Title: Human Rights Defense Cente
Show: Human Rights Defense Center
Date: 2015-12-16
URL: https://youtu.be/TtFXCGDZKjw
Duration: 33:00

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[00:04] welcome to this evening celebration of 25 years of prison legal news my name is Meg fiddler I'm a civilian non-combatant I'm not a lawyer nor have I ever been a prisoner annette and soon became friends with paul right ten years ago when he was awarded a fellowship by the petra foundation which I directed the foundation honored Petra tall Shattuck

[00:35] who grew up in Germany in the shadow of the Third Reich came to this country to work as an au pair and stayed on to graduate from law school with high honors while raising a family and to devote her life as a teacher scholar lawyer and activists to advancing human rights when Petra died young and suddenly in 1983 the foundation was created to recognize and encourage

[01:06] unsung individuals who were making distinctive contributions to the rights and dignity of others by taking risks and persevering without the safety net of personal privilege or institutional support Paul Wright was named a petrol fellow for his extraordinary work from behind bars for 13 years on behalf of prisoners human rights and civil liberties in 1973 Petra wrote the

[01:41] problems I see in America are fundamentally the problems of a mass democracy in which people have lost the feeling that they can influence the government and in which there's so much social and racial conflict that it is very difficult to make the old mechanisms work still she wrote i believe that if we work to put our politics to the test of our ideals and our values which we spell out so clearly

[02:14] in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights that there would be progress and that's what we should struggle for right now I'm honored to introduce someone who has put his politics to the test of those ideals and values a friend of prison legal news tonight's keynote speaker john kyriacou john is a decorated veteran of CIA counterterrorism operations and the only CIA officer with

[02:47] the guts and integrity to publicly confirm that waterboarding was used to torture detainees in the so-called war on terror for upholding his sworn duty to support and defend the Constitution of the United States he served almost two years of a 30 month prison sentence John first I'd like to thank Paul right

[03:18] I guess I knew Paul right before I actually met Paul right i arrived in in federal prison in Loreto Pennsylvania in February of 2013 and after a day or two in prison I got a nice note from Paul Wright saying we have this publication it's called prison legal news here's a two-year subscription and I figured I would be in prison about two years I

[03:48] thought okay well that was nice I'll send him a thank-you note so I sent him a thank-you note and then I sat down to read prison legal news and prison legal news literally changed the course of my incarceration it changed the way I looked not only at my own incarceration but at the issues of mass incarceration and what a lot of people myself included called the prison industrial complex it opened my eyes to issues that I otherwise would never have been exposed

[04:20] to issues as fundamental as those of civil liberties and human rights I joked with Paul when we spoke in Seattle a couple of weeks ago that the first thing I would do when my prison legal news arrived was gather about a dozen different guys in myself and we would read the news and brief out loud I would read it out loud about things that stupid prison guards around the country have done and gotten themselves into trouble and we would sit and laugh and

[04:50] loudly stupid prison guards oh this one raped a guy in the walk-in freezer and you know so we would kind of make ourselves feel better by by jumping on these prison guards but that that was just for fun Prison legal news actually was very was a very serious thing for me because it showed me what really was the most important thing not just about the publication but also about the human

[05:23] rights defense center I said in Seattle that I speak a lot all over the country and I know my my topics well and so I generally tend to wing it I couldn't wing it with my Seattle address and I didn't want to wing it with this address either and I was thinking to myself well why is it that I'm so much less comfortable talking about this issue and after thinking about it I realized that

[05:54] it's because this issue is so important and I think I hadn't really thought through why prison new legal news was so important to me personally the conclusion that I came to was that it's important because when you're in prison you really are all alone we may have friends and relatives on the outside but in prison life just stand still and it's like Groundhog Day where every day is exactly like every other day it doesn't

[06:26] matter if it's the middle of July or if it's Christmas your day is going to be exactly like every other day and you tend to forget that life on the outside is continuing to move forward so it was prison legal news that made me realize that there is support out there for people like me there there's an organization out there that is writing that is suing that's pursuing activism

[06:57] on issues that are that are important in my day-to-day life they're lobbying prison legal news and human rights defense center really were our voices on the outside I can't tell you how many people don't have confidence in their own intellect to be able to challenge either their incarceration or the powers that be that are that are doing things like charging them eighteen dollars and

[07:28] thirty cents or whatever it is for ten minute phone call for example or giving them a Chase Manhattan debit card with their commissary money at the end of their at the end of their incarceration but that include fees that are so onerous that really your commissary money's going to end up going to chase manhattan or to the bureau of prisons but prison legal news understood and prison legal news was out there telling people what was happening by way of background I was incarcerated on the national security charge I was charged

[08:00] actually with three counts of espionage which is one of the gravest crimes that an American can be accused of when when we say espionage we conjure up thoughts of Julia snuffle Rosenberg of spying for a foreign country of treason in some cases an espionage charge carries with it the death penalty I'm a patriot I've always been a patriot and I took an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United

[08:31] States not to cover up the CIA's dirty little secrets and so I decided in that 19 I'm sorry in 2007 that I was going to respond truthfully to an ABC News reporters questions I didn't know what he was going to ask me I said expected that he would ask me about torture and I I decided that if he did I was going to tell the truth and so in December of 2007 I gave an interview to brian ross at ABC News in which I said three things that utterly changed the

[09:02] course of the rest of my life I said that the CIA was torturing its prisoners I said that torture was official US government policy not the result of a rogue CIA officer and I said that the President had personally approved and signed of the torture policy I was immediately referred to the Justice Department with what's called a crimes report the CIA complaining that I had committed a crime believe it or not by

[09:34] the very end of the Bush administration the Bush Justice Department decided that I had not committed a crime but a month later when barack obama was sworn in as president he asked eric holder to reopen the investigation of my interview and so eric holder's Justice Department charged me with three counts of espionage one count of violating the intelligence identities Protection Act of nineteen eighty-two I'm only the second American

[10:04] in history to be charged with that crime and making a false statement I'm still not sure exactly what the false statement was supposed to have been it was thrown out anyway the Justice Department asked that I be incarcerated for 45 years for going on ABC news and talking about torture they said that I had revealed top secret code word information that was declassified solely for the purpose of prosecuting me and that information was that after the September 11th attacks the CIA had a

[10:36] program to kill or capture members of al-qaeda top secret top secret 45 years in prison my attorneys argued from the very beginning that I was a whistleblower indeed there's a legal definition of whistleblowing it's bringing to light evidence of waste fraud abuse or illegality or threats to the public health or public safety the Justice Department didn't care and what they did

[11:07] and I didn't even realize this while I was going through it I didn't realize it until I actually read about it in prison legal news was that they will heap felony charges on you and then come in at the very end after you've spent a million dollars in legal fees and say all right these five felonies we've charged you with will drop four of them if you take a plea and that's why the Justice Department wins 98.8 percent of its cases according to ProPublica the

[11:37] fix is in I decided when I first got to prison that I would begin writing a blog I was proud of it it was called letters from Loreto and it ran on firedoglake com it caused me absolutely no end of problems with the prison administration but believe me I've gone nose to nose with al-qaeda with Hezbollah with the Iranians I wasn't going to be afraid of this warrant of the warden in a in a low-security prison in central Pennsylvania so I decided to use PLN and

[12:12] to quote PLN liberally in my blogs it was PLN that was raising issues that in my experience were not part of the of the public conversation issues like private prisons issues like gouging prisoners for the use of telephones as I mentioned earlier issues like video visits taking the place of real human interaction with your family or with your friends

[12:43] I figured pln was manned by like-minded people and I wanted to get to know these people I wanted to work with him with them not just Paul although I you know because of the letter and and reading peel and I was aware of Paul but it wasn't just Paul it was the entire staff it was the entire organization these were good people I also really like the fact that that pln didn't ignore the

[13:17] smaller issues the more parochial issues it's easy to be academic and to talk about these broad themes of justice and human rights that's great it's important but pln also talked about things like crooked cops which I really didn't know much about I mean I've seen you know fort apache the bronx and movies like that but i didn't have any first-hand personal experience when it came to to abusive and sadistic tormenters like we

[13:49] had in in my own prison there was a book that i read in prison that was written actually buy a John J professor peter moscow's called in defense of flogging and he argues in that book that the Federal Bureau of Prisons like all the state systems really is nothing more than an employment agency for otherwise unemployable semi-literate rural white men and that's why prisons are in the middle of nowhere because the yoga the

[14:21] local yokels will just do whatever they're told to do and they're happy to have a job it's a federal job it's got a great pension I'm going to generalize about something don't think less of me please this is based on my own experience they're having a good time next door to it was my experience that prison guards at least at loretto were failed military grunts people who just couldn't cut it

[14:52] in the military and had nowhere else to go they were unable to get jobs with the local police department and the Bureau of Prisons came calling in fact many guards at loretto were second and third-generation guards people whose believe it or not their parents and their grandparents were there and in some cases were still there can you imagine three generations of prison guards working in the same prison I couldn't fathom the idea so I'm gonna

[15:27] skip a story that I told in Seattle about phony tough guys actually I won't to give it my phone calls were all monitored in prison monitored in real time because I was considered to be a threat to the to the administration my judge had recommended that I served my sentence in a minimum-security work camp and the prosecution agreed to that stipulation so my attorneys drove me to prison and drop me off and you know we

[15:57] all hugged and waved goodbye and I said you know head held high don't worry about me guys I'm going to be fine and they drove away and as they were driving away the cop that was processing me took me out and started to take me around to the back of the prison and I said no no I'm supposed to be at the camp across the street and he said not according to my paperwork you're not I said whoa are you taking me into the actual prison and he said yep so i told myself take it

[16:29] easy there's nothing you can do don't flip out they'll send you to solitary so I waited patiently for five days until I could get a pack number that allowed me to make a phone called and I called my attorneys and I told them what happened and they said well we could make a motion we can file a motion to have you moved but we won't get a hearing for two years at least and by then you're gonna be home so you're just gonna have to tough it out and I thought you know what I'm tougher than

[17:01] these guys are and I'm gonna make the most of this and so I started writing my blog I right here I had my share of funny tough guys who thought they could make their bones by taking on the CIA guy I'm glad to say that I was smarter than they were a couple of them finally made their move one mita full of himself the other got himself suspended there was one particularly nasty incident sadistic guard the only one who ever wore a stab vest but he never bothered me ever this guy's name was blue at

[17:33] least that's what we knew him as blue he was the only guard who used a piece of electrical tape to cover up his name because he was such an that he was afraid somebody would find him on the outside and get some revenge he was the also the only guard who wore a stab vest because he was worried about being shanked it's a low-security prison nobody's worried about being shanked but blue was well I was friendly with the Italians the Italians when I was in

[18:04] prison I spent most of my time with them Italians you may know named Gambino lucchese Colombo Bonanno good guys so they actually really were good guys so one of the Italians uh was chatting with blue one day and he said blue what unity working in blue said I'm in central one and the Italian said oh my friend jon's in central one and blue said who the CIA guy I never mess with that guy never and

[18:36] the Italian said really why not because blue messed with everybody and he said I work in this dump for eight straight hours that's all I need is to go out to my car at the end of the day and CNN is standing next to it and I said to the Italian that's right CNN will be standing next to his car and it's going to be in pln and everybody in the country is going to read it and his careers toast so he never ever bothered

[19:09] me one of the things that was a real shock to me and this too has been addressed in prison legal news was the fact that absolutely everything in prison is is racially based I had never experienced these these very clear-cut racial divisions before and I made a point not to respect them you know in the TV room for example half of the TV

[19:39] room is black half of the TV room is hispanic whites can sit wherever there's a free speech I mean a free seat but can't change the channel and pedophiles aren't allowed in the TV room I made a point to befriend everybody you know my own philosophy in life is I like everybody I meet until they give me a specific reason to not like them and I found that that actually worked well for me in in prison I was in a fortunate position because I came into prison with

[20:11] something of a reputation as a human rights Crusader and the first week that i arrived in prison two members of the Nation of Islam approached me well I was told on my first day by a prison guard if if anybody walks into your cell uninvited it's an act of aggression and you're gonna have to fight so my very first day I was in prison about two hours and two Aryans came into my room swastikas all over their necks the shaved heads so I jumped up off my bunk and I said what do you want one of them

[20:43] said take it easy are you the new guy I said yeah are you a he says I said no are you a rat I said no I'm not a rat I didn't have anybody in my case are you a chomo I said I don't know what that means he says chomo like I'm stupid child molester I said no I'm not a child molester he said okay then you can sit with us in the cafeteria oh I guess I'm

[21:14] with the Aryans now so I was sitting with the Aryans for quite some time but in the meantime to members of the Nation of Islam came up to me and they walked right into my room they were holding a newspaper one of them was holding a newspaper and again I jumped off my bunk and I said what do you want and he said you the CIA guy I said yeah he said Reverend Farrakhan says you're a hero of the Muslim people and we want to tell you you're not gonna have any problems with us I said oh okay great finally one of the Italians came up to me he was

[21:45] actually a senior captain in the Bonanno crime family lived directly across the the hall from me and whenever i finish a book or newspaper I'd give it to him I figure it was good for relations and he said to me hey let me ask you a question why do you sit with those Nazi retards in the cafeteria I said geez I don't know Pete my first day here they told me to sit with them he said from today you're with the Italians I said fantastic so I was with the Italians after that well the Italians are the

[22:17] smallest group in prison but they're the most highly respected and the reason they're the most highly respected was because they get along with everybody and I decided that that's exactly what I was going to do when I left prison heck Paul and I were laughing about this is in Seattle when I left prison the Crips and the Bloods had a joint going away dinner for me it was insane and then the North dainius the Mexican cartel they

[22:48] had a burrito dinner for me it's my last meal in in prison and then the Italians put on this whole spread they had a crooked cop on the payroll so we were getting veal chops and wine and fresh bread and I told one the Italians I don't know what your plans are for after prison but you need to open a restaurant because pay $25 for this and he cooked it in a trash bucket and it was that good anyway I took pln very seriously I used PLN as

[23:21] as something on which I could base my own writings plns focus on human rights became to me probably the most important theme that I tried to address in my own writing when I was on a rotation of the State Department in the mid-1990s I was assigned to the American Embassy in Manama Bahrain it's a it's a very small country it's the same size and same population as Pittsburgh and it's in the Persian Gulf attached to Saudi Arabia by

[23:53] a long bridge and when I got to Bahrain in 1994 I got there just in time for the beginning of an uprising they called it an Intifada and it was my job as the human rights officer to document the Bahraini government's use of force against unarmed civilians they were also killing pro texter protesters extra judicially without the benefit of trial and they used torture and solitary

[24:23] confinement against people who had never been convicted of any crime this was all documented in my human rights report which was mandated by by Congress and was used to pressure the Bahraini government to respect human rights one of the things that was very upsetting to me when I got to prison was the realization that much of what the Bahraini government was doing to its people in the 1990s the American government does to its people in 2015 we torture people every day in prisons and

[24:55] we call it solitary confinement the United Nations has deemed solitary confinement to be a form of torture now we've we've got torture laws in this country we have the federal torture act which specifically prohibits torture and it it actually defines torture well if you look at the definition of torture in the federal torture Act solitary confinement is torture it's not open for debate it's just tortured plain and simple the United States is also a

[25:26] signatory to the united nations convention against torture not only are we signatories we wrote the united nations convention against torture it also defines torture and we violated every single day in this country we also deny prisoners proper medical treatment this is something that I that I blogged about quite extensively but my problems were very very small compared to what other people go through every day and

[25:57] again I was in a low-security prison read pln to see what's going on in our ad max or supermax prisons it's unspeakable I wanted to tell you about one of my cellmates a guy by the name of James James was on supervised release and he violated the terms of his parole just so that he could spend the winter indoors he was living in a cardboard box

[26:29] under a bridge in Pittsburgh and it started to get cold so in October of 2014 he violated just so he could come back to prison and get a warm bed and three meals and some medical care so on his very first day I walked in and he's just sitting on the bunk and i said hi are you the new guy he said yeah James shook his hand um oddball kind of looking guy about my age long mullet that went out many years ago he was very proud of his mullet and he said look I

[27:01] gotta tell you he said I try to be as nice a nice a guy as I can be but I'm severely mentally ill this is exactly how he said it I'm severely mentally ill I have paranoid schizophrenia but as long as I'm on my medication I'm okay I said all right well I said thanks for your honesty I'm going home in a couple of months so please try not to freak out but otherwise ians is a good room I think you're going to be not unhappy here so James got a job in

[27:31] food service it's the worst job in the prison especially am food service which means the cop comes and wakes you up at 4am and you have to go down to the cafeteria and start cooking the food for breakfast and and lunch in the meantime James developed a bleeding hemorrhoid right so he went down to the medical unit he said I've got this bleeding hemorrhoid they gave him tylenol and I said James you know the time laws aren't

[28:03] going to help your hemorrhoid so he filed what's called a BP eight and a half which is an informal request to staff to to try to come to a to an agreement on a complaint if you can't come to an agreement you file a BP nine which goes to the warden the BP ten goes to the regional director and a BP 11 goes to Bureau of Prisons headquarters in Washington so he complained he said I have this bleeding hemorrhoid and they gave me tylenol they told him to go screw himself so he complained again

[28:37] instead of doing the nine though he did an eight and a half in every single day he would go to the medical unit ask for something to deal with this hemorrhoid and they wouldn't give him anything and he would file another eight and a half so rather than going up the chain of command he just kept hitting the same medical assistant they deemed that to be a threat to staff and so they came and cuffed him one day in the cell and they took him to solitary now as part of his punishment completely illegal they

[29:11] decided to completely pull him off his antipsychotic medications how that's a legitimate punishment is an utter mystery to me it's a crime but they got away with it because who's the court going to believe these uniformed officers or this lunatic who's been living under a bridge in Pittsburgh I know what happened next because one of the Mexicans with whom I became friendly was in the cell next to James in solitary and he said that every day the

[29:44] medical unit would send somebody down to solitary to see if everybody was okay but they would deliberately skip James's cell just because he was a troublemaker and so he was getting more and more agitated as time was going on finally one night he sang 99 bottles of beer on the wall for nine consecutive hours people wanted to kill him and then he eventually got up on to his bunk took off his slipper and hit the sprinkler

[30:16] with his with his slipper that set the sprinklers off all over solitary he flooded solitary I happened to be in the hall where solitary was when this happened I didn't realize exactly what was happening but they pushed all of us out of the hall and the cops came in dressed in like this SWAT gear SWAT outfits all black vests the whole business and they went into the cell and they they tased James twice they sprayed

[30:47] him with pepper spray they cuffed him but then they stripped him naked and they took him outside now you've heard about solitary being 23 hours a day in solitary well that one hour that's left over you get to walk around a 10 by 12 foot dog cage in the in the back outside yourself that's your exercise walking around this it's literally a giant cage it's January in central Pennsylvania and so they take James outside naked and

[31:17] they leave him there the Mexican he was telling me the story said that he started by saying I'm sorry I shouldn't have done it please let me back in then he started crying then he curled up into a ball and then he passed out finally they brought him back in but for the rest of his time there he couldn't speak that's not medical care that's torture that's abuse and that's not been

[31:49] reported in the mainstream media the only place that's been reported not just James's case but cases like James was in prison illegal news prison legal news is the only organization the only publication that really cares about these issues they care about mental health care they care about pharmaceuticals and and the availability of pharmaceuticals in prisons nobody else does so really it's for that reason

[32:23] that I'm especially proud to be here I told Paul right in Seattle and I said it before when we met for the first time in Washington that I know what the rest of my life is going to be like it's going to be it's going to be one of activism because these are issues that the American people need to hear about and they're not hearing about it you know one article in the in the new york times magazine every 10 years is not really furthering the cause it's the human

[32:57] rights defense center and prison legal news that are furthering the cause so thank you for having me thank you for allowing me to be associated with prison legal news thanks for coming tonight it's actually quite a good size crowd I think Paul would agree and thanks for listening you
