Title: On Torture, Prison PTSD
Show: David Gornoski
Date: 2019-04-20
URL: https://youtu.be/7Ewyza8fR3o
Duration: 42:00

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[00:00] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] from the heart of Orlando Florida you are listening to the most electrifying show in media a neighbor's

[00:33] choice and I'm your host your neighbor David groski so glad you could join me today in my beautiful neighborhood here in Central Florida and we have a lot to cover today because we are at the heart of what is going on with the controversies in regards to what they have been calling the you know the Russian collusion uh investigation that's going to be breaking tomorrow

[01:04] morning and a lot of people want to know what is that all about what is in the Mueller report from the cliffnotes version We Know according to attorney general bar that there was not anything there as we had already most of us had already understood to be there there was nothing there but we're going to see now the details so there's a lot of people on the left who are looking to this Mueller report like it's the coming of the Ten

[01:35] Commandments we will finally see the sacred document that gives millions of people their sense of meaning and purpose and togetherness and that's the nature of the hallucinatory aspect of modern media is that there's this kind of desire to always have a scapegoat to always have a foreign Boogeyman or an internal Boogeyman and the perfect scapegoats are the ones that have both an internal aspect and an

[02:05] external aspect one foot in on the inside crowd and one foot on the outside crowd and in that case Trump is a perfect candidate for a scapegoat because he's both the consumate you know businessman in New York City uh you know so he's an Insider but then he's got you know International interests and so if you can tar someone like that and say well you know you thought you knew this man but in reality he's crooked he's a casino Mogul and that's why we should suspect that he might have had something

[02:37] to do with the Russian government well then he's a classic perfect case for a scapegoat and so it'll be interesting to see what the the details are I think that $35 million Mueller spent with highly conflicted uh many often times people that had worked uh on the law firms for the CL Clint Foundation this is ridiculous it's a joke and uh and yet still so much of the alleged Free Press will tell you that no it was there was

[03:09] nothing conflicted about that that's just some kind of right-wing blog that says there was a conflict of interest with the people investigating uh the Trump uh Russia question but still we'll wait for the details tomorrow morning but in the meantime I'm excited about my guest here because he is someone who has actually interacted on a personal level with some of the people involved in the uh Russia collusion investigation for Trump he's a a former CIA agent his name is John

[03:41] kiraku welcome to the program how you doing thanks so much for having me doing well thanks yeah and I I've I've read about your story and i' I I was able to uh you know kind of dive into some of the details and I'm I'm fascinated for a lot of topics that I think you can provide insights in uh you're a whistleblower you're someone who uh you came out and you went on uh television and you let the world know that indeed there was uh torture taking place in the

[04:11] CIA and uh you ended up serving time for that isn't that correct that's true yes um I went on ABC News in December of 2007 and I said that uh the CIA was torturing its prisoners that torture was official US government policy it was not the result of a rogue as the president president had intimated and I said that the um that the policy had been personally approved by the president and as you might imagine the CIA didn't take well to that now what led you to reveal this I mean what was going on in your

[04:42] mind when you decided to reveal this well a couple of things uh first of all I am a I am a strong strong believer in the Constitution of the United States I believe in the rule of law reasonable people can agree to disagree on policy but if you don't like the policy that you have to change the law uh you can't just pretend that the law doesn't exist and uh you know we have an anti-torture law in this country I'm not just talking about the McCain Feinstein amendment of 2015 we've got an anti-torture law that

[05:14] dates back to 1946 and we're also signatories and not just signatories but we were the drafters of the United Nations convention Against torture and so I believed that it was my duty as a CIA officer to uh blow the on what I believe to be waste fraud abuse and illegality and so that's what I did how many years did you spend in the CIA and other you know Intel agencies uh I was in the CIA for 15 years and most of that was as a counterterrorism operations officer now

[05:46] you were the head of counterterrorism for the CIA for in Pakistan correct correct in the immediate aftermath of the 911 attacks I headed counterterrorism operations in Pakistan can you give a Layman some insight here why do we give billions of dollars to Pakistan and allow them to have nukes and yet was Osama bin Laden was he just a few miles away from their main base is that right uh yeah AMA Bin Laden was actually living in the Pakistani version of West Point uh and you ask a very important and very good question it's

[06:17] really The $64,000 Question why do we give Pakistan uh billions and billions of dollars in economic and military aid when they are a nuclear power in violation of the nonproliferation treaty and um and are constantly on the brink of war with India which is an important us trading partner uh and the truth is that the policy is very complicated and we just prefer to pretend that these problems don't exist so is it like duck duck goose we just kind of duck duck goose okay you're the guys we're going

[06:49] to give nukes to everybody else we're going to sanction to destroy and make everybody think that they're like the worst place in the world is that how it works welome to Washington because that's exactly how this City Works uh you know it's funny you you have a policy and you would think that because you have a policy you stick with it the truth is that there's an exception to every policy and so there's always a quid proquo we go to the pakistanis and we say if you do a b and c for us we're going to pretend that you don't have nuclear weapons and they say that sounds like a good deal to us and then we all

[07:19] just play this game wow you know I I just don't understand so is did did Pakistan do they do they um do they kind of work with the Petr dollar system and everything and that's why they uh you know Persona n grada versus Iran you know cuz I know Iran doesn't play ball uh when it comes to our oil interest and so forth is that a good is that a good uh quick and dirty cheat sheet for why those guys have nukes and we're supposed to be told every night that you know that's nothing to see here in Pakistan but go ahead and and and uh let's vilify

[07:50] and Destroy Iran right I I think no I think the real reason is that the pakistanis are perfectly willing to kneel down before us when we want them to for example U the pakistanis share a border with China and in fact they're very close to the Chinese politically but if we want access to the Chinese border maybe we want to put a listening post up there they say go ahead and have at it we need um access to uh to the border with Iran in the south of Pakistan that's an area called

[08:22] beluchistan where we have our our drone base they say have at it we tell them we need a staging area to go to go into Afghanistan they welcome us and give us uh a base for it and then at the same time uh they come to us and say look we've done all these things for you we've given you these bases we let you spy on the Chinese and the Iranians and the Afghans and and whomever else we want to spy on so what you're going to do for us is you're going to look the other way while we build this nuclear weapon and also you're going to look the

[08:52] other way as we arm these Kashmir separatists and Kashmir terrorists who are going to attack the Marriott in Mumbai and uh and attack the the Mumbai Jewish center and and kill uh kill Jews there and so uh we do we look the other way and then when push comes to shove we point the finger at Al-Qaeda and we pretend that the Pakistani government had nothing to do with it so wait a second our Geniuses in DC they're giving billions of dollars to these guys they have this deep connection relationship and they didn't know that Osama Bin

[09:23] Laden was in their West Point their equivalent of West Point over there you know that's uh that uh stretches um credulity doesn't it so um I I was always of the opinion that the pakistanis knew that Osama Bin Laden was there you have to be you have to be a mental defective to not know Osama Bin Laden was there everybody knew that he wasn't in some cave in Afghanistan that he was probably in one of the major cities because all of the other Al-Qaeda Fighters that we had caught and Al-Qaeda leaders that we had caught were in

[09:55] Pakistan's major cities we caught khed shik Muhammad in ra pin we caught Ramsey Ben aib in in Karachi we caught uh we caught Omar Al baluch in in karach these guys are in big cities they're in safe houses they're in they're in apartments they're not in caves anywhere and so we in the CIA always assumed he was living comfortably somewhere in Pakistan and and certainly he was now let me qualify that too by saying that I worked very very closely

[10:25] with Pakistani intelligence uh Services when I was when I was living there and assigned there and I was always of the opinion that there were two parallel Pakistani intelligence Services there were the counterterrorism guys that I worked with who were educated in the UK or in the US and they loved us and they would lay down their lives for us and then there were the other guys in their headquarters with the long bushy beards who had come of age in Afghanistan who created the Taliban who would give you

[10:55] the stink eye whenever you'd go over to their their headquarters for me meetings and it's like these two sides of the same organization were working against each other and working against us at the same time wow whoa and that makes my head that makes my head so so so it's almost like if you PID it was it kind of like a pay for playay like look if if you give us $2 billion do in Aid you get this and then if you want to chip in another billion America will let you know what's under door number one where

[11:27] there's Osama Bin Laden right next door West it's like you know what that's that's a really good way to put it and and the short answer is yes that's exactly what it is we're going to take a quick commercial break we're with John kiraku former CIA agent and you're listening to a neighbor's Choice with David groski don't go anywhere more on the other side oh c where you going to run

[11:59] [Music] hi I'm David groski and welcome back to a neighbors Choice radio I'm your political Exorcist I'm here to cast out all of the negative spirits of group think in our lives and reclaim our country neighbor to neighbor for the message of nonviolence peace love and working together all grounded in the principles of personhood the idea that the individual person is at the fulcrum of everything that matters in

[12:30] terms of our law and what we should allow in our own Civic society and I'm joined right now by a very fascinating guest his name is John kiraku he's a former CIA agent he was the head of the counterterrorism unit for them in Pakistan during the height of a lot of the things going on over there um and he became a whistleblower he decided that he had seen evidence of ter uh torture and he did not believe that that was an

[13:00] ethical thing for him to be a part of and he decided to speak out about it did you actually see the activity yourself or you just knew about it through the the the system or whatever no I I did not see it myself what happened was when I finished my tour in Pakistan I returned to CIA headquarters in Langley Virginia and I was in the cafeteria one day and a senior officer uh with whom I worked came up to me and very casually said hey I'm glad I ran into you I wanted to ask do you want to be

[13:32] certified in the use of enhanced interrogation techniques I had never heard that term before this was May the 6th of 2002 and I said enhanced interrogation techniques what's that mean and he described these 10 techniques and I said ooh that sounds like a torture program and he said no it's not torture we got it approved by the White House we got it approved by the National Security Council the justice Department I said I don't know man that sounds like torture and torture

[14:02] is a slippery slope I don't think I want to be involved with that as it turned out they had asked 14 um of us uh operations officers and I was the only one who said no I'm I'm very sorry to say and so on the strength of the work that I did in Pakistan we had we had captured Abu zubeda who we believed at the time was the number three in alqaeda um I got promoted and I became the executive assistant to the cia's deputy director and so in that position I had access to literally every um operation

[14:35] that the CIA was running around the world it's a very unusual position and so as soon as they began torturing abua and others I was the recipient of the cables coming back from the secret sites the secret prisons and um and you know even inside the the agency we were fooled because the reporting was being done by two contract psychologists uh Mitchell and jessen who were reporting that that the uh torture was was actually successful and that Abu

[15:07] Zeda was was giving us information that was saving American lives and disrupting attacks that turned out to be a lie what they had done was that they copied information that Abu zua had freely given the FBI and because the FBI computer system and the CIA computer system had no connectivity we and the CIA didn't know that the that the had already been reported to the FBI and Mitchell and Jess were lying and saying that they had collected it we didn't know that until 2009 and so um we were getting this

[15:40] reporting back saying everything is copasetic he cracked he broke he cried he he wet himself he gave us all this information uh we accidentally made his heart stop we had to revive him and and it was just uh it was torture for nothing it was a violation of the law it was a violation of the Constitution and uh and it resulted in nothing nothing but but a black eye for for our country so what would make them want to lie about it I mean what if they just I mean

[16:12] because because they they were already Under Fire about it internally or something I can tell you exactly what made them lie uh they had signed a $18 million contract and so they had to make sure that everybody in headquarters in a position to have oversight over that contract believed that the that the techniques were working because they wanted to collect that $108 million what did they need that money for what was that going to into their pockets for what what to do well that's how that's how Mitchell and Jess got rich they had this uh this organization Mitchell and

[16:44] jessen Associates and what they did is they reverse engineered the uh Air Force sear program that's that's the program where we teach our Pilots um how to withstand uh torture if they're shot down Behind Enemy Lines they RSE engineered it and they used it to create an offensive torture program promising the cia's leadership that it would work and that it would disrupt the tax and so we gave them $108 million because they had made these promises and by God they

[17:14] were going to make sure that we believed that the that the program was working so water boarding as a technique not that they invented it but water boarding was something sold to the CIA from a private contractor correct that was their thing whoa I I always just had the you know the P you know I always just thought like it was just some kind of technique that they had in their back pocket from the medieval times they like hey let's pull this out that'll get it to work that's where it originated it originated in medieval China oh wow and and was used

[17:45] as recently as the Vietnam War I mean you go through history and it was used by the belgians in the Congo it was it was used in medieval China it was used uh my God during the second world war and and I'll tell you something this is this is one of the things that that really made me decide to go public in 1946 we executed Japanese soldiers who had waterboarded American PS We executed them this was a death penalty offense in January of

[18:16] 1968 The Washington Post ran a front page photograph of an American Soldier waterboarding a North Vietnamese prisoner on the same day that that photo ran the Secretary of Defense Robert S mcamera ordered an investigation that Soldier was arrested he was charged with torture he was convicted and sentenced to 20 years at hard labor in lenworth well the law never changed we changed so in 1946 this was a death penalty act in

[18:47] 1968 it was worth 20 years at hard labor but somehow in 2002 it was magically patriotic and perfectly legal to do when the law didn't change that made no sense to me and the justification of course was that 911 happened and therefore all stops had to be you know throwing out the window all breaks exactly I remember George tenant saying that Osama Bin Laden had promised that he was planning another attack that would dwarf 911 and George was panicked

[19:19] at the notion that there would be two such attacks on his watch and that's why he was willing to do literally anything to stop the next attack including giving Mitchell and Jess $108 million to torture people why didn't why do they have to pay a contractor to do it why couldn't they they just you know hire a consultant to teach the CIA agents how to do it well you know that's kind of been an an ongoing debate why why did they bring in Outsiders to do it and there are a couple of theories although none of the

[19:50] principles have ever really said um you I remember meeting Mitchell and jessen in CIA headquarters in October of 2001 just after the attacks and the reason they came to my attention is that there's a rule at the CIA that contractors are not allowed to have private offices but these guys got private offices and I I remember saying uh hey who are the stiffs over there moving into the private offices oh I don't know they must be somebody because they're contractors they have green badges instead of blue badges so they

[20:21] got private offices they must be big shots well there were a couple of different theories as to why they were hired one of the theories is that they had uh some kind of contact with the deputy director for Science and Technology who introduced them to the head of counterterrorism and they were ready to go so the CIA wouldn't have to reinvent the wheel and start creating this program from scratch they had already done it and they were ready to implement it right then and there the other uh

[20:51] theory is that this way you weren't putting CIA officers in direct danger these contract contractors were people who had decided this is what they wanted to do and they were doing it for money not for any other reason and so if there was going to be legal Fallout they can handle their own dog on legal Fallout and there wouldn't be a congressional investigation that would end up pointing the finger at CIA officers interesting we're speaking with John kiraku who's former CIA agent who was involved with uh he became a

[21:21] whistleblower that really revealed a lot of what was going on with the torture programs that we were told were not torture but let's kind of Whittle this down um why did they choose the waterboarding technique as their favorite torture technique that's a great question that's a great question and the rules were very clear that they were not supposed to begin with water boarding water boarding was supposed to be the the final punishment right if you couldn't get any uh information using

[21:52] any other technique at the very end you should go to water boarding well Mitchell and jesson were so excited to see the implementation of their program that they began with water boarding and there were other things that they did too that were that were patently illegal what did they do they get like a bonus every time they waterboarded or something is this like a sales commission they got the ability to write a cable to headquarters saying oh we we did X Y and Z and we waterboarded him and he was frothing at the mouth and his heart stopped and he was crying and

[22:24] begging and and all of which was true and it made them look like true tough guys where do they find these guys at are they like hiding in a Siberian Tundra Wilderness like they just work pretty much uh they were hiding at a university in Eastern Washington State oh Lord I would want to drink their water my goodness so what in the world it's just hard to wrap my mind around this so so then so they pick this waterboarding technique right and they they they just flip through like a medieval torture manuscript from China and just like a scroll unrolled it and say what that looks really nasty let's

[22:55] try this one essentially yes that's that's basically what they did but there were other things too and there were actually techniques that I always believed were worse than water boarding one was um very easy it was sleep deprivation you know how hard it is to stay awake well the American Psychological Association tells us that people begin to lose their minds at day seven with no sleep they begin to die at day nine right but Mitchell and jessen were authorized to keep prisoners awake

[23:25] for up to 12 days and what what they ended up doing was um was so harming people with sleep deprivation that they actually did lose their minds and they're unable to participate in their own defenses wow so here these guys are at Guantanamo they're certifiably insane because of this this experience and they're unable to assist their own attorneys defending them so I always thought that was worse than waterboarding waterboarding at least wasn't permanent other than when your heart stopped beating and the other one

[23:58] was uh called the cold cell that is where the prisoner was stripped naked he was chained to an eyebolt in the ceiling so that he couldn't sit or or lay down or get comfortable in any way his cell was chilled to 30 degrees I'm sorry it was chilled to 50 Dees Fahrenheit and then every hour um a CIA officer would go into the cell and throw a bucket of ice water on him and we actually killed two prisoners doing that we killed them

[24:28] uh with hypothermia they uh essentially froze to death I know there was a popular thought that the water boarding cannot kill you is that true uh no it can kill you because water actually does get down the windpipe and um and you can drown you can drown with just a little bit of water the thing is is they had CIA Physicians there observing the water boarding we used to jokingly yeah well was kind of dark humor but jokingly call them call them Dr mangala so you have Dr

[25:00] mangala uh sitting by every time Abu zeta's heart would stop beating he would revive him they'd give him a day to recover and then they'd waterboard him again what happened to this this individual what what I don't know his story Zab he was um transferred from one secret prison to another he ended up going to four or five different secret prisons around the world and in uh 2005 he was transferred to Guantanamo and he's been there ever since held in

[25:30] communicado and we know from the uh Senate torture report that um he will never be released ever under any circumstances and that in the event of his death he is to be cremated and his ashes scattered into the sea wow so they don't want no one to he's he's in a uh a chamber of of no of no anything he can't communicate and let me add the postcript to that as it turns out abua was not the number three in al-Qaeda our information

[26:01] was wrong this was the wrong guy a different is those like two of the same names he and a first cousin had exactly the same oh are you Ser wait a second this is just his cousin yeah see this was the topic of my third book um I was tell us the name of the book by the way so we can keep it oh sure it's it's called uh um oh my god I've written so many books I can't think of the title now it's called the convenient terrorist abuaba and the weird Wonderland of America's Secret Wars um yeah

[26:33] abua hold that thought we're going to take a quick commercial break we're speaking with John kiraku CIA whistleblower and this is fascinating stuff don't go anywhere folks we're learning what's going on on a neighbors's choice radio I'm David groski don't go anywhere [Music] welcome back to a neighbors Choice radio I'm David granoski I'm speaking with John kiraku who is a CIA whistleblower

[27:06] he's now on the outside but he had a decorated career in there before he saw what was going on with their torture behavior and activity and decided to speak out and he paid for it and we're going to get into that in just a moment but I just wanted to follow up you said that they you know they this target of this waterboarding and other torture practices Abu zabada was the wrong guy the wrong Abu yeah the the Abu Zaba that we caught was certainly a bad guy he he

[27:39] U ran what was called the house of Martyrs uh training facility and safe house in pesha Pakistan but he never joined Al-Qaeda and he never pledged uh loyalty or fty to AMA Bin Laden there was a cousin a first cousin with the same name Abu zubeda and he was actually um in and out of the United States well as soon as 9911 happened he assumed correctly that the FBI and the CIA would be looking for him and as soon as the 9911 attacks took place he fled to

[28:10] Jordan and he went underground and we were never never able to find him but not knowing that there were two different guys with the same name oh man if you're collecting information from NSA FBI CIA on both of these guys and you think it's one guy this looks like a Terri terrorist Superman right and so we finally tracked one of the Abu aetas down to um fisel laad Pakistan and on the evening of March 22nd 2 2002 we we

[28:42] busted down the door with battering rams and we grabbed him and everybody else inside and the rest is history so probably I'm just imagining half the torture was him trying to them trying to con get him to admit that he was the right Abu he was like no you've got absolutely correct you're absolutely correct and the thing is is it took us years to realize that we had made this mistake but by then he had been tortured he had been exposed to secret prisons he was in Guantanamo and now he knows too much and

[29:13] so he can't be released so here you've got this guy who has never been charged with a crime right he's never been charged with a crime but he'll never go free and to me that's just not the American way so I if there was like okay so he was the wrong Abu but he he did do some bad stuff you said so if there was evidence that he did these bad stuff I mean would that be I mean obviously I'm not trying to say that well that warrants what he's going through but sure sure I mean would

[29:46] would it be a relatively similar uh uh stay for what he was if you could pin the the actual stuff he did do and prove evidence no no he had never actually committed a a a terrorist uh attack so he was involved in training and logistics for terrorists or of terrorists yes so if if we had known that there were two of them and we caught him he probably would have done a good 10 years or maybe even 15 years in prison or in Guantanamo or whatever and he would have been released by now and

[30:16] if he had sold marijuana he would have been in prison for life so that's for sure oh you're so right so man this is just this is like a a house a carnival House of mirrors and and bizaar uh to just look into this stuff you know we've made repeated terrible mistakes that have affected the lives of innocent people um was it the case that Osama Bin Laden denied isn't it true that he denied that he was involved when it first came out that that you know when the news of the 911 attacks happened oh no uh he didn't

[30:50] deny it uh in fact he issued a a video I'm sorry an audio recording to Al jazer uh in in the weeks after 9/11 saying that U that this was punishment for uh the US his words polluting the land of the two holy mosques which means having troops based in Saudi Arabia and um and this was our punishment and that's when he said that that he was planning an attack that would dwarf 911 right no I I knew he came out eventually and said he

[31:20] did it but I thought there was like one statement he made where he's like oh no I didn't do that then he then he changed his his his stance on that was that that's you may be thinking about um about a statement that came out of uh the Pentagon right after 911 very briefly accusing heala of doing it okay and saying that it wasn't Bin Laden that it was his Bala and then his Bala which is and this was really out of character came out and said whoa we don't like you guys but we didn't have anything to do with this wow so how did it you know if we had

[31:51] this relationship with Pakistan and you were the head of counterterrorism there from what years were you over there in Pakistan I was there from uh it was a short tour because um because it was so dangerous we were cycling in and out so I was there for uh 7 months from let's see I was there from January to May and then again from June to August of 2002 wow yeah it was it was dangerous I'm looking here this is an article from cnn.com Bin Laden says he wasn't behind

[32:22] the attacks in a statement issued to the Arabic Satellite Channel Al jazer this is cnn.com based in Qatar Bin Laden said the US government has consistently blamed me for being behind every occasion its enemies attack it I would like to assure the world that I did not plan the recent attacks which seem to have been planned by people for personal reasons and he's been living in the Islamic he said so this is September 17th 2001 so why did he deny it at first I don't understand right you know what I we were we were doing 24-hour shifts back then and I

[32:54] must have been just so preoccupied with finding ter I didn't pay attention to that isn't that I just it's weird that he you know he he he denied it at first you know just you know six days later and then he changes I guess his tune shortly after and starts accepting that so I don't understand that crazy it's weird but anyways I Funny the funny thing about Bin Laden too is that he had literally zero religious credentials he was just a he was a nobody he was the son of of one of the wealthiest men in

[33:26] um in Saudi Arabia ABD Rahman Bin Laden uh the the family is worth tens of billions of dollars they're in charge of uh of all the biggest construction projects in the Kingdom they build airports and ports and hospitals he's kind of like their version of trump over there even bigger way bigger than Trump and the old man had 110 Sons so Osama was one of the younger Sons uh and he was he was sort of the one that went bad you know there are probably five dozen

[33:58] Bin Laden family members who live here in the United States permanently uh Beverly Hills a lot of them live in Miami and uh they wanted nothing to do with their brother uh they had a rough time here in the states after the 911 attacks and almost all of them left the country for a year or two and then just started to come back by 2003 2004 wow just fascinating stuff U I want to go on the other side we're going to take a quick commercial break in just a minute here but I wanted to on the other side kind of go into your thoughts on the

[34:30] Assan story and kind of unpack that because you know you're a whistleblower and you paid uh the price you spent how many years in prison because of what you did I was there for 23 months 23 months we have a lot of people on our program that call in for nonviolent victimless crimes they call in from prison uh and they discuss their experience of what prison's like so on the other side with John kiraku I want to ask you what your experience was like in prison and more about whistleblowing on the other side you're listening to a neighbor's Choice

[35:01] don't go [Music] anywhere a neighbor CH radio is back and I'm your host David groski here with John kiraku former CIA agent and we're exploring a lot of fascinating topics and we're going to have to have John on again some more to unpack he's a wealth of knowledge and a part of American government that a lot of people know

[35:32] very little of including myself and I guess that's the way they've designed it of course it's the CIA but uh you know we should know what they're doing you know they're supposed to be our public servants but you know they're over here you know taking out Chinese medieval torture techniques on people and uh got the wrong guy got the wrong Abu at least in this case that you've been exploring on the show with us today um uh so I wanted to kind of go briefly through you know we have people uh call in from prison for non-violent victimless behaviors and of course so you tell the

[36:03] truth about the the torture I don't did you I mean was their argument that you hurt someone that you that you endangered someone's life by saying that no uh what they argued was that the um was that the information was classified and so they charged me with three counts of Espionage if you can imagine such a thing so how would they have proven that in court like what would be their CA what would be their argument what was their best argument that you were espion well there's this there's this phrase when discussing classified information that it is currently and appropriately

[36:33] classified um my contention was that you can't classify a crime it's actually a crime in the United States to classify something just because it's a crime or because it causes embarrassment to the government um but they they wanted to go to the mat and and not because they necessarily wanted a prosecute John kiraku the point was to frighten any other wouldbe whistleblower uh from public so they could say you see what we did to this guy you want the same thing to happen to you then you keep your big mouth shut but my attorneys told me in

[37:06] the very beginning look this is way bigger than you this case isn't about you this case is about freedom of speech it's about government accountability and it's about transparency you exposed a crime you embarrassed them all the way up to the president and they don't like to be embarrassed and so we decided to fight I was going to go to trial and um I uh I pleaded not guilty I was facing 45 years in prison and um and so my uh

[37:38] my attorneys received Discovery from the justice department and we asked the judge to declassify 70 cables necessary for me to defend myself to prove that this was a crime that that the torture program was a crime and so it was illegal to make it a classified program and so the judge uh we blocked off two days for the hearings and we went into court and the judge said I'm going to make this easy for everybody and I'm going to deny all 70 of these motions my

[38:10] attorneys flipped out objection objection objection and then because it was a national security case um the prosecution was allowed to ask for something called A Part 13 conversation which means an in camera conversation a private conversation with a judge in her Chambers without my attorneys present that's legal only in a national security case and so the prosecutors went back there with the judge they were back there for 20 minutes they came back out

[38:40] I have no idea what they said about me back there and the judge looked at me and she said I'm denying all 70 of these motions and she looked at me and she says don't make me take this to trial well she just underc my whole defense so I have to go to trial because the best that the government said they would do was 10 years in a in a Penitentiary and I said I'm not going to do 10 minutes and so I told them that I

[39:12] was rejecting their 10 years and I was going to go to trial and I was going to testify on my own behalf and in that testimony I may have to find myself talking about some of the Hideous crimes against humanity and war crimes that I witnessed in my 15 years in CIA counterterrorism that I had to defend myself and then they came back and they said okay 23 months well the bottom line is the government wins 98.2% of its cases according to propublica so do you

[39:43] roll the dice knowing that you have a 1.8% chance to win do you take the 23 months or do you gamble and risk getting 18 to 24 years which is what my my lawyers believed I would get if I had lost so I took the deal besides that I had already spent $1.1 million on my defense it wiped me out I went bankrupt and I still owe my lawyers $880,000 that they're never going to see so as my attorneys told me in the

[40:14] very beginning this is more than just about you this is about scaring everybody else in government who might be thinking about reporting a crime well yeah they used you as a public scapegoat to send a message message to to that we're angry at the public and we're going to take it out on you because you opened up this crisis of of humiliation and revealing of our sins and our wickedness in high places and so that's why they had to make an example of you so you went to prison for what two years then yeah two years just sort

[40:45] of two years did did you receive uh health effects or PTSD because of the experience oh you bet I did you know the funny thing too is that um you know I was the victim of two assassination attempts in my career once in Athens and once in a Middle Eastern country that I'm not allowed to to discuss and I didn't have PTSD from two assassination attempts I didn't have PTSD from breaking down doors and chasing Al-Qaeda and Pakistan but boy I had major PTSD when I got back from prison wow did you so you had threats of violence against

[41:15] you and stuff like no um actually uh the prisoners uh welcomed me they adopted me especially the Italians uh and when I say Italian I mean like with air Italians named Gambino and Lui banano Etc um and it was because I hate the FBI as much as they do uh but it was the the guards it was the guards that were always after me oh that reminds me of the Stanford Prison Experiment huh oh yes so you Liv that experiment oh yes

[41:46] and I can tell you from firsthand experience that that experiment was exactly correct in its findings wow people become monsters well I'm sorry you had to go through that just for being a patriot and trying to keep your government accountable we're going to have to have you on again sometime John kiraku I'm glad you're with your family now and keep telling the truth and I know you're in a new eyeway way documentary so what's the name of that movie um it's called Uh yours truly yours truly iway Way's new movie Yours Truly has John kiraku John kiraku dcom folks thanks again John

[42:17] thank you you've been listening to another episode of a neighbors Choice radio I'm David groski Godspeed one day I thought I could fly one day I woke up and I could SE [Music]
