Title: Scheer Intelligence: John Kiriakou Interview 9/10/21
Show: ScheerPost
Date: 2022-05-19
URL: https://youtu.be/R4cW71vcS_o
Duration: 1:03:00

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[00:00] [Music] know hi this is robert here with another edition of sheer intelligence where the intelligence comes from my guest and in this sense not just native intelligence john kiriakou someone who worked for the cia it's the official

[00:31] intelligence agency and i kind of like to see what i do with sort of an alternative view of intelligence certainly about foreign policy at least i'll let the listeners know everything i know nothing is redacted but i've done a bunch of these in fact john kiriakou uh was one of my first on the show we've now been doing it for five years and i wanted to talk to him just about more than anybody else about you know the u.s

[01:01] defeat retreat from afghanistan one of the most absurd adventures and he has not been asked to be on a single one of those talk shows not on msnbc not on cnn you know this whole crap about the free media and we have the progressive side on the msnbc and the right-wing side of the box here is the one person in this country who you can actually say knows more about what happened in afghanistan how we got into it and really knows more

[01:32] about iraq and everything else because he had access to all of the official files working in the cia and has not been asked to be on a single show of you know dealing with what was it all about why america's longest war and coupled with the other you know endless war in iraq which is still not over so just to give a quick brief background john kariakou was a you know he's a a greek parentage and he learned greek his child and everything which was helpful and

[02:04] cia's always interested in foreign languages and he was at george washington university and had a guy who was a former ci agent who was his professor in graduate school and uh recommended him that he go to work for the cia and he did and he was there for you know uh what i guess 10 years before 9 11. a little bit yeah 11 years 11 years as well and working there and working on many different things and he learned arabic

[02:36] and he traveled throughout the middle east and was one of really the most knowledgeable people about that area of the world and i'm going to let him tell the beginning of this story but i do want to give people sort of a punchline right away uh john kiriakou is i think to this day the only u.s government official that has been punished for our torture program not because he tortured anybody but because he revealed uh it to abc

[03:07] uh that we had a torture program and i'm am i correct john has anybody been you're absolutely right the only person who's been um who's been prosecuted who had anything to do with the torture program and my role was to expose the torture program rather than to actually torture any right and you served uh you got a three-year sentence and how long did you serve yeah i got a two and a half year sentence and i served 23 months 23 months uh in prison

[03:37] and and here's this guy by the way let me just just give a couple of high points you were involved in the capture of what at the time was thought to be the highest al-qaeda figure abu zubaida and you were with that azubeida when you after he was captured and when the fbi which was very good at interrogation without torture as opposed to the cia they were sent in an expert and you got really a lot of useful information from abu zubaydah without torture and then

[04:08] they brought in the torture guys and and it all went haywire and useless and uh a future head of the cia was one that was one of your superiors who who approved it you know uh and you could go through the whole story just let's take it from beginning this is a a major part of american history and and your accounting of it even though msnbc and fox and cnn don't care to talk to you you really know more about what happened with the u.s

[04:38] and afghanistan and also iraq because you were on that desk at one point just i'm going to shut up now and please just tell your story and what you learn about it and what the lessons are and i don't care if you you just keep going and i'm not going to interrupt you from that one okay okay um i joined the cia in january of 1990. uh spent the first seven and a half years as an analyst on the middle east i learned to speak arabic i served overseas in bahrain and kuwait and saudi

[05:12] arabia and and i got bored so i made a very unusual switch to operations specifically to counter terrorism operations served in athens which was a critical threat for terrorism post and then when 9 11 hit i volunteered repeatedly to go to afghanistan finally i was sent to pakistan as the chief of cia counterterrorism operations there and in march of 2002 i led the raid that

[05:44] captured abu zubair who we thought at the time was the number three in al qaeda he wasn't the number three but he was a very bad man he he was responsible for creating and staffing al-qaeda's two training camps in southern afghanistan he was the founder of al-qaeda's safe house in peshawar pakistan called the house of martyrs and he was al-qaeda's de facto logistics guy if you needed a false passport you went

[06:16] to abu zubaydah if you wanted to get into afghanistan across the border and you didn't have papers you went to abu zabeta so uh we caught him and he was the highest level capture uh to date right from 9 11 until march of 2002 he was the he was the toughest guy the the highest ranking guy that we had caught and he was sent to a secret prison uh its location has been reported in the

[06:46] media but the cia still will not allow me to say where it was and the fbi began interrogating him now the fbi is very very good at interrogation the fbi has been doing successful interrogation since the nuremberg trials so they knew what they were doing and abuza beta was providing actionable intelligence this is intelligence that was actually disrupting attacks and saving american lives but the cia was very frustrated because it was the fbi that was leading

[07:18] the case you have to remember too that 911 was still an open criminal case and that's why the fbi was in a leadership position even overseas where the cia is usually in a leadership position so the cia got frustrated and then director george tenet asked president george w bush to throw the fbi out of the country where the secret prison was and to let the cia take over for whatever reason that nobody has ever

[07:49] explained president bush did that the fbi withdrew from that country and the cia took over the abazo beta case now within hours of taking over they began torturing abu zubaydah they began using these so-called enhanced interrogation techniques that had been approved by the by the justice department i should back up though and say that several months earlier i was asked if i wanted to be trained in

[08:20] the use of these enhanced interrogation techniques and i said no i said that i had a moral and ethical problem with it besides the fact that i thought it was patently illegal we have very specific laws in this country that prohibit us from carrying out these these torture techniques but the cia did it anyway now here's where the big lie was the big lie was that these techniques worked the techniques never worked

[08:51] what happened was the cia and the fbi hated each other so much at the time and refused so adamantly to work together that their computer systems were incompatible so the fbi was able to gather this actionable intelligence from abzu beta and they reported it back to fbi headquarters in their own channels the cia was not receiving those reports so when the cia began torturing him

[09:22] even though the torture didn't work and abu zubaydah just clammed up he went silent the cia contractors took the fbi reporting re-typed it in cia channels and said look what he's told us the program is working look at the intelligence that he's giving us it's just flowing out of him and so they were able to keep up this lie for years even until after the torture program was

[09:54] officially over now this program went on for years and it wasn't just about beta that was torture it was khaled sheikh mohammed who was the mastermind of the 9 11 attack or attacks it was ramsey benesheb and abdullahi manashiti and other very high-ranking al-qaeda members they were tortured at secret sites around the world they were tortured at the salt pit prison center torture center in afghanistan they were tortured at

[10:25] guantanamo and um and finally in december of 2007 i got a call from brian ross of abc news and by then i had been out of the cia for three years three and a half years and brian ross said that he had a source who told him that i had tortured abu zubaydah i said that was absolutely untrue but it led me to conclude that his source was at the white house

[10:57] and that they were going to try to make me the fall guy because i was the only one who was opposed to torture and so i decided to tell brian ross the truth about the torture program and in early december of 2007 i gave this interview in which i said three things i said that the cia was torturing its prisoners i said that torture was official u.s government policy it was not the result of a rogue as president bush had said and i said that the torture policy had

[11:29] been signed by the president himself and uh and so the very next day the cia reported me to the fbi uh for leaking classified information the fbi investigated me from december of 2007 to december of 2008 and then concluded in december of 2008 that i had not committed a crime they closed the case but then three weeks later barack obama was inaugurated as president and he

[12:00] named john brennan an old colleague and nemesis of mine from the cia to be the deputy national security adviser for counterterrorism john was also one of the founders of the torture program and so john brennan in january of 2009 asked the justice department to secretly reopen the case against me i had no idea that for the next three years my phones were tapped my emails were being intercepted and teams of fbi

[12:30] agents were surveilling me and then in january of 2012 i was arrested and charged with five felonies coming out of that abc news interview and a subsequent subsequent interview i did with the new york times i was charged with five felonies including three counts of espionage and that's when the fight started so and and one of your superiors um went on to be head of the cia and was

[13:01] it deeply involved in the torture program right yeah that was that was gina haspel who we called bloody gina because of her her penchant for torture gina haspel liked torture she actually flew out to the secret site just to sit there and watch a torture session now there's no reason to fly halfway around the world to just watch a man be tortured that's that's a a sickness it's a mental

[13:33] illness what was being we called her bloody gina hospital in the when was that when was she appointed head of the cia she was appointed head of the cia in 2017 and and i'll tell you a funny sideline there the the day that she was appointed i got a call from the washington post and they asked if i would do uh an op-ed for the sunday post because they knew of my opposition to torture of course and assumed correctly my

[14:03] opposition to gina haspel's nomination as cia director so i wrote this and they gave me a ton of space i wrote a 1200 word op-ed and and that sunday morning that it ran i got a call from rand paul senator rand paul a republican of kentucky and he said can you come up to my office so we can strategize about how to block this woman's nomination i said absolutely so i i rushed up to capitol hill

[14:36] and he had a whole team of people there and white boards with senators who were opposed and senators who were four and senators who were undecided and we did this strategy all day long and then a week later when it came time to to vote he voted yes and you know we saw that with so many democrats democrats he's a republican yeah he's a republican we saw it with so many democrats who you would think would have been

[15:06] the the core opposition to a nomination like bloody gina haspel and then who just sort of folded and ended up with no principles whatsoever you know interestingly dianne feinstein a senator from california was really very pro-cia and until her the committee that she was chair looked into it and the cia went after her own people her own staff people and she finally

[15:37] released the introduction to the report we've never been able to read the report though uh from the senate no and and that's an important point bob you know so many people think that the cia torture report was declassified and released it was not what was declassified and it's not even really declassified it's so heavily redacted that you can barely follow it was only the executive summary right the executive summary was for 500 pages as i said heavily redacted

[16:08] and that's what was released to the public the 5 000 page report was never released and in fact um there are a limited number of copies something like 14 and many of them have already been destroyed so there's there's a chance really that no one will ever know what was really in that torture report you know interestingly even in in the barbaric soviet union uh khrushchev revealed some of the crimes of stalin of the

[16:39] stalin era that was that's right the beginning of change in the soviet union the end of the in the end of communism in russia really and and uh it's interesting we all because of a popular movie that was made and so forth we all think that there was actually a a senate investigation which there was and it seems to have been quite thorough and we know the cia tried to crush it and actually uh undermine the chief investigator that's what the movie is about

[17:10] but most people most people don't even know any of this happened but most people think dianne feinstein acted heroically at least getting a report out but the fact is in this democracy we've never been able to see the report we've never been able to read it and it would be a crime if somebody gave it say to a journalist like myself right in fact it would be espionage it would be a violation of the espionage act this is one of my big disappointments on capitol hill you know after i left the cia i went to work on the senate foreign relations committee for two and a half

[17:40] years under john kerry and i never saw people work so hard to keep information from the american people as the staff members on those big committees intelligence foreign affairs or foreign relations and and armed services they don't want people to know the truth feinstein has been one of the biggest disappointments because for so many years she was really nothing more than a cheerleader for the cia she supported for example

[18:11] steve kappas the notorious deputy director of the cia john mclaughlin the even more notorious deputy director of the cia she in fact demanded that uh that kappus be named deputy director again these guys are in up to their necks in the torture program and it was only when john brennan ordered cia officers to hack into the senate intelligence committee's computer system

[18:43] so that he could see what exactly feinstein's people had gathered that finally made feinstein flip and she finally went after now feinstein reported brennan to the justice department for committing a crime and brennan reported feinstein to the justice department for committing a crime and eric holder decided that he wasn't going to do anything for either one of them and so there was never an investigation but this is what we're up against we're up against these titans of

[19:14] politics and government who just don't want the american people to know the truth well it is orwellian i know that's an overused reference but but the fact is it's the continual search for enemies the exaggeration of enemies uh cons and you know than then developing a neat mechanism for destroying the freedom of the american people in the name of fighting that enemy in 1984 you don't even care about what you name it you could just find one and the war on terror came at a convenient time

[19:46] we've always had terrorism and we always will have terrorism when people don't have airplanes they'll use somebody else's if civilian airplanes is a weapon of terror they don't have armies they and and uh whatever is driving them whether it's a form of insanity or their own uh religion or their own fanaticism of some sort uh so they do you know they make civilians uh the enemy and and so do we now with with the drone program but the irony is the

[20:16] senate intelligence committee that she was head of wasn't that set up in response to the the findings of of the church committee right oh a good good point bob yes you're exactly right the only reason we have senate and house intelligence committees is because of the crimes that the cia and the fbi were were committing uh prior to the establishment of the church committee in in the mid-1970s senator frank church yes who was a great man

[20:47] great man yeah and so here was dianne feinstein head of the committee that's supposed to be holding the cia accountable and most of the time she's just defending them mindlessly but then she finally gets this report and and it's supposed to be a victory that we get to read a heavily redacted uh part of the introduction uh rather uh than this as you say five thousand page report i i want to make one little i promised i wouldn't interrupt too much but there's one thing i want to mention

[21:17] you mentioned khalid sheikh mohammed as one of the people who was tortured and there's now going to be a lot of examination by historians and everybody else about why did we go to afghanistan what was afghanistan all about and of course the 9 11 attack and the key architect for people who don't remember or never knew of of this was all supposed to be khalid sheikh mohammed ironically a man who went uh to college in north carolina that's right uh and kind of liked the united states at that

[21:48] time and so i've always been curious how did khalid sheikh mohammed get to be this fanatic who wanted to destroy the twin towers and the pentagon and and so forth and and so i carefully read uh the uh the national um uh 9 11 commission report that right have been appointed right uh by by the president uh by by george bush and was supposed to be bipartisan and so forth

[22:19] and in that report they very clearly say they were not allowed this is the bipartisan uh committee on 9 11. what was 9 11 about they had the highest level of clearances and they're appointed by the president by george bush and they say in that report there's a disclaimer uh and and in that disclaimer they say they were never allowed to interview the people that were accused of doing this including the

[22:50] most important being khalid sheikh mohammed and uh what they were only allowed to do was put questions through the people who were doing the interrogation torture right and and and get some responses from from them so and they had to then write the report based on the information basically given to them by the torturers but they never got to talk to the people accused of the crime i have never understood why that is just

[23:21] sort of passed as a footnote to american history and here you know what does cop what would college sheikh mohammed have said if there was a trial you know there were a nuremberg trial you could find out what the nazis said why have we never been able to hear from these terrorists and you are one of the rare individuals that actually uh was involved in not the torture but in the interrogation of one of these people and what what does anybody even ask you about college sheikh mohammed or what

[23:53] happened what was that all about rarely i'm only very rarely um asked about khalid sheikh muhammad and you know just to to add to what you've said everything you've said is is true it's historical fact uh but the 911 commission was not allowed to interview the cia officers who had dropped the ball in the hunt for the the 9 11 hijackers and for khalid sheikh muhammad none of them weren't interviewed

[24:24] inexcusable but khalid sheikh muhammad is a fascinating figure because first of all how many times was he waterboarded is he still alive or what he's still alive he's um he's still awaiting trial before a military tribunal at guantanamo and every once in a while a statement will leak out through one of his attorneys um saying that well recently he had said he wanted to plead

[24:54] guilty and then he changed his mind and then he said he didn't do it and then he said that if they don't execute him he'll give the details of the planning and he's just all over the map but he's all over the map because he's largely lost his mind at guantanamo between being waterboarded 147 times uh and and undergoing other unspeakable tortures things worse than waterboarding uh he he's just not in his right mind as many

[25:26] of these guantanamo prisoners when you say worse than waterboarding you were in the cia you know we we we've kind of you know and we always accept everything as and under this rubric of american exceptionalism when we do torture it was a mistake maybe an accident uh it'll never happen again fact is we tortured people in vietnam it's one of the reasons why you know the pentagon papers were at issue the rand corporation where tony russo and daniel ellsberg were working

[25:56] and that's where they're the ones who whistleblowed who leaked those or took those papers to the new york times the fact is the rant corporation was going over the interrogation of vietcong prisoners in vietnam and that's what turned tony rousseau who was one of the people reading those reports against the war because the people he was reading about the statements were from people who were tortured it was this torture program of vietnam that's way before the torture program that was in afghanistan or iraq you know and but we have

[26:26] short-term memory and we think oh well torture it happened but you know no we are one of the main propagators of torture as a legitimate weapon of inquiry yes yes we absolutely are are and uh and we we pretend we pretend to be this shining beacon of respect for human rights and human dignity and it's just simply not true you know when i when i say that that khalid muhammad and others underwent

[26:56] torture that was worse than than waterboarding i i'm serious i i'm i'm not exaggerating here there were other techniques things like um for example uh sleep deprivation we know from the american psychological association uh which has studied this extensively that people begin to lose their minds at around day seven with no sleep and when i say no sleep bob i mean you're you're chained to an eye bolt in the ceiling

[27:27] so you can't you can't sit or lay down or get comfortable in any way and gina haspel knew all this and maybe even witnessed it oh yes 100 with 100 certainty she did gina haspel saw or does would she have actually seen somebody chained in that way oh yes yes that's that's what was happening at the secret site yeah chained to an eyebolt in the ceiling so you can't get comfortable

[27:57] uh bright lights like military industrial strength lights uh on 24 hours a day music blasting on a loop just being repeated over and over and over again 24 hours a day after seven days of that you start to go crazy at at day at day 12 you start to die you know people begin undergoing organ failure with no sleep

[28:28] and the cia was was authorized to keep people awake for 14 days beyond the point of death uh that some people suffer that was one technique the other was called the cold cell where again you're chained chained to this eye bolt in the ceiling and you're naked you're stripped naked and your cell is chilled to 50 degrees fahrenheit and every hour a cia officer goes into your cell and throws a bucket of ice water on you we killed people

[29:00] with that technique so there there were techniques certainly that in my view were worse than waterboarding now with waterboarding um it's supposed to induce the feeling of drowning in fact it it has made people drown abuzabeta had to be revived with cpr because he actually did drown during a waterboarding session so these these are these are techniques that were used that that are not you know gray areas well

[29:32] you know maybe they're not torture no no these are these are not just torture but internationally recognized forms of torture that have been banned by treaty to which the united states is right and i want to repeat that john kiriakou who i'm speaking with is the one person in the entire united states government who was punished in connection with the torture program he was not punished for torturing people he was punished for revealing that we

[30:04] were torturing people to a member of the press remember our constitution says that the press is supposed to be free and yet you spent time in prison because you dared to reveal that none of the torturers have ever been held accountable and and it means a startling reality but let me let the more the thing that is often left out and i want to get to is over the reason

[30:35] we were in afghanistan well not really we went in afghanistan to give the russians their vietnam and that's a whole nother story we were messing around in vietnam uh before and we brought al-qaeda people to vietnam that's another documented reality here the the people who did 9 11 you know the al-qaeda people were not natural to afghanistan they were brought there as part of a recruitment to fight when was when ronald reagan called them freedom fighters they were brought there to fight the russians but and who

[31:07] were defending by the way a secular government in kabul but uh the the reality is we don't know what happened with 9 11. and then that brands you was oh you're a i'm not denying there was this terrible attack and i'm not denying that al qaeda was behind it but the fact is we know very little it's like again i bring up more worlds 1984. you know you got an enemy okay you don't want to know too much about the enemy the one human being who had he had a lawyer and a trial we could have heard something from was khalid sheikh mohammed and he clearly by

[31:40] all accounts now seems to have been the key figure and the last thing in the world evidently the cia and the us government wanted was to hear from this guy we heard from nazi war criminals we learned a great deal about the nazis and what they did and what drove them and and how to fight the nazis we learned a great deal from them we have learned nothing uh from the inside of this terror camp nothing and you were there you were sitting in a room with at the time

[32:11] abu zuda who was the top they said was the top guy and you and an fbi agent actually got information from him so what i'm suggesting is that maybe our government didn't want to know who these guys are and what drove them because kali sheikh mohammed was a guy who was thought to be even somewhat pro-american when he was a college student he liked it here crazy as that sounds yeah that's true so how did he go from being this guy in north carolina the others you know they seem to like to go in texas when they

[32:42] were there and go to strip joints and everything who are these terrorists and what really drove them and so forth we have next to no information and we systematically destroyed the brains of p and the bodies of of people who could have given them some clues we tampered with the crime scene you're absolutely right it was my experience that we didn't really care what drove them you know our motivating our motivating factor was was 911 and it was revenge

[33:14] we didn't really want to understand why they did what they did now it was clear to those of us who had interrogated or in my case it wasn't so much an interrogation as it was a conversation a series of conversations with abu zubaydah um i i learned why he did what he did um you know absolutely i i spent 56 consecutive hours with abzu beta and i mean consecutive in the literal sense i

[33:46] sat at the foot of his bed for 56 hours and my orders were not to leave his bedside and so i didn't um we talked a lot about 911 and about why he did what he did and for him you know abu zubaid is palestinian for him it was it was u.s support for israel that motivated him to want to attack the united states it was according to him

[34:16] watching news video of an israeli soldier with his boot on the neck of a palestinian woman as she was screaming for help that's why he did what he did now khalid sheikh muhammad was a little different muhammad was a true believer in osama bin laden not just as as a political leader but as a religious leader despite the fact that osama bin laden had no religious credentials and and bin laden relied on khalid sheikh muhammad because

[34:48] he was an expert planner remember khalid sheikh muhammad was the one who planned the the bojinka attack in 1996 that was thwarted where as many as a dozen 747s were going to be hijacked from manila and flown into buildings all up and down the west coast of the united states that attack never took place we didn't know halechik muhammad's name we knew only his num daguerre which was mukhtar and it wasn't until the fbi interrogated

[35:22] abu zubaydah that he kept talking about khalid sheikh muhammad and his interrogators said who is this khalid sheikh muhammad you keep talking about and abu zubair laughed and said it's muktar you don't know mukhtar well that was a major piece of intelligence that we finally learned that muktar was khalid sheikh muhammad who had been educated at the at north carolina state university right with a degree in agricultural studies of all things

[35:53] uh the fbi got that cia torture didn't get that time for a break um we'll be back in a few minutes this is bob carlson of the unfictional podcast the new episode is called the low rider in paula's trademark is the three tail lights look at how sexy they look nice beautiful stick out nice and round perfect take a step back and you just gaze into her eyes really yeah so i don't know if i've mentioned this but uh i named my car her name is eileen take a cruise with ernie on a brand new

[36:25] episode of unfictional it's out now wherever you listen to podcasts we're back with sheer intelligence and our guest okay so the fact is torture is not only obviously inhuman and illegal by any decent standard it also gets in the way of getting information now the question is and that we're talking at a time when you know uh

[36:56] and that's interesting general petraeus uh who you know who i i just read uh recently an interview with him in the new yorker where he said we should have stayed in afghanistan it was working he still believes it was working he still believes the surges were working and ironically he became head of the c.i.a and he only had to step down uh because it turns out he had given his mistress not the information you were accused which was supposedly the name of a xcia person who wasn't even an uh on

[37:28] covert uh activity uh but rather and revealing the torture program that he had but uh he had these black books that were the highest uh level of secrecy the briefing books for the president of the united states and he had gave him to his mistress you know who was also his autobiographer it was convenient to have a autobiography i mean a biographer who's a you're a mistress and and he got a slap on the wrist and you got prison time he didn't get yeah

[37:59] boy did he get a slap on the wrist i want to emphasize some of the things that you just said because i think that they're really important in the context of how these issues are approached by by the government on the day of my sentencing david petraeus sent an all hands email that's an email to every employee of the cia everywhere in the world and he said that john kiriakou was

[38:31] sentenced today to two and a half years in prison this should be a reminder to all of us that oaths matter he said and that you will be prosecuted for not respecting your oath two hours after hitting the send button on that email he lied to two fbi officers in his office saying that he had never given his adulterous mistress any classified information

[39:01] he was never charged with making a false statement to federal officers which by the way is a felony punishable by up to five years in prison and when they finally confronted him months later with the proof that not only had he passed his mistress classified information he had real he had revealed the the identities of ten covert cia officers and he had given her access to the black

[39:32] books which are literally the most highly classified documents produced by the central intelligence agency and what did he get he got 18 months of unsupervised probation a misdemeanor and at sentencing the judge came down from the bench to shake his hand and thank him for his service to the country you know you can't make this stuff up i mean you

[40:04] know uh and then so let's say somebody from you know let's say rachel maddow is listening to this she won't be but let's say she's listening one of the good people in the mass media i think she makes about 15 million right here or something i don't know what and now she owns part of the company huh now she owns part of the company thanks to her most recent contract what is that what tell us yeah in her most recent contract she signed this super deal where in addition to her i think it's 12 million that she

[40:36] makes which is roughly double what everybody else in the industry in her position makes they gave her part ownership of msnbc which is owned by uh which is owned by universal i believe we'll have to check on that uh are you serious yeah yeah okay so she's listening to this and let's presume she's still a decent person and cares and and so forth how do you square this that here's john kiriakou who served in prison time in

[41:08] prison for revealing they claim uh the existence of this torture program and maybe they say uh reveal because you the guy said do you know anybody in the cia who knows about the torture program and you gave him the name a card of somebody you just spoken to who disagreed with you who actually supported the program that was supposed to be your crime and you just said petraeus revealed ten names i know another cia director panetta the former

[41:39] democratic congressman he had a ceremony over at the cia where they had the zero dark 30 movie writers and so forth there where they revealed the identity of the people the navy seals who had captured and killed uh bin laden one of the you know these are people who could then be targets for any uh terrorists around the world who liked bin laden or worked for him and and yet he didn't serve any time so he have two cia directors who are just let off right yeah that's exactly that's exactly

[42:12] what happened that's exactly what happened you know the you raise a very important point here too with uh regarding the mainstream media i've been on all of the major u.s news networks msnbc cnn fox it's been a long time uh but they've invited me on periodically over the years and i'm always on the defensive because it doesn't matter if you're on

[42:42] fox or you're on you know msnbc for the most part it's going to be a pro cia interview and the funny thing to me is only under donald trump did fox finally turn against the cia and the real cheerleaders for the cia are msnbc and cnn and i'll give you an example i was invited on to this uh re melber show with daniel ellsberg so dan joined from san francisco i joined from washington melbourne's in

[43:16] in new york so the producer called me a day in advance and said how would you like to be introduced and i said oh it's always either former cia officer john kiriakou or cia torture whistleblower john kiriakou and they said okay how about if we just go with a former cia officer i said yeah that's fine so i go to the studio tons of makeup that they put on i get miked up i'm sitting there there's dan on the other monitor and uh they're taping it for later in

[43:47] the day and he says we're gonna take 30 minutes we're going to use about 10 minutes i said great he interviews dan first and then he comes to me and he says we're joined from washington by convicted felon and cia leaker john kiriakou and i shouted mother [ __ ] excuse my language i said i went over this yesterday with your producer i said if you dragged me all the way up here to play games with me i am never speaking to you or your network ever again and i pulled my

[44:19] microphone off and he says wait wait wait i'm sorry i'm sorry please please don't and the producer runs in i'm so sorry it was just a miscommunication and i said don't ever ever treat me like that again so they mic me back up well how do you want to be how do you want to be introduced i said we've gone over this i said make it cia torture whistleblower john kiriyaku so they did but then they cut me down to 20 seconds

[44:50] out of a 30 minute interview and they never asked me to come back and that was msnbc or msnbc msnbc the great liberal hope exactly uh that is just well let me add one other thing and this is the reason that i boycott the rachel maddow show because on cnn even before i went to prison they identified me every time they interviewed me they they identified me as cia torture whistleblower john

[45:22] kiriakou fox news from the day of my arrest called me a whistleblower whistleblower john kiriakou msnbc calls me cia leaker john kiriakou and on the rachel maddow show every time she mentions my name she says john kiriakou who styles himself a whistleblower and so every time her producer calls i say i don't do the rachel maddow show

[45:54] she's a tool of the corporations she's a warmonger and a torture lover and i am not doing her show let's think about this for a second we're gonna run out of time what but uh you got another what five ten minutes or so sure okay uh let's make this an hour interview then we got another 15 minutes because we got to really learn this stuff and again you know uh i'm guided a lot in my interviewing by

[46:24] what i need as a teacher and i'm devoting my class this term to going you know examining brave new world in 1984 and considering whether we're heading to a dystopian future here and lying and and you know one of the big offenses of donald trump because he was so crude as to be ultimately ineffective rude crude you know i call him the sweaty armpit of american capitalism he gave too much away and and uh the people like that petraeus

[46:56] and panetta and brennan and rachel maddow these are people who can make it you know all about manners all about manners and and their wit and so forth and yet you know uh gina she go and she could see a human being hanging from a ceiling being tortured and somehow oh that's okay you know that's okay and find a polite civilized concerned way to discuss it whereas trump said hey

[47:27] i support it i've trumped some water bought them all you know so he's giving away too much the fact is it was barack obama who brought cases against whistleblowers more espionage cases than anyone right uh any president all the presidents before him and uh actually uh trump has had a shorter record so let's really talk about the role of manners and partisan politics and one way we've been able to cover up you know barack obama had a

[47:58] chance uh to have a church commission he had a chance to really look seriously at what uh what this torture thing was all about and he said you know i'm against torture that's not what we do well it is what we do we tortured native americans you know we threw their babies into the fire for god's sake even in california in the 19th century well documented you know uh and so torture's been as american as apple pie for goodness sake and and if we don't

[48:28] recognize that fact you know and we don't recognize that we've been able to do you know barbaric acts on civilians including the dropping of the atomic bombs and drone attacks and so forth we don't really examine ourselves and why do we go along with it why doesn't rachel maddow want to hear more particularly now with the utter failure of this whole afghan adventure you're somebody who knows arabic you're somebody who's been in the region or somebody was in the inside of all this why wouldn't you know

[49:00] msnbc uh have you on instead of having all these ex-generals and people who are actually war criminals yeah well and and it's not just me i'm actually one of the small fries if you look back at people like phil donahue or jesse ventura they both lost their shows on msnbc because of their opposition to the iraq war a former colleague of mine brian becker was a was a regular anti-war voice on msnbc and then once we

[49:31] invaded iraq they decided he was too anti-war and he never went back on msnbc ever again but you turn on msnbc or or cnn or definitely fox and all you see is a parade of retired three and four-star generals or retired deputy directors or directors of the cia and the fbi there there's no room for for a thoughtful anti-war voice on any of these networks

[50:03] yeah i mean just to be clear msnbc is owned by nbc universal news group which is the division of nbc uh universal uh and and so you know we're talking about uh mainstream media a corporate media and uh all of them are you know whether it's murdock or whoever owns it these things but they hire people that act as if they're civil libertarians they're

[50:34] feminists they're liberals they're enlightened and rachel maddow certainly fits that bill and has a massive following of people who she thinks she represents enlightenment well if you're really enlightened and you really care about an informed public and you're talking about what was afghanistan all about how dare how dare you not talk to john kiriakou and i'm not you know trying to thank you to float your boat or something i mean i just don't get it you know i mean i can't complete a sentence in arabic i

[51:05] doubt if she can you know you you know the language you i mean take us through it you were in bahrain you were all these places you were yeah you know most of my most of my adult life i spent living in the middle east i mean i i've recruited spies to steal secrets for the american government i've proudly served my country i was the the victim of two separate assassination attempts over the course of my 15-year career with the cia and then on top of that i worked counter-terrorism issues at the

[51:36] senate foreign relations committee as one of four senior staff members working for john kerry but for some reason i just don't meet the qualifications for any of these news networks well and this is what happened to daniel ellsberg daniel ellsberg had been in the prison he'd been in the marines then he was in the pentagon he was a brilliant harvard student you know and henry kissinger used to try to take credit for first for ellsberg being one of his students and then uh he then tried to destroy him when he was working for nixon uh you know and and we got to talk

[52:08] about this because you know you are for my money looking at it trying to look at it objectively the exemplary american citizen you know you are come on what are we talking about here i'm not you know i i don't claim it i didn't work for the cia and i didn't offer my services i've always been a kind of a contrarian and a critic and so forth but you are the the good scout you're the eagle scout you're going to college you're going to george washington and you and you already know greek and you know someone you have

[52:39] facility for language and the cia guy or xci again if they're ever ex he's your teacher and he says wow and he recruits you you were recruited out of graduate school to go work for the cia and you learn arabic and they post you everywhere and you become an expert and you're doing really well you're honored there uh for 15 years and what happens is you only become the bad boy from the good boy uh because you object to the torture program and you know one funny thing too i

[53:10] thought then let's not slough over that though people listen i've got to understand you were the boy scout i was i was the boy scout and i i was talking about this to a good friend of mine who uh when i say good friend of mine i mean really good we were at the cia together he's a brigadier general in the army he happens to be a psychiatrist on top of it we go to the same church we're in the same men's group we were talking about this and i said i said yeah they really turned on me

[53:41] when i came out against torture and he said no they didn't he said they turned on you when you were still inside he said when you came back from pakistan don't you remember he said they used to call you behind your back the human rights guy and i said yeah he said that wasn't a joke it was 2002 that they turned against you they just waited for the opportunity to really drop the load of bricks on you that took five six more years but he said in 2002 when you were the

[54:13] only one who wouldn't participate in the torture training that's when they decided they were gonna get you and i never thought of it that way but he was right it started in 2002. well so take us to that story 2002. yeah i came back from pakistan in in may of 2002 and um on the strength of the abzu beta capture i was promoted i got a medal i got a big cash award and i became the executive assistant to the

[54:45] cia's deputy director for operations major job and in that position i had access to literally everything that the cia was doing around the world and um i was in the cafeteria one day for lunch and a senior officer walked up to me and very casually said hey i'm glad i ran into you i i wanted to ask you uh do you want to be certified in the use of enhanced interrogation techniques and i

[55:15] had never heard that term before and i said well what what's that mean and he said we're gonna start getting rough with these guys and he was very animated about it and i said well what does that mean and so he described to me these torture techniques i said give me an hour to think about it well i thought about it i talked to another senior officer and i went back and i said look this is a torture program i think it's illegal it's certainly immoral and unethical and i

[55:46] don't want any part of it as it turned out they had asked 14 people and i was the only one who said no and it was funny too weeks afterwards well not funny haha funny sad weeks afterwards i was passed over for promotion and i went into the deputy director of the counterterrorism center's office who was a friend of mine and i was in a rage and i said what do i

[56:17] have to do to get promoted around here i just captured the number three in al qaeda do i have to capture bin laden is that how i get promoted well it turned out that the deputy director of the cia heard that i had been passed over for promotion and he promoted me it's called a field promotion but they passed me over because i wouldn't participate in the torture program

[56:47] and i just never put two and two together until later but we have to i want people listening to this to understand you know i've always i never i tried to understand germany my father was from germany and uh was protestant my mother was jewish so i grew up you know i'm born in 36 and i went back to germany many times to try to figure out why these good german people you know my father had left germany after world war one but you know my relatives my

[57:19] uncle was wounded at stalingrad and everything you know how could they go along with the most barbaric regime and here they were so civilized you know they were farmers but they were well-read i shouldn't say but but you know they were well educated by such standards and and they you know they said well you know you have to know how hard our economic situation was or you had to know or we were just following orders or we never saw any jewish people and you had all these rationalizations and and germany quickly snapped back to being one of the most

[57:50] respected nations which it had been before yes hitler so you have this brief period relatively in german history where they're the greatest barbarians in human history modern human history you know well i think that often when i think about my own government and and it's what hannah arren called the banality of evil the banality of evil and it's easy to focus on some primitive you know fanatical muslim tribesmen somewhere in afghanistan and say oh well no wonder they do bad things we're

[58:21] talking about the best educated people and those other people of the 14 the other 13 who would go along with torture they probably had doctorates or certainly law degrees or masters or something and and why wouldn't they challenge it that that is the really fundamental question to ask about all this it's what david halberstein wrote you know the title of his book on vietnam the best and the brightest that war was not given to us by idiots or poorly educated

[58:51] people people who didn't understand that china and vietnam but although they were both run by communist parties would end up being at war which they have been and china had occupied vietnam for a thousand years and the whole thing was all crazy and to be in vietnam as a block to china and the whole thing was nuts they knew all that they still went along with it and they went along with the torture of the vietnamese that they thought was necessary and the people you were dealing with were all well-educated right and and yeah like sober people and

[59:22] contemporary these are all very highly educated in most cases ivy league educated you're right sober patriotic you know this is something i've i've struggled with i've tried to address in my own books these are people who you know your book the reluctant spy of people that's right the reluctant spy these were friends of mine our our wives were friends our children played together and

[59:53] here they turned out to be monsters monsters murderers in some cases well that's a point on which to end the good guys is monsters murderers the best and the brightest and you know that i think there's only one a dozen copies of that torture report still around uh yeah i think it's about a dozen yeah and they'd like to just they'll probably they're good at it they'll succeed in destroying those copies

[1:00:24] and then they'll say any copy you find is made up or something and we'll never get the story of torture any more than we ever got the story of the genocide against american indians or with the reality of slavery or anything because we're we're good at many things and one thing we're good at is whitewashing white washing uh we're really brilliant at it and there's no indeed sense of accountability ever ever uh well you know i'm gonna get you back on i've decided i'm gonna

[1:00:55] we gotta we gotta we gotta do an oral history here we gotta do a book that that sounds like an outstanding idea yeah you know i just i just sent to my publisher my seventh book and um i i would like to do one just for fun on my own next as number eight but then i probably should do something serious after that well i'm certainly here and i'd like i mean i've already done i think three or four four interviews with you i'd like to put them all together a book do i

[1:01:25] have your permission yeah i guess please do i think that would be so much fun okay well i don't i don't want to have too much fun here because we should really you know you want to keep your humanity and think about these things but you know if you think about anyone you care about any fellow human being being shackled tortured and and so forth i don't care whether it's you know maximum security prison in the united states or in china or anywhere you know

[1:01:56] you you lose your own sense of humanity if you can't feel outraged about that and what you're really telling me and whether these people the generals the politicians the newscasters they're just they've lost their sense of humanity they're just they really have yeah they're not really here if they were accountable uh john kiriakou would be listened to instead he's made been made a non-person and i you know probably have more people

[1:02:26] who listen to me who watch msnbc think of that the next time you do think about why why john kiriakou is not on those shows challenging the these these generals you know uh who who and and government officials who covered for torture but that's all the time we got now uh see you next week let me thank uh christopher ho from kcrw for posting these shows joshua shear who was the executive producer of the show and put

[1:02:56] me together with john kiriakou and actually uh i think he didn't work with you but he knew you knows you you know the only reason we didn't work together is because the day he started i almost got killed in a car accident and i spent the next eight weeks recovering well so that's if you have another show and you might still uh joshua's here from that's right and uh you know let's uh i want to thank lucy burbear for doing the transcription natasha hakimi zapata who writes the

[1:03:27] introduction i want to thank the jwk foundation in the memory of gene stein who is a courageous journalist for helping fund these shows see you next week with another edition of sheer intelligence [Music]
