Title: Ep. 5567 – Kevin Gosztola and John Kiriakou on the Sente
Show: Scott Horton
Date: 2021-08-01
URL: https://youtu.be/OV3V3wFJUwY
Duration: 43:00

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[00:10] all right shall welcome to the scott horton show i'm the director of the libertarian institute editorial director of antiwar.com author of the book fools aaron time to end the war in afghanistan and the brand new enough already time to end the war on terrorism and i've recorded more than 5 500 interviews since 2003 almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scotthorton.org you can sign up for the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available

[00:40] at scott youtube.com show all right you guys on the line we've got kevin got stolen and john kiriyaku of course kevin writes at shadowproof.com and uh of course john kiriyaku is the former cia officer and co-author with gareth porter of the cia insider's guide to america's horrible iran policy whatever something like that anyway and uh both of them good on the story of daniel hale

[01:12] the whistleblower responsible for the assassination complex or the drone papers i guess that the former is the book there and the online of the intercept it's the drone papers and i'm not sure if you guys saw this but uh scahill who um i guess oversaw the production of that series that came out and the publication of that book i guess was the editor of that book uh has put out here a statement saying drone whistleblower daniel hale is a truth-teller in a time of

[01:42] systemic deceit and lethal secrecy and so um but the news is he has been sentenced to prison after pleading guilty for uh leaking this stuff so tell us first of all the news kevin uh what was the sentence and what did the judge say and did he have a chance i read his uh written submitted statement there did he have a chance to read it out loud to the judge you might want to start with john because he was actually president oh okay i'm sorry go ahead then john

[02:14] yeah sure yeah he he did read it uh in front of the judge i was surprised for a couple of reasons first most attorneys at sentencing tell you to not open your mouth um certainly my attorneys told me not to open my mouth they were afraid of what i was going to say at sentencing but but the judge asked daniel if he wanted to say anything he said that he did and he got up and went to the podium he had what he described as uh six pages of comments and then what followed

[02:47] was one of the the greatest pieces of oration that i think i've ever heard you know for those of us who know daniel we know him to be painfully introverted he's a very humble and very quiet guy he's very uncomfortable speaking in front of people let alone speaking in a courtroom packed full of people who are there to you know see how some of the rest of his life is going to play out but this speech just could not have been

[03:18] any more um any more powerful he talked about how he's a descendant of uh nathan hale i i said in an op-ed recently nathan hale that every school child knows uh said i only regret that i have but one life to lose for my country um and he talked about why he did what he did he he took responsibility for the you know technically illegal part of it but he never backed down

[03:49] you know the government said from the beginning that he did what he did because he wanted to ingratiate himself with journalists that was absurd he did what he did because he was morally outraged at the drone program and so he repeated his reasons for doing what he did uh he even went so far as as to thank a long list of people but he included the prosecutors and he named them each one of them and he named the fbi

[04:19] agent who arrested him and he thanked them because he knew they were just doing their jobs uh he told the judge he had been treated with respect uh from the beginning of the process and you know i all i could think of is here's this here's this young guy and he is more of a man than pretty much any man that i know uh he's a he's a role model yeah what's important here is you know his statement so what was it that he told the judge john to paraphrase here yeah he told the

[04:52] judge that the drone program turned him into a murderer and this was wrong that the government was lying not just to the american people about the drone program but it was lying to those who were involved in the drone program uh he told a story about um killing two young girls or one young girl and and severely injuring her sister when he was ordered to fire on a car that may or may not have looked

[05:23] uh it was a story that he had told me earlier uh but he said it made him it made him a child killer it made him a mass murderer and he couldn't live with himself anymore he needed to tell the truth about what this program was really like all right now so kevin what was the sentence here well so uh to add to what john said and i'll i'll answer your question about the sentence but the team for stand with daniel hale posted some

[05:54] snippets of the statement he gave the speech he delivered in court which i hope at some point will be widely available for everyone to read and to chew over but he said i am here because i stole something that was never mind to take precious human life for that i was compensated and given a medal i couldn't keep living in a world in which people pretended that things weren't happening that were

[06:25] please your honor forgive me for taking papers instead of human lives oh man so that's just one powerful snapshot of uh snippet from this uh which as john's referring to generally but also you know it's been noted this went on for about 17 minutes so he got to cover a whole lot before this judge as i understand it he was invited up to

[06:55] the stand to speak to the judge about whatever he had to say related to this case and uh so the sentence was for 45 months and um you know john can more specifically break it down but what's the more crucial aspect to talk about here is that the government the the very zealous prosecutors that throw this sledgehammer at people like daniel hale wanted nine

[07:26] years to 11 years thereabouts for daniel hale because he insisted that what he did was morally just he was willing to plead guilty that this was legally wrong but he would not accept that it was morally incorrect for him to provide documents to a reporter for publication that would expose this u.s military drone program and they lost they didn't get nine years i mean i was prepared

[07:56] for six or seven years to be the sentence that daniel hale received to hear that it was three years and nine months ultimately that he that's that's lower than reality winners sentence nsa whistleblower reality winner and they were using that as the baseline they wanted the judge in the eastern district of virginia to believe that reality winners case was the case by which they should go off in determining daniel hale's sentence and

[08:28] the judge did not buy that yeah yeah does it matter that uh john as you said the prosecutors just lied about his motive that he just wanted to be able to go drinking with jeremy scale was that it you know this is something that i think all of us need to remind ourselves um that that judges hear this kind of nonsense every day the prosecution has to come up with a theory and you know they said the same thing about me that i was trying to ingratiate myself with the media and that i was trying to build

[08:58] a consulting business uh that was that was just nuts i i wasn't trying to ingratiate myself with anybody and i had no consulting business uh the judge saw right through their story about daniel you know daniel they cited this this text message that daniel sent to a friend of his years ago in which he said maybe i'd like to go into journalism i get to meet with cool people and drink in cool bars and and pick up chicks and you know ha ha

[09:29] and that was it that's what they based their their silly theory on that he wanted to ingratiate himself um but daniel had been so utterly consistent from the very beginning about why he did this that it was because of a sense of moral outrage that the judge really had no alternative but to believe him over the prosecution yeah well that's really good now three years and nine months is still a hell of a long time and john the last time we talked you said this guy's not in good shape and you're really

[10:00] worried about him going to prison at all whether he's going to make it out alive yeah yeah daniel and i uh became close over the last a couple of years and he would call me regularly sounding like he was at the end of his rope i can't tell you how many hours we spent on the phone you know just me trying to get him to you know stop trying to figure out how to make a noose out of his sheet seriously so i would do my best to

[10:32] lift his spirits and and tell him how important his message was that every american needed to hear about his experience that this was a book waiting to be written it was his role to educate americans and you know he got all the way through to um to sentencing so about a month ago maybe six weeks ago he and i were talking about about sentencing and he was saying that his greatest fear

[11:03] was these four open uh espionage charges he had elected to plead guilty to what his attorneys believed was the most serious of the espionage charges it was the one that covered pretty much everything that he had been accused of of doing and the other espionage charges were slightly lesser offenses so um so he was afraid that he would get you know nine times five which would be 45 years or nine times i'm sorry or or 11 times five 55 years and and i had a real fear that

[11:35] that's what was going to happen as well so he said that they made this calculated uh decision that they would plead to the one and just hope against hope that either the prosecution would drop the other charges or the judge would dismiss them it was a it was a hail mary pass is what it was and i said to him listen there's one thing that you have to do and i i mean this i said from the bottom of my heart some of the best advice that my

[12:05] attorneys were ready to give me it wasn't applicable to me in the end but when the when the martial service starts to do your pre-sentencing investigation to prepare the sentencing report for the judge you have to tell them that you have a drug or alcohol problem you have to and he said well i kind of do and i said lead with it because that'll make you eligible to be enrolled in the bureau of prisons rdap program the residential drug and

[12:37] alcohol program and i said all it is is they make you go to this room off the library and once a week you watch an episode of intervention from a e network it's been on for 20 years and at the end of two seasons you've graduated from the rdap program and they take 12 months off your sentence so i said you've got to do this well at sentencing you know the judge gave this very long explanation of why he had

[13:08] arrived at the number 45 it was 90 percent good for daniel and um and i i say in this op-ed that i did for reader supported news that i was sitting with tom drake the nsa whistleblower and when the when the words 45 months came out of the judge's mouth dan and i i mean uh tom and i turned and looked at each other and smiled because we both knew that 45 months wasn't 45 months 45 months is this 45 months

[13:38] minus 15 for good behavior that's 35 39 months he's already been in for three that's 36 months because he gets credit for time served then he gets 12 months off for rdap that's 24 months then he gets six months for halfway house and or house arrest home confinement that's 18 months that's what he was asking for and i have no doubt that that's why the judge gave him 45 months because it was it was

[14:12] it was as though he he felt sorry for daniel he believed daniel he appreciated that daniel took responsibility for his actions and he gave him what he wanted without looking like he was weak i thought this was a very well thought out decision on the part of judge o'grady yeah well yeah 18 months still sucks but you're right it's a hell of a lot better than 55 years locked up in there

[14:44] um go ahead kevin williams i was going to say that this is one problem with the way the sentencing was covered in the way that daniel hale's case in general was reported on by the establishment press in the united states over the last let's say six or seven months because when he made this guilty plea when he pled guilty to this one charge i believe many of the reporters naively

[15:16] or ignorantly thought that those four other espionage act charges were just off the table and they weren't paying attention to the anxiety and stress that john's talking about from his conversations with daniel and they didn't acknowledge in their coverage of the sentencing that on the eve of sentencing daniel is still terribly concerned about what's going to happen are they going to go to trial on these

[15:47] other four charges and he didn't know at the time because when during this plea hearing and i think you might remember us talking about this on your show scott but during this hearing when it came up the issue of these offenses and his defender his public defender asked for a dismissal of the charges the judge did not allow the dismissal because the prosecutors wanted to wait until sentencing to decide what to do and to make a decision on whether or not to go

[16:18] to trial and there was no discussion about speedy trial issues there wasn't any thing out in the open they did not agree that they could not pursue these charges against daniel because of the time that had elapsed since the alleged offense is but still you know we get to this date and this happens and if you look at all of the the mainstream coverage from politico washington post even at the intercept there is no

[16:50] mention of these other four charges and the role that they played in applying pressure and coercing daniel hale into a guilty basically a conviction yeah it was it was pretty hilarious to me when the judge said 45 months and all the mainstream journalists got up and ran out of the courtroom like a 1940s film to get to a pay phone

[17:21] to call in their stories and scoop each other by 15 seconds they missed the big news and the big news was the judge was having no more of this prosecutorial silliness and he threw the charges out yeah oh that really is huge and i mean i don't know as much as the doj was trying to make an example this guy did the judge just make another example out of them or that's too hopeful an important point scott that's a very important point there was a lot of discussion between

[17:52] the prosecution and the judge about setting an example right they raised my case they raised the sterling case they raised reality winner and said that kiriakou's sentence was too short we regretted that sentence after we had agreed to it because then it made the sterling sentence too short and what we're looking for as a guideline is something closer to the reality winner sentence and daniel's lawyer said wait a minute the reality winner sentence was in the northern district of georgia

[18:23] we're not talking about the northern district of georgia we're talking about the eastern the um eastern district of virginia and uh they said well this was a national security case and reality winner was a national security case and then daniel's lawyer said fine then let's talk about the petraeus case in the western of north carolina let's talk about misdemeanor charges and 18 months of unsupervised probation and then they said uh okay well all right

[18:53] god yeah that patrol no that's different we like him yeah we like that one you know the bottom line here though and and i i think the judge understood this and the prosecutors didn't was that there is no such thing as a deterrent sentence if somebody is genuinely morally outraged by something that he sees something like a murder program it doesn't matter how long the sentence is gonna be he's gonna blow the whistle and if there

[19:24] are other people considering blowing the whistle and they are equally morally outraged they're not going to be put off by the length of any sentence and that's just something the justice department doesn't get yeah yeah that's just a plain fact of our punishment bureaucracy that our prosecutors that we have in jurisdictions across the country won't admit is that deterrence doesn't tend to actually make much of an impact on whether people commit crimes

[19:54] even outside of uh you know espionage act prosecutions it just isn't borne out by the actual statistics and when you look at real-life cases with people but you know to your to your thing that you're saying about whether the judge was maybe gonna turn it around and make an example out of the prosecutors you know i've talked to several people who were in attendance including john who's here and it it seems like

[20:25] he was just he'd you said he's had it um one part of the hearing in which i think he absolutely had it was you know their insistence and and the way that they were policing how he talked about what daniel hale supposedly exposed in public court because i know that there is a moment before they went into closed session where he referred to the horn of africa right very generally and

[20:58] that that drove the prosecutors batty and they got up and stopped everything and i know he said something to the effect of like is that not general enough for you because like he wasn't talking about any specific countries and by the way it's not actually classified when it comes to uh drone strikes in that region i mean we people are well aware that somalia is uh that the militant group al-shabab is being attacked by u.s drones and has been um

[21:31] and and and so then they go aside and i know there was a there was a they put on the machine the the hiss machine so that they can have this conversation without people in attendance hearing and so they're talking and then they come back and but yeah i mean he was he had to be profoundly irritated that the prosecutors stopped the proceeding to nitpick him saying the words horn of africa you know it was funny too

[22:02] as soon as those words came out of the judge's mouth horn of africa uh the prosecutor stood up and the judge said that wasn't classified right and then nobody said anything and they're just standing there staring at each other and finally the prosecutor says may we approach your honor and then this really like crazy loud white noise came on somebody switched it on it was it was so loud as to be like like deafening and daniel and all 10

[22:33] attorneys and the uh the court reporter went up to the judge they were up there at least five minutes and what they ended up agreeing to clearly was to just pretend that the whole thing had never happened so they turned off the white noise everybody went back to their tables and then they just moved on to the next topic this is the machine by the way scott that they use at the guantanamo military tribunal in order i i think it's the same it's

[23:04] probably the same thing that julian assange got for himself so he could try and uh deceive his uh the espionage operation while he was in the ecuador embassy i mean this is a loud thing that like then you talk under the whole thing was like uh it was it was like watching a movie you know it really was the the the prosecutors were melodramatic uh trying to prove how tough they were and that the the safety and security of

[23:36] of the republic was at stake and then on the other side you've got this guy who he's an everyman and and he's a nice guy like if you if you just sat with him for 15 minutes you would want to be friends with him and he did what he did because because it was the right thing to do it was like a mr smith goes to washington kind of setting yeah and you know i said to tom drake i i wonder if this is one of those films where the good guy actually wins

[24:07] and it was in the end yeah certainly could have been worse all right sorry hang on a second important business here i was telling my friend man you drink too much you know what's causing all these other problems just smoke weed instead it's way better for you and now you can get good smoke in the mail and it's totally legal just about everywhere in america it turns out there's a cannabinoid isomer called delta 8 which is perfectly legal and still gives you that nice little reverse headache kind of feeling you're used to getting

[30:53] documentary national bird he wasn't trying to protect his own identity um he did tell me that he underestimated the gov he did underestimate rather the government's reaction but he doesn't blame jeremy scahill for outing him okay now i'm trying to remember in the original story does it name him there he's still unnamed source at least as far as that one right in the original series at the intersection yeah it said that they they had come they had come by

[31:24] secret documents related to blah blah blah but i don't think they used his name i see but anyway it wasn't that they you know burned him the way that coal had burned winner or any of that right or you correct yeah and by the way and we really need to highlight this and i guess i'll let you have the last word about this part if you want kevin here before we have to go and that is the drone papers at the intercept and uh this great book there are massive and serious and important revelations in

[31:54] here this isn't just a leak of some documents it's a leak of some documents with some things we needed to know in there can you talk a little bit about what it was that this guy sacrificed so much for here yeah um and actually i'd i'd like to if you have time come back to the the effort by the prosecutors to get secret evidence into the uh sentencing okay why we talk about the drone papers and what he did that's definitely important but i think people should know that the

[32:26] the prosecutors were very desperate and tried this ploy to make the judge basically fall back on just remember that in the u.s we have a religion and it's national security and that he shouldn't forget to respect the religion when sentencing daniel hale but it didn't work it didn't work and so they go into a closed session people who were in attendance got kicked out i mean john probably can tell you he got kicked out of the hearing and

[32:57] the hearing that they had was over something that was described in the filings by the defense as an internet compilation video or i was described by prosecutors as an internet compilation video that comes from someone presumably alleged leader of isis within islamic state and this video uh was one that was two followers

[33:27] of isis and it mentioned two of the documents that daniel hale was charged with disclosing and so the prosecutors say hey this is it this is what we've got this is uh proof that there was a risk of serious or exceptionally grave damage that proves it there's a guy from isis talking about daniel hill's documents the only problem was picked up by this guy harry cooper who the defense got to file his own comments and

[33:59] he told the judge that i was an executive expert at the cia i trained top directors including the cia director himself on managing and taking care of classified information i'd like to tell you why i think this is a bunch of bunk because if you're a terrorist group you're not going to shout from the mountaintops that you've got these documents that give you a tactical advantage against the united states you're going to covertly go about your

[34:30] business trying to get the most out of this new advantage you've gained from these documents that were previously secret so he said it's more likely isis is telling the us government they got these trophies or they're telling the world and their followers they got these trophies look look here these are us documents but it doesn't mean that they're not suddenly undetectable by the national security agencies and uh you know for what it's worth it seems like this was a total fail but it's also

[35:00] not the first time that the us prosecutors and the justice department have tried this kind of thing or um this wasn't their case but in chelsea manning's case they tried to do this to her within the aiding the enemy charge that was ish was leveled against her in addition to the espionage act offenses and when i was there one of the hearings they played an al-qaeda recruitment video and it mentioned wikileaks documents and they tried to say that that somehow made her guilty um

[35:34] but ultimately that military judge threw out the aiding the enemy charge so they keep trying to say that when you know terrorists read documents that are published by the intercept or any other media organizations that this amounts to committing a crime under the espionage act and i i i don't really know that they're faring so well with this theory yeah thank goodness for that because of course you could twist that on anything at all you know absolutely yeah all right now and so talk about what's in there one of y'all talk about

[36:04] killing people with robots go john you're the cia assassin you go ahead you know there was there was really nothing that that was terribly shocking in any of these documents it was kind of like you know my revelation which the fbi later described as the worst kept secret in washington pretty much everything that daniel revealed we already either knew or assumed it was the fact that he had confirmed it

[36:34] i think that was so angering to the to the justice department but uh what he talked about was that the government was lying or has been lying consistently when they described these drone strikes as as pinprick or as you know laser-focused and it just wasn't true uh there there were many many uh uh innocent civilians who were killed using drones but more than that he talked about not talked about the the

[37:05] information he released was was that the decisions to strike are still made by human beings and human beings make mistakes every single day about what a person's intent is you know just the fact that you're 14 years old and you're a male makes you an enemy combatant according to to dod policy and so anybody that looked from the sky like they were 14 years old and dressed as a boy was gonna die and the government doesn't want you to know that

[37:37] yeah yeah his was the his was the ekia revelation that people are being designated enemies killed in action posthumously and so the official civilian casualty accounts from the us government are not trustworthy you should not believe them because they are not doing investigations into these people and their identities they are presuming they are terrorism suspects or militants when they are killed and that's you can pick that up from

[38:08] their own policy and the other thing which is you know a good point to end on is that part of the motivation of daniel hale seems to be that he was able to watch president barack obama on television or in youtube videos tell lies about the drone program and he himself knew from his position as a signal intelligence analyst in afghanistan that this was not the way it works president obama's

[38:39] saying you have to have an imminent threat in order for people to be selected as targets and killed and in fact that is not the standard you know what does that remind you of right in that the story of daniel l davis when he saw david petraeus lying about the war in afghanistan and edward snowden when he saw james clapper lying about the nsa spying on us that's exactly hey you can't get away with that yeah so the standard was that if it just

[39:11] threatens a so-called u.s interest that you can launch the strike which could be anything you could twist that to apply to almost anything yeah um yeah and now it says here too in the man hunting in the hindu kush section here chapter five that nine out of ten people who died in the airstrikes were not the americans direct targets by february 2013 haymaker airstrikes had resulted in no more than 35 jackpots

[39:44] a term used to signal the neutralization of a specific targeted individual while more than 200 people were declared enemy killed in action and then as you were referring to there unless they're posthumously proven to have been innocent which nobody's asking then they're all counted as guilty or else why would we have killed them then even though and then of course the jackpot just means somebody's phone number who somebody says is connected to somebody else's phone number and no real intelligence at all

[40:16] that's exactly right man and uh go ahead well just very quickly he is the drone whistleblower and and and this is what made the most splash but something that was brought to the attention of the judge came from the council on american islamic relations and the fact that uh one of their attorneys gadir abbas and there are other groups that have pursued these kinds of cases but daniel released a document called watch listing guidance and it contained a lot of information

[40:48] about the criteria with which people who are innocent or it applied to the way in which innocent people muslim americans especially end up on the no-fly list and this document was used in cases over the last 10 years to defend the liberty interest that people have in travel and they were able to clear their names force the government to remove them from the no-fly list and without this document without this proof that could be brought before the

[41:18] judge it's questionable whether care and these people would have been able to get themselves off the no-fly list yeah that's huge and did it seem like that made an impression on the judge john did you see yes it did it made an impression on the judge you know i i can't stress enough how fortunate daniel was to have drawn judge o'grady um so many of us have had judge leany brinkuma who's a hanging judge on these national security issues and

[41:50] she normally reserves all national security cases for herself she didn't do that with the julian assange case although it might even be worse for julian because his judge used to be a fisa court judge but how daniel drew judge o'grady uh i don't know it was it was a stroke of great luck yeah sounds like it all right well listen thank you both for your efforts uh you know uh john obviously for your personal friendship and supporting this guy and covering this story and

[42:21] for you uh kevin of course all of your heroic work defending all the important whistleblowers of our era and covering their trials and tribulations here so you guys are both great really appreciate it thank you thanks for having me thank you the scott horton show anti-war radio can be heard on kpfk 90.7 fm in la aps apsradio.com antiwar.com scotthorton.org and libertarianinstitute.org

[42:59] you
