Title: People's Tribunal on the Iraq War, Day One
Show: The Real News Network
Date: 2016-12-07
URL: https://youtu.be/aw-LXWf9YCk
Duration: 13:00

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[00:02] [Music] John kiraku was a CIA analyst was a and case officer was a senior investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee a counterterrorism consultant for ABC News and an author he was the first US government official to confirm in December 2007 that water boarding was used to interrogate Al-Qaeda prisoners and he described this as torture on October 22nd 2012 kiraku was

[00:33] sentenced to 30 months in federal prison not for torture but for talking about torture over his decision to blow the whistle on the cia's post 911 torture tactics John kiraku thank you good morning I spent 15 years at the CIA and I would like to speak with you this morning about something that I witnessed uh in the runup to the Iraq War and that was a thirst for war a thirst for war that I had never witnessed before in my in my

[01:03] career or indeed in my life I spent the first half of my career as an analyst at the CIA uh working entirely on Iraq in 1991 in the immediate aftermath of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait I met Ahmed chelby Ahmed chelby was an Iraqi kurd a Shiite kurd which was unusual he and his family had left Iraq in 1965 for Jordan chelby made something of himself

[01:36] he went to the University of Chicago he had a PhD from MIT a degree from the London School of economics and he founded a bank in Jordan called Petra bank which he immediately began to loot he stole something like $36 million mostly from Iraqi refugees and retirees people who had fled uh Iraq over the years or who had retired in Iraq I'm sorry who had retired in Jordan he essentially stole their life

[02:06] savings but the CIA identified Ahmed chalabi as somebody who ought to be the president of Iraq why because he served the cia's purposes at least in 1991 chelby went on later that year to found the Iraqi National Congress a group of Yes Men uh active in Iraqi opposition circles almost entirely in the west most of the members of the Iraqi National Congress hadn't been to Iraq in decades but as I said they had

[02:38] been identified as people that Washington would like to see running the country once chelby was made president of the Iraqi National Congress the CIA began to notice some things number one nothing chelby ever said was true he lied about absolutely everything in addition the millions of dollars of taxpayer money that was going

[03:09] to finance the Iraqi National Congress began to disappear at the same time chelby bought a multi-million dollar townhouse in nightsbridge London finally the CIA issued something called a Burn Notice on chelby meaning that no CIA officer was allowed to have contact with him because he could not be trusted he was a liar and a thief 11 years later in 2002 I was told having just returned

[03:40] from Pakistan that I would be working on a compartmented program I was not even allowed to know what my job was going to be until I signed a separate secrecy agreement I went up to the cia's sixth floor and actually signed a series of secrecy agreements six of them once I had finished I said to the man reading me into the compartment so what gives and he looked at me and said well

[04:10] here's the story early next year we're going to invade Iraq we're going to overthrow Saddam Hussein and we're going to open the world's largest Air Force Base in southern Iraq we're going to move all of our air assets out of Saudi Arabia into Iraq thus deny denying Osama Bin Laden the ability to say that we're polluting the land of the two holy mosques I was so stunned by this ridiculous Revelation that all I could

[04:42] think to say was but we haven't caught Bin Laden yet and this officer told me that the battle lines had already been drawn he said the decision was made and there were two camps the war was being pushed specifically by the office of the vice president president that was Dick Cheney at the time the office of the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the National Security Council he said CIA The Joint Chiefs and the state department didn't want to do

[05:13] it but being good soldiers we saluted and said yes Mr President a day later I walked into the same man's office and he was sitting at his desk with a blank piece of white paper and some Crayola crayon markers just to make conversation I said what are you doing he said I'm designing the new Iraqi flag I said don't you think the Iraqis should design the new Iraqi flag it actually hadn't occurred to him that the

[05:45] Iraqi people should design their flag in the following weeks it became clear to me that Ahmed chalabi was going to have a role in whatever came out of the muck and Meer that we had turned Iraq into the CIA rejected him as I said there was a Burn Notice against him but chelby began appearing in Washington regularly at parties in Georgetown at the Pentagon at the office

[06:15] of the vice president because the CIA had rejected him chelby decided to activate his quote unquote Army of intelligence operatives and to report directly to the vice president's office but we all knew that chelby was a liar the only thing chelby cared about was chelby and he cared about becoming president of Iraq and so he told Cheney's staff and rumsfeld's staff and rumsfeld's chain of command beneath him

[06:48] that was created just to invade Iraq and to handle intelligence exactly what they wanted to hear none of it was based in the truth and there was a quidd pro quo the quidd pro quo was I'll give you the intelligence you need to convince the American people and the US Congress that you need to go to war and when this is all done you make me president of Iraq Cheney and Rumsfeld

[07:19] agreed celibe knew that the administration was obsessed with two issues weapons of mass destruction and terrorism he also knew that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq so he just simply manufactured the intelligence I remember specifically one night that I had been called into the cia's Operation Center Joe Wilson who had been Char

[07:51] defair at the US Embassy in Baghdad in the early 1990s had been sent to nier to speak with the government of ner to ask if it was true if rumors were true that the Iraqis had sought the purchase of yellow cake uranium Joe Wilson had been ambassador to ner after he left uh Iraq and the government of nier said that none of it was true that the Iraqis had not sent an emissary and certainly they had not the N neran government had not received any uh request for the purchase

[08:23] of yellow cake uranium Joe Wilson wrote this uh up in the New York Times as an oped and of course his wife uh Valerie pl's career was later destroyed by it but I I was called into CIA headquarters to to review a document that the CIA had received from a friendly intelligence service that seemed to corroborate cheli's story I went in to look at this document within five seconds anyone who had ever served in any intelligence capacity in the US government could see

[08:54] that this document was a forgery it wasn't even formatted correctly I mean there were spelling errors and grammatical errors and it was obviously patched together by someone who had no idea how this kind of thing worked I said it was a forgery the cia's Iraq analysts agreed it was a forgery it was clear that the Iraqis had not sought yellow cake uranium from the government of ner but chelby didn't care what the CIA

[09:26] said chelby cared only that the vice president and the Secretary of Defense were happy chelby also passed information to Cheney and Rumsfeld indicating that there was a connection between Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden between the government of Iraq and Al-Qaeda nothing could have been any more ridiculous than that there was a famous story from the 1980s when Saddam Hussein had made the minor pilgrimage the umra uh to

[09:56] Mecca he didn't even know the prayers to say and his vice president at the time ISAT Ibrahim had to kneel behind him and Whisper the prayers to him so that he could repeat them out loud Sadam Hussein wasn't a Muslim he was a secularist there was no reason for Saddam Hussein to have any connection with Al-Qaeda or Osama Bin Laden and indeed Bin Laden had made comments over the years that he hated Saddam Hussein as much as he hated the United States so this connection Muhammad ATA

[10:27] allegedly going to Prague to meet with the the station chief of the Iraqi intelligence service there was just made up out of whole cloth because he knew chelbe knew that it was a red button issue that would help to push us into war that's exactly what happened George W bush tried to install Ahmed chelby as the president of Iraq once we had invaded But we had already in such a short period of time made such a colossal mess out of the place that even the Iraqis wouldn't accept him as president

[10:59] unfortunately he did get something he became the oil Minister that's not the crime in this whole thing Ahmed chelby promoting himself the crime is that bush Cheney and Rumsfeld knew all along that the intelligence was phony they were just looking for a pretext for war and they knew that many Americans are too stupid or too disinterested to challenge any of this they were looking for a trigger that would allow them to inst their warped neoconservative vision of

[11:31] democracy in Iraq I remember participating in a secure video teleconference with the National Security adviser the Secretary of Defense it was chaired by vice president Cheney I was a minor figure and so I was a notetaker for the director of the CIA sitting against the back wall and I remember a very senior official of this government saying in complete seriousness as soon as we cross the border they're going to throw flowers at us having no

[12:02] understanding that we were invading a sovereign country slaughtering its people and he believed that we would be greeted as as uh as friends and liberators now the crime is that millions of Iraqis were killed they were wounded they were maimed they were displaced thousands of Americans died for nothing no good reason at all that's the crime and that's why we're here today it's up to all of us to demand

[12:33] Justice even though time has passed no no matter how much time has passed we have to demand Justice thank you very much for
