Title: Guest John Kiriakou Greek American Author, Journalist, a
Show: Crossing Faiths
Date: 2020-11-30
URL: https://youtu.be/d82Vejn9a30
Duration: 58:00

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[00:03] welcome to crossing faiths the podcast where the christian and the muslim discuss religion and politics i'm john pinna and my co-host matthew hawkins is on hiatus for the next two weeks he's uh in the middle of his grad school so he's uh doing some papers and uh and i'm holding the fort on chaperone so we'll see if i can handle it so uh this uh crossing face is a production of uh roll top productions and uh muslims for muslims international which are what i'm the founder and executive

[00:34] director of uh we have a special guest today uh mr john kiriakou a former cia senior official uh operative in central and south asia and whistleblower of on the uh waterboarding uh issue uh that came up with the us government back in what year was it john it was 2007 2007 so um and uh author of books uh and uh has his own uh syndicated

[01:05] uh television art television show radio show correct uh yeah unfortunately it ended a couple of weeks ago but we had a good three year run almost 1100 episodes and and i had a good time doing it so you know we're happy to have you very good dear friend and uh it's it's just really nice to to be looking across the screen at uh someone who's been in the game internationally you know and uh some of our guests that we've had are international development professionals multi-faith but you and i have uh crossed paths

[01:37] uh or past each other in our work numerous times uh maybe seeing each other from the tops of two hills and i don't know maybe we maybe operate against each other i have no idea but but we've spent quite a bit of time um uh in the same region you were uh the regional officer for pakistan weren't you i i was the chief of uh counterterrorism operations for the cia in pakistan after the 9 11 attacks i i got there in january of 2002 and and then we set out to do our job

[02:09] and to try to capture as many al qaeda operatives as as we could so and and how so how long were you in the region uh well most of my career was in the middle east i did tours in saudi arabia kuwait bahrain and then i went to pakistan in january of 2002 and i stayed seven months and then i had a tour in athens before that but working on on arab issues mostly on palestinian issues and then finished things up at the

[02:41] united nations but but pakistan was was easily by far the highlight of my career well that's because of the lassie you know i'll tell you it was unlike anything oh yeah you can't get any better than the food there you know you know what one of the things i discovered first of all pakistani food i gained 30 pounds when i was when i was serving there if you can imagine um i can't imagine when i'm overseas i gain weight because it's like first of all you say well

[03:11] maybe i'll smoke a cigarette because anything could happen to me you know so you start smoking this thing right before you know it you start you start eating the kebab and then you start saying well you know anything can happen at any moment and and really if if something does occur there's gonna be a lot more of them than me so i'm probably not gonna win so i'm gonna have a good meal right that was my that's always my thoughts when i'm overseas oh my gosh i was disappointed in afghan food the afghan food in washington is better than the afghan food in afghanistan and i think it was just because it was

[03:42] it was wartime and you know people couldn't get the ingredients that they really wanted to get but in in pakistan though oh my god the food was it was just absolutely amazing you and i went out to a to a pakistani place here in in washington once or in crystal city uh arlington virginia and it was pretty darn great we went to i took you off for karate afghanistan which was that you know in at uh oh god it's um it's it's i wanna say cornhouse kebab but that's not it it's uh uh it's the palace the kebab palace in

[04:14] crystal city so if you go in there um i always tell people you're gonna come out smelling like islam so it's got you got a little bit of smoke a little bit of kebab and it's all in your clothes you know and uh but i took you out for karaii and people say you know my afghan brothers and sisters will say oh you know that's not the best place you've got to go here you got to go there i don't know it was pretty great look if you want to end the end wars in afghanistan with the taliban first thing you need to do karaii diplomacy

[04:45] you just dump it from the helicopters everyone will stop you know and for those who don't know karaii is there's um karaii is lamb that's been marinated for an undisclosed amount of time probably illegal right it's probably on the tail end of it shouldn't be you know stewing for that long and it's uh it's a marinated lamb that served family style and it's just you you know you dip your food in but when it's being made it's not really made

[05:17] correctly unless the old man's mixing the meat with his beard in the bowl you know but kids run around it's it just is what it is and then in kabab and in in kabul there's a place called shinwari karaii which i have very fond memories sitting with my my uh afghan brothers and sisters and in a building playing fiscal which is a card game but follows suit and uh and just you know eating karaii and hanging out so i i would argue that you probably had to

[05:49] be with the boys you know if you were if you were with the cia and if you were with if you weren't with foreign nationals you you don't eat well in in afghanistan at all no because they're afraid to eat anything you know an old-timer who had served his whole 30-plus year career in in the region told me one time look if you really want to enjoy yourself just accept intellectually accept the fact that you're going to get sick and don't worry about it yeah and you know it's it's funny we might chuckle when we hear something

[06:20] like that but i did i just accepted the fact that i was gonna have the occasional fever maybe a little bit of uh you know stomach issues yeah and i was just gonna enjoy and and so i did i got sick like everybody else did i took a couple of cipro's and i went out and i ate and drank whatever i wanted to eat and drink and i truly enjoyed the experience and you know if you don't go out i mean i went out with the with my buddies so i lived outside of the wire i never lived in the i live well that's not true in 2012 i lived in the embassy

[06:52] in kabul but for 2015-16 i was in afghanistan and i was i was living in chelsea tune which means a thousand pillars said it's the southern part um of uh of cabo probably as you well know uh and the beginning of the death road the the road that the the lollandar road and i've driven down there in a in us in a toyota corolla we went to go picnic two hours down the way it was really funny and the television helicopters what's that helicopters only

[07:23] yeah i know the taliban stopped us they they you know who are you what's going on of course i told i was telling the rso like well i'm going down this way he's like go he's like we we we would love we would love to know what's going on in this section because we went to lollandar and then further further down and he goes we would love to know what's happening i'm like we're going to have a picnic so um but that's where i live and you know the food you know you just kind of you don't enjoy the food you just got to do your thing you know and everybody's so bunkered in yeah you know that's part of the problem

[07:54] i think the challenges that are are our embassies all over the world the point of them is to engage the people it's it's supposed to be outward not to bunker in and fortify and just well you you've heard people say that when hamid karzai was the president of afghanistan really what he was was the mayor of kabul and that's not the way it's supposed to be yeah you should be out there engaging you should be out there having karaii

[08:24] in every town and village that you can get to yeah well i had a buddy of mine who who was uh in charge of education he was running education programming at the embassy when he came in i said listen you got all your foreign nationals order karaii from karaii bring it in and feed them and i said watch what happens he they were loyal to him for the for the rest of the time that he was there he goes i don't know what's in it i don't understand what's going on but because a lot of people don't realize all the food that comes into that embassy is flown in from america yeah

[08:54] ridiculous amounts of cost and they they're there there's a requirement to have some of that but you can you can actually have a minimum of 20 of the food be locally sourced and they don't even do that we're talking about bread you know or or you know not necessarily water but you could have this you could have that and so it would save i mean hundreds of millions of dollars if you didn't fly in all that food i'm not saying that the people shouldn't have food that's not how to say it i used to go to the embassy all the time because

[09:24] you know you get your gatorade you know i would eat ice cream you know real ice cream that's not flavored with pistachios and uh you know because i don't you know you're greek right so you know that pistachio salesman back in ancient times he's the greatest salesman of all time because everybody in the middle east everybody everybody in the meat and in the uh in the mediterranean everything's flavored pistachios why everything you know greece is the world's second largest producer of pistachios behind iran well pistachios and those little small

[09:55] little vests you guys you know um so i know we banter but uh part of the reason why i got you on the podcast today and and you know been dying to get you on is one is we've we have this this very strong relationship we're both men of faith uh and uh and i you're greek uh your ethnicity is greek right your culture is greek yes um you know i i wear you know i wear this all the time so i so the uh roland

[10:26] moland lava uh what is you know i wear this pin all the time one of my favorite slogans yes which uh which is the spartan soldier slogan which means come take it more or less right that's right yes yes that's in modern english people translate it as bring it on you're right bring it on yes so i will this is what i wear and it whenever i wear a suit or i'm ever at you know when i remember doing my engagement at the white house whatever it is and people go what does that mean and i go it means uh you know

[10:58] if you want to shout out the title i'm here yeah you know yeah so i'm indo greek you're uh you know greek greek right so and uh right off the boat and uh and so but you're also eastern orthodox so you're a man of faith and uh and uh you know practicing greek orthodox is there a particular sect within greek orthodox is there or is it just there there are sects within greek orthodoxy but i'm i'm a mainstreamer i i always have been there there's something called old calendarist orthodox and

[11:30] uh and they follow when when the when the calendar was changed in the um in the 18th century they remained with the old calendar i did a pilgrimage to mount athos it's called ionoros the holy mountain in northeastern greece and not only do they use the old calendar but their their clocks are interesting in that the day doesn't begin at midnight the day begins at sundown and so every single day

[12:00] the clocks need to be slightly reset there are a lot of rules with the old calendar you know like i i like we got the same thing we're on this lunar calendar and depending on who you are if you're sunni or shia there's we have two different moons in islam so you know this the shia moon happens a lot later you know the sunnis like it's they're so it's like it's so cool if you see because it was sundown so margaret have his son down they watch and they see the sun go down they go i can't see this okay let's do yes so

[12:31] she uh generally uh generally she'll have to wait until their guy says it's sundown or their guy says it's this so there's two moves in islam um and uh it's it's you know once you start getting into timing it you know and people declaring things it just starts you know you you could wait to be knocking on a door a deaf man's door all day you know i i thought of you the other day i was reading an article about uh ramadan and about a very small and new uh sunni community in northernmost

[13:05] norway oh my god uh and the problem is that in uh the summer months of course the sun never goes down right what do you do if it's if it's ramadan and ramadan happens to fall in the in the summer and there were people like on the brink of starvation because the the sun just doesn't go down that high north that far north and so they decided um after after um several meetings of the community they decided to just do whatever is being done in mexico that they're just going to

[13:36] pretend like their day is the same as the day in mecca and whenever the sun goes down there the sun goes down in norway and they're going to break the fast well you know it's refreshing to hear that because i always advocate i said if life doesn't fit you make adjustments and you know the rigidness of islam only comes from people that that are that really just don't have lives and they really don't want you to have a life either you can easily change things by agreement by consensus in islam and uh and that's

[14:08] part of the reason why we have people you know sharia has a bad bad has a bad reputation but people realize that it's to arbitrate over issues that weren't really addressed and so people don't realize that when you salad out when you're praying the quran it only says three times we're only supposed to do it three times a day but the sunnah which is the way in which the prophet lived he he was a prophet you know beloved of god and

[14:38] and uh of allah and you know peace be upon him his family you know but the the fact is is that he did extra prayer yes that's why it's five people don't realize that yes and so the challenge is is that um you know we get muddled in things uh and some people give you know that's the sunnah the sunnah more weight than the quran or they give the hadees which are sayings more weight than the quran and some of them i i'm not even sure i know what the some of them mean so you know you know do unto others for example with the jesus stuff you know

[15:09] you can take that any which way you want you know so you know which way so uh but so i you know you're a man of faith you know we have a lot of banter because we've been around the block a little bit um on security and development and all kinds of other good stuff well one of the sexy things and you know you're a published author you know that i i think one of the titles your book is the reluctant spy yes all right so you know the reluctant spy and then was it the convenience spy uh the convenient terrorist

[15:39] that was my third book that was about the the capture of abu zubaydah and then what ended up happening to abu zubaydah after he was captured right so i mean you and your you got another book in the works and and a few other things that are cooking yeah i do i do i am my first book was was the reluctant spy and i did well with that book i made number five on the new york times bestsellers list then i wrote doing time like a spy how the cia taught me to survive and thrive in prison and we can have that conversation if you'd like then the convenient terrorist

[16:10] was about uh the abusa beta operation uh my fourth book is being published in um in december it's a textbook being published in the uk and then i'm halfway through writing a book called the cia insider's guide to surveillance and surveillance detection so we'll see where that goes okay all right you know i you gotta you just gotta have a picture of yours of a comic book hero you know with with binoculars on the front cover just sitting at a table with with his

[16:41] date and saying look my profile pictures had 16 pictures of me with binoculars you knew what this was about you know that's right so um so you're but there's all this this you were essentially uh a a government employee a career sure and uh who was passionate about national security and you are still and something was going on all right you were witnessing a lot of different um uh you know ops uh conops they say concept operations they're

[17:11] going on and something happened you had a crisis of conscience i did related to torture yes and my question to you is how did as someone who is a person of faith struggling with ethics and rules in a world where you know i deal with corruption i deal with all kinds of of security issues you know i deal with the community uh and you and i have talked a little bit about this before where

[17:42] a a religious identity to me is that religion to me is there's an identity there's a community and then there's theology yes so my question to you is where did your faith come in when you you whistle blue with i did uh waterboarding and you are the whistleblower yeah if you lie it was worth it yeah so if you you you google john kiriakou you're gonna find the wikipedia say whistleblower uh waterboarding and all that business that happened when was this 20 2012 what was this uh

[18:13] two uh the legal stuff yeah 2012 20 right so so all this stuff popped yes why like what happened to walk us through how your your your logic model in bringing this to light because you gave up your career you gave up your your standing with the government you went through i lost everything yeah i lost my career i lost my clearance i lost my pension i lost my freedom i even lost my family

[18:44] yeah so um so when i say the cost was high i'm not exaggerating so walk walk me through this and walk our listeners through this how because we have a lot of people that lit uh most i would say most of our people are our people of faith most of our listeners are people of faith but the fact is is that we all deal with these crisis of conscience you're somebody who gave up everything for something that was really egregious in your mind related to ethics and rules yes and so i wanted to get at the the meat of what

[19:15] you know what was your logic model to get from from witnessing to to whistleblowing and how did faith become how was faith a part of that sure i'm going to preface my story by telling you that that an israeli journalist who also happens to be a psychologist uh and who wrote a book called beautiful minds which is a psychological evaluation of four whistleblowers through history told me that whistleblowers have a have

[19:46] a far more highly um developed sense of right and wrong than the general public does whistleblowers tend to think of of things in terms of black and white and most members of the general population do not think of things as black and white they see things in shades of grey so with that said i was the chief of cia counterterrorism operations in pakistan after 9 11 and virtually as soon as i arrived within two weeks of my arrival

[20:17] we were told by cia headquarters that abu zubaydah was somewhere in pakistan and we had to capture him now at the time we believed that abu zubaydah was the number three in al qaeda he was not he was a bad guy he was certainly an al-qaeda sympathizer he created and ran the two al-qaeda training camps in southern afghanistan he opened and managed the house of martyrs safe house in peshawar pakistan he was a bad guy if you were a member of al qaeda and you

[20:49] were let's say tired of the fight you would go to abu zubaydah to get a false passport and a ticket home or abu zubaydah was the one who would smuggle you in from let's say karachi to kandahar so you could start your training he was a logistics man so even if he wasn't the number three in al qaeda he was still a very bad guy and my job was to capture him high level target essential to operations precisely precisely and in the in the course

[21:20] of of looking for him and targeting him of course we found dozens and dozens i'm not allowed to say the the actual number but many dozens of other al-qaeda fighters who we captured so on the night of march 22nd 2002 we were hot on his trail and we decided to raid 13 sites simultaneously in two cities in in pakistan

[21:53] thinking he's got to be in one of these 13 sites well indeed he was and the last thing i told the pakistani authorities because remember it's their country so this isn't just the cia going rogue and you know running around the country and grabbing people the the pakistani isi and the pakistani police and a group called the punjab elite force were working hand in glove with us i said don't fire a shot my

[22:25] orders were to take him alive of course as soon as abu zabada climbs to the roof of his safe house to jump to the roof of the neighboring house to escape a pakistani policeman opens fire and shoots him three times with an ak-47 in the thigh the groin and the stomach and they almost kill him so we rush him to a hospital to try to patch him up in the meantime we've captured these dozens of other people and we go back to a safe house to begin

[22:56] interrogating them well a group of my colleagues begins to lead these guys into our safe house and they all have cloth sacks over their heads and i said and this was the first inkling that i had that something was going to just not be right i said why are their heads covered well we don't want them to see our faces we don't want them to know our identities and i said have you seriously never read the geneva convention seriously you can't cover their heads

[23:29] it's a war crime i said take those things off and they wouldn't so i grabbed one and i tore it off this guy's head and one of my cia colleagues said i'm reporting you to headquarters and i said on the contrary i'm reporting you to headquarters because you've committed a war crime so i went down the line and took all of the sacks off their heads in the meantime we had to rush to twice a libad hospital for abu zubair and uh

[24:00] they they patched him up just enough that he wasn't going to bleed to death in the next couple of hours and we put him on a helicopter and we all flew to a pakistani military base about an hour away and i sat at the foot of his bed for 56 hours i tore up a sheet and i tied him to the bed because i was afraid i was going to fall asleep and i remember just staring at him and thinking this is the fearsome al-qaeda this is what we were so afraid of he's a

[24:32] child the guy was only in his early 20s right but this is this is what has our whole country wrapped around the axle where we're accusing everybody of being anti-american and we've shut down the airports and you know people are shooting sikhs because they remind them of muslims and the whole country's gone crazy yeah so anyway i i talked to him extensively over the course of those 56 hours did he ever tell you why he he he

[25:03] is worked for al qaeda like what his critical moment of time was like when you made that decision yeah you know he grew up like so many other palestinian kids in saudi arabia where he was interested in girls and interested in soccer and interested in technology and hanging out with his friends and avoiding the mutawain and just having a good time right but he said he once saw a news broadcast

[25:34] that showed an israeli soldier with his boot on the neck of a palestinian woman and he said it pushed him over the edge it's interesting because this is non-scripted our conversation it's interesting because of the the floyd you know the the the george floyd yes is you know the same type of imagery yeah and people don't understand the power of imagery just like in vietnam when you were able to see the war people lost their stomach for it right so but so that's the more the critical moment when

[26:05] when he did enough enough that's what did it and he said that in his heart he decided that all he wanted to do in his life was to kill jews and we talked about 9 11. i said listen you you certainly couldn't have thought that we wouldn't come after you that we wouldn't try to to find you to capture you to kill you to kill bin laden and he said no he said i didn't want to attack the united states on 9 11. he said i wanted to attack israel but i

[26:37] was overruled he said all i ever wanted to do was to kill jews and you know it's funny too because i believed it and i still believe him 911 was not his thing he was not one of the planners he was not one of the masterminds he was not told in advance when it was going to happen he knew it was going to happen but not when right um and so we continued to talk you know he was very creative he wrote a lot of poetry and he would write letters to himself

[27:10] as a as a boy saying hey it's me your older self i want to tell you about some of the mistakes that we've made and and i want you to be able to correct these mistakes and it was funny to me because when the fbi we we captured his diary that night and we turned it over to the fbi as evidence and the fbi immediately leaked it and said that he was insane that he had a split personality and then he believed that he was two people and i said that's nonsense i even gave an interview to the

[27:41] washington post i said the fbi doesn't know what in the world it's talking about right he was extraordinarily bright he was extraordinarily creative with his poetry and his letters and this was more of a doodle book than it was um than it was a diary it wasn't a diary it was just his thoughts whatever happened to pop into his head whether it was a joke or to draw a picture of something a horse for example he did i mean you know i i think people and like i said the intent of the conversation is

[28:12] not to humanize or or sympathize with people as much as as it might sound um that's right but but but but i don't think people realize when you're on mission and you're in the middle of an op it's you're isolated and you know you're i i always characterize some of my time doing business as uh like the longest card game in history you know you're just you're just waiting for something to happen yeah uh you all know what you're gonna do what's that hurry up and wait yeah hurry

[28:43] up you know well in with the potatoes out with the potatoes you know you load the truck and the second the truck is loaded unload the truck you know so um and so i i think that um you know you you you do whatever you can to not only maintain your sanity but you do whatever you can so that you don't if i could interrupt you for a for a second that's a very important point and you know i said to him at one point i said i should hate you i should want to kill you and i don't i said you're you're pathetic you're

[29:13] you're sad you made a terrible mistake and i'm going to give you some advice i said i am the nicest guy that you're going to meet in this experience my colleagues are not nice like i am and if you do one thing it's that you have to cooperate and he said to me you seem like a nice man but you're you're the enemy and i'll never cooperate well at the end of the 56 hours we were instructed to load him onto a private jet that had flown out to the

[29:44] military base and he was going on to what would be the first of many secret prisons he was very very worried and he asked me to hold his hand as three fbi agents and i carried him out on a gurney and he started crying and he asked me where he was going and i said i have no idea but remember you have to cooperate and then we put him on the plane we maneuvered him in onto the plane and we laid him across the luggage rack at the back of the plane and tied him down to the luggage rack

[30:14] and i bent over and i whispered remember you have to cooperate and so he flew off to a secret location and a couple of weeks later i went back to not a couple of weeks a couple of months later i went back to headquarters well he was so severely wounded that he needed several months to recover before he could even be interrogated because he really was was nearly killed the doctor at the pakistani military base told me that he had never seen a wound so severe where the patient lived and

[30:46] because he was in his twenties and in great physical condition he pulled through he lived so i get back to headquarters and i learned that on august 1st 2002 president george w bush gave the cia the legal authority to begin torturing him and i said you know this is a mistake first of all it's illegal right not only are we signatories to the united nations convention against torture

[31:16] we wrote the united nations convention against torture and it doesn't work it doesn't work besides being morally and ethically wrong it just simply doesn't work and there are dozens of psychological studies that prove that over the years we know from the nuremberg trials right which also saw passage of the the u.s government's federal torture act that torture doesn't work what works is what the fbi does and that

[31:49] is to engage their subject in a conversation to establish a rapport and to allow that person to finally open up sometimes it takes days sometimes weeks sometimes months right but eventually they're going to open up well you and i both know that 90 of the time we find out where the high the high the the high impact targets are because someone within the inner circle let's just let's just takes takes the buy out changes to size to change the life of their families

[32:20] yes and and and they come to us uh they come to us they come to america they come to wherever the the agency and they'll say you know uh i i know where baghdadi is i know where bin laden is and i want to change like i always laugh i you know it's at these guys that you know the rangers and stuff like that who say you know i was hunting bin laden for tenure for eight years yeah well you were doing it wrong you were you yeah that's eight year you were wasting everybody's time exactly everybody's time so don't come to me you

[32:52] know and and uh and talk about that and and it's on the tip of their tongue they wear it on their sleeve yeah you know it's like we're rewarding failure um yes we're rewarding failure you know there's an old saying in the region that i know you've heard a thousand times and that is that you can't buy an afghan warlord but you can certainly rent one yeah and i found that to be immensely true first of all i want to tell your listeners that what you just said a moment ago was absolutely 100 correct almost always it's a member of

[33:22] the inner circle who has seen the reward poster and they'll walk into a u.s embassy and say i can give you baghdadi or khalid muhammad or abu zubaydah or anybody yeah and is it true that you have a 25 million reward and the answer is yes and i can give it to you in dollars pounds euros gold silver diamonds land any way you want to receive it yeah if you can give him to me and we catch him i will make you rich beyond your wildest dreams and i can tell you from

[33:54] firsthand experience that the cia does exactly that yeah so i mean it's you know that that's the big difference and like i said most of these guys are you know the resume builders you know like i said i i i know a couple of guys i know a couple rangers that i know a couple of these guys i know a lot of these guys and and they they wear it on their sleeve and i don't don't even say it for eight years your hunt had been lying down we know what happened is one of those guys in a circle took out the buyout we then called this out he's made sure they knew we were going to kill the prince

[34:24] and they said but don't kill him don't don't don't do it on this day do it three weeks from now right gave us permission and then and then we went in there and you know it was it was you know the seal team was there but there was there's combat controllers on the ground already you know there were there's there is you know uh there was uh um uh there was there was uh you know air force u.s air force the first there you know so you know so the combat controls were there you know pear rescue was there and then everything chess board was cleared right so you cl you cleared everybody there was just the people

[34:54] inside the compound and then that's when your the seal team six came in you know and rocked in there and and did their dinner business uh and then cut and then got out and so you know um the problem is or the challenges is that we have this perception a friend of mine said i want you to watch this movie about the capture of bin laden i want you to see it and i said i i've never you know i don't know what it is and they said it's called zero dark thirty i i that i think that's the one and so i go i watched i got into it for about 10 minutes and i couldn't watch it i go you really think unwatchable well i

[35:26] said do you really think two millennials and i'm not bashing millennials but two two two people two essentially children with notebooks crack the case on bin laden a sadist the guy was was a sadist um uh and then i don't know the young lady where she's like a cultural competency person what's that i know her quite well and she's a sociopath well but and but do you think that these two people cracked the case no it came from an informant it went right to to to ops they turned

[35:57] around verified it and then then it went and then then we started to operationalize you know going after bin laden i go the problem is it doesn't make for good tv it doesn't make for a good movie you know you want you need a hero you need a love you need this you need that exactly and that's the difference it's it's so but anyways let's go back to to yeah let me experience here so they started torturing him on on august the 1st and the the agreement between the cia the justice department in the white house was very specific it was to begin with the most

[36:30] minor technique they called these enhanced interrogation techniques i called them torture techniques but the the most minor one was to grab him by the shirt and give him a shake say answer my questions um that's not torture but they they severely devolved from there a smack across the face a smack in the belly and then they did something called walling where they would they would put a towel around his neck and then smash him up against a wall now the the

[37:02] rules were very specific the rules were that he had to have a towel rolled around his neck to prevent whiplash and that the wall had to be made out of plywood so that there was a little bit of give in it but there was no towel around his neck and the wall was made out of concrete block and so they ended up actually giving him a traumatic brain injury so that was illegal and it doesn't help getting information it doesn't help that doesn't help she doesn't have anything so exactly you know then um you know there

[37:32] were there was a lot of reporting on on waterboarding waterboarding of course is when you strap someone to a board his legs are elevated compared to his uh to his uh head and you put material cloth whatever around his face and you start pouring water in the face and it gives the sense of drowning and in many cases water gets in and you actually do drown abu zubaydah took in so much water that that his heart stopped beating and he had to be revived and that happened twice so that's what

[38:04] got most of the most of the the press coverage was the waterboarding and i somehow became known as the waterboarding uh whistleblower but there were techniques that were being used that were worse than than waterboarding in my view one was sleep deprivation right uh we know that uh we know that people begin to lose their minds around day seven with no sleep we know that they begin to die around day nine yeah but the cia was authorized to keep abu zaba and others a week for 12 days

[38:37] now when i say keep them awake i mean you're chained to an eye bolt in the ceiling so you can't sit or kneel or lay or get comfortable in any way and they have these industrial strength lights that are constantly on you so the brightness is blinding they have hard rock music over and over and over and over again 24 hours a day on a loop to drive you crazy and then they won't let you sleep

[39:08] sure now people died using that technique they lost their minds using that technique the other one was called the cold cell where you're chained into that eye bolt in the ceiling again you're stripped naked your cell is chilled to 50 degrees fahrenheit which is what about 12 degrees celsius yeah and uh and then every hour a cia officer walks into the cell and throws a bucket of ice water on you we killed multiple prisoners using that uh technique as well they were hypothermic

[39:41] and and here's the thing you everybody you kill so for our listeners okay so our you know the listeners that are the patriots and everybody says that that this is what's necessary everybody you kill better information dies with them yes so you're see so the the objective yes has failed right you know we reward failure so that's a problem in the same respect there's a there's a human element right these are human beings we are we're at

[40:11] war uh uh essentially and i'm you know here i am you know my tribe is usually on the receiving end of this all right so um you know i even you know i get threats all the time from national security people all the time they say even though that i'm a patriot an american and i work with the government you know they always like to say that you know you're this close to being sent to to gitmo they always like to some of it saying jokingly some don't i i'll tell i can tell you a story i was

[40:41] i was at the uh during our eric holder during the obama administration i used to work on the civil rights division at the department of justice uh i used to work with there was a civil rights uh council which was muslim all different peoples of faith and working with eric trine who's over there and uh and i remember i was joking jokingly i went to afghanistan in 2012 and uh and i was gone for about a month and i came back and uh she was like oh you were in afghanistan for for you know what were you doing and i said ah you know you know i was there for the last month you know

[41:13] you know don't don't ever don't ever live with it don't ever don't ever join the taliban worst month of my life it was a joke you know i said but the food is delicious someone in that meeting because the entire ic is there someone in that meeting started a report on me oh my god i started a report on and said you know i i think i think pen is in the taliban you know and and uh and right away and then it come across one of my so one of my other buddies on the day you know he's he's sitting there and i was working at the americas line of congress at the time and they and they when i was because i'm

[41:44] looking at a file right now a report and it said in your names on it goes what's going on here and i said why don't you call you know the people in that meeting and find out and he goes i'm going to take this this is nonsense but you but this is the problem right you got people that are collaborating with government doing stuff and they everybody wants to be a hero everybody wants to catch a terrorist everybody wants to do stuff i mean it happens over here i'm in upstate new york and uh we've got a you know counter-terrorism unit up here yeah because they're gonna crack cases right sure no you know i got i got a

[42:16] buddy of mine who's uh [ __ ] police officer just went through went just went through sniper training he went through he went he just went through he went through three days of sniper training 24 hours of training and and he and he thinks he's going to measure wind and velocity and also this stuff like a guy who's been you know like like someone who's been through eight weeks of sniper training courses in in the you know and and he thinks he's gonna and so this is the problem there's there's not a lot of community policing relationship building there's not the idea of knowing your community and cracking cases

[42:47] right uh and and it's it's it's not as sexy as as what's in zero dark dirty right but there's it's the only way in which to do gathering um in in and really the nuanced approach to engaging communities and i i always turn around and say like you know all muslim communities no we don't we're the biggest victims of terrorism we are uh so there's there's a 911 that happens every month in afghanistan and 911 has hundreds of people if not

[43:18] thousands of people that get hammered because of all kinds of terrorist activity and no one taps into that from that perspective that the the what but they end up what that ends up happening is this adversarial relationship and when when i say that people go well you're devaluing 9 11. i go well no we every every 9 11 we honor uh and and we we talk about all the different people uh of different ethnic backgrounds faith backgrounds up in 9 11. what we what we don't acknowledge is

[43:48] that there's like i said there's tragic events that are happening to muslims in muslim countries and it's in and it's it's largely uh i would say not talked about but the it's largely something that is not acknowledged with the same veracity and with the same weight as something that happens in the west um and it it cultivates that adversarial relationship that that really starts to fester into this type of behavior that you're

[44:19] talking about so so you're witnessing all this stuff happen over the course of how long yes um over the course of about um six or seven months okay and uh and i i moved on to to my next position and um and focused on the iraq war so i just stopped paying attention to terrorism counterterrorism abu zubaydah secret

[44:51] prisons it wasn't my bailiwick anymore iraq was was what i moved on to but in the back of my mind i kept thinking this is this is wrong wrong wrong and and friends of mine from counterterrorism would give me updates you know you run into someone in the hall or in the cafeteria and they say oh we did this to abu zubayr we did that to muhammad and and i kept waiting for someone to come forward and to and to say something because in my mind this was so clearly illegal this was so

[45:23] clearly a violation of both federal and international law i i was flabbergasted that nobody was saying anything about it and and nobody said anything well then i resigned from the cia in 2004 for those reasons or other reasons no um i got divorced my kids were here in the states i wanted to spend weekends with them and i knew i was going to have to go back to the region probably for a year or two years and i

[45:55] decided no my kids are young they need their dad in their lives and so i i left the agency and again i i waited for someone to to go public and no one did nobody but finally in december of 2007 i got a call from brian ross at abc news and um and i decided that that was my opportunity to set the record straight and i i knew exactly what i was getting into but i believed strongly that that this

[46:25] was immoral and unethical and illegal and um and so i spilled the beans so where did how did faith faith your faith uh uh what was how was your faith a catalyst in making the decision and was your faith a catalyst in helping you through the post after you made this decision so maybe the second a little bit about that i mean i i i've been to a great thor just so you know i've been to spend a lot of time in degree in well the

[46:56] russian orthodox church because you know i went to school spending quite a bit of time in russia in the former folks and eastern illinois you're you you guys don't have short ceremonies it's like three hours at a pot of clip you know and you're standing yes you know so so you know it's it's a it's a dif and i always appreciate the iconography and the eucharist is hidden right so the eucharist is is uh is always behind the wall and the choir so it's like this like the walls are singing you know and uh so it's pretty cool um

[47:29] uh so you know your your faith is you know is you know it's ancient and and your faith has a lot of nuanced and ritualistic components to it um so how is your faith like actualize this decision making like what happened here my faith really is what i relied on uh to make this decision you know i really do believe that that some things are black and white right or wrong and torture was wrong it doesn't matter

[48:02] if if the victim of the torture had something to do or may have had something to do with uh with 9 11. it was irrelevant and so um i decided to fall back on my faith and uh just let the chips fall now there's a there's a 20th century greek orthodox saint saint nick darios of egyna and i don't know why i've always connected with this saint i i've been to

[48:34] his to his home to his con he created a convent on the island of vegana i've been there a dozen times at least and his life story just spoke to me so clearly where he had been the um he had been the greek orthodox bishop of alexandria egypt in the 19 well around 1900 and uh there were other priests there who were jealous of him and the quick rise through the ranks that he had undergone

[49:04] and so they began spreading these rumors that he had had sexual relationships with nuns with greek orthodox nuns none of it was true can israel drax priests hook up they can hook up though right before they become priests they can get married okay yeah they can get married but bishops are forbidden from uh marriage they have to be celibate okay so he was stripped of his bishopric and he was essentially exiled to the island of vegena and although he spent the rest of his

[49:34] life writing letters to the archbishop and to the patriarch and to the ecumenical patriarch trying to clear his name he never expressed any anger at the people who did this to him he only expressed forgiveness and they had ruined his life right and he forgave them and it was never like oh boy i i have to forgive them because i'm christian and he genuinely forgave them

[50:04] sure he wanted to be bishop again sure but it was like no hard feelings and i thought to myself once everything collapsed around me and i i find myself charged with five felonies including three counts of espionage and i'm facing 45 years in prison you know i thought if nectarios could forgive his accusers i'm gonna forgive mine and then i looked at people like you know nelson mandela or martin luther king where these guys really did forgive those who sought to ruin them

[50:36] yeah we had a guest a previous guest suzanne sylvester who whose whole concept of of of her spiritual journey she was a catholic and and now she's a sort of a spiritualist and life coach and public speaker author has a television show in sky she has this this whole idea of accepting that things won't happen once you accept that things won't happen you kind it it it relieves you of the burden it's liberty of of of worry

[51:07] about all this stuff and and so the same thing happens with i think forgiveness you know i mean i always say i don't you know i don't have uh i mean i think i i do have i think there's some people that view me as their enemy and i think sometimes people need a villain in their life so i'm happy happy to be that villain you know like whatever like i can't argue with chris and i can argue with crazy you know um and uh and and yet i think that uh but you can't carry with you all this you know and that's the part of the problem is

[51:39] that it hurts you yeah you become you just become you know you know forgiveness i think carrying with you the idea of all this stuff now i'm saying this i'm talking to both sides of my mouth because if it it it's like it's like we have to push dunwali which is you know has bidal has revenge i always say retribution you know that's i always go i can retribution sometimes you know things i don't believe in karma i don't think karma exists um but i do believe that that retribution occurs uh i think that

[52:12] and i think that there's it's something that is uh you set in motion the force and it's always one of these things where people accept and love all the good things that happen to them and then when something bad happens they don't think they say that that was somebody else right that was somebody else that did that bad thing but all the good stuff was associated with you even though there's good people in your life that help you with those good things and sometimes you know that good and bad it's just his life you know i i always like the um sylvester

[52:42] stallone who says nothing's gonna hit you as hard as life you know he says that you got to get keep getting up you know he's got this really great quote and uh and it it it's it's true life is good bad and ugly and it's how you how you deal with it so you you did this whole thing you you you whistle blew on torture not just waterboarding right you have this this saint that you're that you're that you're passionate about it's he's not the patron saint of mental illness is he because you know you can pray all you want you're not getting rid of it you know

[53:13] right so um but uh see you you have this example and you you you have obviously the legal components of stuff you know and and uh and i always like i said argue the same part of our conversation that we had in the beginning it's like you want to get information from somebody torture doesn't work just on a practical level stop that you know it doesn't work but um but but let's take the next level is that there's a moral obligation right uh and so you

[53:44] you you whistle blow you do this whole business and you lose everything in your career your family uh your your pension all the things that i mean your life churned on a dime literally uh 180 degrees and started going south uh and and you're still dealing with it right now i mean your your business right now is your industry is what it's whistle blowing uh it's telling your story and it's it's re-operationalizing your life it's

[54:15] the biggest con op of your of your life right now and it takes time you know i got out of prison five almost six years ago yeah and uh it's just now that i've gotten back on my feet and things are really starting to move forward uh like i said earlier the the cost is very high but again you have to weigh you have to weigh how you want to get through life do you want to get through life with regrets saying wow i wish i had stood up i wish i had i had said something my

[54:46] kids would have been proud of me if i had said something or are you just going to do it because you know what's right and what's wrong and that was wrong yeah it was as simple as that yeah i mean you know i i've been involved a lot of the you know i you know i know i might say whistleblowing i don't know if it counts as whistle blowing so when the subprime mortgage hit uh you know i i whistle blue i and i got fired and rehired three times by the same entity um because in 1999 i was involved in these in these these are back they have this

[55:17] bit it's called the big builder conference that's like the top 100 builders that go to to washington and they discuss what's going on and i remember um i i remember sitting in these meetings and i had to i i had a crisis of conscience and i went through the whole thing with my industry and said we can't do this and it was you know we had the the the secretary of uh there was a treasury there we had everybody sit there talking about our interest rates we can buy into the interest rate we can do all this stuff and i'm going this is not right and and and uh and and and what i do i

[55:50] went to the membership of the national home builders i and i was a blue they fired me and then they the the trade contractors threatened to pull their membership so they rehired me um and then they figured out and i've been through some of this stuff it's uh you know and a lot of stuff with corruption overseas but i i what i wanted to do is is uh is make sure that we highlighted you know this this and broke the ice between us with this conversation you know and and uh and talked about faith and conscience and whistleblowing and all of this stuff um but i i know you have to go i i know

[56:20] we're we're short of time but i wanted to just um you know close out with you know one more question and then we'll close out one is you know your what's your message you know you've been through uh now 10 years of hardship as a result of really making a crisis of kind of but this crisis of conscience and then it's something that's so high impact i mean essentially taking on the us government a lot of people are making micro

[56:51] decisions and and and moral decisions based on their faith their honor um their ethics and rules and what's your message to the community and a lot of our listeners are international deal with corruption every day so so what would be your advice to somebody says somebody who's dealing with an issue right now or some kind of crisis that when it comes to corruption or oh sure you you really do have to follow your heart look we all know we all know deep down what's right and

[57:22] what's wrong don't try to rationalize or explain or excuse go with what you know in your gut is the right thing to do because even when there's fallout once it's all passed you're going to know you're going to realize and understand that you did the right thing i appreciate that this has been uh a uh crossing face a production of of uh muslims for muslims international and role top productions our special guest was john kiriakou

[57:53] and we appreciate you taking the time very gracious of you to to spend time with me today and we'll have you on again soon thank you so much for having me thank you
