Title: CIA Whistleblower: Biden Intel Pick Avril Haines Approved Ob
Show: Democracy Now!
Date: 2021-01-20
URL: https://youtu.be/-ZzRSvKhSF4
Duration: 6.8:00

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[00:00] john i wanted to ask you about one of the uh confirmation hearings that are taking place of avril haynes uh that began yesterday along with a number of others the secretary of state the secretary of defense department of homeland security avril haynes biden's nominee to be director of national intelligence she was obama's top lawyer on the national security council from 2010 to 2013 and cia deputy director from 2013 to 15 where she authorized using

[00:33] drone strikes to carry out targeted extra judicial assassinations in 2015 when she was cia deputy director cia agents illegally hacked the computers of the senate intelligence committee to thwart its investigation into the cia's detention and interrogation program and he called torture program that used torture methods that were called enhanced interrogation like waterboarding she overruled those cia's own inspector general and failing to discipline the

[01:04] agents and even awarded them the career intelligence medal john kiriakou you are a cia whistleblower do you know about the history of avril haynes and what are your thoughts on her becoming dni i was frankly very disappointed when president-elect biden named avril haynes as the the dni there are so many questions that so many of us have about avril haynes and the work she did at the white house as well as at the cia that really have

[01:35] to be answered we know that avril haynes at the nsc was in charge of of determining whether it was legal or illegal to place people on john brennan's kill list we know that in in almost all cases that she said it was legal to put these names on the kill list and people were subsequently killed uh by drone uh including american citizens like anwar al-laqi and his son they were american citizens who had never been charged with

[02:05] a crime they had never faced their accusers in a court of law there was no due process for them she's never had to answer for that as you pointed out correctly she was also the deputy director of the cia when the cia under john brennan was hacking into the senate intelligence committee's computer systems in order to disrupt the investigation uh that led to the senate torture report and finally another question that i have that i would like to see uh her answer is what her role was exactly

[02:36] in the redaction of the see the of the senate intelligence committee's torture report remember that report was never released what was released was a very heavily redacted version of the executive summary of that report so we we got a very heavily blacked out 500 pages well there are another 5 000 pages to that report that we have never seen and john kiriakou what about the situation with julian assange and what

[03:08] you would hope that the biden administration might do in relationship to him i've been in very close touch uh over the last couple of weeks with people around julian and people on his legal team and we've been trying to read the tea leaves relative to the british court's decision not to extradite him to the united states that's being appealed right now and uh you know you hear things both ways for example when you read the the judge's uh ruling uh

[03:40] until the very end it looks like julian is just getting clobbered in this ruling the judge essentially agreed with everything that the justice department said and then at the very end of the ruling said that because julian uh suffers from depression and is suicidal that sending him to the united states where he would be subject to solitary confinement which the un has declared to be a form of torture would push him over the edge so the ruling was great the reasoning leading up to the ruling was

[04:10] not so great and now the justice department is appealing the rumor that i heard was that perhaps the biden people reached out to the british and said look we wouldn't be terribly upset if this thing were to just go away uh and then we got the great ruling well now it's being appealed so what happens if he loses the appeal even if he wins the appeal if there's no pardon or commutation and so far there isn't what's to keep the british from

[04:41] expelling him to australia and then the justice department just asking the australians to extradite him all over again so really the only the only way we can end this whole thing for julian is is uh through a presidential action it has to be a pardon or a commutation and people can go to democracynow.org to see the um speech of niels melzer who is the u.n special rapporteur on torture and other in cruel inhuman or degrading treatment or

[05:12] punishment he visited julian assange at the belmarsh prison finally john kiriakou what happens to this money the millions of dollars they are raking in is it giuliani is it going some bank account for trump when he leaves like the hundreds of millions of dollars he raised after the election um lying about election fraud uh who tracks this money ah that's a good question and the answer is that nobody tracks this money

[05:42] this money goes directly into the pockets of the lobbyists and the lawyers who charged it you know there was a terrific article in the new york times about six months ago talking about rudy giuliani's fourth divorce and in the course of discovery the new york times uh learned that rudy is a member of 16 different country clubs and he told the court that he needs seven million dollars a year to maintain his current lifestyle and to pay his dues at 16 separate

[06:14] country clubs and so how's he going to do that he's going to do it by gouging as many people as he possibly can rudy's not a stupid guy he knew that the moment that donald trump walked out of the white house to get on that plane and fly back to florida that his career was finished because now nobody is going to pay rudy giuliani anything he's done
