey welcome back I said yeah thanks good to be back he said yeah I'm glad I ran into you I wanted to ask you do you want to be certified in the use of enhanced interrogation techniques and I had never heard that term before and I said what's that mean and very excitedly he said we're gonna get rough with these guys and I said well what does that mean and so he laid out these ten techniques from what they called the attention

[1:21:38] grasp all the way up to two waterboarding and two techniques that I always believed were worse than waterboarding and I said oh that sounds like a torture program can you oh he said yeah sure no no it was sleep deprivation and the cold sell and I'll get into those in a second okay I said that sounds like a torture program no no he says we we got it approved by the President and by the Justice Department and I said yeah you may have but I said

[1:22:09] listen just in my gut I have a moral and ethical problem with this and he said okay suit yourself as it so happened I was passed over for promotion a month later now here I had just caught the number three in al-qaeda and they passed me over for promotion so I went into the deputy director's office he I had worked for him years earlier and I said what do you mean passed over for promotion what do I have to catch bin Laden to get promoted around here and he said well we

[1:22:39] talked about you in the promotion panel and you didn't want to be trained in the in the enhanced interrogation techniques and his exact words that displayed a shocking lack of commitment to counterterrorism well the station chief in Pakistan for whom I had worked had been promoted to be the associate deputy director of the whole CIA and he made me his executive assistant and he promoted me so I got the promotion but I realized I'm on the other side of this thing and

[1:23:11] it's kind of lonely over here but I thought you know I grew up in um I grew up in a very progressive household my parents were you know followers of the news I remember when I was six years old and I remember this very vividly and I've talked to Daniel Ellsberg about this but when I was six Dan released the Pentagon Papers and of course it was major national news and even as a six-year-old I remember my parents talking about it at the dinner table

[1:23:42] because we always talked about the events of the day at the dinner table and in our house Daniel Ellsberg was a hero he was a hero he was somebody to be emulated and so from when I was a kid I was never really afraid to stand alone because if I really believed in my heart that I was right then that's all that really mattered and so I stuck it out and I refused to be trained so you know these

[1:24:13] techniques some of them clearly were not torture if I grabbed you by the lapels and I say answer my question doggone you that's not torture but they very quickly progressed into torture for example one of them was called walling wal Li ng and that is when a prisoner has his hands tied behind his back a towel is wrapped around his neck to prevent whiplash and then he slammed

[1:24:44] into a wall now the wall has to be fiberboard or something akin to fiberboard because you don't want to cause permanent damage and that towel is supposed to cushion the blow so Abu Zubaydah was was a victim of walling but they didn't wrap his neck in the towel and the wall was made of concrete now there's another prisoner I don't

[1:25:15] know if I should say his name or not I won't just to be on the safe side right who was walled repeatedly to the point where he has permanent brain damage and is unable to participate in his own defense so how is that legal the other two techniques that I told you I had particular objections to besides waterboarding which everybody knows about were sleep deprivation and the cold cell now sleep deprivation sounds like no big

[1:25:46] deal and in 2002 the Secretary of Defense at the time Donald Rumsfeld famously said that he didn't believe that there really was such a thing as sleep deprivation because he can go 48 hours without stopping you know his work and his desk is a stand-up desk he doesn't even have a chair and so he doesn't believe that my sleep deprivation is a problem well we can see what he's asked exactly the point we know from the from the American

[1:26:18] Psychological Association that people begin to lose their minds at day 7 with no sleep they begin to die around day 9 well the CIA was authorized to keep people awake for 12 days so how is that legal and moral and ethical the other one is the cold sell the cold sell is very simple a prisoner is stripped naked he's chained to an eyebolt in the ceiling so that he can't sit or lay or

[1:26:52] get comfortable in any way his cell is chilled to 50 degrees Fahrenheit and every hour a CIA officer goes into the cell and throws a bucket of ice water on him we we killed people with that technique we killed them now I understand actually like intellectually I understand when President Obama said we need to look forward not backward I get it if you're a CIA officer and you've been told that

[1:27:23] you're operating within the confines of the law and you do what you're told to do I understand but no one was authorized to murder prisoners nobody and there was never any justice for those people that we killed what about I'd heard another person tell me that they would have them like masturbate and do in hold really uncomfortable poses is that true or is that something you were aware of um I have never heard that at least not in

[1:27:54] the CIA context now I I'm not an expert on what happened at Abu Ghraib which was a military torture program a rogue torture program that would not surprise me at all if you told me that it happened at Abu Ghraib yeah so yes I'm just curious if that was something that was across the board or like you said a rogue group would have Tyrone yeah and there were other things that CIA officers did especially to Abu Zubaydah that had been outlined in the Senate torture report that were never

[1:28:25] authorized and certainly never prosecuted we knew for example that Abu Zubaydah had an irrational fear of insects and so they put him in a in a box like a coffin and then they poured a container of cockroaches in on top of him and then closed the coffin and just listen to him scream how is that legal and moral and ethical it can't be it's repulsive Bakshi I don't even know what they come up with these things it is it

[1:28:56] does come up with use I'm just curious I know it's a neat I've talked to enough people in government to know it's always need to know and you don't get your information but I'm very curious who sets the standards or who sets these policies these all came out of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center yep now they didn't invent them you know Chinese Communists used them the Belgians used them in the Congo a hundred and twenty years ago the Chinese used them back in the in the fourteen and fifteen hundreds these are old

[1:29:28] techniques but they were used because they work right you know and this is another issue to hide abate a lot of people in public venues whether they're at universities or radio or television shows I debate people who are pro they want they wouldn't call themselves Pro torture but certainly Pro enhanced interrogation techniques and their argument is that is that these techniques worked well first of all that's not the issue it doesn't matter if they work and first of all what does work mean it got somebody to talk lots

[1:30:01] of things can get people to talk raping them gets them to talk you gonna rape them I mean we don't because it's it's it's an abomination but if you if you want to get them to talk killing their children in front of them would work are you gonna do that next raping their wives in front of them you know that that might work so it's not an issue of whether it works I'm gonna sound like a broken record it's an issue of whether or not it's moral legal and ethical right but that's not the argument that

[1:30:32] the government wants to hear when do you think this is all this all came out of 9/11 these type of all of it yeah the problems the Patriot Act just caused just to the Patriot problem warrantless wiretapping mass surveillance all of these were byproducts of 9/11 which makes me conclude that here we are all these years later and Osama bin Laden one you know he wanted to effect

[1:31:03] American society he wanted to crash the economy and affect society and he crashed the economy he put us into a permanent wartime economy he this into a period where we spend untold trillions of dollars on national defense we've lost our civil rights and civil liberties we have a Patriot Act we have secret FISA courts so bin Laden one that's unfortunate so what do you think is gonna have to happen is there

[1:37:52] great to hear and then I haven't couple of the question I guess she was gonna ask them of John whiteheads friends but I'm not sure let's see what the questions oh I want to ask you about Geoff sterling I've been working with Holly we've had some scary things happen I don't know if you would I think you already at that point I was just disgusted to her she was called me Kate put me in touch with her and we were really concerned about her husband he was having heart issues and that where he was at and I just was very concerned

[1:38:24] she did say he did kind of get some help and I just really did to my best I could with people I know to ruffle some feathers but there's another it's just as I feel I feel for her I like her so much I like him so much and I haven't had to haven't spoken to him but you know I speak to Holly and so yes I don't know what's gonna happen out of that right I'm not sure I wish her thoughts on that well Jeffrey's still in the halfway house and right they're making they're making his stay there very difficult um they won't let him have a telephone because bo P regulations are

[1:38:56] such that you're not allowed to have a cell phone if it has a camera and if it has internet well every cell phone has a camera and internet so in every halfway house but Jefferies you have to white out the camera and just promise them that you won't surf the internet and if they want to check your phone they have the right to check it with with Jeffery just because they're they're actively trying to be as difficult as they can with him because they don't like him

[1:39:29] they just won't let him have a phone and so it's hard for him to stay in touch with Holly at the same time Jeffery is like me in that he doesn't need to learn how to write a resume the guy's an attorney and a decorated fraud investigators exactly so he doesn't need their stupid classes they're forcing him to go through the classes and instead of just sending him directly home to home confinement just to harass him they've kept him at the

[1:40:01] halfway house so they've told Holly that he's not even eligible to go home until this coming Thursday um Holly purposely has not gone to the press because she doesn't want to ruffle the the Bureau of Prisons feathers and and we have to wait and see until Thursday to see if he comes home if he doesn't come home I told her that I was gonna write about it again I'm in very close touch with them and so you know I

[1:40:31] want to I don't want to make things difficult for him at the same time we just can't abide this kind of behavior from the Bureau of Prisons it's discriminatory I could give maybe people you can maybe you probably can word it a little bit better give a little history about mr. sterling what happened to him yeah Jeffrey sterling is a bonafide whistleblower he was a CIA officer in the agency's Iran operations division he's also African American which is very important in the story so Jeffrey was

[1:41:06] involved in an operation that he believed constituted waste fraud abuse or illegality which is the definition of whistleblowing he went to his superiors they told him to mind his own business and and so he complained up the chain of command which is exactly what you're supposed to do when he didn't get any satisfaction there he went to the Congressional Oversight Committee which is also exactly what you're supposed to do and so as punishment for going to

[1:41:40] Congress with his concerns he had a an assignment rescinded he was supposed to go to the Middle East and they yanked the assignment out from under him and when he asked why his supervisor said well we thought it would be funny if you know not funny ha-ha but funny odd for a big black guy to be speaking persian farsi and jeffrey responded when did you realize i was

[1:42:12] black and so they said well we're gonna send you to germany with his his things had already been shipped out to the Middle East so he said I don't want to go Germany I was told I was going to the Middle East well how about we just fire you and they fired it so he filed a racial discrimination suit which believe me enraged them the thing is is the CIA's long been guilty of racial discrimination and sex discrimination it

[1:42:44] was only in the nineteen nineties that that women were were given equality to men in the CIA at least in the operational division so I've had some conversations about that so she validates exactly that statement oh it's just dreadful in fact there was a class-action suit of female officers that was settled in 1993 and in the settlement that in the decision the judge said he had never seen a case where the defendant had so fully documented the charges against itself as

[1:43:16] the CIA had done right crazy so Jeffrey was fired he filed a racial discrimination suit well James Rison of the New York Times covered that story and so Jeffrey and rised and spoke as it turns out 52 separate times never for more than a couple of minutes at the same time Rison wrote a book called Bush at war which talked about this Iran operation that constituted waste fraud

[1:43:48] abuse or illegality now there was someone on Capitol Hill on the Senate Intelligence Committee who was thought to have been the source rise and source for that story the CIA of course pointed the finger right at Jeffrey and they said you're a malcontent you complained about this program you're talking to Rison your Rison source jeffrey said i'm not rising source I have been talking to Rison it's been about my sex my racial discrimination suit which he has covered

[1:44:19] in the New York Times well the Justice Department decided there's no sense in going after this guy on Capitol Hill when we already have this guy Jeffrey sterling we're gonna go after him they repeatedly offered Jeffrey deals to plead guilty just take the deal and he refused he refused for a total of 11 years right not 11 I guess - to nine years and the reason he refused to take

[1:44:49] the deal was because he was innocent yeah and he told me he said you know I I thought as soon as I got in front of a jury they would realize how ridiculous this was well remember I said in the beginning of our conversation the Eastern District of Virginia look at how your jury is made up they would convict a bologna sandwich if the government asked them to and so Jeffrey was convicted on nine felony counts including seven counts of espionage the

[1:45:20] only thing that saved him from dying in prison was just serendipitously his sentencing date came the day after David Petraeus his sentencing date and so judge brinkema even though she's a hanging judge she was my judge she was Jeffrey's judge and she already assigned to herself the Ed Snowden case she said in good conscience she couldn't give him what she had wanted to give him because

[1:45:50] of what to tray us had done you got a sweetheart deal we're running out of time here but I want you to go ahead and say one more time what you're doing and I'll discuss Jeffrey next week as well so can you give what it is you're doing you're sure yes I have a radio on 105.5 have founded the Washington area from 4:00 to 6:00 in the afternoon by day through Friday and a weekly column at reader supported news org in your book my book is doing time like a spy how the

[1:46:22] CIA taught me to survive and thrive in prison well thank you John so much I appreciate it you
