Title: John Kiriakou: Never Forget America's Torture Legacy
Show: Scheer Intelligence
Date: 2023-09-22
URL: https://scheerpost.com/
Duration: 50:00

---

[00:00] Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer Intelligence and I'm bringing back an old guest, one of the people I've had a number of times and it's just somebody I have

[00:33] such enormous admiration for and he's gone through, John Kiriakko, let me just cut to this chase. John, when did you, you were recruited out of what, George Washington University to go work for the CIA, what year was that? I was recruited in 1989, I started working for the CIA in the first week of January of 1990. And you stayed there until when? I left in the spring of 2004.

[01:07] 2004, so that's what, 15 years, 14 years? Yeah, about 14 and a half, yeah, and you had, and you learned Arabic. I did, they taught me Arabic, right? And amazingly enough, and the reason I wanted to talk to you, I teach at USC, University of Southern California, and I showed the film, The Report, which I think is excellent and it's on the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on torture.

[01:43] And Diane Freinstein, who was the chair of that committee, over with Republican objection but she was the head of the committee and the Democrats controlled it, and they did this study of where did the torture come from, what was it all about, and they actually theoretically had the cooperation of the CIA. And they came up with a view, I put it in contrast to that Hollywood movie Zero Dark Thirty, which said that torture somehow worked and got to help the U.S. capture,

[02:18] have been lied and then kill them, and so forth, and none of that turned out to be true. But the fact of the matter is I can't refer listeners to the torture report that they paid for. How many pages was it? The report itself was about 5,500 pages long. Yeah. And when did it come out? It came out in December 2014. Okay. So, it's almost a decade ago, and the only part that was released was the introduction

[02:49] heavily redacted. The report itself may not even exist anymore, I don't know, there were a couple of copies right? Right. And what happened to it? Yeah. That's really a very important issue that I think most Americans either don't know or have forgotten about. The CIA only produced six or seven copies, I should say, of the full report. What we saw was a heavily redacted version of the executive summary of the report, which

[03:20] was about 500 pages. But the report itself was owned by the CIA. The CIA maintained ownership and control, final word, over the actual report itself. So there was a report in the New York Times about three years after the report was finally written saying that the CIA was going to begin taking back the copies that had gone to places like the Executive Office of the President, the Office of the Vice President, the Senate

[03:54] and House Intelligence Committees, et cetera, and they were going to begin destroying them. Well, we don't know if that ever happened. So it may exist. It may not exist. We just don't know. What we do know is that it probably will never be declassified. So the reason this is so critical is we're now getting into any conspiracy theories, although conspiracy theory is kind of a way of just alluding to hypothesis that either have

[04:27] been explored or have not or can be documented or not. But the fact of the matter is the main evidence that would be available about what happened on 9-11, how we got into a war on terror, what Al Qaeda was all about, what was this relation to Saudi Arabia after all 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi troops, whatever they were, the young men from Saudi Arabia. And just this week as we're recording this, the President of the United States, who spoke

[05:02] at the UN about we represent democracy in just about every other country in the world who's not in Western Europe or not a form of major colonial power, represents authoritarian governments, whatever they are. And ironically, it's the same week in which he said he's going to develop an alliance with Saudi Arabia to protect them militarily. So here's this self-proclaimed great democracy, and we still really don't know the details of what happened at 9-11 as far as Saudi Arabia's relationship to certainly citizens of Saudi

[05:39] Arabia who were living there, actually 15 of the 19 were from there, none from Iraq, none from Afghanistan so that countries that we invaded. So you would expect that when you capture people, you would learn something about what they are, and then you would have a trial, hopefully a public trial of these people. That didn't happen. And you figure into this historic story, maybe certainly one of the major, one of

[06:11] the three or four most important events in American history changed a whole nature of our government, just the national security state solidified it. You were then in the CIA, you were an Arabic speaker, and let's just begin with that. You were involved in the first major capture of somebody who was said at the time to be the number three person in al-Qaeda. And in the movie, the report deals with the interrogation of that person.

[06:42] And the reason I felt some urgency in doing this is in my class that I was teaching and I showed the report, I was shocked. That's a class of about, you know, I think 68 students, all very sharp, great SAT scores. And none of them knew about this report, and none of them were really familiar through their high school or years of college education about what had happened, the torture, the torture program.

[07:13] That is shocking to me. Yeah. And here's the president of the United States talks. We are the great democracy, but we are the great democracy that did the torture program. You were there. Let's set this historically just because people don't know that story now, John. Tell us what happened. How did you get the call? Why were you the person that received this prisoner? And what happened to him? Right. And really, like so many of these stories, it begins on 9-11.

[07:43] Like everybody else in the CIA, I volunteered that very day to go to Afghanistan and fight or do whatever was required of me. I volunteered repeatedly, stressing that I was fluent in the Arabic language and certainly they would need people to carry out these interrogations and interviews and debriefings. And they just ignored me. Every time I would volunteer, they'd say, thank you very much, and they would ignore me.

[08:14] Well, it turned out in those early days immediately after 9-11, they weren't interviewing people. They weren't interrogating anybody. They were killing them. And so finally I made what really was an idle threat. I went into the office of the deputy director for counterterrorism who was a friend of mine and I said, look, if you don't send me to Afghanistan right now, I am walking straight to Exxon with my Arabic and I am not looking back.

[08:49] And he said, oh, relax, relax, okay. And I had been volunteering to him for months at that point. And he said, can you go to Pakistan? I said, yes, when? He said, tomorrow. I said, yes. What do you want me to do? He said, I want you to be chief of counterterrorism operations. I said, okay, done. And I walked right over to the travel office and made a reservation, called my then-girlfriend. And Langley, this is at the CIA's headquarters. At the CIA's headquarters, yeah. I called my girlfriend, who was also a CIA officer, told her I was going to Pakistan

[09:23] the next day. She said, how long? I said, I don't know, six months, 12 months, I don't know. She said, okay, I'll meet you at your place and help you pack. And the next day I flew to Pakistan. So we began doing counterterrorism raids very slowly. I had been there about a week. I'd come up with a standard operating procedure for taking down a suspected safe house. And in the first raid that we did, of course, we partnered with the FBI because 9-11 was still an open criminal investigation.

[09:53] We partnered with Pakistani intelligence because, after all, it's their country. And so we... He broke down the door of this house at two o'clock in the morning and grabbed two 18-year-olds. Both of them began crying. One asked if he could call his mother. It was pathetic. And it was easy. And so about a week later, a friendly Arab intelligence officer passed me a slip of paper with an address on it, and he said, I think this is an Egyptian Islamic jihad

[10:25] safe house. I said, great. Thank you. We broke down the door and grabbed two members of the Egyptian Islamic jihad. So I said, you know, this is going pretty well. But we're going to be here for 50 years if we're going to be breaking down doors and grabbing one guy or two guys. So I came up with this idea. We had CIA officers all the way up and down the Pakistan-Afghanistan border in every little border village just sort of standing there with binoculars to see if there were al-Qaeda

[10:59] people trying to cross the border. So I said, I had this idea. Let's pull all of our guys off the border. We'll let al-Qaeda come into the country, because you know they're going to all go to the same handful of safe houses. You know they're going to make a mistake, probably an electronic mistake. And then we can raid the house and catch 20, 30, 40 of them at a time. So we did that and then started having success. Well, on the night of March 22, 2002, we carried out 13 simultaneous raids at 2 a.m.

[11:38] And in the course of those raids, we captured Abu Zubeda, who we believed at the time was the number three in al-Qaeda. We captured the commanders of both of al-Qaeda's training camps in Kandahar and Helmand provinces in southern Afghanistan. And we caught dozens upon dozens of low-level al-Qaeda fighters. Now you said something that's important. You talked about Guantanamo for a moment, and I want to tell you about the first time I heard anything about Guantanamo.

[12:09] I mean I knew since I was a kid that Guantanamo was this American base that we maintained in Cuba that the Cubans hated. And that was pretty much all I knew about it. So after the Abu Zubeda raids, we had captured so many people that my Pakistani intelligence counterpart called me one day and said, listen, the jail is full. We just can't squeeze one more person into the jail. You're going to have to do something with all these prisoners. So I called CIA headquarters, the Counterterrorism Center.

[12:40] And I said, Raul Pindi, jail is full, and the Pakistanis want us to get these guys out. What should I do with them? And the response was put them on a C-12 transport plane and send them to Guantanamo. And I said, Guantanamo, Cuba? And he said, yes. I said, why in the world would we send them to Cuba? And he said, oh, we came up with this idea. We're going to send everybody to Cuba for a couple of weeks until we can decide which federal district court to try them in.

[13:11] You don't mean actually the country of Cuba. I mean, a portion of Cuba that the US had seized through its colonial connection. Right. Guantanamo. Yeah. But it's in Cuba. Yeah. But it was obviously controlled by the US. Right. Yeah. It's US base in Cuba. So the idea was to divide them up and try them in either Boston, the Southern or Eastern districts of New York, the Eastern District of Virginia, or the Federal District

[13:44] of Washington, D.C. I said, that's a great idea. And so we started loading people onto plane after plane after plane and sent them to Guantanamo. In the end, we sent something like 770 people to Guantanamo. It turned out that the vice president at the time, Dick Cheney, didn't have any intention of ever allowing any of those people to go on trial in the United States. And then later on, of course, Congress acted and formally banned the transfer of any prisoner

[14:16] from Guantanamo to the United States, even to face trial, or to be transferred into a US prison. So that just never happened. And so one of the prisoners who is still there is the man you captured. Yes. Abu Zabeda. And for people who haven't watched it, I'm trying to encourage people to watch the report. Annette Benning is in it. Help me here. It's a dramatic movie.

[14:48] Adam Driver is the star. Annette Benning is terrific as Diane Feinstein. I have to tell you, I didn't watch this film when it first came out because I was afraid that it would upset me, it would make my heart race, it would give me PTSD or something. I ended up watching it on a plane, and I couldn't tear myself away from it. It was so wonderfully done. And the point they made, though, in this film, which I've heard you make, is that when you were in charge at that time, and then they brought in the FBI experienced

[15:24] person who had to do interrogation. You actually got the only useful information that was ever obtained in that process. That's right. And when the torture guys from the CIA took over and they excluded the FBI when the FBI pulled out because they wouldn't do torture, they didn't get any more information. And that prisoner, that prisoner without trial, who turns out not to have actually been officially a member of Al Qaeda, is still in Guantanamo. Yeah. This is a big problem for a lot of different reasons.

[15:58] Abu Zubaydah was first taken to a secret prison where he was interrogated by an FBI officer named Ali Soufan. Ali was a terrific translator, an experienced interrogator. And over the course of many weeks, something like six weeks, he established a rapport with Abu Zubaydah, a relationship that allowed them to carry on a normal human-to-human conversation. And in the course of that conversation, Abu Zubaydah gave us information that we had

[16:31] never been able to collect before at the CIA or at the FBI. He gave us, for example, the Al Qaeda wiring diagram. Now that may not sound like a big deal, but I assure you it's a very big deal because we knew about Osama bin Laden and Aiman Isawahdi, and we really didn't know anything else. So one of the examples that I like to give of what I mean by the wiring diagram is Ali asked Abu Zubaydah, if you were going to do an operation in Düsseldorf,

[17:06] how would you do that? And Abu Zubaydah responded that, well, there's this guy, Mohamed, and he's at this address, and Mohamed is good at organization. And he has a friend, Ahmed, and here's Ahmed's phone number. And Ahmed has access to weapons. And there's another guy, Abdul Rahman. He's Ahmed's cousin. He has access to explosives. So then we could call the Germans and say, listen, you have a problem in Düsseldorf. And here's the information. And they could wrap up that cell. Well, we didn't know that these cells existed.

[17:38] We suspected that they did, but we didn't have definitive information and especially lead information as to how to locate and capture them. Abu Zubaydah gave us that. Abu Zubaydah also identified to us Khalid Sheikh Mohamed as the mastermind of the 9-11 attacks. We didn't know that name until Abu Zubaydah gave it to us. We knew that there was a very bad man out there somewhere who went by the nom de guerre, Muhtar. Muhtar was the mastermind of what was called the Bojinka operation.

[18:13] It was a plan to hijack 6, 747s from Manila and fly them into buildings up and down the west coast of the United States. The operation ever took place because a housekeeper stumbled on the plans while cleaning the apartment of one of the would-be hijackers. And she called the police and the police raided the apartment and then it just never happened. So we knew this Muhtar was out there planning terrible things.

[18:45] We didn't know who he was. Abu Zubaydah was amazed that we didn't know that Muhtar was Khalid Sheikh Mohamed. And so once he told us who that was, we could target Khalid Sheikh Mohamed and we ended up capturing him in Rawalpindi, Pakistan in August of 2002. An interesting thing, you say they didn't know Khalid Sheikh Mohamed, but he had been a student, I believe in North Carolina, an engineering student

[19:16] and actually kind of a normal person. Lived with an American family when he was a student in North Carolina. Somehow I'd gotten radicalized after that, but was actually knowledgeable about American culture and so forth. Oh, yes. Yeah, very much so. So you came up with this information and then you discovered that he wasn't actually Abu Zubaydah, was not actually a member of al-Qaeda.

[19:47] Right, that was one of several surprises for us. He had never formally joined al-Qaeda. He had never pledged fealty to Osama bin Laden. He had never sworn an oath, so he was not the number three in Al Qaeda. He was a bad man, and he did a lot of work on behalf of Al Qaeda, but he was never a member. Now, getting back to Ali Sufran, the CIA was jealous, frankly, at the progress that Ali was making. And every day, at the end of the day, he would

[20:18] write a cable back to FBI headquarters recounting the conversation that he had had that day with Abu Zabeda. Well, even post-911, the CIA and the FBI hated each other so intensely that even their computer systems were not compatible. And so, Ali is writing these cables back to headquarters, back to FBI headquarters every day, and the CIA is not seeing them. Once in a while, the FBI would write a memo and send it

[20:51] over to the CIA saying, yeah, we're talking to him, so here's a memo. Well, the CIA was upset. This is a very serious bureaucratic kerfuffle between the two organizations. And so, in late July of 2002, George Tenant, who was the CIA's director at the time, went to President Bush and asked President Bush to turn primacy of the case over to the CIA to take it away from the FBI and give it to the CIA. Why George W. Bush agreed

[21:25] to do that is something that I don't think we'll ever understand. He's never talked about it. It wasn't in the torture report, and George Tenant has never talked about it, but that's what happened. And so, the FBI knew that the CIA was going to begin torturing him. And so, to protest that, the FBI withdrew all of its personnel, not just from the secret site, but from the country that the secret site was in. On August the 2nd, 2002, the CIA began torturing Abu Zubaydah, and he

[21:56] immediately clammed up. He was so upset, so angry, and disgusted when they started torturing him that he just went silent. But the two contract psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, to whom the CIA had paid $108 million to come up with the torture program, had to prove that it was working, even if it wasn't. And so what they did is they took all of the

[22:28] reporting cables that Ali Soufan had written, retyped them in the CIA's database, sent them back to CIA headquarters, and said, oh my god, look, we only waterboarded him one time. And look what he told us. He gave us the kitchen sink. He gave us Khaled Sheikh Mohammed. He gave us the wiring diagram. Somebody should call the Germans and tell them they have a problem in Dusseldorf. Well, after a while, they had reported it.

[23:00] Which you had already done. No, I was out of it by then. No, I mean, but the Germans had already been called by the FBI? Yeah. Well, I don't understand. By the way, there was a movie because the CIA was very involved in the making of the Zero Dog fairy. And there was even a report, a special prosecutor report, about what they did wrong. But they revealed the

[23:31] identity of Navy SEALs who had captured Bin Laden, jeopardized their security, to the people working on the movie, right, the screenwriters? Yeah. What happened was, Catherine Bigelow, who was the director and executive producer of Zero Dark Thirty, and Mark Boll, who was the lead writer for Zero Dark Thirty, were able to go to the CIA to receive classified briefings in

[24:01] violation of the Espionage Act. Over a classified mock-up of the Bin Laden compound, they based the movie on what they had been told in those classified briefings. And then when it was all over, they were invited to an Atta Boy session in the CIA's auditorium called the Bubble. The speaker was the CIA director Leon Panetta. And in his speech, Panetta outed the Navy SEAL, who had

[24:33] killed Bin Laden, as well as several other Navy SEALs. Panetta later said he didn't realize there were unclear people in the audience. That was nonsense. It was Panetta's office that had invited them to the event. And so the CIA's Office of Public Affairs went back and not just redacted the names of the SEALs, but they redacted 27 lines of otherwise classified information. Again, that was in violation of the Espionage Act, but there was never any price to pay. And to make matters worse, to thank the CIA analysts for giving them

[25:08] classified information for their movie, Boll and Bigelow sent tickets to the movies premiere in West Hollywood. And for the people who couldn't make it to the premiere, bought them watches. If you could imagine anything so corrupt taking place at the CIA, it's just even in retrospect, it's crazy to me. And in the Inspector General's report, they pointed out there was even chance about who would play Panetta, who would play other people. And I have

[25:44] to point out because I didn't do it in the introduction. You refused to participate in the torture program or be trained for it. They asked you to do it. And you became a critic of the program after leaving the CIA. And you are the only person who has served time for being and having any connection with the CIA and torture program, not that you tortured anyone, but because you are accused of having revealed some and then you served just about two years.

[26:14] Yes. In prison. That's right. And you know, it's funny. When I got out of prison, the first interview that I gave was to the BBC hard talk, I think is what it's a it's a kind of a hard hitting, mean spirited talk show. And the host kept trying to provoke me. And he said, finally, well, you're not showing any remorse for the crime that you committed. And I said, no, because I have no remorse. It's not a crime to reveal a crime. The crime was committed

[26:47] by the CIA. The crime was committed by the torturers. I'll never apologize for what I did. I said, John McCain got up on the floor of the United States Senate to thank me for providing a public service to the American people. I'm glad that I did what I did and talk who had been tortured who had been tortured. That's right. And talking to the New York Times and and the and ABC News is is not espionage. Sorry, it's just not.

[27:19] Well, it's good to know that despite prison and being the only person who had the irony of it, the only person who served time for the torture program is the person who was accused of having exposed it so much for respect for the truth. I just want to bring up one little footnote in this connection. Before 9 11, there was a good Hollywood movie made about terrorism called The Siege with Denzel Washington. All right. Right. I happened to have a big part

[27:50] because of show that actually was done for KCRW that we're doing this for left, right and center. Ariana Huffington was on that show. So the the principal people on the show we did. We did a reenactment for that movie. This is before 9 11, you know, you'll be two years before. And but the hero in that movie is an FBI agent who speaks Arabic. And he tries to say you can't round up every Arab in Brooklyn to solve this problem is not done. But

[28:24] it's interesting. And then the real life hero here in your story and in the movie, the report was another FBI person who at least knew the language. These doctors that were paid what you say 100, 108 million dollars psychologists. They didn't know Arabic. They didn't know what they didn't know anything about the countries or culture or anything. Right. Not a thing. Yeah. And yet, going to what mass media does amazingly, this movie gave them and

[28:56] their torture and justify torture. Yes, it did. Yes, it did. And to make matters worse, when the torture report came out, a big group of retired seniors, CIA leaders, George Tenet, Jim Pavitt, big important people, Jose Rodriguez and co for black. They, they all attached their names to a rebuttal book that was published, saying torture worked, torture saved

[29:27] lives. We would do it again if we could. We didn't make any mistakes. It was this outrageous, they admit, but they didn't admit it was torture. They called it no, they only called it enhanced interrogation techniques. That's right. Yeah. I want to know, how did you survive? You, you lost your pension. You served your marriage broke up and your wife then was in the CIA. You had all sorts of family problems. And actually, frankly, you haven't

[29:58] looked better than you do. right now, you've lost 100 pounds. I don't know if I'm at liberty to discuss this. I mean, you look like a sad old bureaucratic veteran. The last couple of times I talked to you, now vigorous young man, and you even have your humor back. Some of it got a little humor. How the hell did you survive? You know what, Bob? It's been a process. And it's taken me years.

[30:31] But I have to be honest with you, I like myself. I'm pleased with the way I turned out. I'm never gonna be wealthy. I'm never gonna live in a giant house. But my children respect me. I'll tell you, my third son just started college two weeks ago. And he's going to Miami University of Ohio. And he called me. I don't think we should get too specific here. Okay, no, that's okay. You are a controversial figure. Well, he called me the other day to tell me he was,

[31:03] he had just walked out of his very first philosophy course and, or philosophy class. And he said, dad, I just walked out of my first ever philosophy class. And I said, oh, I hated philosophy. It was so boring. And he said, no, no, no, listen. He said, there are like 300 kids in the class. And the professor starts talking about, about ethical dilemmas. And he said, there's this guy, John Kiriakou. He was a loyal CIA officer.

[37:51] You speak the language that's supposed to be terrorizing us, but you have to end up on Sputnik, a Russian radio station that has very few listeners because in our supposedly free society, we cut back their access to people. That's right. So now, just like with Edward Snowden, oh, bad guy, you know, Snowden tried to take refuge in, I think, 30 different countries. He ends up in Russia, so he's now a bad guy, right? Right. Oh, you know, that's a pet peeve of mine.

[38:22] People say that all the time. Well, Snowden defected to Russia. No, he didn't. Snowden was in the transit lounge of Moscow Airport on his way to Ecuador when John Kerry canceled his U.S. passport and stranded him at Moscow. John Kerry, a hero of opposition at one point to the Vietnam War was in secretary of state and he canceled him, yeah. Yeah. That's exactly right. And so that's how he ended up in Russia. You know, that's so important because we talk about

[38:52] what's real news and fake news and everything. And, you know, it's so easy to blame Donald Trump for every bit of distortion. But we've been very good at lying. We lied about, of course, the Vietnam War. We lied about, you know, why the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We lied about lots of things and very effectively. So actually Trump is probably one of our worst liars. You know, he's so blatant and boorish about it. You know, Harry Shulman was a very effective liar.

[39:24] He said he never wanted to see Oppenheimer again because Oppenheimer did question the wisdom of destroying mostly innocent civilians with these bombs and so forth and worried about it, even though he helped create it. And so we have this weird sense of our own history and it's important to make Edward Snowden a villain. What Edward Snowden revealed to us is that private companies, which do have a right to gather information and so forth, it doesn't rise to a challenge

[39:55] to our constitutionally guaranteed freedom, but they weren't doing it privately. The U.S. government... government was invading the machinery of Google and Facebook and Apple and everybody else and grabbing information, actually jeopardizing their position as companies that have to have the trust of people around the world, breaking into their cables, breaking into general cables and spying on the American people in clear violation of CIA's operating rules and mandate. And yet he's, he's now the bad guy, right? Because he takes refuge in the one country

[40:30] where he was trapped and because we didn't let him go to Ecuador where probably he would have been like Julian Assange probably, you know, would have been over. Oh yeah, he would be in a prison in the United States now had he actually made it to Ecuador because there's been a change in government there and that pro-U.S. government turned Julian Assange over to British authorities and that's why he's at Belmarsh Prison. And Julian Assange, who of course was not an American citizen, was not working for an American agency like Edward Snowden or John Criaccio, he, I just can't, the five major

[41:05] newspapers that published the information, I don't want to get agitated here, but you know, the five major organizations and includes the New York Times have issued a statement saying that what Julian Assange revealed and then they printed was legitimate news that we had to have, democracy requires it. However, they made that statement but generally shut up about the fact that the guy who did their journalism was a publisher like them has been almost driven out of his mind in a prison and now we want to get him and put

[41:39] him in a maximum security prison in the United States even though the Australian government is objecting to that and says, well, wait a minute, he's a citizen of our country. So to put you in historical context, John, I have to say I began this by saying I admire you as much as anyone I've ever interviewed. Thank you so much. That means a lot to me, Bob. Thank you so much for that. But I've interviewed a lot of people. I interviewed, you know, Bobby Kennedy and then Jimmy Carter and you know, people all over the world, you know, people you might

[42:09] not like, you know, the Fidel Castro's, you know, all sorts of people, you know, that's what I've done for a living. But I've interviewed you a bunch of times. I've followed every aspect of your story and you are the great American hero. You are. You are, you know, you are the Boy Scout, you know, who stuck to the idea, which was not America Ubalis, but quite the opposite, you know, America has to stand for values even if the last man standing or last woman standing

[42:43] believes in those values. And, you know, how they can, that's what really got me to want to do this interview now, because I was so shocked that my students, that through their education and they've gotten, you know, some of the best access, you know, we're a top, you know, top 25 school or something at USC. They're very smart students. They want to learn. And we had a movie, an important movie made the report, and I was shocked

[43:15] that not one single person in my class even knew of its existence. You know, not one. Amazing to me. Yeah. And, you know, and their whole life has been shaped by what you were doing. Right? They were born then. That's what their age is now. They, you know, they're 23 if they were born or 22 if they were born that time. And so their whole world, our world, but their life world has been post 9-11. Yes. That's it. They are the champions.

[43:46] You know, and it's funny, in my mind, 9-11 was practically, you know, last Tuesday. That's how fresh it still is in my mind. It's just crazy. Well, when you just said at the beginning of the podcast that we're coming up on a decade ago that the torture report was released, I thought, oh my God, how's that even possible? A decade? But you're exactly right. All of these students are post 9-11 Americans. They're the 9-11 babies. That's what they are. They're 9-11 babies.

[44:20] So I'm there Tuesday. It was Monday, actually. I'm sorry. It was Wednesday. Let me be very clear about my facts here. Monday, yes. And I show this movie. You would have thought that I had just acquired some document. You know, it's available. You can get it on, I think I got it on Amazon Prime. You know, I'm showing it straight there. I didn't break into any safes or anything, but you can't read the report. You know, you can read a part of it. Why don't you, let's pay tribute to the movie. What does it get right?

[44:55] You go, I don't want to send you to jail again now. Oh, no, that's okay. Well, you know, I'm going to make a recommendation first and say that the report's out there. The executive summary is out there. Again, it's heavily redacted, but if you really want to understand what it is the investigators were trying to convey, read the footnotes. The footnotes are so critical to our understanding of what it is that the CIA was doing.

[45:25] I think the most important thing to take from the report, I think the thing that Americans should be most appalled by or most shocked by is the fact that CIA officers went far beyond what they were permitted to do under the Justice Department's terms. You know, the Justice Department said you can do these 10 things and this is how you have to do each one of them. And the CIA just tossed that off to the side and did literally anything they wanted.

[45:59] We only learned in the report that Abu Zubaydah, for example, was to use the CIA's terminology, rectally hydrated with hummus. Now doctors came out immediately and said there is no medical benefit whatsoever to forcing hummus into somebody's body rectally through a tube. They did that to humiliate him and to torture him. There are a couple of... And to humiliate his culture.

[46:31] Yes. Oh, yes. They threatened to use pages of the Quran as toilet paper. They made prisoners, the prisoners of course were all Muslim. They made them stand naked in front of female soldiers. Anything they could think of to insult them and to belittle them, trimmed their beards. That's right. That's right. So it's deliberate humiliation. But let me get back to the critical point about the functioning of a democracy,

[47:05] which is that the truth will set you free. Yes, indeed. I mean, after all, it's not... Okay, let's have a little democracy with our stake. It's nice to have. No. The reason we have this Constitution with its amendments is that the founders, again, whatever their failings, the founders said, we have the potential to be the bad guys. Yes. And if I'm not the bad guy, I'll be my colleague over there. And what we want to do is protect the society against us,

[47:37] not the foreign enemy against us. Precisely. Precisely. We're either going to be a country that respects the rule of law or we're not. It's as simple as that. And there isn't anything in between, because you have the opportunity to always be corrupted. And they knew this because after all, they were making a revolution against England, which they had admired more than any other country in the world, most of them, right? And yet now, and the English who they admired would be hanging them from the nearest tree

[48:10] if they lost this revolution. And actually quite a few people in this country wasn't a country yet, but in the colonies had doubts about it or didn't want to do it, you know? But these were the group that wanted to do it, the Washington and so forth. And Washington warned us in his farewell address after being president for two terms about the imposters of pretended patriotism. That's right. This is what George Washington, the general, just like General Eisenhower warned us about the military industrial complex.

[48:41] That's what we're talking about. We're talking about the military industrial complex, the imposters of pretended patriotism. And what they do with their torture, with their censorship, with their classification is prevent the average American citizen, or in fact the vast, vast, vast majority of American citizens, from knowing what happened, knowing who are the enemy. Well, how did they work? What do they think? That's what a trial would do.

[49:11] That's why giving journalists access would do. And having lawyers and being able to publish it. What was this terrorism about? Why this ally of ours, Saudi Arabia, which now President Biden had it nowhere, as we're preparing for a war with China, which kept us alive during the pandemic. And we don't like China, because they're maybe a more successful capitalist country. Whoever's running it, really, they're cleaning our clock on making stuff,

[49:42] including electric cars now crashing through the old market. Okay, so we're going to have a war and an Orwellian terms. We have to find the enemy. You know, and Putin's a great enemy, even though Putin is the anti-communist that our own government backed when he was against Gorbachev. He was, you know, Yeltsin's guy. So history gets just turned. Now we want communist Vietnam, which we once fought this bloody decades-long war. We want now iPhones made, and Vietnam.

[50:12] Communist Vietnam, because China is communist and they're through nationalistic, so we'll go to Vietnam. I mean, they just play with history. And what people have to remember is this idea of freedom and limits on power is not an indulgence of a sane democratic society. It's the essential oil, okay? And that's what everybody forgets, you know? And so really without spawning conspiracy theories, we really don't know what this

[50:43] whole thing was about, this war on terror and so forth. You know, after all, if we was really about Muslim fanaticism, we wouldn't have gone to war with Iraq. Everybody forgets this. I always ask people, what did Iraq have to do at 9-11? What? You know, not one single, one of the hijackers was from Iraq. Saddam Hussein was a sworn enemy of al-Qaeda. Yes, he was. There was one country in the Middle East where al-Qaeda couldn't function, because

[51:14] Saddam Hussein was a ruthless dictator who would kill him at any time. So what we're really talking about is information we not only have a right to have, but a need to have. And this great adventure that happened right now, maybe we'll end up in a nuclear war with Russia and China, but we'll never know how does this happen? How does this happen? Why did we all suddenly have big fights about Russia with its borders and Ukraine?

[51:45] I mean, everything. We don't get the information. In your case, let's just maybe wrap this up with, the fact of the matter is, you don't get on MSNBC, the so-called enlightened, more what, Democratic Party influence station. I mean, I don't know, you know, so where do you get on, Sputnik, and then you're condemned for it. Yes, in fact, the Washington Post listened to my show and said that I was weakening

[52:17] our democracy because I was criticizing a crooked judge in Pennsylvania who took bribes to send children to a for-profit prison. He was convicted and sentenced to 22 years. I was saying it's terrible to have crooked judges. And the Washington Post said you were weakening our democracy. I was weakening our democracy. I said, and the Washington Post, which has been a conduit for both information obtained by whistleblowers

[52:58] and yet for the government that then wants to persecute them. I mean, the same Washington Post that printed depending on papers, but, you know, the current Washington Post wouldn't defend Julian Assange, who was, as Daniel Ellsberg pointed out, directly in line, as he pointed out about you as whistleblowers who were directly in line with what he was trying to do. You know, I could go on a long time with you, John. It is so encouraging that, you know, that they didn't get you down.

[53:32] Not a chance. You know, if they thought that they would, they didn't know me at all. Well, you know, maybe we should conclude on that. You know, how, you know, you're kind of a, even though you have a Greek background, but then again, most of us in this supposed melting pot have some other background. But really, you're kind of as American as apple pie. I like to think so. No, but I mean, just take us back. I mean, who was John Carriaco? And how did you end up being a truly major, major figure in American history?

[54:09] Thank you. You know, I'm just, I'm just a normal average guy. I grew up in Western Pennsylvania, nuclear family. My parents were public school teachers and, you know, grew up with baseball and football and church on Sunday. And my dad, when I was eight years old, my dad bought me a shortwave radio at an auction for 50 cents. I still remember it. And that radio, that beat up old radio opened the entire world to me.

[54:39] As soon as the sun went down, I could listen to the BBC or Radio Moscow or stations, you know, in China and Cuba and Europe and all over the world. And I decided then that I wanted to see the world. I wanted to go to school in Washington DC and I wanted to see the world. And that's what I ended up doing. And you saw the world and then you felt that your fellow Americans had a right to see parts of it. Right to know.

[55:10] You know, after my whistleblowing, a journalist who also happens to be a psychologist told me that in his own studies, he found that whistleblowers have an unusually highly defined sense of right and wrong. It's far more highly defined than it is in the general populace. And he said, it's almost like whistleblowers can't stop themselves. And I said, that's how I felt. I couldn't stop myself. I couldn't sleep at night knowing that this was happening in our name, that the government

[55:43] was carrying out these crimes in our name. So I had to say something. And even though they don't call it torture and even though it is clearly defined even in the introduction to the report, you still have your top people, including a former liberal congressman. Yes. You know, when I knew him, he was kind of left liberal congressman in California, you know, but defending this thing and lying about what it supposedly accomplished, even though the

[56:14] report destroys even the part that we can read, the redacted part. I want to mention something about Daniel Ellsberg and his partner. The Rand Corporation was paid for by the Air Force and Daniel Ellsberg had been in the Marines and been in the military and then now was working, you know, for the government and Tony Russo, his partner. Tony Russo, people don't know this. I happened to was an expert witness. I'd been to Vietnam. I knew a lot about.

[56:45] So I was an expert witness for Tony Russo if it had gone to trial. But because the judge had been offered the job of being head of FBI, it went into a mistrial at that point. But Tony Russo turned against the Vietnam War while he was working for the Air Force, the Air Force contract, evaluating the interrogation of Vietnamese prisoners in Vietnam. And he saw and recognized that they were being tortured.

[57:17] And he saw also that they were giving bad information that it was not in any way even justified. So torture was done in Vietnam. And Tony Russo, who was worked with Daniel Ellsberg to get the papers printed and give it to the New York Times, then the Washington Post, that's what he was moved by. That torture, aside from being at totally heinous, also was counterproductive. I was telling the Americans what they wanted to hear about pursuing the war that ended up

[57:49] in our most ignominious defeat. And so from Daniel Ellsberg and Tony Russo to you, John Kiriakou, a straight line. And we have, like I said, I keep this a half hour, I'm going to keep it to an hour. We got two minutes. I want to talk just for the last two minutes about Julian Assange. Yes. I mean, here is a guy who did what a journalist is supposed to do, what a publisher is supposed to do. He wasn't in the CIA. He hadn't taken it off.

[58:19] He's not an American. And he found, hey, you're shooting up and killing a Reuters correspondent. You're killing innocent civilians. You know, you're laughing about it in your helicopter. We have information. I'm going to reveal it. And that guy has, and we can use the word torture, the UN has said that Julian Assange is, the UN repertoire and torture, big report is being tortured. And he's now the most visible victim of this Orwellian nightmare where torture becomes

[58:52] enhanced interrogation, you know. Yes. You're absolutely right. And you know, I know on podcasts and things like this, we try not to be specific to a certain day, but I'm going to be specific to a certain day. Six Australian parliamentarians, including four senators, two members of the lower body, the House, including a former deputy prime minister came to Washington. They held a rally this afternoon at the Justice Department and a vigil.

[59:27] And they brought with them a letter signed by 60 members of the Australian parliament asking President Biden to drop the charges against Julian Assange and let him go home. And I'll tell you another thing. Forgive me if I go over our two minutes. I don't know if you remember the name David Hicks. David Hicks was an Australian national who was a troubled teenager. At the age of 18, he converted to Islam and then made his way to Afghanistan to fight

[59:58] alongside the Taliban. He ended up being recruited into Al Qaeda, and because he didn't speak Arabic, they just gave him a gun and told him to stand guard at the Kandahar Al Qaeda training base. He happened to be in Pakistan on 9-11, and as soon as he saw the news, he ran back to Afghanistan to help Al Qaeda fight the Americans. He was almost immediately captured by the United States, and we sent him to Guantanamo, where he was tortured mercilessly.

[1:00:30] The Australian government came to us and said, well, wait a minute, you can't torture an Australian citizen. This is a five-eyes citizen. You have to let him go. So we put him on trial at Guantanamo, we found him guilty, we sentenced him to time served, and we turned him over to the Australians. Well, he was a genuine bad guy. What about Julian Assange? Why aren't the Australians in the streets over Julian Assange? Now it's getting better than it was six months ago even.

[1:01:05] But more needs to be done to impart to the White House that this is an issue worth falling on the sword for. We have to release Julian Assange. But the government that wants to bring him back, certainly the Trump administration wanted to, but that's Joe Biden. By the way, we voted for wars that were based on lies and so forth, but now we're all going to be encouraged to shut up and go along with the program that we need because there's no

[1:01:37] other old white person we can mail, we can find. We have to go with the one we got, otherwise all hell will break loose and the source of all evil Donald Trump will come in and so forth. I want you to talk finally about good guys, about Barack Obama. You went to prison, right? It was Barack Obama, the Barack Obama administration that sent me to prison.

[1:02:08] When you're president, when you're president, the buck stops with you. I'm trying to be nice, but you're absolutely right. You probably voted for the guy. I certainly did. I got t-shirts. I contributed to his campaign. I took my kids to the inauguration with my youngest on my shoulders to see this great, this great new president who was going to fix all of our problems, and instead he makes John Brennan, CIA director, John Brennan, who was the executive director of the CIA during the torture program, was one of the founders, the fathers of the torture program,

[1:02:42] and Barack Obama is the one that just allowed the drone war to explode. In George W. Bush's last month as president, he killed 24 people with drones. In Barack Obama's last month as president, he killed 440 people with drones. Is that really the country we want to be? What's trial by drone. That's right. Yeah. But I wanted to make it little personal at the end here. We're talking about, okay, maybe we're going to have an argument whether Biden's

[1:03:15] a good guy, but I never doubted that Barack Obama is a great guy, civil libertarian, law professor, concerned about all these issues, talked about limits on power, promised us he would not lie and would respect the constitution. And here is John Kiriakou, and what is your crime anyway? They claimed you gave the name of an open member of the CIA to ABC.

[1:03:47] Yeah, they tried that at first. They said, oh, you gave the name of a CIA officer to ABC. And I said, he's never been undercover. He's on LinkedIn as central intelligence agency. So it's no secrets. Then they charged me with violating the intelligence. No, no, let me just stop there, because I did follow that case, and every time you tell me something, I then go and spend hours, oh, wait a minute now, I love John, but, you know, okay, what is he pushing here?

[1:04:18] So it actually was a case where you were asked by this reporter, as I recall, would there be someone in the CIA who knows about all this, who disagrees with you about the torture program? Do I have that right? Close. Tell me. He asked me, he sent me a list of 12 names. Who is the he? We are loved. Cole. He gave me a list of 12 names, and he said, I'm writing this book about the rendition program. Can you introduce me to any of these 12 people? I said, I don't have any idea who these people are.

[1:04:50] Then he sent me another list of 12 names. And I said, look, I don't know any of these people. You clearly know this issue better than I do. I said, kidnapping wasn't my thing at the CIA. I was always the good cop. I don't know anything about the rendition program. And then he said, well, what about the guy that you mentioned in your book? I think his name is John. I said, oh, I said, yeah, that's John Doe. I said, I don't know whatever happened to him. He's probably retired and living somewhere in Virginia. Well, I had confirmed the last name in the email.

[1:05:23] Now that name was never made public. That's why I said John Doe just now. The name was never made public. And after the fact, the CIA director, David Petraeus, revealed the names of 10 CIA covert operatives to his adulterous girlfriend. He was never charged with that, but they charged me with a felony. And that's what I ended up going to prison for. So we have to understand that.

[1:05:55] You were already a controversial figure because you had spoke as you had a right to about what was wrong with the program, right? Torture, right? So you were contributing to the public dialogue, your crime, which you end up in the prison with, I think, some mafia figures. Oh, yeah, very senior mafia figures. Yeah, you're in there. Oh, yeah. David Petraeus, by the way, who was somebody who has been a professor at different universities, including USC, they're very distinguished.

[1:06:26] The New York Times loves them. They seem to have a profile about him every couple of months. There must be a schedule of how great David Petraeus, the greatest general and all that. And he had these black books. Let's just be clear about that, which were for presidential briefings that were the most important secrets, right? This is not true. Literally the most highly classified information in the US government. With these black books. Yes. And he let his mistress, you know, I don't want to be

[1:06:57] puritanical here about his adulterous girlfriend or something. That's that's, you know, I'm not interested in condemning his personal behavior. But but his mistress, right, did not have the clearance. No. Yes. So he gave the most prized, secret, current information that he was responsible for giving to the president of the United States. And he let his mistress, who was going to write about this, right? Right. And she was writing a biography about him.

[1:07:30] Yeah. And so she could read this to see how great he was and how knowledgeable he was. And he gets a slap on the wrist. Yes. He got he ended up getting a misdemeanor. He took a plea to a misdemeanor count of improper. Improper. Oh, improperly securing classified information. He got 18 months of unsupervised probation. And at his sentencing, the judge came down from the bench to shake his hand

[1:08:02] and thank him for his service to the country. Right. It's something the judge did with you, right? Right. The judge said to me, if I could give you 10 years, I would. And you had actually risked your life out there and, you know, in the center of the war on terror. And so that double standard is what should alarm people. Yes. That that, you know, if they were really stern, cast masses and you reveal class, this is what bothers me about the Trump thing.

[1:08:37] I am absolutely convinced that every president who left office, left with all the documents he might need to write his book or anything like that. I mean, I've been I've interviewed a lot of these people. I interviewed Richard Nixon after his brother, you know, I've seen Jimmy Carter before I had after his president, Ronald Reagan. I talked to very extensively as a journalist. Ronald Reagan had no trouble at all bringing up all sorts of things that were classified as nobody had been president. He got to talk about what he wanted to talk about.

[1:09:08] I'm not going to sit here defending Donald Trump. But my God, you know, oh, he he's got papers. He's not supposed to have I mean, you know, so there's something so annoying about the double standard that it's OK. It's OK for Petraeus to give his mistress these books, which he was fully intending to use. It wasn't just say, hey, honey, read this while I go take a shower. No, it's you know, you're writing a book. You can read this top secret.

[1:09:40] You're like the president. John Kiriakou gives the name of a known CIA person mentioned on LinkedIn and so forth, and you serve hard time. Yes, the only one. Now that is what the history books have got to record. None of the other people involved with the torture program, none. Served any time. No, none of them. In fact, they all went on to great riches. They all got got Seven figure book advances and positions on corporate

[1:10:12] Oh sure George Tenet got six million for his book. Jose Rodriguez got four million for his book And this just goes on and on and on they're on the boards of of American defense contractors and They're talking heads. John Brennan's a talking head on MSNBC You know getting at least a hundred thousand just to be on call for that They've done very well for themselves financially. Let's end. Let's end by talking about John Brennan

[1:10:44] He's the guy who threw you under a bus. Yeah, you know, I I've known John Brennan for 30 32 33 years and Never really liked him. I thought he was over in over his head intellectually at the CIA But he was a political player. He rose through the ranks and you know, I thought well, you know John Brennan, I don't really have anything to do with him He doesn't have anything to do with me But then when I was arrested and we received discovery from the Justice Department

[1:11:17] 15,000 pages of classified documents There was a memo from Brennan to Attorney General Eric Holder about me And it said charge him with espionage and then Holder wrote back and said my people don't think he committed espionage And then Brennan wrote back and said charge him any way and make him defend himself And so they did and then they waited until I went bankrupt and then they dropped the espionage charges Here's Eric Holder who I had dinner with on occasion

[1:11:49] Presents is a very progressive I Well, let's let's get to the chase and the liberal community of Hollywood Eric Holder was much admired I'm not going to drop other names, but I Dinner with some very well-known liberal people and here's Eric Holder Who even though he did not believe and the people working for him did not believe you a committed espionage was willing at the head of our secret

[1:12:21] Police agency the CIA to charge you in the hopes of breaking you Breaking you. Yep People I've got to understand this language We know it when the Chinese do it when the Saudis do it when the Russians do it. We say, oh, yeah, yeah That's totalitarian. They break them. They destroy him, you know What are we trying to do with Julian Assange drive him crazy? Sure, you know, they can kill himself Yes, so that we don't have to worry about it anymore And that's what they try to do with you. Here's sir. Here's John Brennan the darling of MSNBC

[1:12:54] Which you know, we have one monopoly corporation own thing. That's the bad guys It's Fox and then there's this is the liberal one and this guy is telling Justice Department to charge you right right right. There's supposed to be separation of these agencies Justice parts of the interest in justice the CIA is supposed to be you know spy agency that we're watching very carefully So they don't overstep and then that's supposed to be spying on Americans

[1:13:26] Yeah, and then you know in the end and I mean the very end the Justice Department made their final Final offer best and final offer. They said now I was facing 45 years They offered 10 then eight then five then three and a half then two and a half and my lead attorney said, you know I've been a lawyer here for 52 years and I've never seen them come down in time Usually if they offer you 10 and you say no then they offer you 12 then 15 then 18 And I said, well, why are they going down in time?

[1:13:58] He said because they have a shit case and they know it's shit He said we're gonna go to trial Well, I believed we were gonna go to trial because I believed I hadn't done anything wrong And so they make their best and final offer of two and a half years In prison and my my wife and I stayed up all night to talk about it and we decided I'm gonna turn it down And so I emailed the attorneys at like six in the morning. I said I've decided I'm gonna turn it down Let's go to trial once I get in front of a jury. They're gonna see how ridiculous this is and I'm gonna win

[1:14:32] The attorneys drove to my house and got there at seven in the morning. I put on a pot of coffee The lead attorney was very blunt. He said he said you stupid son of a bitch take the deal and The attorney who I liked and respected the most Got right in my face and 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

[1:15:05] Then the third attorney was really very much a southern gentleman Said if you were my own brother, I would beg you to take this deal and I said, well, listen realistically Let's say I don't take the deal. I go to trial and I'm convicted Realistically, what am I looking at? And he said 12 to 18 years take the deal And so I took the deal So just for people who have not followed your case and for that I blame the mass media and I blame

[1:15:39] politicians of The right and left and Republican and Democrat and I blame Barack Obama. Let's lay it out. I do too. Yeah Yeah, yeah, Barack Obama will put you through this ordeal and a lot of other people that Someone like myself I've probably met at different receptions and interviews and so forth as I did with Eric Holder But I just want people to understand the power the power of the state the power of government and

[1:16:14] And I saw it with Daniel Ellsberg and Tony Russo because I say I was a bit involved in that trial and Daniel Ellsberg literally a Boy Scout Marine Gung-ho Little vietnam war at the beginning, you know, Bamba and everything suddenly up against. Hey This guy Nixon president Nixon. He's gonna put me away for a hundred and forty years or so. I forget the exact number Yeah, that's what it was right and he never did get that trial. He probably would have lost it, you know and

[1:16:47] And and so you're in this position Where you're you still believe That this is a fair you are still naive enough to believe That you could turn down it. Well, I I did in in October of 2012 Yeah, I believed it But no, I'm I'm a realist now No, what the whole system's rigged. This would be a good way to end with who is John Kiriakou

[1:17:17] I don't have this the skill set to write a great movie about you But you really are and I just put it right out there. I think I'm questionably one of the great American Stories, thank you, and I would like to get inside your mind We have a few we can take as much time with one hell. They're not going to send us to jail. I don't think so But but seriously What's going through your mind, you know what, you know, six, wouldn't they say 14 years in jail 16 year?

[1:17:48] Yeah, 12 to 18 he told me to expect if they stuck to their word Yeah, I've gone for more. I mean sure look at Julian signs. I mean, how many is he facing? Oh, like a hundred and something Yeah, yeah, what did he do? He revealed an embarrassing deeply embarrassing story casting our military in a bad light. So In your case Just take it the Boy Scout, you know This mr. Smith goes to Washington. This is you're still believed

[1:18:24] You still I did I believed in the system. I don't at all anymore Not at all and to tell you the truth and it got even worse under Trump You know, this is not a partisan issue Both parties are equally You know culpable in this this assault on our civil liberties You know Partons were for sale for example under Trump Trump is celebrating WikiLeaks during the campaign and then and then actually files charges against Julian Assange and

[1:19:01] Then Joe Biden has the opportunity to drop the case against Julian Assange and he picks up the Trump case and keeps it going It's just not fair Yeah, it's it's startling Okay, well, I don't know where to I guess we'll just end it but I Wouldn't have your courage Oh, I find that hard to believe. Oh, no, come on. I look I

[1:19:32] I'm not a veteran of the prison I've been in a few jails with a couple of nights here and they actually wasn't jailed even Lithuania, Russia and Soviet Union And I was in China during the Cultural Revolution being lectured to that was pretty scary I mean, I've been around Algeria a few things but those were all a few days here a few days scary But you know really
