Title: Spelunking the Deep State with John Kiriakou
Show: Real Progressives
Date: 2023-01-11
URL: https://youtu.be/is0yrElNSFA
Duration: 1:00:00

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[00:01] [Music] people at the CIA are there for 25 30 35 years they're unelected there's no accountability to pretty much anyone and they know that they can outweigh presidents if there's a president that they don't like like Donald Trump they don't have to do what he says they just slow roll whatever orders come from the White House and end up at Langley [Music]

[00:32] lesson that I learned at the CIA it's that the CIA will push the envelope all the way into illegality unless somebody pushes back [Music] foreign is that this campaign is not just about electing a president it is about making a political revolution

[01:03] empty ing money from our children and borrowing from China people are dying is the program so critical it's worth borrowing money from China to pay for it and if not I'll get rid of this [Music]

[01:36] now let's see if we can avoid the apocalypse all together here's another episode of macro and cheese with your host Steve grumbine all right yes this is Steve grumbine with macro and cheese this week I have another whistleblower I've got a guy who has been on the inside seen what the belly of the Beast looks like came outside and has not been able to stop talking about it since I'm speaking about John kiriaku who is a former CIA officer former senior

[02:07] investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and former counter-terrorism consultant for ABC News he was responsible for the capture in Pakistan in 2002 Abu Dai believed to be the third ranking official in Al Qaeda in 2007 kiriaku blew the whistle on the cia's torture program saying the CIA tortured prisoners that torture was official U.S government policy and that the policy had been approved by then President George W bush he became the

[02:40] sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama Administration under the Espionage Act a law designed to punish spies he served 23 months in prison as a result of the Revelation hiriaku won the Joseph a Callaway award for civic courage in 2012 Penn Center USA's prestigious First Amendment award in 2015 the first blueprint for free speech International whistleblowing prize for bravery and integrity in the public interest in 2016

[03:12] and the Sam Adams award for integrity and intelligence also in 2016. hiriako is the author of The Reluctant spy my secret life in the cia's war on terror doing time like a spy how the CIA taught me to survive and thrive in prison and the convenient terrorists and Abu zabadai and the weird Wonderland of America's Secret Wars and without further Ado let me bring on my guest

[03:44] John welcome to the show sir thank you Steve good to be with you normally I'm on the other side of the mic here when I'm with you in political Misfits yeah is one of the things that we didn't say there is that you're the co-host with my dear friend Michelle witty as well and that's always a pleasure so thanks for having me on all those times I don't know it's wonderful we love having you thanks for doing it absolutely one of the reasons why I brought you in here I think everybody that has become politically active since let's say 2015 because there's a lot of stuff that

[04:15] happened and occupied but I think a large group of people that had previously never sniffed the world of politics came alive when Bernie Sanders ran in 2015 against Hillary Clinton then we saw the Donald Trump regime then we saw Bernie run again Joe Biden was selected by the Democratic Party and I think a lot of people have been through the mill watching their hearts desires and their dreams and their hopes get smashed along the rocky shores of

[04:48] democracy and I think people just genuinely believe that this is just the way it is and that there is no alternative and that people are otherwise just assuming that they have no power and part of that is not by accident part of that is the stuff that goes on behind the scenes by unelected bureaucrats and other spy-like agencies such as the CIA which you're intimately familiar with not just in the United States but globally

[05:19] in a prior interview with Chris Hedges that was listened to or seen by nearly half million people one of the key things you brought out was a senator who had kind of left you high and dry during your time when you had come out and been brave and ignored you and when you confronted him with it his concern was that he was going to lose his clearance that the CIA had eyes on him and that Terror that he felt the way I understand it based on some of your work

[05:51] seems like that's not a isolated incident that seems to be like an unelected body is covering over our elected representatives and so beyond the idea of democracy failing us there's a deep state that control the levers of power that go beyond the theater that is politics so often Steve people believe that this is a right-wing Trope and it's not it's a fact of everyday life here in the

[06:21] United States the week that Donald Trump became president in January of 2017. I got a call from CNN and they asked if I would come on and talk about this back and forth that Trump had been having with the CIA and you might remember this where Senate Majority Leader what's his name from New York Chuck Schumer yes where the Senate Majority Leader had

[06:52] warned Trump not to take on the CIA because he said they have nine ways from Sunday for getting back at you and so CNN had me on and they wanted to know what he meant by that and I said well it's not November 22nd 1963 because that's what people were jumping up and shouting about what it was was you look at presidents presidents are only president for four years or eight years

[07:23] people at the CIA are there for 25 30 35 years they're unelected there's no accountability to pretty much anyone and they know that they can outweigh presidents if there's a president that they don't like like Donald Trump they don't have to do what he says they just slow roll whatever orders come from the White House and end up at Langley if they don't want to do a covert Action Program let's say they just move slowly

[07:55] knowing that in four years he's going to be gone or worst case scenario eight years he's going to be gone now one of the other things that the CIA does and they're very very good at this is recruiting in air quotes recruiting new presidents the CIA especially loves it when a president is elected who has little or no intelligence experience because what happens is literally the day after the election the pdb stack the president's Daily Brief staff begins to brief the new

[08:28] president-elect with the same briefing that the president himself gets now when I was there there were only 11 people who were entitled to a daily pdb briefing so it's the president the vice president the secretaries of state and defense the National Security advisor a handful of people on the National Security Council and that's pretty much it so when you've got a brand new Young inexperienced president you go to him the day after the election or her whatever the case happens to be

[08:59] and you say Mr President Madam president your first briefing just wait until you see the cool things that we are doing all around the world wait till you see this blue border report that's classified at four levels above top secret or black border report that's eyes only for the president and you've sort of sucked them in to this little club that we all had where this stuff is so important and so

[09:31] secret that nobody else can know about it isn't it cool isn't it great to be one of us now and you've done it you've sucked them in and as it ends up there are the ones running foreign policy not the president they're the ones telling elected overseers on Capitol Hill how things are going to be not the overseers themselves the CIA is very very good doing this kind of thing they've been doing it really since the 60s

[10:02] since the 50s even with the recent non-disclosure of the Kennedy assassination it was heavily redacted but little came out it's quite clear regardless of whether or not you believe the CIA was involved in taking out a president and activists and political leaders like Martin Luther King Jr or breaking up the Black Panthers or whether it be attacking Occupy Wall Street these people are unelected bureaucrats

[10:34] or unelected soldiers in a sense right it explains in many ways why no matter who gets elected it really all stays the same yeah that's absolutely right this may seem like a few years late but I want to get a definitive answer Define what the Deep state is and is not yeah to me it's actually pretty simple to viewers of Fox News and oan and Newsmax it probably isn't very simple to me it is those unelected officials

[11:07] who run the day-to-day operation of the country's foreign policy defense policy intelligence policy it's really quite easy the way modern government has been set up is that it's not supposed to be like that you've got the executive branch you've got experts within the executive branch and then you're supposed to have the legislative branch that is overseeing all of this

[11:38] and in many cases especially in that of the CIA it just doesn't work that way but I'm not allowed to say how many people are in the CIA the number is classified but it's tens of thousands of people with a multi multi-billion dollar budget and you've got about a dozen and a half people on the Senate side and maybe another two dozen on the house side that oversee this gargantuan organization and it just simply doesn't work now the story that you opened with I think is an

[12:09] important one and it Bears a little bit of explanation when I got out of prison I ran into this Senator at a dinner party and I went up to him and I said hey Senator I gotta say I was disappointed that you didn't come out in support of me you should have been in my view a natural Ally he got very angry he got right in my face about it he goes look it took all of my energy just to not lose my security clearance

[12:40] and boy that just made everything so clear to me here you are one of the senior most members of the Senate intelligence committee you're supposed to be the boss the one overseeing the CIA and you are afraid of them you're afraid that because you came down on a certain side of a political issue they're going to take your security clearance away that's just cowardice but it also goes to show you the long arm of the CIA

[13:12] oh I've been doing a lot of research on everything from the Bolshevik Revolution to present largely focusing recently on what happened post World War II and the effects of combating then what they saw as Joseph Stalin's Empire Building desires and the act of trying to counter communism became everything you already had McCarthy you had so many things that had become so toxic to

[13:44] society but I think this is not the beginning of the deep state but I think this is the beginning of seeing it in its nascent State Truman battling with MacArthur and MacArthur wanting to take the Korean War into China into Russia right willing to do whatever it could to put the death stake Into the Heart of Communism and it took everything Truman had and I'm not here to defend or celebrate Truman I think it's pretty

[14:14] fair to say he's a mass murderer right but he had to stand up against his General and relieve him of Duty uh popular military guy so Truman says thank you and brings him home yeah replaces him but it almost cost Truman his presidency it definitely cost him a lot of clout a lot of people really angry at the move but that was a blatant very visible Act

[14:44] of the understate at the time yes standing against the sitting president and doing their own thing behaving as if they're the kings of the world minus being elected to be in that role is that the beginning of this departure or has this been going on even further back it started earlier than that there was a movement within the military in the mid-1930s to essentially overthrow Franklin Roosevelt wow and

[15:16] then nothing ended up coming of it and several generals were forced into retirement you're 100 right about MacArthur and Truman there were Rumblings during the Vietnam war of Westmoreland yes exactly even before Westmoreland yes Westmoreland was one the other one was George Wallace's running mate the general who said he wanted to turn North Vietnam into glass Curtis LeMay Yeah we actually had to worry about that kind of thing

[15:48] until the end of the Vietnam War but now Steve it's as though the Deep state has evolved to a point where they're more sophisticated than that they know better than to do it publicly out in the open they know that they're far more powerful behind the scenes doing it quietly that's why as recently as the 1980s we had people like Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan sponsoring votes of no

[16:19] confidence in sitting CIA directors we would never see something like that today now the Senate and House intelligence committees are really little more than cheerleaders for the CIA post 911 nobody would dream of challenging the CIA let me point to the torture program and it's not just the torture program we can talk about the rendition program the secret prison program we can talk about a whole bunch of different things but the oversight committees were fully informed that

[16:51] these programs were going on the oversight committees knew that these programs were illegal at least they were also immoral and unethical and do you think a single person objected and I mean from the left to the right and everybody in between nobody objected I'll add that through much of the torture program the chairman of the house intelligence committee was Jane Harmon the progressive Democrat from Venice California oh my you think she

[17:21] ever objected to the fact that we were kidnapping people and taking them to secret prisons to be tortured and in some cases at least two to be murdered extrajudicially the Democrats never objected Nancy Pelosi before she was the speaker was on the intelligence committee do you think she ever objected nobody ever did is that an indicator of cowardice or the balance of power between the Deep State and our elected officials that's a great

[17:52] question and I think it's a combination of the two I think that post 911 Federal elected officials regardless of their ideology really believe that we're the good guys and if the people who know best the people who are leading the CIA the people who are leading DOD or the people who are leading the National Security Council say that they need X Y and Z well then by God we're all patriotic

[18:23] Americans and we're going to give them x y and z and I think that that does a disservice to the American people because we should question everything if there's one thing I learned at the CIA one lesson that I learned at the CIA it's that the CIA will push the envelope all the way into illegality unless somebody pushes back unless somebody on Capitol Hill or at the National Security Council or at the Justice Department's office of legal

[18:54] counsel says wait a minute you can't do that it's illegal they'll do it they have to be told not to and almost nobody has the guts to tell them not to that brings up a great point and I think for those who don't know this let's get back to the beginning of the CIA yeah when did the CIA even get spoken into existence it's actually relatively recent the CIA was created with the National Security Act of 1947. now there's kind of a fun

[19:25] story there too because J Edgar Hoover who was the director of the FBI since it was created in the Calvin Coolidge Administration in the 1920s he was adamantly opposed to the creation of the CIA he famously hated General Bill Donovan who was the founder of the cia's predecessor organization the office of strategic Services the OSS and Hoover believed For Better or Worse that we didn't need a CIA that the FBI could do everything and they were doing

[19:56] everything as it was in 1947. and so he was actively lobbying for no votes on Capitol Hill that would have defeated the National Security Act of 1947 and besides creating the CIA this act also created the National Security Council so President Truman called Hoover into the Oval Office and said look I want you to stop lobbying members of Congress on the National Security Act we need a CIA and the deal that they came to was that

[20:29] Hoover would endorse the National Security Act and in exchange Truman would make the CIA a division of the FBI that was a lie he was lying to Hoover he never had any intention of making the CIA division of the FBI and so the bill passed Truman signed it into law and after it was all said and done Hoover realized that he had been duped and the CIA was created now don't forget there was no

[21:01] congressional oversight committee to oversee CIA activities until 1975. oh from 1947 until 1975 the CIA did literally anything it wanted to do and there was no one anywhere in government to tell them no within months of the cia's creation for example they stole the 1948 Italian elections it was the first covert action program that the

[21:32] CIA carried out and then that stretched all the way through the Vietnam War and it included governmental overthrows and MK Ultra experimentation on American citizens with LSD and Other Drugs assassinations of foreign leaders attempted assassinations of others there were dozens of assassinations dozens including of allies like the president of South Vietnam for example so yeah we had Decades of just want and

[22:02] lawlessness and I'm going to pull us back to the great financial crisis that just occurred in 2008-2009 and you had unelected Wall Street oligarchs through the revolving door of what amounts to be these cabinet positions that advise presidents and help create law and create the tools of the trade to regulate Wall Street and we solve all these Bad actors JP Morgan's Jamie dimon and others the

[22:35] Obama Administration and their staff deeply involved in planting these horrible people that were doing Elite control fraud all with an idea that we would have the Securities and Exchange committee be able to manage them or these various Watchdog groups within the government regulate them and they underfund them they understaffed them I think that to manage all the different businesses I believe it's the Auditors that would handle that

[23:06] Professor Bill black who's famously was the king of Bringing Down the Savings and Loan crisis he identified the Elite control fraud to create the environment that allowed everyone to blow the values of these houses up through an extremely intricate web of coercion and Corruption and then no one gets prosecuted as the entire economy collapses millions of people destitute losing their homes and this is

[23:37] in essence an element of the deep State at work while having an oversight group that is supposed to have the teeth to manage it and yet nothing happened yeah so the idea of creating a government so small you can drown it in a bathtub while having these Rogue deep State organizations being able to do whatever the heck they want to do who are they serving yeah the rules of the game that they're playing by and the people they're serving are not you and I there's

[24:08] someone else somewhere way above our heads I'm curious what your take on that is in terms of the lack of enforcement and the lack of oversight of the CIA yeah very representative of the lack of oversight of Wall Street it's always underfunded and understaffed and intentionally weak and feckless oh yeah and then at the same time you've got in some cases one in other cases both political parties demanding deregulation of pretty much any and every industry in

[24:40] our economy whether it's banking or Airlines or Trucking or whatever making it that much more difficult to carry out oversight it just doesn't make any sense to me it seems like every American would want the most efficient the most law-abiding the most trustworthy government possible and instead we've implemented National policies that make that just impossible let's take a look your story with the

[25:12] CIA is remarkable for the purposes of this program I'm gonna pretend I don't know any of it and I don't know nearly enough of it so I'd like for you to tell us the story of John kiriaku what was your story and what were the results sure well I was at the CIA for 15 years the first half of my career was in analysis solely on Iraq and the second half of my career was in counter-terrorism operations

[25:44] starting off pre-911 fighting Euro Communists terrorist groups my real Focus was on a Greek group called revolutionary organization 17 November and then post 911 of course everybody worked against al Qaeda I ended up going to Pakistan as the chief of counterterrorism operations at the station there and in that position I led a series of raids One Night in late March 2002 that resulted in the capture of Abu zubaida

[26:15] who we believed at the time was the number three in Al Qaeda we also captured again I'm not allowed to say the number but many dozens of other Al-Qaeda Fighters that night and several mid to high-ranking leaders of Al Qaeda this is a very long story I'm gonna skip 99 of it in the end up as a beta was sent to a secret prison and he was tortured there mercilessly I was opposed to that torture and when I went back to CIA headquarters from

[26:46] Pakistan I was asked if I wanted to be trained in the use of enhanced interrogation techniques that was one of 14 people who were approached I'm sorry to say I regret to say that of the 14 I was the only one who declined I said that I had a moral and ethical problem with it and I believed that it was illegal we have very clear laws in this country and we have since 1946 specifically outlawing exactly the kinds of techniques that I was then being told

[27:17] were legal under American law I'm not a lawyer but my God you have to be a complete not to see that this was an illegal program so I declined and it was in my view so egregiously illegal that I waited for somebody to come out and say so publicly nobody did two years later I resigned from the CIA and decided to go into the private sector and I still waited for somebody to come out and say look the CIA is torturing

[27:48] people nobody did in December of 2007 Brian Ross called me from ABC News and I knew Brian Ross by reputation the guy won 14 Emmy Awards and was one of the greatest investigative journalists in America and he said he had a source who said that I had tortured Abu zubaida I said that was absolutely untrue I was the only person who was kind to Abu zabeta I said I never laid a hand on him or on

[28:19] any other prisoner I said your source is either misinformed or he's a liar and he said well you're welcome to come on the show and defend yourself I had no idea that was a reporter's trick because I had never spoken to a reporter before well a couple of days after he asked me President George W bush gave a press conference in which he was asked about torture and he looked right in the camera Steve and he said we do

[28:51] not torture like that I happen to be sitting on the couch with my then wife she was also a senior Cia officer and I looked at her and I said he is a bald-faced liar now at the time on the strength of the Abu zubata capture I had been promoted to be the executive assistant to the cia's deputy director and so I'm seeing everything that the CIA is doing everywhere in the world that's my job to keep the deputy

[29:24] director informed so this made me angry this statement by Bush this black and white lie that we don't torture if few days after that it's a Friday and he's walking from the south Portico of the White House to get onto the helicopter to fly to Camp David and a reporter shouts a question at him about torture and he turns and he says well if there is torture it's because of a rogue CIA officer and I told my wife Brian Ross's sources

[36:11] and they agreed that I was realistically looking at 12 to 18 years wow so I took the deal it was rough it was bad so in the end was there any acknowledgment that your findings were factual thank you for asking that six weeks before my release from prison I called my wife I was allowed to call her for 15 minutes every other day and I said to her how's your day going

[36:42] she said it's great and I said yeah great why and she said because the Senate torture report was released today and it proved that everything you said was true and John McCain got up on the floor of the Senate and said that the country owed me a debt of gratitude because if I hadn't blown the whistle on the cia's torture program the American people would never have known what their government was doing in their name

[37:14] and Steve that made it all worthwhile isn't that something you're not doing it for accolades you're not doing it for money nope you're doing it because you can't not do it inside you you know you gotta do it exactly Legacy is an important thing to me I don't know why I've always had this obsession with my legacy I want my kids to be proud of me I want my grandchildren if I ever have grandchildren to be proud of me maybe I'll get hit by a bus tomorrow and my

[37:46] grandchildren won't have had the opportunity to meet me so I want them to be able to look back and say my grandfather was a stand-up guy he did the right thing when history asked him to take a position he took the right position I wasn't the only person at the CIA that was opposed to the torture program there were dozens of people who were opposed to the torture program so why didn't they say anything why didn't anybody speak out I will never understand that But Here we are now all these years later and the cost

[38:17] has been very very very high but I can sleep at night I'll tell you what the biggest cost of this was after I got out of prison my wife and I split up she elected to move on with her life with someone else so I divorced her we've been involved in a very bitter custody battle ever since and two years ago I was on the stand in court right here in Arlington Virginia and my lawyer said was she a good wife and I said oh she was an amazing wife

[38:49] good mother Good Wife I couldn't have made it through this ordeal without her in fact she went with me to ABC News on the day that I blew the whistle on the cia's torture program she sat just off camera and when I finished the interview I said to her how did I do she said you did great I said yeah I didn't say anything classified right and she said no you did great so then she gets called to the stand and her lawyer says is it true that you went with him to ABC News when he blew

[39:22] the whistle on the cia's torture program and she said yes and her lawyer said why did you do that and she responded the cia's office of security asked me to go with him and report back to them on his activities something that I continued to do for the remainder of our marriage oh my god dude we had two kids after that wow and she was ratting me out to the CIA for all those years oh my God this is like Total Recall

[39:54] yeah the cost was very high now again with that said I can sleep at night I don't know what her situation is I haven't spoken to her in three years but I can live with myself wow I just want to put this in context you uncovered one big but one lie yes one aspect of the CIA

[40:25] that Americans had no idea about and even if they did have an idea they couldn't get past American exceptionalism they always find a way to make it out to be that the good guys do what they have to do to keep us all safe right but that's just one lie how many other state secrets and state lies are happening and we're living in this weird world I hate to pull out the cliches of 1984 and the thought police sure well

[40:55] that's a legitimate question because just in that short period from September 11 2001 until the middle of 2005. we're talking about a secret torture program a secret extraordinary rendition program where people are kidnapped and taken to countries not their own for torture a secret prison program where there's this archipelago of secret prisons there are all kinds of Secrets just in that short period of time we also now know from Wikileaks thank goodness From the Vault

[41:27] 7 Revelations that the CIA is able to take control of your car by hacking into its computer system for the purpose of what forcing you off a cliff forcing you into a tree killing you somehow we know that the CIA can hack into your smart TV and turn the speaker into a microphone so they can listen to you and what you're saying even when the TV appears to be off and these are just random Revelations

[41:58] that we've either stumbled upon or that we learned because of whistleblowers what is it that we don't know it's incalculable how much is out there that we don't know you know that saying it ain't what you know it's what you think you know that just ain't so yep so much of the narratives that we as activists media alt media families friends you know so many of the things we tell each other and we are

[42:30] absolutely certain we're right may have no basis in fact or worse just enough of a basis in fact that it retains that necessary credibility you got to have a little bit of something that ain't perfect because otherwise the brain will reject it right I hate to say this because I've always said there's no way people are that organized that they can pull this off I Was a Serial scoffer and yet as we've gone through this

[43:01] my primary area of activist-based expertise is on the macroeconomic side where we've been lied to immensely with this false austerity narrative right we talked about so often and it's deprogramming and decolonizing your brain from these lies to get to just a base of neutrality yeah and it's so destabilizing to think that there's no amount of study you can really do

[43:32] to understand what's being done a lot of this is happening off the books top secret that will deny your existence how in the world could we as concerned individuals as people who are looking for a better world a better life when you see not only the number one military in the world that has Global reach but then you realize that it goes deeper than that in terms of the deep State

[44:02] apparatus than the Spy Network how in the world are regular people to come together it feels almost like hubris right to think that we can take on this Leviathan and when and it feels like we're herded into voting for people that we don't really select right the whole damn thing's a charade the whole system is broken is it broken or is that a feature well yeah that's actually a better way to say

[44:33] the system that we have is exactly the system that the political leaders in this country want this is the system that they allow us to work in you're exactly right I'm a realist I know that the CIA is not going away I would hope that it would I don't think we need a CIA it causes us more trouble than it's worth but I know that it's not going to be abolished then the only alternative is to ride our elected officials to conduct true oversight but if they're in on it

[45:03] too and they're not willing to conduct true oversight then we're screwed there's this one Senator that I mentioned who wants to conduct oversight but is afraid of losing his security clearances what about the other six or seven Democrats on the Senate intelligence committee what's their position their position is that they're in bed with the CIA that's why they're on the intelligence committee wow I've got a whole analysis that I'm working up for my own purposes

[45:35] as I dig into history and revolutionary-minded documentarian type deep Dives and I constantly find myself starting at the Bolshevik Revolution not because of anything good or bad about the Bolshevik Revolution but it really took capitalism by storm they didn't know what to do with this and in a recent interview I did with a brilliant academic mind named Clara mate she breaks up austerity was the response to

[46:08] that period of time as World War one showed people that there was an alternative and people started having visions of things other than just this oppressive capitalist system that weighs everyone down and everything started changing right then then U.S policy since then almost everything we've done has been to directly counter any kind of spread of communism oh yeah now I'm not

[46:39] necessarily preaching communism though I'm sympathetic to it I'm an mmtm form leftist so my politics are a little different but not two different sure but as I think through this they had strange bedfellows with Joseph Stalin during World War II but immediately following that as they split Korea as they went through the process of getting Japan out of all these places that their empire had reached everything that they have done has been with the

[47:10] name of better dead than red and so I wonder as a CIA guy to what degree has the CIA Been instrumental in blocking socialism and communism as a construct both internally to the U.S and abroad has this been a driving Factor it's been the driving factor I addressed this at length in my fourth book it's called the CIA Insider's Guide to the Iran crisis we're in crisis with Iran

[47:41] because of decisions that we made in the middle 1950s to overthrow the democratically elected government of Iran just as one example because of our irrational obsession with Communism and it happened not just in Iran but all over Africa in Southeast Asia which of course led to the Vietnam War and throughout Central and South America it was an irrational obsession with Communism

[48:11] that's what got us into Afghanistan even though the Soviet Union was weakened battered and humbled we still decided that we would rather throw our lot in with the mujahideen than with the Soviets and you see where it got us these are the pieces as I try to make sense of U.S history and more importantly global history because

[48:41] there's so many interrelated things then the predation on the global South the third world that we have created through the programs of Oppression that we've instituted I often hear about how the CIA is sent in in advance oh yeah to destabilize the region to make it right for these moments yeah but it seems to me like this is 100 percent the ML and if that is the mo

[49:14] who is this serving because communism is people ownership it's workers owning their means of production it's about an egalitarian society where there aren't classes and rulers yeah how much does the CIA play in that well the rule used to be enormous in the 50s through the 60s into the mid 70s as technology has improved they've gotten away from that on the

[49:45] ground impact and they do a lot of it remotely a lot of it still happens but thanks to Matt taibi and the Twitter files we're seeing now that a lot of it was done through Twitter remember it was Hillary Clinton that asked Twitter not to do its system upgrade on the night that the so-called Green Revolution was beginning in Iran so the CI is still in up to its neck it's just not necessarily on the ground

[50:16] the last time I can think of where there was a significant CIA presence physically on the ground is in the six weeks after the 9 11 attacks where we helicoptered a dozen or so people in they met up with the Northern Alliance which provided horses we parachuted in Secure Communications millions of dollars in cash and said okay overthrow the Taliban and find Bin Laden

[50:47] and so they set out for Kabul wow so let's put a bow on this one I have so many more questions but in the spirit of I know you so I'll have you back on in the future if somebody listening to this is saying wow oh my goodness is the most important thing somebody can take away from not only your experience in jail and your experience as a whistleblower but overall as they try to process their daily lives what would you tell them

[51:20] I would tell them that the CIA at all work for us the American people own this information and we have to demand that our elected officials hold every single employee of the CIA every other intelligence service in our government to account we own this information we're the bosses and if our elected officials are not

[51:50] going to conduct legitimate oversight then we'll elect people who will conduct legitimate oversight it's that important to us I want to close off on that note but I feel compelled to say that watching what happened to Bernie Sanders yeah through the 2015 primary makes the concept of electing other people feel hollow I'm not voting Republican it's not

[52:22] really about voting per se every time I see the Democrats rally around a corporate student exactly and defend the establishment narratives and realize how many layers of lies are stacked on top of Lies look what's happening with Ukraine and Russia yeah just the fact that people are so deprived of understanding history NATO the IMF they don't even understand any of the games being played on the international stage yes and so it feels

[52:56] so Hollow to think that a CIA that would run the risk of allowing us to vote for people that are progressives that are going to undo these things if we can destabilize the world and their elections how is it that we wouldn't make sure that we are getting exactly what they want here as well yeah I'm glad you're raising this because I think we need to make it very clear that the answer to these problems does not lie in the Democratic Party

[53:28] it just doesn't there's no difference between the Democrats and the Republicans on these issues there are just two sides of the same coin the problem is far bigger than just well I demand oversight okay great so do I but that's not going to change anything we really do need viable third parties in this country we really do and God knows that we've moved backwards on this issue in the last four decades I remember when I was a teenager there was

[54:00] a congressman from Illinois John Anderson he ran for president against Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter and he got seven percent which was dramatic but he got seven percent because he participated in every one of those presidential debates in 2000 Ralph Nader ran for president as an independent before that in 1992 and 1996 Ross Perot ran as an independent for president participated in the debates and got

[54:30] something like what was it 20 mm-hmm well what happened was those presidential debates used to be sponsored by the League of Women Voters independently of the political parties and in the end the political parties decided to get rid of illegal Women Voters create the so-called Commission on presidential debates which is three members of the Democratic National Committee and three members of the Republican National Committee and they decided that no independent will be invited to any presidential debate

[55:02] and so ever since that decision was taken we don't have third party candidates that can get National exposure they're never invited to the debates nobody pays any attention to them and the Democrats the Republicans just trade the presidency back and forth doesn't seem like an election to me it seems more like a game yeah it's not a functioning democracy that's for sure no but there in which lies my big rub on third parties and that is to have a

[55:33] third party you got to be able to have access to have access it requires the duopoly to concede that and give it over to you yeah and because they have control over the media every possible fool that capital and these establishment Elites have is used as a weapon to prevent us from having anything other than what they want us to have populism doesn't do much of anything at this point because we have no real agency yeah to do anything with it and that led me to that question

[56:04] prior you got this deep State like this how would somebody in a modern society even pull off a political revolution much less a real Revolution yeah we somehow able to compartmentalize things but we don't synthesize the knowledge we have and say that isn't separate that's all part of this they've got the access to everything through them that they're not going to give up and you've got the Deep state that works to create a fake narrative

[56:37] and we have a society that is immune from actually taking action and I'm trying to find my way through this Maze and all I do is keep hitting walls what are your thoughts there I don't see the light at the end of the tunnel if it is a light it's probably a train coming yeah I hate to say that but I have to agree with you I want to be optimistic by Nature I am an optimistic person but I'm just not optimistic

[57:08] every time you think there's forward movement or even momentum sometimes and that we might be able to reclaim our democracy it ends I don't feel like I have anything really to look forward to politically feels like big old sham yeah because and macro cheese we're here to make things happen I'm a guy that wants to see change I want to change the world but you can't change the world by faking

[57:41] the world around you you've got to address the real problem and the real problem is we lack agency we lack the parallel systems to give us a media voice we lack the political clout to make a difference I'm just trying to make the point that you've got a deep state you've got a CIA you've got a political machine that is run by a duopoly that doesn't allow external entrance into its game

[58:13] and then on top of it you've got parties that are baked into preventing any kind of change to what they would do baked so far into the rules that short of a revolution I don't know how you go anywhere with that but you've also got the CIA and all the other apparatus that keeps the world in check waiting to keep a revolution in check yeah yeah it was wonderful having you on sir I really appreciate and I love that

[58:44] we have a good connection clean here please let everybody know where we can find more of your work oh thank you I'm on sub stack so it's John kiriaku.substack.com everything I write I put on sub stack that's the best place and don't forget John is a co-host of political Misfits and definitely one of my favorite hosts I enjoy the way you do interviews so with that John I look forward to our next conversation and for youth out there I feel it's important to

[59:15] know that while we're on one hand fighting for economic truth we've got an entire political system here geared up to present narratives that just ain't so to keep us from winning so we've got a lot of work to do John thank you so much for joining me thank you sir you got it this is Steve grumbine with my guest John hiriaku from macro and cheese we are out of here
