Title: Kiriakou on the CIA, Obama vs Trump
Show: Hard Lens Media
Date: 2019-10-03
URL: https://youtu.be/V6eXin4Blys
Duration: 35:00

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[00:00] [Music] welcome comrades thank you for joining us today I have a very special guest with us I have CIA whistleblower John Kerry aku John key please introduce yourself to our viewers and subscribers and where can we or where can they find your work oh sure thanks

[00:30] my name is John Kiriakou I'm a former CIA counterterrorism officer I blew the whistle on the CIA's torture program in 2007 I'm a former senior investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and counterterrorism consultant for ABC News but it's the whistleblowing that's sort of put me front and center on these human rights issues I'm on Twitter at jQuery aku I'm on Facebook John Kiriakou and John Kiriakou calm all right thank

[01:02] you John so let's start from the beginning what what made you join the CIA in the first place and what was it if you collaborate on the various roles that you that you held what was that like you're so I was in grad school at George Washington University and I was taking a class called the psychology of leadership best class I ever had in grad school taught by an eminent psychiatrist by the name of Gerald post and he gave us an assignment one day where he wanted us to shadow our bosses and write a

[01:35] psychological evaluation on them and so I was working for a labor union at the time called the United Food and Commercial Workers Union it's the largest union within the afl-cio and I was a little bit afraid of my boss he was one of these old-school union organizers he had had his back broken by scabs on the picket line one time and just a mean old school tough guy and so halfway through the week we got into an argument and I called him a racist which

[02:06] he was and he got so angry his face got red and he bunched up balled up his fists and he's to set a stance and I remember that recoiling a little bit because I thought well here comes now I've gone and done it and he looked at me and he says my penis is bigger than yours I said what I said I quit you're nuts and I quit and I walked out I quit this in my paper thought that he was a sociopath with

[02:38] psychopathic and possibly violent tendencies Wow I always did not expect that part so I sent it in and the next week I got my paper back and the professor gave me an A and in the in the column in the right-hand column he wrote I agree with your assessment I believe he's a sociopath with psychopathic tendencies please see me after class and so after class I said dr. post you wanted to see me yes he says come down to my office so I went down to his office he closed the door and he turns he says look I'm not

[03:10] really a professor here I'm the CIA officer undercover as a professor here and I'm looking for people who might fit into the CIA's culture he said I like your writing style would you like to be in the CIA Wow sure why not and so I started the process it took a while but you know there are so many levels of testing and investigations and polygraphs and all kinds of stuff but eventually I made it through the process

[03:40] and a year later I was working at the CIA Wow and then what what were the roles that you held there well I started off in the Directorate of intelligence as an analyst I was in something that used to be called the the Office of leadership analysis it no longer exists but I was assigned to Iraq this was in December of 1989 January 1990 nothing ever happened in Iraq ever it was the same cabinet since the 1968 revolution right we didn't even have diplomatic

[04:11] relations with them I mean we did but it was just barely we had just you know a four person embassy and so I was told take your rock learn how to how to do CIA style analysis we're going to teach you we're send you to the writing course and you'll learn the CIA writing style and then when you get good enough to do it will transfer you onto something interesting like Romanian that's what they told me something interesting like Romania well just when I got to the

[04:42] point where I really believed I knew what I was doing I was and I had a degree in Middle Eastern Studies my focus was on Islamic theology my Master's was in policy analysis so I had this skills in the background once I really figured out what I was doing Iraq invaded Kuwait we went to war with Iraq in the first Gulf War and drove them out and I was the go-to guy I was Saddam Hussein's biographer in the intelligence community and so because I knew so much about the Iraqi leadership

[05:14] I was sent out before the war to to live with the Koidu royal family in exile in Saudi Arabia I was the liaison to the Kuwaiti resistance as they were going across the border into Kuwait to blow up Iraqi tanks and installations and stuff like that I did that for three and a half years then I went to a year of full-time Arabic training and then overseas as the economic officer at the American Embassy in Bahrain I returned

[05:45] as a senior Iraq officer and did that for another two and a half years and then I got bored and so I made a very unusual switch from from analysis to operations as it turned out I was the only person in the entire CIA who spoke both Greek and Arabic and there was a counterterrorism slot in Athens looking at Arab terrorism and so I went through the the operational training found that I actually had a knack for it and I went

[06:17] to Athens working counterterrorism I came back to headquarters in 2000 2001 the September 11th attacks take place and then I go out as the chief of counterterrorism operations in Pakistan post 9/11 did some really cool things there caught Abu Zubaydah who we thought was the number three in al-qaeda so when I went back quarters I became the executive assistant to the CIA's deputy director for operations and then I went to the United Nations after that and I left I

[06:50] retired in places what they say I left from the United Nations okay and then you also touched on this in the in the intro a little bit but if you can elaborate on what means you blow the list on the CAE a answer and the CAA and just describe the whistleblowing process yeah that's a good question because in 2007 there was no process when I got back from Pakistan I was asked by a senior officer in the counterterrorism center if I wanted to be his words

[07:21] trained in the use of enhanced interrogation techniques I had never heard that term before and I asked him what it meant and very excitedly he said we're gonna start getting rough with these guys I said what's that mean and so he sort of delineated these ten techniques that were gonna be used and I said buddy that sounds like a torture program to me and he said no it's not torture we got approval from the White House and the Justice Department I said let me think about it for an hour so I went upstairs to the executive floor and

[07:52] and I I asked for five minutes with a with a very senior CIA officer for whom I had worked in the Middle East a decade earlier and I said they just asked me if I wanted to do this thing that they're calling enhanced interrogation what do you think of that and he said first of all let's call it let's call it what it is he said it's a torture program they can use whatever euphemism they want but this is a torture program and secondly torture is a slippery slope and you know how these guys are somebody's going to

[08:23] go overboard and they're gonna kill a prisoner and when that happens there's going to be a congressional investigation and then there's going to be a Justice Department investigation and somebody's gonna go to prison do you want to go to prison I said no I don't want to go to prison it turned out I was the only person who went to prison but I said no no I don't want to go to prison I went back downstairs and I said this is a torture program and I want nothing to do with it and in my mind this was so illegal it was so unethical

[08:53] that I just assumed somebody would come out and say something and nobody ever did so two years later I resigned from the agency to go into the public to the private sector rather and and I still waited for somebody to say something finally after another three and a half years this is five and a half years after the fact I decided I would say something and so bright up the rest of my life I said that the CIA was torturing its prisoners I said the torture was official US government

[09:24] policy it was not the result of a rogue CIA officer which is what President Bush had said and I said that the that the torture program had been personally approved by the President himself and so as you can imagine within 24 hours the CIA filed what's called a crimes report against me with the Justice Department the FBI investigated me for a year from December of oh seven to December of oh eight and then in December going they sent my attorneys what's called a declination letter declining to prosecute me they

[09:56] said that I had not committed a crime four weeks later Barack Obama is inaugurated and he names John Brennan an old enemy of mine deputy national security advisor I had no idea that John Brennan then asked the Justice Department to secretly reopen the case against me and so for the next three years my phones were tapped my emails were being intercepted teams of FBI agents were following me everywhere and in January of 2012 right this is four

[10:29] years after I blew the whistle I was arrested and charged with five felonies including three counts of espionage right so that's interesting so what why do you think the Obama administration was so harsh on whistleblowers versus the Bush administration I think it was a combination of John Brennan and Eric Holder Obama had a nick Sounion obsession with national security leaks and I know that that came from John Brennan because I had friends in the White House at the time telling me that

[11:01] John Brennan is really getting the president revved up about leaks that that old-timers said that they hadn't seen anything like this since Richard Nixon was president and so I say this all the time this is something I think that's very important the Espionage Act was signed into law in 1917 it was written to combat German saboteurs during the first world war between 1917 and 2009 it was used three times to prosecute Americans who had spoken with the media

[11:31] just in the eight years of the Obama administration he charged eight people with espionage for speaking to the media it was used as a weapon unlike anything that any previous president had ever done and this was at the urging of of John Brennan and Eric Holder right and then also around that same time where you were blew the whistle there was another whistleblower sergeant Joseph Darby who her viewers are not

[12:03] familiar with this the Abu Garbi great I I'm sorry Abu Ghraib whistleblower you know it didn't seem like he got the same treatment as you why do you think that is because he was military and there's an entirely different system for the military I was civilian and the National Security Division of the Justice Department takes no prisoners don't forget to this is how these guys get promoted you know these prosecutors and assistant US Attorney's these

[12:34] Justice Department functionaries they don't get promoted if if they don't initiate prosecutions and so they do two things to ensure those those convictions they do something called venue shopping which means they charge you in the federal district court where they believe they're most likely to get a conviction and that's usually the Eastern District of Virginia no national security defendant has ever won a case in the Eastern District of Virginia that's where I was charged Jeffrey sterling Julian Assange ed Snowden we're

[13:07] all charged in the EDB a the other thing that they do is called charge stacking where even if they believe you've violated a law they'll charge you with 10 15 20 fell and they'll wait until you go bankrupt and then they come to you and say okay we'll drop all these charges if you plead guilty to one felony well ProPublica published a study in November 2012 in which they found that the federal

[13:37] government wins ninety eight point two percent of its cases so do you really want to roll the dice knowing that you have a 1.2 percent chance I'm sorry one point eight percent chance of of winning you know like for me because they charge tacked me as well I was facing 45 years in prison they're offering me 30 months amount in 23 I had five kids at home so you know what do you do everybody takes the deal everybody in fact I'll tell you a funny story I just reminded one of my

[14:09] attorneys of this yesterday I was talking to him the Justice Department made its best and final offer 30 months do 23 I stayed up all night long with my wife we were gone over Harvard Law Journal papers and I was the only person ever charged with this crime so no there was no case law nobody else had ever been charged and I decided this is crazy as soon as I get in front of a jury they're gonna realize how stupid this is and so I called my lawyers early in the

[14:40] morning and I said I'm gonna turn down the deal I'm going to trial they drove straight over to my house this was very early on a Saturday morning like 7 a.m. and one of them pulled me aside it was the the attorney I like them all they were great the Washington Post called them legal Titans but I left this one the most and I and I respected him the most and he pulled me aside he said you know what your problem is your problem is you think this is about justice and it's not about justice it's about mitigating damage take the deal and

[15:12] that's what convinced me to take the deal because he was right there are a lot of innocent people in prison I came to learn that firsthand I met a lot of them it's not about justice it's about getting the best possible deal yeah unfortunately that's how the system is and hopefully that can change you know the as we were pointing out earlier the Obama administration was known for prosecuting whistleblowers

[15:43] such as yourself do you think there's any indication that the Trump administration will break Obama's record in prosecuting whistleblowers good question you know when when Donald Trump was first inaugurated I gave an interview to MIT press News and they asked me a similar question did I think that Donald Trump would carry on Obama's policy of prosecuting whistleblowers and I said I can't imagine anybody being worse than Barack Obama the fake phony

[16:15] progressive Barack Obama in his war on whistleblowers I said my guess is that Donald Trump has more of a libertarian streak and he'll probably back off that was foolishly naive in fact we've seen so far in the whistleblower cases brought by the Trump Justice Department not only are they getting convictions like Obama was but the sentences are longer and now they've essentially kidnapped Julian Assange you know Julian

[16:47] is looking at a very real possibility of dying in prison right and that's that's a very tragic oh my god it's just so minute so many aspects of and also Chelsea Manning as well exactly right so many aspects of both of their stories are are so horrible they're so chilling like you you can't even imagine that this takes place in the United States but it does it does every day and you have to blame the mainstream media as

[17:17] well where the heck is the Washington Post and The New York Times you know they they know they'll do front page editorials on Jamal keshavjee and what a terrible terrible thing it was that he was executed but isn't it equally terrible that the Justice Department is prosecuting a publisher if they successfully published punish Julian Assange what's to keep them from going after the Washington Post right and but also these mainstream outlets don't they have a close tie with these agencies

[17:48] and that's the real scandal look at Kendall a nyan as my favorite example Kendall a nyan is the so-called national security correspondent at NBC and MSNBC formerly of the Los Angeles Times so Jason Leopold of BuzzFeed did a Freedom of Information Act request in which he asked for copies of all correspondence between the CIA's Office of Public Affairs and all mainstream reporters and what he ended up finding

[18:20] was that Kendall a nyan of NBC and MSNBC was writing articles and sending them to the CIA for approval before he even sent them to his own editors right you know it's not journalism when you take the CIA's press release change a couple of the words and the positions of the paragraphs and put your name at the top of it and run it in the newspaper that's not journalism and what happens is the CIA knows that it's that it's successful it's going to be successful when it does

[18:50] this they say look treat us right publish this or don't publish that or we're never talking to you again and you're finished in Washington and they all cower in fear before the CIA's Office of Public Affairs right and so so knowing what you know and have experience within the CIA do you think that this agency you know causes more harm than good should it be abolished or do you think

[19:21] he serves some purpose no I don't think it serves any purpose John Kennedy famously said in October of 1963 just weeks before he was assassinated that he wanted to break the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the wind that never happened but there were others who thought similarly like Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York who wrote a book in 1976 about abolishing the CIA

[19:52] and he was a conservative Democrat and still believed that the CIA should be abolished I've come to the conclusion that the CIA is just simply unnecessary the State Department's Bureau of intelligence and research does better analysis than the CIA does the Department of Defense has a bureau called defense human services defense human intelligence services they go through exactly literally exactly the same training in human source recruitment that the CIA does they could

[20:23] do the human source recruitment and then in terms of technology and technological development we have NSA and we have DARPA so why compete we don't need ia right I agree and also I'm just curious to see what you say about this what do you think is the most pressing issue that no one is talking about right now wow that's a tough one overall yes you

[20:53] know in 1993 Bill Clinton instituted a new policy at the CIA it became derisive Lee known as the cull C ull the new policy was we were going to go through the files of literally every recruited asset in the world and if those assets had any human rights problems in their past they were gonna be fired right and they actually did it it took about two years but they fired fully

[21:24] one-third of all the recruited assets in the world and I remember thinking wow Bill Clinton has some balls he was serious about this like human rights is really a thing now and the CIA whether they like it or not they're gonna have to respect human rights and then September 11th happened and then the mantra was kill them all so you had new executive orders from the White House you had executive order 12333 this is

[21:54] the ban on assassinations which was revoked then you had secret prisons than you had secrets renditions and then you had a secret torture program and if anybody got in the way you just killed them that's I think the most important thing that nobody's talking about right now Wow there were a number of times when I was still at the CIA where we gave an order for example for a kidnapping and several of us I was I was a

[22:28] mid-level manager at the time several of us went to the Director of Operations and we said listen this is the wrong guy we've made a mistake here no there's no mistake this is the guy we're like now we think this is not the guy well the guy was sent to Syria where he was tortured mercilessly for 18 months they raped him they gave him electric shock they pulled out his fingernails and then this came back to us and said listen we think this

[23:00] is the wrong guy Wow and they let him go we've never apologized we never sent made any settlement because you can't sue the American government well this happened multiple times to multiple people where we were wrong it was the wrong guy and so you end up with well there was a there was an Egyptian national who lived in in Germany and we snatched him off of a bus and sent him back to Egypt where they tortured him like an animal and then they came back

[23:31] and they said it's not the guy well when he went into the torture chambers in Egypt he was you know he looked like you or me and he ran a grocery store when he came out he had a beard down to his waist and he was carrying a copy of the Quran and talking about how he wanted to kill Americans well that's our fault we did that we radicalized him and his friends and his family members and then multiply that by all the villages that we've bombed and all the weddings that we've bombed and all the funerals that we've bombed right dirge for terrorism

[24:03] what's no wonder everybody hates us right and you know it it's a terrorist organization and you know that the CIA you know before breakfast tries to actively overthrow and to stabilize any state that defies us hegemony so I I kind of want to touch touch back on we were just talking about about how can the CIA be a Bosch or overthrown like

[24:33] well the Empire will just have to crumble or or do you think it's feasible to actually overthrow the surveillance state I don't I I think it's too embedded it's too well financed it has too much support from know-nothing Americans at the same time I'm I'm a realist and I understand there's not going to be a popular action to overthrow this surveillance state yeah I think that it has to be done incrementally we've had some successes

[25:03] in Congress for example at scaling back slightly but still scaling back for example the Patriot Act or some of NSA's surveillance authorities also I recommend to to college students I speak at colleges and universities all the time and people invariably wait in long lines to ask me how they can get into the CIA and even after all that I've told them after all that I've said in these speeches they still want to go to the CIA and I tell them you know if you

[25:34] go to the CIA you're gonna find yourself around year 10 of your career as suddenly being in a position of authority and if you have any brains and maybe some foreign language capabilities you're going to continue to get promoted and you're gonna be able to change the CIA from the inside you're gonna be able to respect human rights and civil rights and civil liberties and you're gonna be able to stand up to the policymakers this is one of the reasons why I hate when the CIA has generals or admirals

[26:04] heading it because generals and admirals became generals and admirals by saying yes sir right and you don't want somebody to say yes sir you want somebody to say mr. president let me tell you why that's a terrible idea let me tell you why we shouldn't be doing that and mostly ia directors don't have the guts to say something like that right there they're programmed to be robots yeah that's yes men yes exactly before I add to that yeah look at John

[26:34] Brennan as as an exam exactly John Brennan's the perfect example John brennon Washington's a small town right and and there aren't too many different circles in which people like us formerly of the intelligence community travel John Brennan will tell everybody in Washington who is willing to listen how much he wants to be Secretary of Defense and so it's better for him to have been a robot it's better for him to have been a yes-man because he wants to be the Secretary of

[27:06] Defense in his next iteration that's a great example and then we also we have a question from our from my another host Paul yeah I wanted to bring it to sorry we're kind of reforming this a little bit Julian Assange sits in kind of a really weird I know we're kind of bringing it back from CIA a little bit but in in the context of whistleblowers Julian Assange is in this weird place of being sort of persecuted by the United

[27:38] States via extradition while not even being an American citizen like I wonder if you have any thoughts of like how that compounds his situation and if you have any insight as to like maybe advice even for what he should be doing or his legal team maybe I meet regularly with his attorneys I don't want to give away any secrets but but this is literally unprecedented this is something that

[28:09] nobody's ever had to fight before we've never charged a foreign national right with espionage like this especially one who's clearly a journalist and publisher and so literally everything in this case every part of this case is precedent-setting which i think is very very dangerous you know there's another thing to that poor Julian is going for they're going through his his prison sentence in the UK expired nine days ago he was sentenced to 50 weeks in prison

[28:43] for bail-jumping it's a am I allowed to swear on this yes it's total [ __ ] charge right totally [ __ ] they just made it up as a way to hold him because when the reason I say it's [ __ ] is because there was no criminal charge to back it up right he jumped bail on this sexual assault thing and the sexual assault thing was withdrawn so technically he didn't jump bail but anyway not only did they hold him in prison they held him in maximum-security Belmarsh prison in

[29:13] solitary confinement with the worst serial killers the worst most depraved criminals in all of the United Kingdom beyond that his sentence expired nine days ago he did the sentence but the United States asked the UK to keep him in Belmarsh until we're darn good and ready to send the FBI's jet to London to pick him up and render him back to the United States look everything about this is illegal everything about it is

[29:44] inappropriate so I will say the hope that I have for him is he has some of the best legal minds in both Washington and London behind him with that said he's being tried in the Eastern District of Virginia where I said earlier nobody has ever won a national security case there and worse than that I complained bitterly in writing and in TV interviews that his judge was my judge and Jeffrey Sterling's judge and ed Snowden's judge

[30:15] Leonie brinkema a hanging judge former prosecutor in the Justice Department's National Security Division in fact that has changed now where Julian will not be tried by Leonid brinkema he's going to be tried by the chief judge of the Eastern District of Virginia and guess what he did before he was the chief judge he was the chief judge of the FISA Court so there's no such thing as a fair trial for Julian Assange and there is especially no such thing as a fair trial in the Eastern District of Virginia

[30:46] yeah and that's that's a total shame what they're doing to Julian we can only hope that he gets out and he gets to recover and get the treatment that he desperately needs because his work and such and and the likes of your work as well are desperately needed Thank You Anna in this yes Tara time it's a terrible time but we can't forget about Chelsea Manning Elsie Manning yeah her work is desperately needed she is definitely a hero and she is being mistreated as well she's back

[31:19] in there's a solitary confinement he's in general population in a population in the federal holding facility at Alexandria and in addition to that and mind you this is a contempt charge she's not been convicted of any crime right she just they wanted her to go against Julian yes and to contradict herself right what is they subpoenaed her they said we want you to testify before the grand jury she said no they said that she said everything I said or everything

[31:52] that you would ask me I said in my own trial all you need to do is submit the transcript for the record it answers all the questions but what they wanted her to do was to say something differently than what she said in her own trial because then they can charge her with perjury with statement so she did something incredibly brave braver than what I would have done what she could have done is go before the grand jury and just say in response to every question I don't recall you know well

[32:23] where do you live what's your address I don't recall what did Julian Assange tell you on this date I don't recall and there would be literally nothing they could do to her but she didn't do that she said that this was a violation of her fourth and sixth amendment rights to the constitution and by God if that meant going to jail she was going to go to jail and not only has she lost her freedom but she's being fined $1,000 a day for every day that she doesn't testify she's lost her home she's lost

[32:54] everything that she had worked for you know she was she was making money giving speeches and traveling and the LGBTQ community has taken really great care of her she's lost all of it it's all gone and that that's a shame and like again we we are major supporters of Julian Assange Snowden and Chelsea Manning and we hope that you know we can you know get them home you know so we can come home one day Chelsea you can get out and quickly julian assange can

[33:27] get out and be free as well because those those people are heroes for sure you are too and we would like to thank you again for joining us pleasures all mine and before we wrap up please remind our viewers where they can find your work you bet so let's see I've got a podcast every day called loud and clear that's on all the platforms I Heart Radio iTunes Spreaker Spotify I'm on Facebook

[33:59] and Twitter Facebook's John Kiriakou Twitter's at jQuery aku and I'm at John Kiriakou calm well thank you John and then the the people that are watching this right now please stay with us we have another interview coming right up thank you again for joining us and thank you John for taking the time to speak with us thank you [Music]

[34:52] yeah
