Title: John Kiriakou & Brian Ross — Doing Time Like a Spy
Show: Strand Book Store
Date: 2017-05-17
URL: https://youtu.be/0iSfm1yeJUA
Duration: 45:00

---

[00:00] [Applause] app thank you thanks I just come from world news I did a story tonight about somebody who leaked extremely sensitive information extremely to the Russians key information that could reveal a source inside Isis but he won't be prosecuted because he's the president of the United States how do you feel about that John um Angry to tell you the truth I try very hard not to be angry I try very hard not to be B um and I think that

[00:32] generally I succeed if you if you dwell on these issues you just make yourself crazy with that said I'm just continually struck by the hypocrisy that we see in our government granted Barack Obama had what I believe to be a nixonian obsession with National Security leaks to the point where his response was a gross overreaction and that was the use of the ESPN act to to really to to crush dissent you know the Espionage Act was

[01:04] written in 1917 to combat German sabator during the first world war between 1917 and 2009 and I'll add it was never updated uh three Americans were charged with Espionage for speaking to the Press just under President Obama eight people were charged with Espionage for speaking to the Press not for leaking uh classified information to foreign governments not for selling information but just talking to the Press I'll add

[01:35] that it is illegal in this country to classify a crime if a governmental agency or organization is committing a crime it is against the law it's actually a felony it's never been uh nobody's ever been charged with it but it's a felony to classify that program um nobody tells you that instead they just use the Espionage Act to go after people who's who whose Revelations uh don't fit the administration narrative with that

[02:06] said what Donald Trump did yesterday or the day before um is Barack Obama's definition of Espionage right anybody else would have been charged with multiple felonies the president of the United States can declassify anything he wants therefore he can say what he wants I feel somewhat responsible for putting John behind bars no it was an interview that John did with me for ABC which in which he was the first person to publicly acknowledge that CIA was using waterboarding was torturing people and

[02:38] one person's gone to prison for that and that was John you know I called my wife once um shortly before my release it was December 2014 and I said uh how was your day and she said it was great and I said yeah why would happened today and she said today the Senate torture report was released and it proved that everything you said was true and I thought you know what at least I have that and I like to claim some responsibility

[03:09] for for Congressional debate on the torture issue and for eventual passage of the McCain Feinstein amendment I don't know if I had anything to do with it it had not been it was it was a secret it was a secret that was a secret you write in your book that your brother told you on the day of your arrest this will be the best day of your life yeah yeah um I I I'm I feel like I'm getting there my brother told me the day that I was arrested I know you can't see this but this is going to turn out to be the best

[03:40] thing that ever happened to you and I I was suicidal that day I certainly couldn't see it were you you KN you knew it was coming oh yeah I had been told by the FBI that I was going to be arrested on Monday this was a Thursday the reason why the FBI tries to arrest people on THS Thursdays is because the the federal courts are closed on Fridays for arraignments they don't arraign anybody and so you have to spend Thursday night Friday night Saturday night and Sunday

[04:11] night in the DC jail where you're going to be beaten and God knows what other horrible things happen to you know a guy in a suit uh in the DC jail but I said the magic words to the FBI I want to speak to my attorney and that was the only thing that saved me so so they had to let me go to speak to my attorney and they called the attorney and said we'll let him turn himself in on Monday morning so I did but they were they were

[04:42] completely surrounding my house my neighbors were calling saying hey I got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and there's a guy sitting in front of your house just staring at your house and you know I had to say well there's another guy right there and there's another one over here and there are two behind us and you know they followed us into church on Sunday they followed us into Target when we went shopping it was very very heavy surveillance in-your-face kind of surveillance um but you

[05:12] know you get past it you have to get past it otherwise your wife lost her job my wife was fired from the CIA on the day of my arrest only because she was married to me yeah and you know she was another one like my brother that day she she said you have to embrace this you haven't done anything wrong you're a whistleblower not a leaker and she said you have to keep talking about this case because eventually they're going to move on to the next person which they did with Ed Snowden and she said if you keep

[05:44] talking about this and by extension writing about it your side of the story will become the side of record and so that's what I did I no no uh second thoughts at all um I I'll add something too Jose Rodriguez who uh was the deputy director of operations for the CIA and who destroyed the tapes of of the torture uh trolled me on Twitter the week before I went to prison and he said um don't drop the soap very classy classy man and I

[06:19] responded to him and I said I'm on the right side of History Jose and you aren't and I would rather be me than Jose and at you tell a fascinating story of the book about how they set you up made an approach as if you're going to be turned by a foreign country yeah you know I still get a knot in my stomach every time I think about it before I got in trouble I was the senior investigator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee working for

[06:49] John KY who was the chairman at the time and one of the wonderful things about that job is you get to have lunch with foreign diplomats from all over the world yeah have to pay for your own lunch because we had very serious ethical uh guidelines but I just L The Exchange right so I got a call from a Japanese Diplomat the number three in the Japanese Embassy introduced himself and invited me to lunch so I remember that lunch being delightful we talked about Israeli elections and Turkish elections and the peace process and I

[07:22] also remember that his English was so bad that we did most of the conversation in Arabic his Arabic was excellent so at the end of the lunch he said to me what's next for you and I said well I think I'm going to resign soon I promised Senator kery I'd give him two years and it's been two and a half and I'm I'm ready to to move on and do something else and very excitedly he said no don't do that if you give me information I can give you

[07:53] money and I said what's wrong with you pitching me cold pitching me like that I have to report this now said what are you thinking and I went directly to the office of the Senate security officer and I said I was just pitched by a foreign intelligence officer so he had me write up a memo which he sent to the FBI two days later the FBI sent two agents to interview me and they said here's what we want you to do we want you to call him back invite him to lunch

[08:23] and try to get him to tell you exactly what information he wants and how much money he's willing to pay for it I said fine you want me to wear a wire they said no we're going to be at the next table so we'll just listen to the conversation I said fine so I invited him to lunch we had lunch he gave me all the information I should add they called me that morning to say something had come up they weren't going to be there but I should just go ahead with the lunch and write them another memo so I did the lunch I wrote a second memo they

[08:55] asked me to do it a third time and a fourth time and a fifth time which I did finally in the fifth lunch he said he had been promoted he got his dream job and he was transferring to Cairo he was going to be the number two at the Japanese Embassy in Cairo I said yeah congratulations I shook his hand never saw him again A year later after my arrest the justice department turns Discovery over to my attorneys and we see in Discovery that they never was any Japanese Diplomat he

[09:26] was an FBI agent Undercover trying to get me to commit real Espionage because they wanted to charge me with Espionage well what what another thing we found it was a series of memos from the CIA to the justice department and back the CIA wrote to the justice department and said charge him with Espionage and the justice department responded and said but he hasn't committed Espionage and the CIA wrote back again and said charge him anyway and make him defend himself and so the

[09:58] FBI thought well he he hasn't committed Espionage maybe we can trick him into committing Espionage and then that's usually you know a 30 or 35 year sentence but I kept reporting the contact every time this guy would offer up something I would write a memo and send it to the FBI and finally they came to the conclusion that I was not going to commit Espionage and so they just dropped it and came up with the cover story of him being transferred to Cairo

[10:28] but it gives you idea of how badly they wanted to get you yeah and the cia's counterterrorism center was really driving this thing the the the memos back and forth would do this and do that and the FBI was actually resistant but he hasn't committed a crime well do it anyway and what they do Brian is we know this from you know so many other examples scooter Libby and we can go back Iran Contra Watergate even once they start digging they're going to find

[10:59] something there's a wonderful book that came out in 2012 by Harvey silverglate who's a professor of law at Harvard and it's called three felonies a day and he says that we are so over criminalized in this country and so over legislated that the average American excuse me on the average day going about his normal business commits three felonies every single day so if they're investigating you or not even you may maybe they're

[11:29] investigating somebody close to you they're going to find something and there's nothing you can do about it what it comes down to is damage control the justice department does these two things one is called charge stacking so let's say you actually have done something or may have done something that violates the law they'll charge you with 5 10 20 felonies and they'll wait until you're bankrupt and then they'll come and say

[11:59] all right take a plea to this one count and we'll dismiss all the other charges and that's why according to prop publica the government wins 98.2% of its cases CU these cases almost never go to trial because people try to cut their losses another thing they do is called venue shopping where they will charge you in a district that is going to be the toughest on that crime so the Eastern District of Virginia where I was

[12:30] charged um is known as the Espionage court because no National Security defendant has ever won a case there I was charged there Jeffrey Sterling was charged there Ed Snowden has been charged there and the rumor is that's where the Julian Assange grand jury is meeting as well Eva they call it Eva edva so um you know I didn't know that or if my attorney said it I don't recall and it didn't register but I like Jeffree Sterling and others I kept thinking well as soon as I get in front

[13:01] of a jury they're going to realize how ridiculous this whole thing is this is just the the CIA is furious at me for airing the dirty laundry I can get past this and my attorneys were telling me you're living in a dream world I even had a good friend's wife's uncle if that makes sense um is is a jury consultant oh famous One OJ Simpson Zimmerman William Kennedy Smith and he took pity on me and he said he'll help me out for

[13:33] free right this is guy who you know it's $10,000 a day he's a he's a big deal so we got him a security clearance and he came up to Washington and he reviewed the case and he said if we were in any other District in America I'd say let's go for it we'll win it but the eastern district of Virginia you don't have a chance and so it became damage control that's primarily because they have a huge number of government employees oh see this is the thing your jury is going

[14:04] to be made up of people from the CIA the FBI the defense department Homeland Security intelligence Community contractors you don't have a chance with one of a one of those juries and there's a racial component as well to get it out of the district right oh absolutely there's a racial component as well I mean Jeffree Sterling look what happened to Jeffree Sterling Jeffrey Sterling is an African-American case officer from the CIA a brilliant linguist and an attorney uh he was passed over for an assignment in Europe only because of the

[14:35] color of his skin and he actually said to his boss at the time he had been assigned to uh somewhere in Germany and then they withdrew the the assignment and said well being a black man you're going to stick out in Germany and Jeffrey said when did you realize I was black right I got this assignment a year ago and so uh they they said well we can send you to Africa and he said that's not the deal I'm a I'm a farsy linguist

[15:07] send me to Germany so um he ended up resigning and filing a racial discrimination suit against the agency well the agency this was in the eastern district of Virginia which is where the CIA is located and the agency went before the judge who ended up sentencing both Jeffrey and me and they said we can't defend this case because we we'll have to Ral classified information National Security and the judge said dismissed Cas is dismissed there's no justice so Jeffrey had been

[15:39] talking to James ryzen at the New York Times about the case about the racial discrimination case somebody gave Jim ryzen some uh information on an Iranian operation that went bad Jim ryzen's W two bullet surprises he's not going to write a book based on one source's uh information but the agency got it be in its Bonnet that Jeffrey had given rise in this information there was literally zero evidence that Jeffrey had

[16:12] given rise in this information there was metadata showing that they had spoken to each other 52 times over the course of 18 months which Jeffrey said under oath was about the discrimination case the CIA said nope they were talking about top secret Iranian operations and the jury eastern district of Virginia would convict a baloney sandwich said guilty of seven counts of Espionage so that's what we were all up against in the in the eastern district that's why I told

[16:43] Ed Snowden I was very clear I said don't come home you won't get a fair trial you're going to get 40 years and you're going to die in prison they want him to oh very badly they want him very badly I told him also that I had something called an 11 c1c plea which I had never heard of before an 11 c1c plea is a negotiation between the um the defense and the prosecution and the agreement is then

[17:14] written in stone so the judge can reject it but she can't change it so we agreed I was facing 45 years in prison they offered me two and a half and I took it so the judge can't change the 2 and A2 I changed my plea to guilty in October of 2012 we go to court um the courtroom was sealed because the the trial was under something called sipa the classified information protection

[17:45] act so you had to have a security clearance to be in the courtroom so the judge said that this was the first 11 c1c plea she had ever had and she was a Reagan appointee she's she's been a federal judge since 19 1987 and she said these were her exact words that the agreement was fair and appropriate those were her words fair and appropriate so the formal sentencing was set was set for January I go in and the courtroom is packed with every

[18:17] National Security journalist in Washington and she says I don't like this 11 c1c plea not one bit and I'm standing I have to stand right and she says Mr kiraku if I could I would give you the maximum well guess what she could all she had to do was say I don't accept this to 11 c1c plea but she was grandstanding and showboating for all

[18:48] these journalists she loves getting her name in the paper so I just stood there cuz I knew she was full of and uh then I went out to uh to talk to the Press just like the prosecutor had done right you signed up to serve your country and you did so well in so many different ways and then you're sent to prison and the judge said that was all irrelevant irrelevant to the case there wasn't been some very dark days for you oh yeah you know I was

[19:19] in shock in retrospect I was in shock for a long time and so you know I I show up to the prison we had asked the judge if she would send me to a minimum security Work Camp no bars on the Windows no concertina wire you're free to come and go you can't run away you know you have to be there for count time and she agreed and the prosecution said that was fine with them so I get to the prison turn myself in and the guard starts leading me around to the back of

[19:49] the prison and I said no no I'm supposed to be at the camp across the street and he chortles and says not according to my paperwork you're not well I told myself take it easy there's nothing you can do if you make a scene they're going to put you in solitary so I didn't say anything I I thought I'll just wait until I can get to a phone took me 5 days to get to a phone and I called my attorney and I told him they put me in the actual prison with the murderers and the

[20:19] pedophiles and he said oh my god well we can file a motion but it'll be 2 years before we get a hearing and you'll be home by then I'm sorry you're going to have to tough it out so I was in shock for weeks in the meantime before I left for prison one of my attorneys jesselyn radak and Daniel ellberg who's become a dear dear friend The Godfather of National Security whistleblowers and a couple of other people said that I should write a an

[20:52] open letter to my supporters an open email to my supporters and that they would circulate it and there were something like 600 people had signed up for a list to get some news so I waited about 10 weeks until the shock had worn off and I was comfortable and and I wrote this open letter and I didn't even realize it at the time but I sort of blew the whistle on the uh on two things that the guards had done to me one of which was actually a felony it was conspiracy to commit violence in a federal

[21:24] facility and so I sent it to my attorney she gave it to the proprietor of this website Fire doog Lake and I didn't know that the owner of Fire doog Lake was friendly with Ariana Huffington so she sent it to Ariana she put it on the Huffington Post and it went completely crazy I got more than a million hits in the week that it was published and then the Press phone call started CNN came to the prison and 60 Minutes came to the prison and so there was this active

[21:57] discussion of putting me either in solitary or in what they call diesel therapy uh to cut me off from the media diesel therapy is when they put you on a prison bus I'm at Loretto Pennsylvania and the bus goes to the the maximum security penitentiary at Canan Pennsylvania which is the Transportation Hub for the Mid-Atlantic and maybe you're there 3

[22:27] weeks 3 months you don't have any idea and from there you go to USP Atlanta and you sit there for a while and then Oklahoma City and Yankton and Loke and you just go all over the country but the reason for that is if you are in transit status you're not in the system nobody knows where you are and you have no access to a phone to an email or to pen and paper and they can do this for as

[22:57] long as 18 months before they have to sort of find you again so that would have been My Punishment well this blog had gone so viral that people like Susan Sarandon and yoka Ono and John kuzak and Oliver Stone began tweeting about it hands off John kiraku John kuzak wrote the peace group code pink started this sustained campaign to call the director

[23:27] of the Bureau of Prisons and demand that I be left alone and they said that they had logged 1,600 calls to the head of the Bop It infuriated them but they backed off but when you have the weight of the state out to crush you MH what about your training you can't win but you survive you survive and you know there are there are ways to resist um I broke my finger on like my third day in prison it took them weeks

[23:58] before they sent me to an outside specialist and as they were chaining me up they put leg shackles and they put a a dog uh chain around your waist and you got you got a chain around your neck and it connects your neck to your waist and your hands it's it's awful it's something you see in movies so they've chained me up like an animal and um they want me to sign a paper saying that I won't try to escape that I acknowledge that if I try to

[24:30] escape I'll be shot dead and that I must call everyone I encounter sir and I said absolutely not won't do it well you have to do it or we won't uh take you to the doctor I said then don't take me to the doctor I'm not signing it I said you're young enough to be my child I'm not calling you sir you call me and kiraku and any number of things I said respect is earned if you want to be called sir you call me sir and then we can have an exchange but I'm

[25:01] not signing this and he and the other guard just kind of looked at each other for a while and then he said all right let's just go so there are little ways to resist your book is such an incredible indictment of the federal prison system it really is the stories you tell thank you I I was shock surpris they haven't come to look for you actually I hope they do I hope they do um I was shocked at how broken and how dysfunctional our system is you know one

[25:33] quarter of the Justice Department's budget goes to prisons one quarter of the budget it's a billion dollars right over or no it's more than that well whatever it is it's one quarter of the of the Justice Department's budget but there's no Rehabilitation whatsoever you know I had in my mind that you can learn Plumbing or small engine repair or something some skill there's there's literally nothing they will give you a

[26:04] GED class but it's taught by other prisoners and I I wrote in in one of these blog posts and it's in the book you have people in prison who are uneducated or undereducated they come from very difficult backgrounds broken homes in many cases drug addiction in the family or mental health issues so they make a mistake they get wrapped up they go to prison so they're in prison for however

[26:35] long it is 2 5 10 years and you've done nothing to prepare these people for their release you've not educated them you've not trained them you've not given them any hope whatsoever you've only crushed their spirits in the years that they've been incarcerated well guess what they're going to go home one of these days and the only thing they know how to do is to commit the same kind of crime that they committed that got them in trouble in the first place or they learned a new

[27:07] crime in prison I wrote in one of the blog posts actually it was it was this one the best of my recollection I learned how to manufacture methamphetamine I seriously did everybody talks about it it's all they talk about is how different ways that they made meth I learned how to run a Ponzi scheme I learned how to um commit mortgage fraud and steal from Banks it's like check kiting but with mortgages I learned all kinds of crimes because

[27:38] that's all anybody talks about they're not learning anything they're not being educated the system the entire system is a disaster we should be ashamed of it and in Europe none of the Western European countries have systems like this none of them housing is different food is different Medical Care is different and prisoners are educated at there and you and coming out of that when you left what was it like the first day out you know Brian I thought that I could just step back into my life again and I was out and everything was going

[28:08] to be great and that wasn't the case at all no one had prepared me for the depression the anger issues PTSD it took me six months before the PTSD dreams stopped I had the same dream every night it was that I had gotten out but it was a mistake and it was almost midnight and count time was coming and I had to figure out how to get back inside the prison so they didn't send me to solitary it was 6 months before that

[28:39] dream stopped and how was the family ah you know that was my Saving Grace my wife was very unusual in that she was Rock Solid from the very beginning I'm sure in retrospect she was in shock too but you know I I said a few minutes ago that she was fired on the day of my arrest and I was in my attorney's car going home from my arraignment when she called to say she had been fired and I said oh honey I'm so sorry and she said no don't be I told

[29:11] them that that was okay I didn't want to work for any organization that treated my husband the way they treated you and as it turned out she landed on her feet working for a major Fortune 100 company she's been promoted three times she's a senior director now making triple what she made at the agency and now agency people are calling her asking if she can help them get into this company and as for isn't it and as for the agency now what do you think I think

[29:42] that I think the agency is a severely damaged organization and I blame Congress for this because there's no oversight you know the Congressional oversight committees really are no more than cheerleaders for the agency and so there's no one to to say no stop and that's what the agency needs because the culture is such that they will just keep pushing and pushing and pushing just to see what they can get away with they need some kind of adult supervision and we're not getting it on Capitol Hill and where do you think they started to in

[30:13] your view go wrong 911 this may sound quaint maybe even naive but between the church Committee in the mid1 1970s and 911 there was respect for human rights at the CIA the CIA famously underwent what they call a a cull uh in the early 1990s where they decided to focus on human rights and they went through the files of every single recorded or recruited Source in

[30:44] the entire CIA and they got rid of everybody who had a problem a human rights problem in his background so that actually hurt intelligence collection but morally it was the right thing to do on 911 the gloves came off all the rules changed you know the CIA Brian was set up to as I say in the book recruit spies to steal secrets and then to analyze those secrets and to provide the best possible intelligence to the policy

[31:15] maker now it's a paramilitary organization we have assassination squads running around the world killing people who have not faced their accusers in a court of law uh thanks to the um Vault 7 uh Revelations we know that they're hacking our iPhones that they're hacking our Samsung Smart TVs I mean these are these are Technologies or programs that can very easily be used against American citizens and do we trust the CIA when

[31:47] they say well yeah these are provocative operations but trust us we're not spying on Americans come on well that's what they say and America seems to welcome the sense that you're out getting the bad guys so how do you change that I think I'm probably in the minority but I'm going to say it anyway I would rather run the risk of another terrorist attack than give up my civil liberties you know so many generations of Americans fought and died to give us

[32:19] these civil liberties that that we've held dear for 240 years and we've just given some of them away I don't I don't mind I said this earlier I don't mind taking my shoes off at the airport I don't mind but I'm not going to give you my laptop and my cell phone and my passwords so you can see what I post on Facebook and see who I'm chatting with I I've made great use since I got home of uh encrypted Communications it's pretty much the only way I talk to people now is using

[32:50] encryption I have a switzerland-based encrypted email because it's not uh subject to subpoena and um you know I've made friends with people like NSA whistleblowers who were able to educate me on these issues Tom Drake Bill beny Kirk weeby people who know these things and know that no matter how hard we try the government can probably still get to our Communications we just have to make it as hard for them as we can but do you feel that you feel there's no sense of

[33:22] uh what you feel is on the part of the American public I I I don't I I hate to say this it's the same thing with the torture program Brian after all these years a majority of Americans support a to a torture program I don't know how that can be like are people not paying attention has nobody ever read the Constitution before you know I say this all the time in speeches in 1946 we executed Japanese soldiers who waterboarded American prisoners of war in January of 1968 it

[33:53] was January the 18th 1968 The Washington Post ran a front page photograph of an American Soldier waterboarding a Vietnamese prisoner of war when the Secretary of Defense Robert mcamera saw that photo he ordered an investigation that Soldier was arrested he was charged with torture tried convicted and sentenced to 20 years in prison well the law never changed it's still the same law it's the federal torture act we changed and uh there's no explanation

[34:24] for it there's no excuse for it there's no way to justify it so final question for you now what is next what's left to do you've done a lot I I try to I I find myself um not even purposefully but I find myself more and more vocal about the use of drones I'm deeply Disturbed that even American citizens are being killed with drones without ever being charged with a crime just because we

[34:55] don't like their politics you know when the when the Attorney General of the United States tells a sitting US senator that the president has reserved for himself the right to order the assassination of an American citizen even on American soil without ever charging that American with a crime that's no longer America so I think that's the next Battleground it's the Drone War well John best of luck to you in that thank you so much Brian thank you and thanks for coming

[35:25] everybody so great to see you did anyone have any questions they wanted to ask happy to answer questions yes yes ma'am so you say you um feel that being angry is not useful not not helpful so you try not to be angry but what you describe is uh or you're making comments this is not America this is not America how do you still feel you are American when your country is not the America you think it should be how are you able to work with

[35:56] that uh I I have long believed and I convinced myself many years ago that the Republican party and the neoconservative and neoliberal movements in this country do not have a monopoly on patriotism I really believe in the Constitution I really do it's the only thing that separates us from chaos and so you know it's easy to sit in an echo chamber I do I do odd interviews all the time with people like

[36:28] I'm actually embarrassed to even say people like Ron Paul and Jesse Ventura and and well I won't even say what some of the others are but I find myself agreeing with them more and more and more just because they take this more libertarian point of view when I when I first got to prison I don't even think I put this in the book I may have made a reference yeah I made a reference to it in one of the letters from Loretto I got to to prison I was there a couple of weeks and I got a letter from Governor

[37:00] Gary Johnson the the former Governor of New Mexico and the 2012 and 2016 libertarian nominee for president and it was the loveliest letter and he said I think you got screwed and I think it's really terrible and I wanted to offer my support so I wrote him back I said hey thank you so much it was so unexpected and so pleasant it really lifted my spirits I did not know that he also wrote to the attorney general and said shame on you you should let this man go so he can earn a living for his family

[37:32] well when I got home the first call that I received from somebody who was not a close friend or relative was from Gary Johnson and he welcomed me home and asked if I would be on the board of directors of the libertarian party well I'm a third generation Democrat but I was so angry about the Obama Administration and what had happened I said sure I'll throw my lot in with the uh Libertarians

[38:03] so he asked me if I would campaign with him in the month before the election we went to something like 20 States together and um and you know there are a lot of kooky Libertarians right they don't have cell phones because they don't want the government tracking their movements like nobody you're you're you sell life insurance in Dallas nobody cares about your movements anyway um but I I felt like I kind of found a home in this new

[38:33] libertarian party because they were the only ones talking about whistleblowing and and you know the tradeoff in National Security between security and civil liberties and he got what 3% I said to my wife the other day she asked me you're not going to stay with the Libertarians are you and I said I think I'm probably going to go back to the Democrats but uh but only if they're serious about about these these rights

[39:05] we've lost you know civil rights civil liberties human rights for me those are the three big issues and so if we get a Bernie Sanders like Democratic candidate somebody unlike Hillary Clinton who I believed never saw a war she didn't want to jump into head first then yeah I think I'll probably go back thanks hey John thanks for coming um so

[39:36] I'm just curious you know uh like mentioned Gary Johnson you know he said he was you know like you know he wrote to attorney general said he was shocked what happened let him go you know Jose Rodriguez I you know probably illegally destroyed the tapes he wrote I think he wrote a book about torture got a $6 million book advance for it too so you know how did you wanted CIA over 20 years so how how did your colleagues or friends in the agency how did I mean did people back you did they look at you as a traitor like good question I'm just so curious you know good question something
