Title: John Kiriakou, CIA whistle blower part 1
Show: Fort Collins Community Action Network
Date: 2016-04-25
URL: https://youtu.be/PCAYwyiEbY8
Duration: 54:00

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[00:01] [Music] my name is Cheryl destaso and I'm the coordinator for the Fort Collins Community Action Network strength through peace is the sponsor of today's program and they're an affiliate of the Fort Collins Community Action Network the grandson of Greek immigrants John kyaku was born in Western pH Pennsylvania through his grandparents

[00:32] John became steeped in Depression era politics developing not only a keen sense of the injustices that plagued American workers but also a thirst for other cultures John earned a degree in Middle Eastern studies from George Washington University where he became fluent in Greek after graduating he continued at George Washington entering a master's program in legislative affairs one of John's professors in graduate school was a CIA Spotter and asked John to apply to the CIA which he

[01:04] did early in his career John became fluent in Arabic in the late 90s he spent a few years in Greece and narrowly escaped an assassination attempt by the radical group 17 November the attempt instead claimed the life of a British defense atache in 2002 John was the chief counterterrorist operations for the CIA in Pakistan where he led a successful mission to to capture abuabu at at the time thought to be al-qaeda's thirdd

[01:35] ranking leader two years later John left the CIA he worked as a senior investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and then as counterterrorism consultant for ABC News in 2007 John disclosed details about the US torture program in an interview with ABC News within days the US justice department began an aggressive investigation of John kyaku that spanned 5 years continuing through Obama's first turn in 2012 John was arrested and

[02:07] indicted on three counts of violating the 1917 Espionage Act John and his wife at the time a CIA agent both both lost their jobs John's legal defense Bill cost a million dollars which left them with massive debt to avoid risking a lengthy prison sentence and a million more in debt John accepted a deal and guilty to disclosing the name of a CIA operative to a journalist he was sentenced to 30 months in prison even

[02:37] though the name of the operative was never released to the public John entered the Laredo federal prison in February 2013 and served almost two years he was released to house arrest a year ago in February and finally freed in June today John works as an associative fell as an associate fellow at the Washington based think tank for policy studies John's traveled 65 countries in 43 States and this is his first trip to Colorado for Collins

[03:08] please join me in welcoming John kyaku thank you thank you thank you very much thank you so much I'm I'm very happy to be here I'm embarrassed to say it's my first trip to Colorado I actually used to tell people sure I've been to Colorado cuz I went through the airport once on the way to Santa Fe well thank you very much uh to to strength through peace first of all for for having me here today U I'm very pleased to be here and I'd like to talk

[03:40] about a couple different things I hate being the torture guy I never really considered myself to be the torture guy but this is the position I've found myself in but more than torture I'd also like to talk about ethics and intelligence operations because frankly there aren't any ethics and intelligence operations so I'd like to start by talking about Abu Zeda I had been in the CIA for about 12 years uh before I had even heard of Abu

[04:12] Zeda I spent the first seven and a half years of my career as an analyst working on Iraq uh mostly in the Middle East I spent a couple of years in Bahrain I served in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and uh and really worked on Iraqi issues all those years but I got bored and in the late 1990s I I switched I made a very unusual switch to counterterrorism operations and found after going through the training that I actually had a knack for it uh the job really is simple to

[04:45] describe it's hard to actually carry out but the job of a CIA case officer or operations officer is to recruit spies to steal Secrets easy is that or to recruit spice to infiltrate terrorist groups on your behalf now there's a lot of work that goes into that but it's doable and like I said I I found that I had a knack for it and I enjoyed myself very much so after the September 11th attacks like everybody else in the building I volunteered to go to Afghanistan to do

[05:15] what I didn't know and I didn't frankly care but everybody was volunteering and I thought that it was my patriotic duty to volunteer as well after all I spoke Arabic and I was one of only about a dozen and a half people in the entire CIA who spoke Arabic if you could imagine such a thing um but they they didn't send me to Afghanistan so I kept threatening and begging and threatening and finally they said all right they were just tired of hearing it you can go to Pakistan I said okay when tomorrow I said okay what do you want me to do

[05:46] there we want you to be the chief of counterterrorism operations I said great well I had never been the chief of counterterrorism operations anywhere let alone in Pakistan right after September 11th so I flew to Pakistan the next day and um introduced myself to the we're not allowed to say station Chief uh we say the senior Cia officer in country I introduced myself to this senior Cia officer and he said okay welcome what I

[06:16] want you to do is I want you to come up with a standard operating procedure for taking down a terrorist safe house I said okay well I didn't even know where to begin so I sat down at a desk with a legal pad and I thought so what would I do if I were to take down a terrorist Safe House well I guess I'd want it to be dark so like the middle of the night I wouldn't want anybody to see me and frankly I would want the terrorist to be sleeping so I wrote 0200 at the top of the page and I came up little by little with his plan and um our Pakistani

[06:50] Partners I'll call them uh said that they thought they had found a safe house where somebody was was HED up and I said okay well let's let's hit it so we went out at 2:00 in the morning it was about a half a dozen of us we had a battering ram and we broke down the door and there was a 19-year-old Tunisian kid in there and he started crying and asking for his mother and that was my first Al-Qaeda fighter this became a pattern I came face to face with

[07:21] Al-Qaeda many many times and almost to a man they were children um mostly teenagers or people in their early 20s and they they had several things in common and this really was the very start of a transition in my thinking about Al-Qaeda and about Islamic terrorism they were all illiterate they were all um jobless and indeed had no job skills of any kind

[07:52] they were all from isolated villages in their home countries Yemen Algeria Saudi Arabia Libya Syria all over the place but from these very isolated Villages nobody was from any of the big cities I never understood this next one none of them had good relationships with their fathers which I thought was fascinating but I'm not a psychologist so I I was never really clear on what that meant in the greater scheme of things and um invariably the The Village Imam would go up to these guys and say

[08:24] what what are you doing here in this Village you can't read and write you have no job you have no future no man would let his daughter marry somebody like you you should go make Jihad against the Americans because if you do we'll give you $50 a month and if you're martyred we'll give your family $500 so what you're going to do is you're going to take this ticket and you're going to fly to Dubai and when you get to Dubai somebody will meet you and they'll give you a ticket to Karachi Pakistan in Karachi somebody will pick you up and take you to a safe house and

[08:56] then finally we'll get you to a training camp in Afghanistan and you can train well these guys didn't have any beef against the United States they didn't know the Quran they couldn't read they didn't know what the prayers were they weren't particularly religious they just simply didn't have anything else to do and they didn't have any future in their own countries and believe me making $50 a month carrying out Jihad against the Americans is better than sitting in that Village in Yemen just watching your life pass

[09:27] by so they went to Pakistan and they were young and inexperienced and stupid and confused and when we started bombing Tabora they all ran down the mountain and cross the border into Pakistan and we caught them well that was going pretty well because we would hit a house two houses a night and we're catching one at a time two five at a time one night I think we caught eight so I thought well this is actually going pretty well and then we

[09:58] get word that Abu was somewhere in Pakistan and my orders were he's somewhere in Pakistan you have to catch him and take him alive the problem was was though that that Pakistan is the size of Texas and it has 230 million people in it so to say he's somewhere in Pakistan go catch him if an impossible Prospect we would get these cables from headquarters um that were meant to be helpful he's in laor he's in F Abad he

[10:30] went back to lore again we think he went back to filad again we know from his diaries that we captured um he was just driving back and forth between the two cities and he was looking for a safe house he couldn't find one that he liked and so he was just looking around driving around neighborhoods back and forth that's why we couldn't catch him so I came up with a couple of terrible ideas ideas that just were impossible and doomed to fail and headquarters again was trying to be helpful and they was they would send us these panicked

[11:00] emails in the middle of the night saying we found what we think is his safe house it's a it's a mud uh building and it's reinforced with three- foot thick mud walls and these are the geoc coordinates and we would get a team together as quickly as we could and we would drive over there at 2 a.m. and it was the maternity hospital the first night and then the second night it was the police station so I had to say to headquarters we appreciate you trying to help us but please stop you we're wasting all this

[11:31] this Manpower let us figure this out in the meantime send us an analyst who can help us go through this information and help us find the guy so they sent an analyst out an analyst called a targeting analyst most analysts sit in their cubicles at CIA headquarters they read all Source information everything from press to CIA reports to Military and FBI reports State Department cables NSA intercepts everything and they they think these big thoughts thoughts they figure out what it means for policy and then they send

[12:02] the their reports to the president the secretaries of state and defense and the chairman of the National Security Council and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff a targeting analyst is somebody who's very tactical and very operational so he'll come and go through a stack of documents or information this high and figure out how we can Target different individuals so this targeting Analyst job was to narrow down abu's possible locations as best he could to make

[12:33] it possible for us to find him well the analyst worked on this for several weeks and then came to me and said I can't get it down any lower than 14 possible sites and I said wow we've never hit more than two places in a single night before we can't hit 14 so I sent a cable to headquarters and I said we need a huge team one big enough to hit 14 sites I'm multaneously we need weapons and Communications gear and night vision

[13:04] goggles and battering rams and ammunition and you name it and they chartered a 737 and put these pallets of equipment on the 737 and sent us a team of 36 men half CIA half FBI FBI because at the time you'll recall September 11th was still an open criminal investigation as if we were going to actually prosecute somebody rather than just to stick him in a secret prison or in Guantanamo for the rest of his life without facing any charges so the team arrived and um we

[13:39] did a lot of leg work and pre-operational surveillance we looked at all these different sites to make sure that it wasn't a setup we weren't you know going to go in and be ambushed there was Ingress and egress and there were a couple of mistakes we made in this in this uh targeting of the 14 sites one of the sites was a shishkabob stand that had a pay phone and there were obviously Al-Qaeda people living in the neighborhood they would go to the shishco Bob stand make a phone call on the pay phone and then go back to their little hiding place well you

[14:11] can't attack the shishkabob stand at 2 o'cl in the morning there's nobody in it another one uh was a girl school that we actually did raid and made a terrible mistake I'll tell you that in a minute so in one night March 28th 2002 we hit all 14 sites simultaneously and in the last site the 14th site we found abua when we began to break down the

[14:43] door he his bodyguard and a Syrian bomb maker climbed to the roof of the house and attempted to jump to the roof of the next door neighbor's house to try to escape there was a Pakistani policeman on the ground in between the two houses and he shot each of them as they were jumping the Syrian jumped first and was killed instantly uh Abu Zeda jumped second and was shot in the thigh the groin and the stomach again with an AK-47 and The Bodyguard jumped third and

[15:14] was shot through the femur nearly lost his leg in the end so I asked the Pakistani when I finally got onto onto the site I was at the nearby Safe House our safe house I asked the Pakistani where's where's the guy we never told the pakistanis who we were going after we said he was a big fish but we were afraid that they would uh leak it to him that we were on to him and we were looking for him we didn't we didn't trust them uh frankly frankly so

[15:47] we called him the big fish and then that became Mr fish so I said where is he and he says here here's your man Mr Fish and I looked at him all we had had was a six-year-old passport photo of abuaba handsome young thin beard and mustache this guy was a fat slob clean shaven wild Albert Einstein hair going all over the place I said that that's not him at least I don't think it's him

[16:19] he said yes this is him this is your Mr fish so I called the analyst I said what do I do I said they shot somebody but and they say it's him but I don't know if it's him he he said get me a picture of his eye we'll do a retinal scan so I kneeled down over him and I shouted uh if the hunic open your eyes but he was dying he was bleeding to death and he couldn't open his eyes and when I opened his eyes they were just rolled back in his head all you could see were the whites so I said all I see are whites I

[16:51] think he's bleeding to death and he said get me a picture of his ear I didn't know until that night that no two people on earth have the same ears they're like fingerprints so I took a picture of his ear that this was the days before our phones had cameras so I had to actually pull out a camera take a picture of his ear plug the camera into the phone download the picture into the phone and then send it to the analyst he sent it to headquarters and a minute later they came back and they said it's

[17:22] him so we threw him into the back of a filthy Toyota pickup truck that the Pakistan Dan had commandeered and we rushed him to the most horrible place on Earth fad hospital we we arrived by now it's about 3:15 a.m. there were dogs and cats walking up and down the Halls swarms of mosquitoes just feeding on people's open wounds they had this bar of Irish Spring soap with about a dozen syringes coming

[17:53] out of it and if you needed a shot they would pull the syringe out fill it with whatever medicine you needed give you the shot and then stick it back in the bar of soap again so here we are a half a dozen Americans dressed as pakistanis in the middle of the night with an Arab who's bleeding to death and I told the doctor you've got to save this guy's life in English he was a little shocked but they took him into the operating room and then tried to patch them up as best they

[18:25] could in the meantime word got around the al-Qaeda community that had gotten him and so they began driving by the hospital and just opening fire on the hospital I said to the Pakistani major I was with if they realize that we're unarmed we're dead we have to get out of here I said can you find a a helicopter and he said he could 20 minutes later a helicopter landed in the parking lot and I just walked into the operating room and I said doc wrap it up we have to get them on a helicopter and get out of here so the doctor sewed him closed as

[18:55] quickly as he could we loaded him onto the helicopter and took him to a nearby Pakistani military base he was in a coma for the first 24 hours but during that 24-hour period I received orders from headquarters that I was to not leave his side the order was 247 CIA eyes on do not leave his bedside but I was afraid I was going to fall asleep so I tore up a sheet and I tied him to the bed in the meantime they took him back into surgery to finish this operation he was bleeding

[19:27] so profusely I mean he was just soaked in blood we were soaked in blood there was blood pooling on the ground underneath the bed and the pakistanis were pumping as much fresh blood into him as as they could but it was just leaking right out again from his wounds so the Pakistan doctor came out and told me I've never seen wounds this severe where the patient lived and I said what you got to try your best because my orders were to take him alive we didn't think your man was going to shoot him three times um but they saved

[20:00] him he was in this coma again for a while I mean never really came out of it even before surgery so it was another 12 hours or so in in the meantime um I was very dirty you know this had been an operation that was ongoing and we didn't have a chance to sleep or eat or get changed or anything so I called a colleague of mine and I said could you do me a favor at the safe house could you get me a clean pair of underwear and um and a shirt I said I'm really dirty and I got to get out of these clothes so

[20:32] he brought me pair of underwear a pair of socks and the only clean shirt I had was a a t-shirt that my children had given me that I slept in it was a red t-shirt with a decal of SpongeBob Square Pants in the in the middle so about six hours after that I noticed Abu zua is beginning to stir so I got up and I stood at the foot of his bed like this and I was looking at him and I I recount this in my book that you could see the exact instant where he

[21:05] realized oh my God the Americans had me because he opened one eye and he looked at SpongeBob and his pulse went from 110 to 220 and the heart monitor started going and then the doctor ran in and it clear and they shock him and then they gave him Demerol and then he was out again so I sat back down for about 4 hours I remember turning the ceiling fan on full blast so that the mosquitoes wouldn't wouldn't Converge on his

[21:37] gunshot wounds I have a thing about mosquitoes my wife laughs about me but I consider myself to be a pretty tough guy but I'm freaked out at the thought of something drinking my blood it just is from when I was a little kid it's always bothered me and just to see the millions of mosquitoes in the room and they're all going after his wounds it just it was disgusting so I turned the ceiling fan on full blast to blow the mosquitoes away from his wounds and frankly to keep them off myself so I I waited there at

[22:08] the bedside and he finally came around again and remember I had him strapped down on the bed like this so he looked at me and he went like this for me to come next to him so I went up close to him and I moved his oxygen mask and I said um shme what is your name and he shook his head so I said it again shme and he said to me in English I will not speak to you in God's language and I said that's okay abua we know who you are and he said he started

[22:39] to cry and he said kill me brother please take the pillow and kill me and I said no we've been looking for you for a long time uh nobody's going to kill you as a matter of fact you're going to get the best medical care that the American government can provide so he really started crying pretty hard I think about this a lot even though it's been 14 years I still think about it all the time he said that he would never know the touch of a woman he would never know the joy of fatherhood he didn't

[23:11] want to attack the United States on September 11th he wanted to attack Israel but he was overruled and um after a while he started reciting poetry that we later found in his Diaries he wanted to talk about the differences between Islam and Christianity and then I felt like we had enough of a rapport that I said I'm going to give you some advice I said I am the nicest guy that you're going to meet in this experience

[23:43] my colleagues are not as nice as I am if there's one thing you do it should be to cooperate and he said you seem like a nice man but you're the enemy and I'll never Co cooperate I said well suit yourself he was very worried later on about what was going to happen to him and I said I'll tell you the truth I have no idea what's going to happen to you nobody has said anything to me uh I know that they're coming to get

[24:15] you I know that there's a trauma surgeon on the plane I know that you're going to be well taken care of but beyond that I can't imagine that the rest of your life is going to be easy well the plane landed I had been with him for 56 hours at that point and he asked me to hold his hand while we wielded him out onto the tarmac um I did he was weeping quietly and we maneuvered him onto the plane we laid him across

[24:45] the luggage rack strapped the luggage rack to the uh or strapped the gurnie to the luggage rack and I wished him the best and he went on 6 weeks later I returned to CIA headquarters I happened to be in the cafeteria one day and a senior officer from the cia's counterterrorism center approached me and said I'm glad I ran into you I wanted to ask you do you want to be certified in the use of enhanced interrogation techniques I said what's that mean enhanced interrogation

[25:15] techniques I had never heard the term before and very excitedly he said we're going to start getting rough with these guys and I said what's that mean rough so he laid out to me the 10 techniques that eventually became the cia's torture program and I said that sounds like a torture program how's that legal we have laws against torture in this country oh no no it's been approved by the justice department it's all legal I said I don't

[25:45] think this is for me you know you know what let me think about it for an hour I said well I had a a friend on the 7eventh floor the executive floor of the CIA he had become one of the senior most officers in the agency I had worked for him in the Middle East a decade earlier so I went up and and made a a quick appointment to speak with him and I said they just asked me if I wanted to be certified in these enhanced interrogation techniques what do you think of this and he said first let's call it what it is they can use whatever euphemism they want but it's torture

[26:17] it's a torture program secondly torture is a slippery slope you know those guys you work with you know what's going to happen somebody's going to kill a prisoner in custody and then going to be a congressional investigation and then there's going to be a Justice Department investigation and somebody's going to go to prison do you want to go to prison and I said no I don't want to go to prison well it turned out I'm the only one who went to prison but at the time I said no no I don't want to go to prison so I went back down to the counterterrorism center and I said this is a torture program and

[26:47] I don't want to have anything to do with it so I was because I had said no I was not read into this special compartment right only special people got to read the cables that were coming in from this secret location where Abu abuaba was being held in the meantime I got promoted on the strength of the abua operation and I became the executive assistant to the deputy director of the CIA now in that capacity I was supposed

[27:18] to have had access to every cable that was coming in every operation around the world it's it's really a very prized position but I was cut out of this torture program it turned out most everybody was cut out of the torture program so what I was seeing in general classified traffic was beginning on August the 1st 2002 the CIA its contractors two psychologist contractors began torturing Abu

[27:51] Zeda they said for example by the time they got to water boarding and we'll get into that in a second that they water boarded him once he had cracked he had provided actionable intelligence that saved American lives and disrupted future terrorist attacks right that was a lie that was the lie that was put into General traffic knowing that eventually if something was going to leak it was going to be that if something was going

[28:21] to be passed to the Congressional oversight committees it was going to be that in the back channels the eyes only channels and we now know this thanks to the release of the Senate torture report they waterboarded abua 83 times he went into convulsions he vomited repeatedly he begged them to stop and he provided no actionable intelligence that led to no disruptions of terrorist attacks and

[28:51] saved no American lives interestingly enough the CIA leaders from the period um responsible for the torture program recently came out with a book in which they said that the Senate torture report is just simply factually incorrect despite the fact that the torture report is based on primary source original CIA documentation I would pause it to you that they are the

[29:21] Liars because torture is their legacy when they die and their obituaries are written the obituaries aren't going to say this great Patriot died this great champion of Freedom died it's going to say this architect of our ill-advised and illegal torture program died and so they believe that if they keep repeating this lie over and over and over again that people either will be too stupid or too gullible or too lazy to do their own

[29:53] research and will believe that torture worked I can tell you that it did not not work there's an FBI agent by the name of Ali sufan Ali and I work together in Pakistan and as soon as Abu Zeda was captured Ali was sent out to the secret prison where Abu Zeda was being interrogated now it pains me believe me it pains me in my gut to complement the FBI but they are really good at interrogations really good you don't

[30:24] even realize you're being interrogated and what Ali did was he sat across the table from abuaba once abuaba had recovered enough to be able to sit and have a meeting with somebody he offered him a date or a fig or an apple or whatever it was and they had a conversation over a period of weeks Abu Zeda opened up to Ali and did provide actionable intelligence that led to the disruption of terrorist attacks particularly in Europe but the CIA didn't like the fact that the FBI suddenly had Primacy in

[30:56] this case especially because the Loc was overseas and the CIA is always supposed to be the primary agency overseas while the FBI is the primary agency in the United States so George tenant didn't like this one bit and he went to President Bush and he said I want the CIA to have Primacy I want you to order the FBI out and the president said okay and he ordered the FBI out II returned to Washington within 24 hours the CIA began torturing Abu AA and he

[31:26] stopped talking and never started talking talking again the core issue here is one of Ethics there is no such thing as ethics training in the in the CIA when you enter the CIA you either have your own ethical standards your own moral background or you don't now couple this with what I'm about to tell you a CIA psychiatrist told me one time that the CIA actively seeks to hire people with

[31:57] sociopathic tendencies not sociopaths sociopaths have no conscience they're unable to feel empathy and they can very easily pass a polygraph exam because they're they're unable to feel guilt okay they don't want sociopaths because sociopaths are hard to manage they tend to go out on their own but people with sociopathic tendencies feel comfortable working in moral ethical or legal gray areas and I'll admit to you you you know

[32:28] when my bosses have come to me or had come to me in the past and said Hey listen what are you doing tomorrow and I'd say oh nothing much okay we want you to break into this house and plan a bug I'd say okay and I'd break into the house and plant a bug or plant a camera or you know steal some documents or whatever that was the job I had no problem breaking into places I actually kind of enjoyed it you get a little adrenaline rush and then you think you know USA USA right we're the good guys we thought well let me ask you something

[32:59] about ethics this is something that I often pose to uh to University students college students because I think that this really encapsulates the idea of ethics and intelligence operations let's say that you are CIA case officers and you're working in the Middle East on a counterterrorism issue and you have recruited a major penetration of a foreign terrorist group Hezbollah Isis Al-Qaeda whatever it is and this guy is giving you real information that's allowing you to disrupt these attacks so

[33:31] you're meeting with him in a hotel somewhere in the Middle East and at the start of the meeting he says to you look I've done everything you wanted I've given you all this private secret information now you're going to do something for me I want you to go out and I want you to get me a prostitute right now and if you don't I'm not going to cooperate with you anymore how many people here would get him the prostitute yeah sure he's a scumbag but your your job is to work with scumbags right so yeah sure you'd get in the prostitute what if he asks for a child

[34:06] prostitute absolutely not absolutely positively not I would tell him hey you think you're the only game in town you think you're the only person we have that's infiltrated this group now he may be but it's a child we're talking about the sad point of this is that there's no there's no guideline for this kind of thing there are no rules I can tell you firsthand that I've worked with people who would go out and get the child prostitute without giving

[34:37] it 5 Seconds of thought because it's not something that you have to cable back to headquarters and ask permission for you just go out and do it right we're supposed to be professionals we're supposed to be operations officers we're supposed to be the the tip of the spear as they say The Cutting Edge of American foreign policy but you lose your humanity and then there's nobody to tell you you're losing your Humanity this was a serious problem that I had at the CIA it's a serious ongoing problem at

[35:10] the CIA now besides the fact that the torture program was immoral and unethical I maintained from the very beginning beginning that it was illegal we have something in our country called the federal torture act the federal torture act has been on the books for many many years and it specifically defines and then specifically bans torture to put it in a nutshell it bans anything that makes a person physically

[35:41] uncomfortable or it bans anything done on behalf of the American government by a private person that makes a person uncomfortable so clearly all of these these 10 uh techniques were illegal there were two midlevel Justice Department officials at the time John U and J BBY and they somehow were able to turn

[36:11] the law on its head Allah what does the word is mean uh and they somehow concluded that because Al-Qaeda Fighters were not State actors they were not representatives of any one country that they somehow were not allowed the protections of the Geneva Convention in addition to the fact that the torture techniques were not torture they were enhanced interrogation techniques right different

[36:44] terminology so that means it must be different I've even given the CIA the benefit of the doubt I've never called for the prosecution of CIA officer who believed they were acting within the law by carrying out these torture techniques but again we know from both the Senate torture report and the CIA inspector General's report that CIA officers went far beyond what the justice department ever approved for example on the first

[37:15] day that Abu Zeda was tortured he was subjected to a technique called Walling Walling is where the prisoner has a a rolled up towel around his neck or one of those sleep pillows around his neck and he's grabbed by the lapels or by the shirt and he's slammed against a wall now the technique says in in the rules in the memo from the justice department that the wall must be made of plywood so that there's a little bit of give and the

[37:45] Prisoner doesn't get a skull injury well on his very first day the Walling technique was used with Abu Zeda oh but they forgot to put the towel around his neck and the wall was made of con rete why wasn't that officer prosecuted there was a prisoner by the name of Hassan ghoul Hassan gou turned out to be innocent of anything as many many prisoners were especially at Guantanamo but hen ghoul was subjected to a torture technique

[38:15] called the cold cell so the prisoner is stripped naked he's chained to an eyebolt in the ceiling so he can't move and he can't get comfortable the cell is chilled to 50° and every hour somebody goes into the cell and throws a bucket of ice water on him after about four hours of that Hassan goul died but nobody was ever prosecuted for killing Hassan ghoul what about Mahar arar has anybody ever heard of Mahar orar Mahar arar was

[38:46] a professor at a university in Canada he had been in Europe he was flying back to Toronto via JFK in New York when the plane landed in JFK two FBI a agents went on board and took him off the plane they wouldn't tell him why they took him off the plane he was turned over to another government agency that has never been identified and Mahar was flown to Syria where he was tortured mercilessly for the next 18

[39:16] months finally after 18 months the syrians came back to us and said we think this is the wrong guy and so we said said okay let him go he sued the American government his suit was dismissed with prejudice on National Security grounds meaning if the CIA is forced to defend thems themselves they'll have to reveal classified information and they can't do that because we need to protect National Security right so the suit was dismissed

[39:47] I spoke with Mahar last year he told me he has not been able to leave his house in 10 years he has such severe post-traumatic stress disorder he did Sue the Canadian government and they gave him a settlement of $6 million but he said they took my life I mean what do I do with $6 million I can't leave my house he'll never work again and we've not even apologized there's a second man by the name of Khaled al-masri anybody ever heard of khed almasri sure khed Alm was

[46:32] investigation again they investigated me for another three years and then in January 2012 I was arrested and charged with three counts of Espionage one count of violating the intelligence identities protection act of 1981 I'm only the second American ever to be charged with that and a felony account of making a false statement and my attorneys and I were never exactly clear on what exactly the false statement was supposed to be it was thrown out anyway um but Espionage I

[47:03] mean this is the gravest crime in American can be charged with this a potential death penalty uh crime so the three counts were based on this uh on one I had given the New York Times top secret code word information that was Declassified solely for the purpose of Prosecuting me and that information was that after the September 11th attacks the CIA had a program to kill or

[47:34] capture members of al-Qaeda top secret the other two counts were just as ridiculous uh this same New York Times Reporter called me and said he was doing a story on a CIA officer who had been overt his entire career never Undercover on LinkedIn CIA analyst yeah I mean his email is like CIA guy aol.com

[48:05] seriously so he says can you introduce me to this guy I said you know I haven't seen him in years but I have a business card he had resigned from the agency years before he went to work for a consulting firm I said he gave me his business card so I scanned the business card and I sent it to him and I sent it to another reporter I was charged with two counts of Espionage for those two emails now we challenged those counts of Espionage in court and my attorney said your honor you know this is the result of Mr kyaku faxing a business card uh to a reporter an unclassified business card

[48:36] for an for an overt employee and the judge says well I find that very hard to believe and she says to the prosecutor you know Mr I don't even remember his name I think I just blocked it out on purpose some kind of psychological defense mechanism Mr whatever his name was and he stands up and he says well well your honor Mr kyaku should have known better that even if it was unclassified he shouldn't have been talking to the press and the judge

[49:08] said but Mr kiraku has a First Amendment right to freedom of speech well yes but she said I'll entertain a motion to uh dismiss the Espionage charges and they were dismissed but this whole process dragged da for a very long time and my attorneys uh wanted to be paid so I sold everything I had I had a

[49:39] little piece of Beach property gone uh all my stocks and bonds gone I sold all my personal possessions on eBay and I gave my attorneys $150,000 remember my wife was fired the day I was arrested just because she was married to me she had a stellar CIA career so we were both unemployed and um I said well how much do I owe you guys they said you owe us another $880,000 and this was like you know

[50:11] September so I said if we go to trial how much am I going to owe you they said another million perhaps 2 million in addition to the 880 so my wife and I sat down with a calculator and we tried to figure this out it became an economic decision but this is the Justice Department's goal this is the plan the plan is to bankrupt you what they do is this thing called stacking where instead of charging you with a crime they'll charge you with five crimes or 10 or 20 like they did to

[50:43] Tom Drake or Jeffrey Sterling or like they're trying to do with Ed Snowden and what they do is they bankrupt you and they get you to the point where you're desperate and you'll do anything to make this case go away and so they come back and they say well will drop all the charges but one if you plead guilty so do I roll the dice remember I'm looking at 45 years I'm I'm 51 I'll die in prison there's no federal parole thanks to Ronald Reagan's get tough on crime nonsense from the 80s so do I roll

[51:16] the dice knowing that the justice department wins 98.2% of its cases according to prop publica um you know we used to have a joke at the CIA s Hussein I worked on Iraq most of my career Saddam Hussein would win 98% of his presidential uh in his presidential races and we would laugh and we'd say the fixes in and the justice department wins 98% of our cases and we say wow they're Geniuses never understood that so do you roll the dice knowing

[51:46] that you have a 1.8% chance of success or do you just take the take the plea and make the thing go away one of my attorneys the the one who I who I admired and respected most pulled me aside one day and he said if you were my brother I would beg you to take this deal this can be a blip in your life or it can be the defining event of your life let it be the blip and so they offered me 30 months I'd be out in less than two I took the

[52:18] deal in fact it was a little bit embarrassing because on the day of my sentencing I had to stand up and the judge said uh how do you plead and I said I changed my plea to guilty and she said do you admit that you committed this crime uh purposefully and I said no I do not it was an accident and she said to my attorney you need to consult with your client and my attorney leans over and he says you have to say you did it on purpose and I said but I didn't do it on purpose and he said I know but you have to say that you did because that's

[52:48] the only way you get the deal I said sure I did it on purpose and she says Okay I accept your plea guilty sentencing is in three months but that's our justice department you know I hadn't committed Espionage but in the eastern district of Virginia they would convict a baloney sandwich especially when the jury is made up of people from the CIA the FBI DOD and every defense contractor in Washington what are your chances I'll tell you one more thing about that too I laugh now but it made me cry back then

[53:20] um my best friend's wife has an uncle who is the top jury consultant in America OJ Simpson jury William Kennedy Smith George Zimmerman all the biggest uh uh trials so he flew up to Washington and he said because you're Rich's nephew uh I'm going to do this for free so we had him get a security clearance we we read him into the case and he came back and he said if we were in any other

[53:50] District in America we win this but the eastern district of Virginia he said you you don't have a prayer they don't call it the Espionage court for nothing and interestingly enough I read later that no defendant in a national security case has ever won in the eastern district of Virginia I stayed up all night with my wife the night before I decided to take the plea I was supposed to go to court at something like 10:00 in the morning

[54:20] and at 7 I sent a letter to my attorneys saying Heather and I had been up all night and we decided we're going to go to trial I haven't done anything wrong and I'm going to fight and the next thing I knew they arrived at the house and that's when we had the blip versus defining event conversation and he said you don't get it you can't win we're beyond the the question of of guilt or innocence guilt or innocence doesn't matter
