Title: A conversation with John Kiriakou
Show: CODEPINK
Date: 2020-12-23
URL: https://youtu.be/CQ6AC0Kn8lE
Duration: 51:00

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[00:00] so we have 57 on the call why don't we begin we thank you hanya for posting the agenda in the chat no problem why don't you go ahead and begin with the updates sure um well i'm as some of you may know already i'm the president and co-founder of muslim delegates and allies we are a female-led coalition born from the dnc uh democratic national convention by two bernie sanders uh actually um and if i can have everyone please upon entrance mute yourselves that would be wonderful

[00:32] thank you so a couple of things i wanted to go over one is uh the georgia senate runoffs which uh muslim delegates and allies has been heavily involved in we have hosted up to date over a hundred and one events phone banking events and postcard writing events um and we are we have about four thousand volunteers who make daily phone calls um they also uh give a volunteer some of their time over the weekends to make phone calls and we just launched in direct collaboration with the warnock and assaf campaign

[01:04] the first ever multilangual postcard writing event where we write an order in korean oh all right korean um urdu as well as vietnamese and i am forgetting one spanish which is the most important but i also wanted to go over an initiative that nadia and i had launched in collaboration with muslim alliances to save and protect america from infiltration by religious extremists as

[01:35] well as american muslim democratic khakis center for pluralism and there is a petition that we have circulated um for signatures which i will like to share with you um on recommending not only muslim activists attorneys and officials but also progressives i'm sure that the writing campaign um stays true to their promise um and and uh you know give everybody a chance and make uh his cabinet as diverse as possible if he in fact

[02:05] is uh uh you know obviously again um uh pro diversity which we see some of that right now in his campaign but so far from the recommendations that we made marcia fudge was appointed um ali zaydi was appointed um and uh deb holland as well i think i'm missing one more but um if there is if it comes to mind i will share with you but yeah we're very excited about that i'll share this uh with you all and i'll hand it over to marcy for and and medea

[02:37] and thank you for being here thank you very much my pleasure that barnes all right so i'm marcy wintergrad with a lot of you know who i am um my update is uh to thank everybody who participated in our campaign challenging michelle flournoy for secretary of defense zeroing in on her hawkishness on china there was an article that i'm going to briefly summarize in foreign policy magazine recently which is really uh interesting uh by mark mark perry and

[03:09] his point about austin and i'm gonna okay his point about lloyd austin who was nominated for secretary of de defense passing with biden passing on michelle flournoy uh the journalist's point is that it all comes down to china really that uh i'm going to read you the last ones last paragraph uh for washington's china is a threat proud the appointment of lloyd austin looms as a counterpoint to their foreign policy agenda

[03:39] one of larger defense budgets less resilience on diplomacy and a greater willingness to use force all reasons why biden appointed austin in the first place so that is good news uh also the article mentions how he opposed backing saudi arabia and its assault on yemen from the very beginning whereas we know that florine wanted to continue selling military hardware to the saudis also i wanted to update you on i'm working now volunteering with code pink

[04:11] it's uh as the volunteer coordinator or the coordinator for code pink congress and this is an effort uh that began here with all of you um making calls last week uh to capitol hill uh we are going to be tracking about anywhere from five to 15 pieces of legislation and other issues here we'll have a separate portal on the code pink website and as part of this uh legislative watch we'll be mobilizing co-sponsors for

[04:42] peace and foreign policy legislation and mobilizing votes as well and then we'll track that and announce the results and we may give points and demerits and so forth as part of our accountability and then ultimately issue some certificates uh you might be in the hall of fame or you might be in the hall of shame so that's my update medea uh yes hi great to see everybody and a number of you have been helping on

[05:13] this uh latest campaign which is um focusing on uh mike morell and um april haynes now in the case of mike morrell uh it's interesting because just like michelle florinoy he was only two months ago cited all over the press as being the most likely get the job of cia director and

[05:44] the campaign that many people around the country did around michelle florinoy was a great success and um now because there has been a lot of uh speaking out around mike morell um his uh uh the the odds of him getting the job have gone down um and uh so we felt like it was important to keep the momentum going and

[06:16] uh perhaps the the person who really has done the most to affect mike morrell's uh standing has been senator ron wyden who came out and openly called him a torturologist to hear from senator i mean i'll be saying that um uh they don't dianne feinstein who was uh in charge of the the of the torture hasn't come out and said anything that we can find about uh mike morell

[06:48] but uh ron wyden not only called him a torture apologist but said that his um position uh as cia director for wyden was a non-starter and you know that really showed the biden administration that there was going to be a fight around him uh for the confirmation hearing and so um we have four months now uh been working on the two positions of mike morrell and avril haynes

[07:18] who was already nominated for national intelligence director uh marcy was it back in august that you had the uh you want to explain that at the dnc virtual convention uh 450 delegates signed a letter open letter to bayern hire new foreign policy advisors michelle florinoy was one of those we objected to as was avril haynes so that was back in august which was really great um we at code pink have been

[07:49] having a campaign which included getting many thousands of people to sign a petition uh against mike morell and the latest was uh this thing in the that we have done over the last less than a week of getting um the detainees at guantanamo as well as torture victims from america many of them had been trained by u.s forces at

[08:21] pool of the americas we got the head of school of the americas to join with us and the wonderful group witness against torture i don't know if we have jeremy on the call i don't think so not yet well against tourists be helpful in this exciting thing but i'm taking his place uh wonderful thank you i see we also have nancy from close guantanamo who is extremely helpful in this and uh

[08:54] so in the course of uh just a couple of days we managed to get it stupendous list i think kenya can you put that um up there with the sunnies i can uh send it to you again honey perfect uh thank you so um we had a very impressive list also of people like our guest speaker tonight and other former or retired members of the intelligence community

[09:26] people from the cia the fbi and so we put out the letter we didn't get a lot of mainstream press on it i think um it's a tough week between vacation and uh the covid relief package um but we did get about uh we wrote an article that got out in about 20 different um uh sites it's coming out tomorrow on

[09:57] salon and it keeps being put out in different places our common dreams did a great job on it alternet and we um so we also took that letter and sent it to the biden transition team and to the individual members of the senate intelligence committee so that is what we have done so far and then this call is to

[10:30] continue to work on that campaign we don't know when the announcement for who the cia director will be but it could be within the next couple of days or they could wait until after the holidays um but it will certainly be soon it's one of the key positions that hasn't been announced yet which shows that it is controversial uh and i did post it if you're on facebook it's on my facebook page and please do share the

[17:19] at the senate foreign relations committee avril rose very quickly through the ranks why because she's very bright she's very con competent and she loves the drone program this is really what i wanted to talk about the most tonight because she's another one that has pulled the wool over the eyes of the mainstream media it was avril who would take these calls in the middle of the night uh asking should we launch or should we

[17:50] not launch listen i've been in the room when these calls have taken place early on in the drain the drone program where where a drone operator will call whether it's the the cia's counterterrorism center or the general counsel or later on during the obama administration avril haynes and they say we have the vehicle in the sites do we launch it was avril that said yes it was avril that decided whether it was

[18:21] legal to incinerate someone from the sky just because you don't like their politics you know think back about about uh anwar awlaki for example anwar olaki uh was an american citizen he was killed by a drone during the obama administration that drone strike was was justified by attorney general eric holder and anwar alaki had never been charged with a crime

[18:52] he never had due process soon after he was assassinated his son was assassinated a nephew was assassinated again american citizens well it was avril that approved those assassinations again i'm going to repeat myself because it's so important i think that this has to be a mantra for us they were not given due process they were never accused of a crime they never faced their accusers in a court of

[19:22] law and they were american citizens and that is who joe biden wants to name as the director of our national intelligence organization it's it's something that's utterly stunning to me i want to say one other thing oh i see a wonderful comment from from uh sage fonsbeck i want to repeat it its sociopaths float to the top yes they do let me tell you about that and forgive

[19:54] me if you've heard this before in other venues but a cia psychiatrist once told me that the cia actively seeks to hire people who have sociopathic tendencies they don't seek out sociopaths because sociopaths have no conscience they blow right through a polygraph exam you can't catch them in a polygraph but because they blow through the polygraph you can't really weed them out either and so it's those sociopaths who have no

[20:25] conscience who are willing to step on the backs of those around them to get to the top that actually make it to the top they're the ones that become the leaders of the cia of nsa of dni and all of these other three-letter organizations that we have it's it's almost impossible to keep them from practicing their sociopathy and here we find ourselves in that position again where we've got we've got a democratic

[20:56] president who is not at all progressive surrounding himself with those same sociopaths who had served the last president it's a it's a sickening situation that we find ourselves in and that's why the work of code pink is so important we saw what happened in the last couple of weeks with michelle florin i thank god but the job's not done between avril haynes and uh and mike morrell i i will say one more thing there's there's another

[21:28] person being considered for cia director now i'm on record of saying i don't think we need a cia i think it should be disbanded certainly it hasn't had any major intelligence successes in the last 60 or 70 years that we can that we can really point to um it's missed every major world development in that period of time but um if there's going to be a cia director i think that the person being considered who would do the least amount of damage is a guy named um named daryl um

[21:58] oh my god i'm blanking daryl blocker daryl blocker would be the first african-american cia director he's a career uh cia officer who specialized in in african affairs and he doesn't have the stink of torture on him he legitimately had nothing to do with the torture program he didn't know there was a torture program he wasn't read into it he was off in africa for many years doing his own uh his own thing so if there has to be a

[22:30] cia director let's pick the one who's not an overt murderer maybe that's a good place to start thank you john and i just wanted to uh share with our participants that avril haynes in addition to compiling the drone kill list on a weekly basis and basically uh being the architect of the legal framework that justified these attacks and shielded people from accountability um in china [Music]

[23:02] marcy we lost you we lost your audio uh try again marcy can you hear us you you can't hear me at all okay so she led the the team that redacted the torture report this was a six thousand page report and she uh redacted it uh to reduce it to a 500 page summary that's just covered with black ink so many redact redactions in addition she was i believe the deputy

[23:33] director of the cia she let all those agents off the hook who hacked into the computers of the investigators looking into the cia's use of torture so that was a clear violation of separation of powers the firewall between the legislature and the legislative and executive branches she has a lot to to explain and i want to ask john what questions would you want senate intelligence committee members to ask can we can we hold on to that for one sec sure we'll let you think about that john

[24:03] uh i just wanted to acknowledge a couple of people um i see down here from democratic uh socialists of uh from from progressive democrats america pda and to say how pda has been very helpful in this campaign as well as roots action uh norman solomon and david swanson and i also see on here that we have todd pierce who is a retired major from the army and he was

[24:35] a attorney that's called a jag attorney judge advocate general on the defense teams for guantanamo military commission defendants and todd i wonder if you want to add something before we go into the q a part not much to add to what john has uh expressed so well the program is ongoing i mean if you think about excuse me um indefinite detention as a form of torture which guantanamo is so

[25:05] it's an ongoing torture program when you look at it accurately correctly enough not even knowing with what's going on inside there today but john really addressed the issue of drone warfare and uh you know there's so much involved with that and how it ex creates incites more hostility toward the us it's uh you know it's exactly the opposite of what we should be doing but with that but i want to thank john for putting us out thank you todd it's always good to see

[25:36] you likewise with you thank okay you let's go back to marcy's question oh yeah my question was so the senate intelligence i wanted to get three mayonnaise but you're not out anymore are you able to get them yes sir please can i please ask everyone to please mute yourselves use that mute button as your best friend tonight please okay so the question is so these hearings i'm not sure when they're going

[26:07] to be you know late january early february sometime uh and the senate intelligence thank you sir we'll be uh questioning avril haynes if she's still in the running i mean if she's still the nominee and i assume she probably will be uh what questions do you think the uh intelligence committee members should be asking wow there are so many questions uh i think that need to be asked of avril haynes there are so many ugly things in her um

[26:37] in her near-term personal history uh besides the the drone program the legality or really the illegality of the drone program one of the one of the first things that i would ask her if i were a senator this one is locked now okay is is why she uh why she overruled the cia's inspector general and declined to punish in any way any of the cia officers who were involved in the torture program

[27:09] i know several of the officers who were involved in the torture program not only were they not punished they were all promoted they were all given the the the career intelligence medal every one of them something that she did she promoted them or yes yes she would have she would have been the one to make that decision in the end uh another thing too is as you said marcy and this this bears repeating the the senate democrats in the intelligence committee did not release

[27:40] the senate torture report they released a heavily redacted version of the executive summary of the senate torture report i'd like to know what her role was in um in the discussions about destroying that report at the end of the obama administration was it destroyed and why wasn't the report itself reviewed for for release why wasn't the report itself released even in a redacted version

[28:11] you know i i said at the time that the that the executive summary was released that if you want the real story of torture read the footnotes in that report that's where the real story is told well even just the footnotes in the actual report i think would have been invaluable for historians and invaluable in educating americans to teach them what not to do in future generations as todd pearce said

[28:42] that program had exactly the opposite effect of what it was supposed to uh have done it turned people all over the world against us it reduced us to the level of of the people that we were trying to fight and really i think it made us worse than the people we were trying to fight because in their own view they were fighting oppression we were just out killing people so she's never answered for the drone program she's never answered for her refusal to punish torturers and i'm

[29:13] not i'm not saying people who were told that the justice department approved the torture program so go ahead and do it i'm talking about even people who went over and above and murdered prisoners in their custody nobody justice ever told the cia they could just wantedly murder people and she's never responded to questions over the redactions of the report so there's a lot to talk about in her in her nomination hearing um when it finally

[29:45] takes place which i assume is going to be sometime in late january or early february and john can you explain for people who don't remember uh what was the issue around the senate intelligence committee is the hacking of oh oh yeah thank you thank you i meant to mention that as well talk about a constitutional violation this to me this was a constitutional crisis so the senate intelligence committee the democratic staff on the senate

[30:16] intelligence committee was investigating the cia's torture program we know from the movie the report just how involved this was and here is john brennan a barack obama appointee as the uh as the director of the cia and avril haynes as the deputy director of the cia they ordered their their own cia hackers to hack into the the democrats computers on the staff

[30:48] that was investigating the torture program to see what it was they were writing what it was they were collecting i mean this is to me this is a watergate level kind of scandal uh finally dianne feinstein gave a very angry speech on the floor of the senate and then nothing ever came of anything eric holder refused to press charges actually after feinstein asked that charges be pressed against the cia officers brennan asked the charges be filed

[31:21] against the senate intelligence committee investigators nothing ever happened but avril haynes was responsible for that along with john brennan she needs to answer those questions as well and before i i think we're almost ready to open it up but i see that jeremy brown is now with us uh with and he helped very much on this campaign uh if you want to add anything jeremy uh thanks yeah just briefly i mean the

[31:51] response to the letter we circulated was tremendous you know a bunch of former detainees signed some of them authoring specific statements for this campaign you know executive directors of major peace organizations it all happened rapidly and i think that's just a sign that a lot of people are still deeply passionate about this issue i mean this letter was sort of a catalyst for four years of you know pent up uh frustration and anguish to kind of explode and i think there's a lot of

[32:22] um potential you know on the nominations themselves and then a related set of issues that are going to confront us very quickly and then just in general we don't want biden to be obama 2.0 who talks a good game about reckoning with american corruption but then gives a pass to the unfinished business of biden you know obama and a pass to the corruptions of trump it's sort of all of a piece and then the tone

[32:54] set in the first couple of weeks and months of the administration is vital i think and then on top of that we we should let you know that uh a number of the the groups that we contact and some individuals said they would have signed it if it was only against mike morrell uh and they didn't have the same feelings about avril haynes and that's why i'm really glad tonight you focused a lot john on april haynes and we have to get more and more information

[33:25] out about her because yes she is the softer side of um the policy but as you said perhaps even more dangerous and there is a a really good chance uh that the administrative the biden will say well we didn't give you mike morell uh so we've got april haynes and it's kind of a you know a quote win-win so um that would be a win and we have uh we will have

[33:57] the chance uh during her confirmation hearings to uh really ask our senators to get these issues out so thank you and i think you're going to open it up for questions yeah yeah there's a couple of really great questions in the chat john um i there is one question here that uh is is it possible that john or other cia whistleblowers can be appointed to cia executive positions uh no unfortunately um

[34:29] the the the truth is that um with a national security conviction which which was the whole point of my prosecution in 2012 uh i'm ineligible for a cia position unless i get a presidential pardon and apparently i was passed over tonight uh president trump pardoned 15 people uh this evening uh including all of his cronies from the the russia scandal but uh i wasn't one of them so i i don't think that uh i'll end up with the cia

[35:00] um seriously though there are a lot of former cia people or former intelligence people who i think would be absolutely fabulous uh going back to the cia and trying to bring order to the place people like ray mcgovern although ray's a little long in the tooth and he probably uh would decline can you imagine ray mcgovern back at the cia i know a half a dozen a dozen people like that who could really i think change change the place

[35:30] if they had the opportunity but the short answer is no i i don't think i don't think it's possible there's another question from phil which came before the one i just asked um john are there any members of congress who think like you are saying that's a good question well you know there is no rondellums anymore uh there were so many there were so many members of congress back in the uh in the 70s and 80s who did think

[36:01] like i think um i think that that's changed you know i had a lot of high hopes for um um oh for heaven's sake what's wrong with me tonight jamie raskin and when push came to shove he sort of fell in line behind nancy pelosi on these intelligence issues so i i've been really disappointed um in the senate no in the senate you know we've got ron wyden

[36:31] uh i confronted ron wyden one time years ago about my own case i i thought maybe he would have been more supportive and and he said and he said very convincingly look it takes all of my energy just to not lose my security clearance and so that's what they're up against on capitol hill they have to be very careful about how far they push somebody's mentioning bernie sanders rachel k is bernie yes bernie's great but he doesn't really focus on intelligence issues

[37:03] he's mostly domestically focused good of those members of the senate who are on the intelligence committee really ron wyden's the only the only hope what about heinrich yeah heinrich is good most of the time but he doesn't really have the political juice to push these things can you talk about dianne feinstein in her role i think dianne feinstein is one of the greatest disappointments on capitol hill

[37:34] she is completely and totally bought in uh to to the intelligence community as it stands now and that's why her attack on on john uh brennan was so unusual because she was a longtime supporter of john brennan's and then he disrespected her by hacking into her staff members computers um feinstein's there there are reports that feinstein is beginning to slip cognitively too she's had two conversations just

[38:05] recently in the last few weeks with other senior democrats who are urging her to step aside uh from these these top positions from the the vice chairmanship of the committee and from her position on the on the judiciary committee so even in her right mind i don't think dianne feinstein is is terribly um reliable on on these cia overreach issues and uh john i do see another uh question great question actually two-part

[38:36] question from jeremy jeremy if you'd like to unmute yourself i think it'd be best that you asked the question yourself um from um our honorable speaker okay uh so john i mean lovely seeing you again um first you know jeremy interrupt thank you very much for that that fantastic uh chapter that you wrote in the recent whistleblower book i absolutely loved it and i'm indebted to you thank you great likewise um yeah so just for the sake of our messaging how can you verify that morel knew about the eit program say that he must have known like what's the

[39:07] closest to proof that we could point to the idea that that's that's a very important question because his position has been to deny that he was read into the program and my guess is that he probably was not was not read into the program officially but in the positions that he had it would have been impossible for him not to know about it you know when i was when i was briefing my my last job at headquarters was as

[39:37] executive assistant to the cia's deputy director for operations and so every single morning i had to brief the director who was george tenet at the time the deputy director was john mclaughlin and all the deputy directors of the four directorates right operations intelligence administration and science and technology and then their deputies the associate deputy directors um once we attacked iraq the executive director and deputy executive director

[40:08] began sitting in on those high-level meetings and so he was one of those of those people sitting in every single day so after i would give the the normal briefing on on iraq then we would go to a smaller group and talk about counterterrorism he participated in those meetings and you had to be read into the compartment to be able to participate in those meetings or

[40:38] get what was called a dci waiver that even if you weren't technically read in you could still be briefed on the subject he's he's been very good very successful uh in doing this dance that sure i was in every senior position in the cia but i knew nothing about the program like people actually believe that great thanks thank you we can move on to the questions of others if you want the

[41:08] second one's sort of complex so feel free to move on well medea i'll let you handle um do we want to wrap it up with q a or do we want to ask one more question well why don't we give jeremy the chance to do his last and then we'll do one more and then we'll wrap it up sure okay i mean the spirit of the last one is to say that a lot of people in washington don't think that the drone program was a problem right targeted assassinations is more humane there was criteria for targeting um it was broadly legal you know she was

[41:41] simply carrying out something controversial but doesn't have any special culpability how do we raise drones and maybe we could hear from medea too so that they occur as a problem in the context of her her vetting as as opposed to a credential well i think this is where code pink comes in uh because what you've done against drones uh medea and uh and my code pink friends um is that you've brought it to the public's attention you're right jeremy people don't think that the drone

[42:12] program is necessarily bad because the drones are out there to kill bad guys before they kill us but i can't even begin to tell you how many weddings we accidentally bombed because there was a tall guy wearing white and if he was tall and wearing white he must be osama bin laden so we kill 30 40 50 people and then apologize and send in sacks of cash or we bomb the wedding and then we bomb the funerals too because everybody's tall and wearing

[42:43] white so i think it's up to us to humanize these attacks now donald trump um i think changed the rules so so nobody's allowed to talk about civilian casualties we need to talk about civilian casualties and we need to humanize these attacks so people can understand exactly who's dying in them these are not pinpoint attacks like the government wants us to believe at least not all the time you can't you can't fire a rocket uh into a into a

[43:14] tea house or a cafe to kill one bad guy or two bad guys and not think you're gonna kill everybody else in the cafe and that's what we need to talk about that's what the government doesn't want us to talk about perhaps one thing we could do is look at some of the cases of civilians killed during the time that april haynes was in charge of that program because they're putting her forward as somebody who um redid the rules so that fewer

[43:45] civilians would be killed and they love to you know put people forward like that um obama you know tried to change his own rules that he had where they were killing so many civilians and then make it fewer civilians so i think um getting concrete examples of civilians killed and telling their stories would be a great way to counter that narrative that april haynes wanted to kill fewer billions we don't want to kill any

[44:15] civilians that's right todd pierce had a question yeah so john john already explained this so well but uh i want to remind people of all that code painted years ago 2012 2013 whenever it was on the drone program and uh and john i'd ask you can you comment has a cia people that you knew were they were considering everything we've just talked about torture the drone program which is killing civilians killing civilians is a war crime so these people

[44:45] what we're talking about here are all war criminals under the nuremberg standards they would have been tried as war criminals and uh convicted just on the facts that we know and it seems worthy of bringing up that april haines is on the fact that we know a war criminal and yet here we are stalking the government once again never stop with war criminals uh i would just add one more sentence we've been given them we've given them all impunity i won't go through the legal analysis of how they have that but even a victim cannot bring a case

[45:17] against a cia war criminal because the way that's set up it immediately gets dismissed uh to legal chicanery and so that's adding impu impunity on to the already existing war crimes because impunity is also a war crime so our entire government has become so infiltrated with war criminals that i mean we shouldn't even be able to walk in public holding our heads up anymore but we do obviously jim hart has a comment here too isn't it isn't killing us citizens without judicial process by drone or any other

[45:49] method illegal and to be disapproved absolutely you can't you can't just wantonly murder u.s citizens uh but then you might recall uh near the end of the obama administration eric holder was being questioned by uh by um oh it was somebody on the senate committee and i don't remember now who it was oh yes i do it was rand paul and he said does the president have the authority to kill an american citizen

[46:20] on u.s soil if he believes that that citizen is a threat to public safety or to national security and eric holder said yes that the president has the right to kill american citizens not just overseas but on american soil now that's never been challenged in the courts he has he has cited the uh the patriot act as giving authorization um it's not specifically laid out like that in the uh in the uh patriot act but that's the excuse

[46:52] they're they're using and marcy's got a comment that that it's you prefer not to differentiate between u.s citizens and others i totally agree murder is murder and it's wrong and someone who murders wantonly like this is a war criminal can i just add something that i learned going over to yemen to interview families of people who were killed by the drones um i like so many of us was always careful to distinguish between

[47:24] innocent civilians and fighters until i learned and met mothers whose 17 year old 18 year old sons joined al qaeda because they wanted to protest their government um heavy-handedness tutorial rules and didn't couldn't find any other way to do it and um she one of the mothers said to me don't you have a problem in the united states when young people

[47:55] are proud uh they join a gang and would you want them hired by a foreign government wouldn't you want them uh given some re-education to change their lives and this woman had two of her young sons killed by u.s drones and said that to me and since then it gives me a whole different perspective of who are the people that we're killing that we call

[48:26] um the the the um extremists and you know how did they become extremists and so just to say that um yes it's easier to talk about the innocent civilians but um we should recognize our drone program um after is when we kill people with our drones we're creating more people who then join these extremist groups so we do the opposite in terms of trying

[48:57] to change the behavior of young men who are looking often times for a way to protest abuses may i add something to that medea when i was stationed in pakistan i i led raids all the time and i was responsible for the capture of i'm not allowed to say the number but it was many dozens of al-qaeda quote-unquote fighters and there was one thing that i learned very early on about these so-called fighters first of all most of them were children

[49:29] 17 18 19 years old they weren't fighters and they all told essentially the same story they were from isolated villages in their countries they had no hopes of a job they were largely illiterate and they couldn't find a bride because what man would want his daughter to marry someone who was illiterate and had no job skills the local imam said you shouldn't stay in this village

[49:59] you should go to afghanistan to make jihad because they'll pay you 500 a month and if you're martyred they'll give your family 500 as a martyrdom reward well if you have literally nothing to live for and you're being offered 500 a month that's incredible money for some of these guys and they were young and so they made their way to afghanistan to go through training not because they had any problem with

[50:30] the united states they didn't know anything about the united states other than that we were bombing their countries um this was not religiously based these guys didn't even know how to pray they didn't know the quran they had never met read it because they can't read they went there just because they were desperate and i i decided early on that if you're gonna fight terrorism the way you fight terrorism is through education and public works projects

[51:00] to develop economies it's through foreign aid and i don't mean usaid foreign aid i mean like legitimate foreign aid like the danish the you know the danish were the ones who built the uh the sana yemen sewer system for example uh the italians built the uh the aidan electrical grid like that these these guys were not born terrorists they weren't ideologues who ran to al-qaeda you know

[51:32] shouting death to america none of that ever happened they were just children thank you so much john uh it's been you know our honor to have you with us tonight and todd as well and everybody um there's so much we could talk about and i you know you've given me a lot of ideas for our campaign going forward and i thank you for that
