Title: John Kiriakou on CIA Propaganda, War with Iran and Going Viral
Show: The American Conservative
Date: 2026-02-19
URL: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZfEX7MK0Rrw
Duration: 49:26

---

[00:00] you've gone mega viral on Tik Tok, on Instagram, just in like overnight almost uh I would say like in the last couple weeks. It's kind of amazing. >> Uh it's mostly among Gen Z, so people my age and they have a particular interest in what you have to say. I'm wondering why you think that is. >> I'm thrilled by that. You know, I've actually asked a couple people uh why that is because I'm not entirely sure

[00:32] myself and and a couple have just without skipping a beat come right out and said it's because you tell the truth and that there was a price that came with telling the truth and people respect that which makes me makes me very very happy. Um, maybe on a less serious note is that I'm kind of proud at my storytelling abilities. And it might be that, you know, I'm a I'm a good storyteller and some of them are fun and, you know, they they cut

[01:04] them and make lasers shoot out of my eyes and, you know, give me the Alvin and the Chipmunk's voice. I I don't know if that's it or not. And I think on a more serious note, it's it's that I I have consistently told the truth. You know, I remember I remember making a decision in December of um 2007 when I was getting ready to go on that Brian Ross interview on ABC News. And I decided, and I even said this to my wife at the time, I'm going to tell the truth

[01:34] no matter what he asks me and just let the cards fall. And then um and then fast forwarding another well exactly seven years like to the week um I was I was six six weeks before being released from prison. I was able to call my my wife every other day for 15 minutes. And I called her one day in December of 2014 and I said, "How was your day?" She said, "It was great." And I said, "Really? What made it so great?"

[02:06] and she said because the Senate torture report was released today and it proved that everything you said was true. And so, you know, it's there's just no better policy than to tell the truth. People will recognize that you're telling the truth and they'll respect you for it. And I think that's why it's it's taken off. Now, that's that's in the most recent example. Earlier on, you know, I I I was on Tucker Carlson's show. Oh, I'm gonna say it was in the spring. No, we're in

[02:37] the spring. So, it was it was probably in the fall of last year. And then I did Patrick Bet David. And then I did Joe Rogan. And then I did Diary of a CEO. And each one of those shows built on the previous ones. And so it gave me exposure to people who otherwise had never heard of me, young people who were too young at the time of my whistleblowing. And so it's kind of like this new generation of people that's just discovered my message and I think

[03:08] that's been a very positive thing as well. >> I I completely agree and just as someone who is Gen Z, uh I could just say this generation uh they don't believe anything that the federal government >> tells them about our foreign policy, about all the wars that we're fighting, usually on behalf of Israel. Um they call it fed slop in fact that you know like slop that the federal government is feeding them. >> Oh that's a great term fed slop. I hadn't heard of it. >> And and you're famous of course for kind

[03:39] of debunking fed slop. you know, when it comes to this torture report um or or when it came to our global torture and rendition program, as we saw in the torture report, the CIA had offices devoted to spreading lies about that program, saying that it was successful and giving us results and you of course exposed all this. >> I I want to move on uh to another reason why I think people are so interested in what you have to say now. I think it has to do with what we're seeing play out in Congress uh and the White House over these Epstein files. Yeah.

[04:10] >> To the point where government secrecy and deep state redactions have just basically become a meme. Um, when it comes to what limited files that have been released, there is a lot that I want to ask you about. I do want to start with someone who has gotten in trouble for her ties to Epstein, which is Kathy Rumler. Yes. >> Who was the former White House chief legal counsel under Obama. It was revealed in these emails her extensive connections to the US deep state, even

[04:41] winning this CIA award personally from John Brennan, the director, >> which may I add, >> is normally given to people who are killed in the line of duty. [snorts] >> It's very interesting. I, you know, I I haven't seen this award either just given to a civilian um winning these types of CIA awards. What does that tell us then about the ties between not you know the CIA and and Wall Street where she worked but also just who she was and

[05:13] what she may have been doing that she the civilian is winning CIA awards. >> Yeah. I'm going to I'm going to speculate here too because I think that this is a very important story that's not being covered. Um Kathy Rumler was the White House counsel under Barack Obama, the seniormost attorney in the White House. Why did she have such a close and abiding relationship with John Brennan? I mean, we can speculate as to why she had such a close and abiding relationship with Jeffrey Jeffrey Epstein. And and you will have seen by

[05:46] now the the numerous emails that she sent Epstein saying, "When are you in town again?" "Oh, next week. I want us to get together with John Brennan. Are you free? Oh, you're gonna love John Brennan. We should get together for dinner. Oh, let me introduce you to John Brennan. He's a real sweetheart. Why? Why was there this overwhelming desire to introduce Jeffrey Epstein to John Brennan? And why did Kathy Rumler have this relationship with John Brennan? So, here's my speculation. Um,

[06:18] in in 2009, The New Yorker magazine broke a major story in that they reported on the existence of what was then called the Tuesday morning kill list meeting. Right? This is a meeting at the White House chaired by John Brennan, who at the time was the deputy national security adviser for counterterrorism. They would come up with a list of people to be killed that week by the CIA, people who had not been charged with

[06:48] crimes, people who had not faced their accusers in a court of law. The teams would fan out around the world, they would kill their targets, and then they would go back to the White House the next Tuesday and get their list from that Tuesday morning kill list meeting. Well, John Brennan was chairing that. Kathy Rumler would have been the final legal authority in the White House to approve those assassinations. And I think she was into it and I think

[07:18] that's why they became friends. Now, she was in over her head with with Epstein. I mean, I can't imagine that somebody so smart could be so stupid, but you know, here we are. And I'm wondering if I'm wondering if it was Epstein that wanted her to to broker this introduction to John Brennan. Now, we also know from this latest trunch of Epstein files that that Epstein's attorneys reached out to

[07:50] the CIA and to the NSC and asked for some sort of a letter, some sort of documentation proving that Epstein had ties to the CIA. We we don't know that he did. I think he did. My belief is that he did. even if they were incidental, even if they were, um, oh, what's the word? Um, transa, excuse me, transactional. And so, um, I'd like to now know what the story is

[08:22] about John Brennan. And God knows he hasn't said anything at all about Jeffrey Epstein. >> There's a story here. >> John Brennan uh, has always been one of the most mysterious deep state creatures in Washington. He's someone that you know very intimately from your time working at the bin Laden station. He was, I believe, the head of uh Saudi Arabia station at the time in the 1990s. Um, and he's just been endlessly promoted despite overseeing a really a series of security failures in the

[08:53] United States, including, I would say, 911. Can you talk about >> how you know him and your experience working with him and and why you think he's just uh ascended uh so quickly? uh up the deep state ladder. >> This this is very very much a a Washington swamp creature story. Uh when I first met John, he was the deputy chief of the Arab-Israeli analysis group,

[09:24] a mid-level nobody. So, he was a GS-15, a a relatively new GS-15, and he was working for a woman named Martha Kesler. Now, Martha was arguably the US government's leading or one of the US government's leading experts on Syria. She was brilliant and she was elegant. and he went to Martha in the mid1 1990s

[09:54] at Christmas time and he said,"Martha, I've been your deputy for three years now and I think that I am ready for promotion into the senior intelligence service and I want your blessing." And she said, "Not only will you never be promoted into the foreign int the senior intelligence service, I don't even want you working for me anymore. You're fired." Well, at the CIA, when you're fired, quote unquote fired, you're not really fired so much as you are given six weeks

[10:26] to find another job. And if you can't find a job in six weeks, then you're fired and they escort you to your car and they take your badge and nobody ever hears from you again. So, the normal turnover period for jobs is in the summertime. This was Christmas and and there was just no job for him. So he started pounding the pavement just going office to office to office looking for work. Finally he found a position in the

[10:57] PDB staff, the president's daily brief and the job was to be the briefer for the lowest ranking official entitled to a PDB to a president's daily brief. Right? There are like 16 people who get the presidential briefing every morning. This lowest ranking person was the director of intelligence programs at the National Security Council and it just happened to be George Tennant. And so he John went down to the White

[11:29] House and he and George immediately hit it off. They are I I never encountered two people who were more similar in personality than John Brennan and George Tennant. They're both, Forgive me, this is gonna sound awful. They're both ugly pockfaced alpha dogs, you know, cigar smoking, philandering. This is just how they are or were. And

[11:59] George, even though George was only around 40 years old, he had had a heart attack recently. And so he wasn't allowed to smoke. So after the briefing, every day, John and George would walk out of the White House to this little kiosk that used to stand on the corner of 17th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, and they would buy cigars, and they'd stand there and smoke and laugh and joke and talk. Well, lo and behold, George becomes the deputy director of the CIA in Bill Clinton's second term.

[12:31] He brings John back with him to the White House, and names him deputy director of the office of Near Eastern and South Asian Analysis, Martha Kesler's boss. And the very first thing he does when he gets back to the office is he fires Martha Kesler. So there were some administrative changes at the time. The director of intelligence was undergoing a reorganization and so a more senior officer squeezed Jon out of that

[13:03] position. He was only in that job for about three months. So George Tennant who saw great things for John Brennan decided to name John the CIA station chief in Riad. Now John had never had five seconds of operational experience any time in his in his life. and all of a sudden he's in charge of one of the biggest and most important stations in the world. That is normally a two-year position. You can ask to extend for a third year. He extended for a fourth year and a

[13:34] fifth year and finally came back to headquarters as the deputy executive director of the whole CIA, the fourth ranking official in the entire CIA. There was a problem in Riad though, and that is this persistent rumor or persistent reports that it was John that ordered that the 911 hijackers be given visas to enter the United States. I've

[14:06] always believed that to be true. I don't have smoking gun evidence that it is true, but it would not be out of the ordinary for that to be the case. Why would you give someone visas who you know are in al-Qaeda, the this terrorist group who have been plotting, in fact, there was this Malaysia summit, I believe in 2000, that's right, >> to go into the United States and do this planes attack to blow up uh these towers. See, that that sounds crazy to

[14:38] you and it sounds crazy to me, but if you are this gung-ho alpha dog who thinks that he is smarter than everybody else in the room, you're going to try to recruit them when they get to the United States so that you can double them back against al-Qaeda, what we used to call core al-Qaeda, um, bin Laden, Zawahi, and the people immediately around them. Well, that makes sense actually because the CIA is famous for recruiting terrorists. It's what we do around the world uh in Syria

[15:08] and Afghanistan, which is where of course al-Qaeda came from. So that that kind of tracks with the history of that organization. >> Sorry to cut you off. >> No, no, you are exactly correct. Uh and then 911 happens. He comes back. He's the he's the uh the deputy executive director of the number four. He becomes the executive director of the number three person in the agency. It's George Tennant, John McGlaughlin, and John Brennan. One, two, and three.

[15:40] And then he decided that greatness awaited him. And he wanted to head his own agency. So he lobbyed President Bush to create what was briefly called the TTICK, the Transnational Terrorism Information Center. It's now called the National Counterterrorism Center and he was its founding director as he proudly says in his official bio. Um I I was the executive assistant to the CIA's deputy

[16:10] director for operations at the time. Uh Jim Pavitt and Jim hated Brennan. Everybody hated Brennan. And and Jim used to mock Brennan whenever somebody would say, "Well, we there's a report from the tick." He would he would say from the t tick what's the t tick and its eminent director have to say about an issue and then everybody would chuckle and you know the truth is that Brennan was telling everybody who would listen at the time that he believed he would be

[16:42] the next secretary of defense and that never materialized for him but that's that's how he saw himself. I mean it was just a natural that he would become the director of the CIA. But how did he become director of the CIA? So in 2007 there was this enormous wave of retirements at the CIA in the senior intelligence service um itself. We were we were six years past 911. People were exhausted. It was time to cash in and move on.

[17:13] Brennan was one of those by some by some accounts 180 senior intelligence service officers who retired in ' 07. But they all saw themselves as the next Secretary of Defense, the next Secretary of State, the next National Security Adviser or CIA director. All 180 of them, half of them went to the John McCain campaign. Half of them went to the Hillary Clinton campaign. John Brennan was literally the only one that went to

[17:43] the Obama campaign and then Obama won. And Brennan was the guy. You're probably a little bit too young to remember that as soon as Obama won in 2008, he named Brennan CIA director. And the progressive left went crazy. They said, "This guy is a Bush administration murderer. who was one of the godfathers, one of the founders of the torture program. And

[18:15] that's the guy that you want to be CIA director. And Obama withdrew the nomination. Well, he made him the deputy national security adviser for counterterrorism because that position doesn't require Senate confirmation. And the liberals could jump up and down all they wanted. There was nothing they could do to stop it. Also, the calculation was in four years, the liberals would have forgotten about all this stuff. And they did, >> right? >> They did. And so in 2012, he became the CIA director.

[18:45] >> It's really amazing. Um, I want to ask you, you know, in the course of that time and and it was pretty much the same same or similar time span that you were uh with the CIA. The organization seems to have gone from representing the interests of what it was basically founded to represent, which is the interests of Wall Street. um and the seven sisters, the the oil company, Standard Oil. Um that was at least the case when someone like George HW Bush was a CIA director. Um what seems to

[19:18] have happened at least in the early 90s beginning then uh is that >> uh the CIA has morphed into basically a second branch of MSAD uh basically uh under the control of Tel Aviv. Obviously, we have this incredible and bizarre uh intelligence sharing arrangement, not at the CIA, but between the NSA uh and uh Israel sharing raw signal intelligence with that country even before our own analysts see it. But

[19:49] I I think you know a great example that just happened uh or that just occurred in the last year was uh the CIA director now Ratcliffe going to Trump blocking out Tulsi Gabbard and the other uh more moderate realist voices uh non-intervention voices in the administration to share the MSAD's own cooked up intelligence on Iran which ultimately reportedly uh as the gray zone uh reported convinced the president to bomb that country in June. So when

[20:20] did that transition happen where it at least was it uh the organization was at least representing you know some American interests although albeit corporate interests you know of Wall Street and and Standard Oil to now just full-on representing Israel's interests. How did that happen? My my career started in January of 1990 and in January of 1990 it was already that way. Um I I have told the story many times that my very first briefing that I ever

[20:52] gave after being on the job for just six weeks was to um Mossad and Shinbet and they actively solicited my willingness to cooperate with them more than I otherwise was allowed to. And I I indignantly pointed at the guy, the Mossad representative, and I said, "I am not recruitable. Don't even think about it." My boss later laughed and he said,

[21:24] "They they do that to all of us. All of us the first time they meet us. It's like they can't help themselves." Um, so in January of 1990, it the the relationship was already that close and that one-sided. I I can't help but to think that that it had to be that way during, you know, beginning in the Reagan administration because if it was already that way during George HW Bush, I mean,

[21:54] it had to start somewhere and we were constantly on the brink of armed conflict with Iran all through the Reagan administration. So, I'm I'm going to make a an educated guess and say that's that's when this enhanced closeness started. Now, you make a good point that Tulsi Gabbard and frankly others of of the anti-war persuasion have been largely pushed out of this administration or if not pushed out than

[22:25] marginalized. Uh, Ratcliffe in my estimation appears to be a neocon. Uh, Marco Ruby is Marco Rubio is a is a well-known neocon. We've already bombed Iran at the insistence of the Israelis. We've now sent two aircraft carrier battle groups to the Gulf at the insistence of the Israelis. uh we took out Saddam Hussein at the insistence of

[22:57] the Israelis and all that did was to strengthen the hand of Iran. I happen to be speaking with you from Dubai right now and I can tell you that that government officials and academics who follow these these you know issues of international import are genuinely worried right now about what's coming next. Uh, I say often in podcasts, forgive me if I'm repeating myself, if you really want to know what American military intentions are, watch

[23:30] naval movements because if we're not moving aircraft carrier battle groups, we're bluffing. Well, we're moving two aircraft carrier battle groups right now. And that has me very worried. It has people here in the Persian Gulf very worried. And this is exactly what the neocons want. Lindsey Graham has to be jumping up and down right now. >> Yeah, he he absolutely is. And it's everything that the Israel lobby has wanted forever. It's amazing, too, because if you read the National Security Strategy that was published

[24:02] less than two months ago, it seems uh or in November, it said we're going to get out of the Middle East. We're no longer going to interfere to impose our own values on that region or try to change their forms of government. we're going to accept what they have and work with them on, you know, issues of common interest. Um, and we're not doing that at all. We're basically doing exactly what, uh, you know, President Jeb Bush, um, or a President Hillary Clinton likely would have done.

[24:33] >> You're I think you're exactly right. Yes, >> I want to move um to a topic I've been meaning to ask you about for a while. It just concerns the anatomy of the CIA because obviously it's a highly secret organization. The only information we get from it is whatever the CIA will choose to leak to the public uh to its stenographers and the New York Times or the Washington Post like David Ignatius or we'll learn things from uh you know obituaries of uh various CIA officers um

[25:05] or in the case of yourself you know brave leakers who by the way are very rare. we we don't see them often. Um that's how we learn anything about the CIA. So we don't learn much. One of the I would say uh most secret uh parts of the CIA is the uh is a part of the special action group. It's called the political action group. Um obviously as I just said these CIA later leaders and station chiefs are are generally revealed in their

[25:36] obituaries and through other reporting but since the 1980s uh not a single political action group officer has been identified to the public. Uh so who led that uh organization after 1982 and the exit of Raymond uh or sorry Walter Raymond Jr. and the ultimate creation of the NE at the same time uh which is basically a CIA organization. All of that is unknown who led the political action group. So what is that group and

[26:06] and why is it so secretive even compared to other branches of the CIA? >> Yeah. Well, the the group is essentially the CIA's lead clandestine um propaganda arm. It's the It's the group that is able to put propagandists in place around the world, keep them funded, and then supply to them the propaganda to be released. It used to be called um the active measures group.

[26:38] Uh but when the when the Iron Curtain came down, the the Berlin Wall came down, uh it changed its name like everything else did. But you're right. This is this is the group that would be working with or would be financing um NE uh that would be working with or financing the Democratic and Republican National Committee's international groups. And you run into them every once in a while overseas. I ran into both of

[27:09] them in Kuwait. Uh, and I mean like weeks after the war ended in 1991, like there wasn't even any food and half the the country was on fire, but the DNC and the RNC are there and they're flush with money. Um, so, you know, there was this there was always this carefulness to not propagandize the American people,

[27:40] right? They always had to they always had to ensure that what they were doing was was outwardly focused. It was focused on on foreign minds and foreign voices and foreign you know media outlets and personalities. But Barack Obama changed all that uh in u what was it 20 the national uh the National Defense Authorization Act

[28:11] of 2011 I think is what it was. Yeah. It's kind of a funny story. The NDAA uh it was changed for the strangest reason. We've got these propaganda outlets aimed at Cuba called Radio T Radio Marti and TV Marti, right? And we know I know with 100% certainty because I did a study on it for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. We know that nobody in Cuba watches TV Marty and nobody in Cuba listens to Radio Marty.

[28:43] Sometimes they're jammed, usually not. The only time that Cubans actually watch or listen to them is when they're playing baseball games. >> They're covering baseball games because the games are in Spanish. >> That's it. Well, the Dish Network, you know, the Dish Network, that satellite TV company in the US, um, they picked up radio and TV Marti in the southwestern corner of Florida to beam at Cuba.

[29:14] But there was this little slice of territory right on the coast of Florida, like around Fort Myers, where Dish Network subscribers could get TV >> Marty. >> Well, that's illegal. You can't propagandize the American people. And so members of Congress wrote a wrote an amendment lifting the prohibition on propagandization of the American people just so the Dish Network could continue to carry TV Marti. Well, it had there

[29:45] was broad fallout from that decision. Now the CIA can propagandize the American people. The CIA can plant uh pro-CIA stories in the American media, which as you noted a few minutes ago, they do with their preferred stenographers at the Post and the Times and and elsewhere. And it's perfectly within the confines of the law. That law should never have been amended. Never. Because now, even as Americans, we don't know what's true and what's false. We don't know what

[30:17] originated at the CIA uh just to try to to win our minds. [clears throat] [snorts] >> So, Congress authorized the CIA to propagandize Americans. That's pretty amazing. Um I want to move on to another organization actually that that you're not a part of, but that you are very familiar with due to your time in Afghanistan, which is the DEA. um which most people really don't think of as being related at all to the CIA or even serving some of the same purposes, but

[30:48] they really seem to when you look at uh what they do particularly with uh their involvement with the Afghanistan war uh which if people remember Afghanistan during the course of that war became the global hot spot for heroin production and poppy production. Uh the DEA would publish reports during that war saying that all of the heroin production was caused by the Taliban, the people who the CIA and the State Department were fighting rather than the Northern

[31:19] Alliance and the various tribes that we were allied with in the region who it turns out were actually the ones growing all the heroin. um including for instance the uh president Cararzi of Afghanistan, his brother uh who was on the CIA payroll. Um and so I guess my question is what does the DEA's uh involvement or or all these reports that they were publishing which we now know were fake, what does that reveal about the role of that organization uh and and

[31:50] just in that deep state network that we have in the United States and their role abroad? you know, that's actually that's actually a more complicated question than it than might appear on the face of things. Um, and and I'll start with a little bit of background. So, many of your viewers will have seen the uh the television series Narcos on Netflix. And one of the themes in Narcos is just as the DEA is going to move in for the for the arrest, they're going to grab Pab

[32:21] Pablo Escobar. They're gonna grab the gentleman of Cali. Um the the CIA station chief steps in and just screws up the whole operation because the CIA doesn't care about drug interdiction. They cared about communism or terrorism. That was always true. and the the CIA had for the most part a very difficult contentious relationship with DEA, but not always because what you just said,

[32:52] this cooperation, this clandestine cooperation between the CI CIA and DEA on drugs is also true. So when I was the senior investigator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I was there from 2009 to uh 2011. I told John Kerry, who was the chairman at the time, that I wanted to go to Afghanistan and do an indepth study on heroin poppy. When the Taliban were running the

[33:23] country in the year before 9/11, Afghanistan produced literally zero heroin poppy. None. There was a fatwa that was issued by the Taliban forbidding the cultivation of heroin poppy. So by 2009, Afghanistan was producing 93% of the world's heroin. 93% of all the heroin in the world was coming from Afghanistan. So I flew out there and I

[33:56] told the Pentagon in advance, of course, that I was coming and that I wanted to um you know, investigate this and fly down to the heroin producing areas. They didn't like that at all. Not at all. So I I fly into Kabell. There's a helicopter waiting for me and it takes me to Bram uh air base. And in Bagram, they give me this briefing. They're very formal, the military in their briefings. And it was funny to me. They thought that that would satisfy me and I didn't

[34:29] really need to go actually see heroin poppy growing. So I said, "Well, let's go." You know, I I had made plans. I had expectations that we would go to Kandahar Province and then to Helman Province, which is where all that poppy was growing. They fought me on it, but I insisted and I outranked them, frankly, as a as a uh senior congressional staff member. I had the rank of a brigadier general, onear general. So, it's the only time I ever pulled rank ever in my

[34:59] entire career. And I made them fly me first to Kandahar uh and then to Lashgar where we had a little outpost, a little state department outpost called a PRT. And when we got to Lashar, I insisted that we get in a jeep with security and a translator and we just drive into the poppy fields until I could find a heroin poppy farmer. I wanted to talk to him. And so sure enough, we find a poppy farmer out there

[35:30] cultivating his fields. And we pull up and he's very nervous. And the translator says that, you know, I'm from the from the Congress in Washington and I wanted to talk to him about Poppy. Okay. He says, what do you want to know? And I asked what in retrospect was a very naive, silly question. I said, "Why do you grow poppy when instead you could grow things that have two growing

[36:01] seasons like onions or pomegranates or tomatoes?" And he goes like this. "The Americans told me in 2001 that if I told them where the Arabs were hiding, I could grow all the poppy I wanted." And I said,"What Americans told you you could grow all the poppy you wanted?" As soon as that second question came out of my mouth, my military handler grabbed me by the collar and said, "We got to go.

[36:31] We're under threat." And pulled me back to the jeep and we took off. So, I get back to Washington and I write this paper. I bang this paper out and I include this information and I secretly send the paper to a friend of mine at DEA. He was assigned to this DEA off-site facility way out in the sticks in Virginia and he calls me back and he says, "Buddy, you know you're never going to

[37:02] get this paper published, right?" And I said, "Why not?" And he said, "Because we want them to grow poppy. It's our poppy." And I said, "Why in the world would we want to produce 93% of the world's heroin?" And he said, "Because almost all of that heroin goes to Russia and Iran, and we want them to be addicted to heroin. It weakens their societies."

[37:33] And he was right. I never got that paper published. John Kerry killed it because the CIA told him to. And now here we are all these years later where China produces, you know, 90s something% of the world's fentinel. All that fentinel comes to the United States. Why? Because the Chinese want us to be addicted to fentinel. It weakens our society. But that was one of the most egregious cases where I saw CIA and DEA working

[38:07] together in direct opposition to the best interests of the United States. >> I want to move to some current events. Uh first of all, I I can ask you about this. There was a really concerning letter that was published uh by Ron Weiden and he wrote it to the CIA on February 4th. It was it was brief so I could read it to you here. He said, "Dear Director Ratcliffe, I write to alert you to a classified letter I sent

[38:39] you earlier today in which I express deep concerns about CIA activities." That was it. That was the whole letter. I guess my question is if Widen has these deep concerns about CIA activities, as he calls it, I think it would be useful if he told the American people what exactly those activities are. He'll never see, >> you know, Senator Mike Rall, for instance, famously read >> zero. >> Yeah. The Pentagon papers into the uh congressional record. Those were

[39:10] classified documents, right? >> And you're normally not allowed to do that, but because of the speech and debate clause that we have in our constitution, you are. Um, so why doesn't someone like Widen do the same? >> He doesn't have the balls to do it. You know, this is this is a problem that I have with Widen. If you look at all of the members of the House and Senate Intelligence Oversight Committees, Widen is the only one who will challenge the agency,

[39:40] but he will only challenge the agency using the AY's rules. Several of us begged Widen and Stuart Udall to under this the speech and debate clause of the Constitution to read into the record the Senate torture report and they just refused. Um, shortly after I was released from prison back in uh, 2015, I was invited to a dinner at the

[40:12] Greek ambassador's residence and Widen was another one of the dinner guests and he came up to me and said, "Hey, welcome home." And I said, "Thank you, Senator." I said, "I got to tell you, I was I was a little disappointed in you. I thought you would have done more to uh to help me." And he says, "Look, it took all of my energy just to not lose my security clearance." And I was like, "Oh, you're afraid of them.

[40:43] That's what it is. He'll walk right up to that line." And God bless him because he's the only one who will, but he'll never ever cross it. So, it didn't surprise me one iota >> that he didn't either release the first letter to the to the media >> or refer to the to the contents of the first letter in the second letter. Not surprised at all. >> Yeah. [snorts] And also, he famously was the one to ask uh the CIA director at the time or head of national I forget

[41:16] his title, but it was John Clapper. >> Yeah. at the head of DNI uh whether or not the uh intelligence community was unconstitutionally spying on Americans without any warrants. Uh the only reason he asked that question in the first place is because it I mean apparently he knew you wouldn't ask that question uh if you did not receive some sort of tip. It was very specific um to what they were doing which no one at the time knew. It was Glenn Greenwald and Edward

[41:46] Snowden who exposed it. Um, but somehow Widen knew and he kept it secret, keeping the CIA secrets on their behalf from the American public, even though he works for Americans. Uh, it was very bizarre. >> Yeah. And then, you know, Clap, what Clapper could have said was, "Senator, I'm happy to answer that question in closed session." It's all he had to say, >> but he didn't. He said no. And when later confronted that that one-word answer, no, was a felony,

[42:17] uh, it was making a false statement or also contempt of Congress. He said, well, no was the was the least incorrect answer he could think of to give at the time. And Widen just accepted that. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No one gets in trouble for that either, for committing uh that level of perjury, uh lying about unconstitutional programs. In fact, the only people who seem to get in trouble are the ones who leak uh information

[42:48] about what our government is doing uh legally uh behind the backs of Americans like like you did. Um let me ask you one final question which is about uh Iran, what's happening in Iran mainly and and the Trump administration. It was reported by the Wall Street Journal, what really anyone with eyes and ears could see for themselves over the past month, that the United States uh has been very actively involved in trying to fment these protests in Iran. Uh that

[43:20] they smuggled in thousands of Starlink terminals, flooding that country uh with Israeli propaganda, >> maybe as many as 40,000 Starlink terminals. >> Yeah, it's a really amazing and quite an operation. Congratulations uh to the CIA and MSAD on that one. Um although it so far it's been unsuccessful. They haven't really uh turned over that regime. It was reported earlier that the CIA of course played a very similar sabotage role in Venezuela preceding our bombing of that country

[43:50] and abduction of their uh democratically elected leader um or you know not so democratically elected in that case. Um, in fact, the Trump administration was was pretty open about how they used CIA covert action uh in Venezuela, even announcing that they were working to destabilize Venezuela as they were doing it. I'm wondering how you would compare the ways in which Trump is now using the CIA to how his predecessors like Obama

[44:21] used it. Yeah, this is something that I just simply don't understand about Donald Trump and his personal ideology. I was a I was a vocal believer in the idea that the MAGA right and the progressive left could could come together to oppose wars of choice. I really believed that was going to be the future of the of the Republican party and Donald Trump, you know, for all of

[44:54] his protestations that he is that he has, you know, either negotiated peace or over he has overseen the negotiation of peace between countries, you know, 7, 8, 11, depending on what countries you're counting. um he's just been wholly neocon when it comes to Iran. You know, one of the reasons why we know about this is that the Israelis have told us the Israelis have leaked they they couldn't help themselves but to

[45:25] leak their operations uh to the Israeli media. Uh we know for example that the Mossad has been working with the MEK, the Mujah, which until Hillary Clinton took them off the terrorist list was on the terrorist list. And now Hillary represents them and and Howard Dean and Rudy Giuliani and Corey Luwendowski and big mucky mucks of both parties representing a terrorist group that tried to

[45:57] assassinate the US ambassador in Iran and the highest ranking American general in Iran in the 1970s and was allied with Saddam Hussein until he was overthrown. So, we know that the Israelis and the Americans smuggled in as many as 40,000 Starlink terminals so that people would be able to maintain their internet access. We know that the Israelis and the MEK were the ones who jinned up these these

[46:27] protests that led to so many deaths. We know that the Israelis and the MEK set fires to at least 16 mosques and then burned 38 fire trucks so that the fire trucks weren't available to respond to the fires. Um I think this has disaster written all over it. We started this conversation by talking about aircraft carrier battle groups and how there are well there's the USS uh Abraham Lincoln is in the Arabian Sea right now and the USS George

[47:01] HW Bush is steaming now from the coast of uh Virginia to the Persian Gulf. Um does Donald Trump really believe that two aircraft carrier battle groups are going to overthrow the uh the Iranian government? You know, there's this very dangerous belief, it seems, in the administration that all the Iranians need is a gentle push and democracy is going to flourish. It's going to take root and flourish and we're going to

[47:31] live happily ever after. And there are going to be diplomatic relations between Iran and the US, between Iran and Israel, and maybe the Sha's son returns, which he won't, and everybody's going to be, you know, it's all going to be milk and honey. And there's no precedent in the history of the planet Earth for anyone to conclude that that's how things are going to go. So I'm I'm very worried about what the Israelis and the CIA are doing in Iran. I think it's incredibly destructive. I think a lot of people are going to die

[48:04] if we initiate uh an attempt to overthrow the government. And one thing nobody's talking about, how do we defend aircraft carriers which take like an entire day just to turn around from a hypersonic missile when we know that the Iranians have hyper sonic missiles? You can't defend against one of those, especially when you're a ship the size of an American city. So, I'm genuinely worried about the way things are going. I think that we should

[48:37] be deep in diplomatic negotiations with the Iranians right now. I think that we should care one wit what Israeli uh national interests are here. It should be what's good for the United States and we should be using the good offices of the government of Oman to affect these uh these talks. And I think that in order in order for whatever agreement that's negotiated to stick that the president has to then send it to the Senate to be ratified.

[49:09] It's the only way that we can come out ahead in this thing. >> Yeah. Well, I I completely agree. Of course. Um John, it was it was great to talk to you. I'm going to be respectful of your time. Um I hope we could talk again soon. >> I [snorts] look forward to that. Thanks for the invitation.
