Title: Kevin Gosztola
Show: Kevin Gosztola (The Dissenter)
Date: 2020-01-03
URL: https://youtu.be/OeU8ioca92M
Duration: 36:00

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[00:00] hello everyone and welcome to the dissenter weekly update for January 3rd 2020 I'm Kevin gas Toula managing editor for shadow proof comm we launched this show in 2019 and each week we run down the latest news and whistleblowing and related press freedom stories we also highlight developments with WikiLeaks Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning on today's show we welcome guest host John Kiriakou he is a CIA whistleblower and a former senior investigator with the

[00:31] Senate Foreign Relations Committee he's also a good friend of shadow proof welcome to the show thank you so on today's show we'll be talking about more documents from WikiLeaks that expose fraud in an OPCW investigation in Syria as well as Trump's assassination of an Iranian general and how that for that pertains to the war on whistleblowers but first we encourage viewers to hit the red subscribe button below this

[01:01] video to follow our show and remember that shadow proof is a hundred percent reader funded and supported website our ability to do this show depend on your financial support if you want to help us sustain this show and grow as an organization please donate or become a member at shadow proof comm slash donate so to begin we'll we'll do our first topic which is related to Amazon and critics who have been outspoken against

[01:33] Amazon to Amazon employees were informed they could be fired after they spoke out against Amazon Marin Costa and Jaime Kowalski previously said Amazon's cloud computing business AIDS oil and gas exploration customer called it was scary to be called into a meeting like that and then to be given a follow-up email saying that if I continue to speak up I can be fired but I spoke up because I'm terrified by the harm the climate crisis is already causing and I fear for my

[02:03] children's future so Jon to you I mean we've we've seen in the close of 2019 these horrific images from Australia of the brushfires we've seen other examples of these natural disasters in the last year or these natural occurrences that show the effects and yet we have this major mega corporation like Amazon cracking down on employees freedom of speech yeah this is a very disturbing development

[02:34] inside a company that has already given us lots of different reasons to be concerned you know Amazon it was reported just recently in the last couple of months for example does oh it's like we're having a connection issue give its own employees a cup or a jar and throw it away they're not even allowed to go to the bathroom now here we have an example of employees reporting waste fraud abuse or

[03:05] illegality the very definition of whistleblowing being threatened with the loss of their employment and then the actual loss of their employment following the the warnings so yeah this is just another reason to hate Amazon and companies like Amazon and it's another reason to go to our elected officials to complain because there have to be protections and and they have to be codified protections for whistleblowers in corporate settings as well as governmental all right thanks

[03:36] for that John we're gonna go on to the next story which involves a whistleblower lawsuit in Pittsburgh Jeremy Roe the CEO of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center has said that he wants UPMC to become the quote/unquote Amazon of health care and in a recent development we saw in the final week of 2019 that a whistleblower lawsuit against UPMC neurosurgeons was reinstated by a federal appeals court it

[04:07] alleges starting in 2000 origins quote inflated the number of spine operations they did while performing needlessly complex medical procedures to beef up their earnings quote and that was in the Pittsburgh post-gazette a local newspaper again this shows the profit motive in healthcare and how it makes it really difficult for people to guarantee that they're actually getting the appropriate treatment they deserve

[04:38] this is really an example of corporate greed I'm from the Pittsburgh area I was born and raised in the Pittsburgh area I can tell you that the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center is one of the most highly respected medical what can you call it a conglomerate in the United States on top of that the Pittsburgh post-gazette is a very serious newspaper it's a serious investigative journalism site the pit party is telling us besides

[05:11] the fact that there was this profit motive and that that UPnP was trying to maximize profits was that they were purposely putting people's lives at risk in order to maximize these profits that it takes a certain kind of sickness I believe I think this is a bigger story than the national media has has given it credit for being frankly the reporting has pretty much only been in the Pittsburgh post-gazette this is something that needs to go national because I believe it's indicative of a bigger and broader problem throughout

[05:42] healthcare yeah and for those people who follow whistleblowing issues closely they're they're accused of violating kickback statutes they're also accused of violating the False Claims Act maybe you have some knowledge of the False Claims Act I know that this is a very useful tool that people have used to are interested in challenging the the culture of fraud in this country seem to

[06:13] be having a connection issue John yeah I just got back I just heard you I got most of your question yeah you know this is exactly why the False Claims Act was passed into law in the first place it was to it to expose and to to out organized I'm using the air quotes around organized criminal activity when it comes to inflating billing operations so you know we we go after we go after the Mafia for

[06:44] example using Rico statutes well this is kind of the the RICO statute of of health care we have this law for reason we have this law because earlier whistleblowers have shown us that such a law was necessary if this brings down doctors neurosurgeons if it brings down corporate leaders at UPMC health and UPMC Medical Center then it needs to it needs to be done all right

[07:15] and just like to acknowledge that there's a little bit of a problem with the Commission but we're gonna keep on in the past weeks of 2019 we had WikiLeaks despite the fact that Julian Assange is their founder is in jail facing this extradition case for on 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act we

[07:46] have an organization that has been under attack still doing crucial work and they've been working to expose fraud in the organization for the prohibition of chemical weapons investigation into an alleged chemical attack in DOMA Syria in April 2018 they released a fourth batch of documents from whistleblowers and it contained further proof victims in videos that we all saw we're not

[08:16] suffering from toxic chlorine gas as symptoms were inconsistent we're also finding that one of the engineers who who is a whistleblower and this has had his work suppressed and essentially was informed or found out that his work was going to be removed from a database so that nobody knew that it had any existence whatsoever that had not been done in connection with this

[08:46] investigation I wonder what what are your comments on this effort that WikiLeaks led them in Alden to aid these professionals in exposing what the OPCW did yeah this is a far bigger deal than what this is 15 separate investigators objecting to the fact that their analysis was either

[09:18] taken out of context or it was falsified entirely that the opcw's final analysis of events on the ground following the alleged we now know false chemical attack in Douma took place the the conclusion was that there was no evidence to indicate that such an attack took place that the the information was falsified and it was the false information that was used to come to a political conclusion so the fact set

[09:50] that means whistleblowers came out I think is wonderful it was very it was very brave back the fact that they had to rely on WikiLeaks to do in that sphere resides me but it also as you pointed out serves to remind us not to the canvas and they keep coming out with

[10:22] these with these original first-person documents proving that so much of what we know from the mainstream media is just a false narrative we wouldn't know any of the story without WikiLeaks yeah absolutely and I just wanted to mention a quote from one of these documents that was put up on leaks website where I mentioned that expert stated that the onset of excessive frothing as a result

[10:54] of pulmonary edema observed in photos and reported by witnesses would not occur in the short time from the reported occurrence of the alleged incident and the time the videos were recorded so approximately three to four hours and then furthermore and this is from a toxicology meeting that took place June 2018 you see the experts were also of the opinion it was highly unlikely that victims would have gathered in aisles at the center of their respective apartments as such a short distance from an escape from any

[11:27] toxic chlorine gas to clean your air and you also see things here like that suggest it one of the other email threads shared suggest that the death of the circumstances of death for the victims chlorine rather than a corpse was arranged one of the things that's been key about these documents that's been showing is a very likelihood that much of this that's finished for us yeah it's funny that's

[11:58] what the investigators said from the very beginning and nobody paid any attention to them so even after these revelations from from WikiLeaks we see shows like Morning Joe on MSNBC another one is Ali Velshi on CNN repeating this narrative that there was a chlorine gas attack in do that the chlorine gas attack was it just simply is not true in a letter to the UK government we had UN special rabbit or Niels Meltzer share

[12:31] his strong objection to the UK government's indifference toward Julian Assange's ongoing abuse and mistreatment this was a quote that was in his letter no objective observer can escape the conclusion that mr. Assange is that mr. Assange is due process rights have been seriously consistently and deliberately violated in every phase of each judicial proceeding conducted against him in all involved jurisdictions as we had this really strong letter and it was pointing

[13:02] out how Julian Assange you know all of this evidence of psychological torture was brought to the attention of the UK government and then yet they continue to deny that any such torture has taken place and in fact Niels Meltzer doesn't stop at Assange's abuse he also connects it to the fact that the British government has done nothing to comply with requests and/or the effort of UN officials to urge the

[13:33] British government to care about their and their involvement in the torture and rendition program and and so Niels Meltzer connects their indifference to Julian Assange as torture to their indifference to getting accountability or seeking accountability for torture and rendition your comments John yeah this is a an important statement coming from the United Nations Special Rapporteur I'm afraid that it's been largely ignored at least by the US and

[14:04] British governments I'm in touch with Julian Assange's attorney he's and this is a real concern that they have when we read in the media for example Kevin that Julian struggles to remember his own name or that he is unable to participate in his own defense they're serious about this they're not making this up they're not exaggerating there they're experienced in their contacts with him this is this is a real thing and it's because the American and British governments are are breaking him

[14:36] mentally and emotionally they're doing it deliberately they're doing it with malice aforethought and the United Nations thank goodness has recognized that now what's more important is that we need a judge to recognize that his hearing for extradition of the United States is coming up in February I know that you'll be there these hearings normally take up that's John normally take about four hours this one is scheduled to be something like four weeks so perhaps there's a chance that

[15:08] that something good may come of this I don't know I don't think any of us know including his own attorneys I was also glad to see that the special repertoire mentioned Chelsea Manning that Chelsea Manning her treatment is also is also a kin to torture chessy manny has not even been charged with a crime she's being held in attempted court for refusing to testify against Julian Assange before a grand jury Jeremy Hammond the the famed anonymous hacker is also being held

[15:38] without charge for failing to to testify against Julian and a grand jury these grand juries are are renewed even after their term runs out and as a result people like Chelsea and Jeremy can be held literally indefinitely now Julian's already been charged with a crime and there's a law in the United States saying that a journey cannot be I'm sorry a grand jury cannot be impaneled or cannot continue to be impaneled once the charges have been levied well this tells me that either

[16:10] the Department of Justice is breaking the law in continuing to hold Chelsea Jeremy or they intend to add additional charges on to the two dozen plus charges they've already filed against Julian it's something that we probably won't know the truth about until at least February and probably March as you mentioned Niels Meltzer also wrote a letter to the US government on Manning's coercive confinement and it's me the first time that he put something

[16:40] together importantly he references his predecessor Juan Mendez who we both know very well had determined that Manning was tortured that if not cruelly and humanely treated while she was confined at Quantico after being arrested for disclosing documents to Wikileaks and Chelsea had her own reaction to all this she said that I am thrilled to see the practice of coercive confinement called out for what it is incompatible with international human rights standards regardless even knowing I am very likely

[17:13] to stay in jail for an even longer time I'm never backing down and so that was a big deal there we your your comments on Chelsea anything else you might have to add on Chelsea Manning you know I'm gonna say Chelsea Manning has been through a lot over the last decade decade plus I have to say that I am absolutely astounded

[17:43] at the level of strength and metal that she has displayed these these coercive detentions are meant solely to break people and to tell the truth Chelsea could have gotten out of this early on by playing a little game with the prosecutors she could have gone before that grand jury and answered every question with the response I don't recall plain and simple and they would have had to let her go she was offered immunity and and refused the immunity saying that

[18:16] immunity was unnecessary because everything that they wanted to ask her before the grand jury she had already testified to in her own trial in a military court and she urged them just to take the transcript of her own testimony and enter that into the record so she could have a third thing is she could have testified against Julian but she stood up and she refused so this is this is an unusual toughness this is a toughness and fortitude that we don't normally see on a day-to-day basis I have mad respect for Chelsea Manning and

[18:49] for the way she has stood up and one of the things that we've been doing on the show is we give people an update on the amount of time that these cases that we're following so before we move on to the last looser discussions that we have for the end of the show it's 296 days that Chelsea Manning has been in jail she owes a hundred and eighty-seven thousand dollars in fines now and of course we also know that

[19:20] Julian Assange has now been in jail it's going on nine months and he served a 50 week sentence for violating bail conditions already and yet as highlighted in Neil's Meltzer's letter not released on house arrest so unable to prepare an adequate defense you mentioned jeremy hammond so jeremy hammond is now in the alexandria detention center that's the same one that chelsea manning is being held and

[19:52] and particularly for him it's important for people to note that it's not clear what is up into his sentence because he was originally sentenced to 10 years for violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and so it's not clear if that sentence has been suspended so that he can be punished for contempt of grand jury do you know if no I don't know but there's another important point there I'm glad that you raised that because you've reminded me Jeremy was participating in something called our death that's the residential drug and alcohol

[20:24] program it's a Bureau of Prisons program that allows you to go through something like 10 or 12 months of drug and alcohol counseling the fact the matter is at least in the prison that I was in you go every week and you watch videotaped episodes of intervention from ane that counts as your drug and alcohol counseling and then at the end of it you have up to 18 months taken off your your sentence but you have to complete the

[20:54] whole year before you get the reward well Jeremy had two months left to go in his RDoc counseling they yanked him out of our dad to send him to Alexandria jail the the federal holding Center in Alexandria Virginia where he's refusing to testify in the grand jury against Julian Assange that means that they have effectively added 18 months to his sentence so even if he had agreed to testify this was just a way to screw Jeremy Hammond and to lengthen his

[21:26] sentence all right and then we'll also just mention that reality winner is serving her sentence and that that continues and she's the NSA whistleblower she's doing a sentence in a facility in Texas Terri Albury is still completing his sentence and he's met by whistleblower and then so and then there's another case but we'll get to it at the end of the show so I wanted to catch up with you because one thing we mostly ignored on the show was this

[21:59] Ukraine call whistleblower because it's dominated attention and the whole purpose of doing this show has been to cover these whistleblower stories that don't get covered in the media but I wanted to talk with you because you were one of the first people that I talked to when it's all started to get reported and like I wanted to know what you thought about it and there's been discussion about you know whether this person is a whistleblower or not but you know in the last week or two it's become this big thing where Trump gets accused of retaliating against the whistleblower

[22:31] by naming the whistleblower the Republicans go on Twitter and they share a name and they get used of naming the whistleblower it seems kind of silly but then it also is connected to something serious I think because we don't really want public officials just outing what's blowers randomly in order to go after them and I think the biggest problem that I have is that we have a clear case here of a partisan whistleblower and so it's been really difficult to figure out

[23:03] what is the truth in all of this yeah let me get one thing out of the way right off the bat I'm on record you were the first person I spoke to about this but I'm on record as saying that I don't believe that this is a real whistleblower and it's not because the whistleblower has taken one partisan position or taken another partisan position it's that there's a very specific mo that one has to go through to report waste fraud abuse or illegality in the intelligence community

[23:34] you go to your supervisor from there to the Inspector General the Inspector General then goes to the oversight committees that's not what happened not even remotely close to what happened in this case in this case the whistleblower went to his supervisor his supervisor went to the Inspector General the inspector general though then went to the General Counsel's office the general counsel went to the CIA leadership back to the inspector general to the DNI Inspector General and then not to the

[24:04] oversight committees but to the Justice Department so what we ended up with if you read this CIA whistleblower complaint is not a straight account of what the whistleblower claims to have seen or or wants to reveal it's it's a very legalistic document clearly written by a team of turnings now at the CIA on the analytic side where this whistleblower supposedly is you go through six months of writing training at the CIA's famed training

[24:37] facility called the farm known as the farm and they do that because they want every CIA analyst to write in exactly the same style so that when the president reads the the PDB the president's Daily Brief every morning no matter who wrote it it looks exactly the same but this whistleblower complaint is not in that CIA di writing style it's in a style of attorneys and that tells me that whatever information the whistleblower initially reported or

[25:07] wanted to report it was overtaken by the CIA's general counsel and the CIA's leadership and then reported back to the DNI it never made its way to the Oversight Committee like it was supposed to and I believe that it was then it was in part advocated so I don't take this whistleblower seriously I actually went on one of the new shows and said that I didn't think it was a whistleblower I thought it was an anonymous source for the Democratic staff of the House Intelligence Committee now with that said and out of the way

[25:39] I can't see any reason any legitimate reason why you would have to reveal the the identity of the whistleblower that just doesn't make any sense to me now internally in the CIA that whistleblowers probably never going to work in a serious job again even if he's able to remain inside the CIA the battle lines are gonna be drawn his career is finished if his identity is revealed and it pretty much already has been he's gonna have trouble even getting

[26:10] follow-on employment and that's just not fair we can disagree about the the methodology we can disagree about the information or the import of the information but ruining the guy on purpose is is exactly what we should be standing up and and opposing at least I know you and I have opposed it from the very beginning I think it's just wrong yeah well and I think that one of the things so there are two points and then we'll move on to the last thing but one issue is this tug-of-war between

[26:43] whether it's journalism or whether it's trying to out the person I think that if you're a journalist you reasonably would start to have questions about where this person comes from who surrounds them what was the genesis of this these allegations and and how they came to be public I think that's a fair thing to explore now initially I guy remember talking to you about the way the New York Times went and reported it but that was because they were just splashing

[27:14] that this was a CIA person with no context whatsoever and that was my objection but I suppose a most significant thing to talk about is this narrative which is I suppose this you can call whistleblower can now claim to be hugely instrumental in the house impeachment President Donald Trump and and how should we process that yeah you know it goes to motivation and whistleblower attorneys will tell you that motivation is irrelevant if a

[27:45] person is reporting waste fraud abuse illegality or threats to the public health or public safety that's all that matters motivation is irrelevant to the to the argument but you know I struggle with that because in this case it seems to me that motivation would be the heart of the argument I would want to know what the what the whistleblowers motivation was because it would help me to conclude whether or not it was a real whistleblower but we we spent what a day or two days on that issue when the New

[28:16] York Times as you rightly say splashed it on the front page and then everybody just stopped talking about it and I sorry do you think there's any merit to Republicans complaining that they can't interview this person or is it fair because of the way we've seen behavior reported for them to not have access to this person no I think they should have access you know when I blew the whistle on the torture program I was subpoenaed by the Senate Armed Services Committee and I went up to the Armed Services

[28:48] Committee and met with the staff for a solid eight or nine hour it was half Democratic and half Republican we were in the vault the skiff it's called so we can speak freely we could speak you know in a classified setting and the questions from both sides were were all relevant they were all down in the weeds they were all investigative in nature and while I fully recognized how partisan Capitol Hill is especially at a time like this I

[29:19] can't help but to think that the staffs at least would have been professional and the Republicans probably should have had the opportunity to interview that whistleblower all right so the last thing that I wanted to talk to you about involved this assassination of an Iranian general that vividly played out less than 24 hours ago and we learned that Trump had himself apparently authorized this drone strike on the Iranian general it was in it was in

[29:50] Baghdad it was on an airstrip that apparently I understand he was killed and the point I wanted to make with you here was and how it relates to the show is that we had a lot of whistleblowing on this assassination complex as it's been to thread or the drone programs that the military as well as the CIA we had a lot of public information that warned us of what could happen if somebody like president Donald Trump was elected and was able to use this power

[30:21] we criticized Barack Obama constantly where his appointing himself judge jury and executioner a lot of people who were critics and these whistleblowers were shooed away and told to buy it because it was President Obama and he's a smart person we should trust him and then it turns out now is this is where we find ourselves with a very dramatic escalation that could be happening between the u.s. and Iran your thoughts yeah this is why we have such a great

[30:53] debt of gratitude to people like David Hale one of the the brave drone whistleblowers he warned us that this was going to happen and and you're exactly right that we we Barack Obama so much slack in this illegal program you know it's it's not legal to send drones to other countries and to just rocket people without due process without the the right to confront their accusers in a court of law before a jury of their peers whether

[31:24] we like their politics are not as irrelevant what's what what's relevant is that they have the same constitutional protections at least they're supposed to that everybody else has and so Barack Obama got away with it for so long the inevitable continuation was going to be Donald Trump getting away with it and now we have Donald Trump killing arguably the second most important person in Iran a potential successor to the supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei we're talking about Qasem Soleimani

[31:54] and there's there's going to be retaliation you know an Iranian journalist tweeted last night that he asked Iranian officials isn't it true that this is like killing Petraeus or mattis and the response was no this is far worse than killing Petraeus or mattis this is like killing pence and so you know everybody's talking about de-escalation de-escalation is a pipe dream Mike Pompeo the Secretary of State and former CIA director was on Fox and

[32:25] Friends this morning in which he said incredibly we're we're in we're in you know Orwellian craziness right now he said that that this was a move that was made in order to help de-escalation and that by killing silly money we saved untold lives number of lives of Muslims and of course all the all the nattering nabobs

[32:56] on Fox just nodded their heads over and over that like that made total sense that by taking out the the number two most powerful person in Iran that's going to help bring peace to the region and it's gonna make Muslims safer that's what we're dealing with here yeah and we also heard I believe from people like Pompeo that they're going to wake up in the morning and thanked us for what we had done echoing dick cheney's they'll be greeting us with liberators

[33:26] when we come to Iraq and I think a good point to close here is just to make it abundantly clear that one of the things we need most are whistleblowers from military and yes these national security or intelligence agencies who could come forward right now and speak out about what is happening we don't get that enough but we also know in particular with Iran what makes it so dangerous is how both political parties are extremely reluctant to be sober and objective in

[33:59] their responses to the actions of the Iranian government and other players in Iran and we've seen in the last 10 to 20 years you know in public reporting a lot of evidence of what the US has done against Iran and they have a lot of reason to view us as aggressors and this kind of activity to constantly be carried out by people in the Trump administration it does not come without consequences which is why it's important for whistleblowers in the Trump

[34:30] administration to be listened to if they were to come forward and we need to pay very very close attention to what the Democratic candidates for president are saying about this assassination so far only Bernie Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard have condemned it everybody else and I'm talking from Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren on down they have all fallen into line with the neoliberal Pentagon intelligence community yeah I believe Warren and Biden both echoed the

[35:00] idea that he deserved to die yeah so okay although it's been it's been good to have you on as a guest we Apollo was a pleasure we apologize for the connection issues earlier for those of you who have been watching but it did get much better in the last 20 15 or 20 minutes so that's really great and it's always good to talk to you so we'll have to have you back on later on this year to go through some more stories but thanks again John and so you know what will happen links to all the Articles that we mentioned

[35:31] and again please hit that subscribe button lo follow us on Facebook and Twitter at shadow proof come and support us for even just a few dollars a month at shadow proof calm / donate we have all kinds of member perks from tote bags to a member newsletter in a chatroom and your donations will go directly to keeping us online and funding reporting from talented freelance journalists once again I'm going to be going to London in February February so your support is going to help me be able to be there for the three to four weeks that this extradition hearing against Julian

[36:01] Assange is expected to go so thanks again everyone and please send us any feedback and tell your friends about us and have a great rest of your week
