Title: Ep. 5150 – John Kiriakou on the Brutal CIA Torture of Abu
Show: Scott Horton
Date: 2019-12-30
URL: https://youtu.be/fmUsmRQO_cQ
Duration: 44:00

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[00:10] all right shall welcome with Scott Horton shelf I am the director of the libertarian Institute editorial director of anti-war calm author of the book fool's errand time to end the war in Afghanistan and I recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003 all of which are available at Scott Horton org you can also sign up for the podcast feed full archive is also available at youtube.com slash Scott Horton show all

[00:40] right you guys introducing John Kiriakou former CIA guy now it does journalism and host a show on Sputnik and he wrote the book The Reluctant spy and I'm sorry I am forgetting John the title of the book that you wrote with Joe Hickman about right it was about zubeida and then I wrote one I wrote one called doing time like a spy which one the First Amendment award and I got a new one coming out Oh with Gareth Porter

[01:11] with Gareth Porter right the CIA insiders guide to the Iran conflict great and when's that coming out that's coming out January 21st so right around the corner great that's awesome I know from talking with Gareth he's been hard at work on that thing so oh boy did he take it seriously yeah well he is he really is he's a committed researcher and and truly an expert on Iran yeah yeah he wrote the book

[01:42] manufactured crisis of course about the exactly grandeur all right so listen uh we're gonna bring up some old stuff and fight a little bit here um the first time anybody ever saw you on the TV you were saying I looked torture they just tortured three guys in just a little bit yeah it's the big deal right right yeah that's what I said yeah so yeah the truth of the matter was that that the that the contractors who were carrying out the torture program Mitchell and Jessen were were lying in official

[02:13] channels they were sending back these lies from the field in order to to justify this bogus program and so we didn't even know that they had lied until this year inspector general's report was released in 2009 so all those years they had fooled so many of us yeah but we knew long before that that there were CIA ghost prisons at Diego Garcia and on ships at sea and in Morocco and in Poland and of course that people were being tortured I mean the Abu Ghraib

[02:43] scandal broke in 2004 and all that was traced immediately back to copper green special access program in the military and to the CIA black site torture program that had been authorized at the highest levels of the White House nope I've got to disagree with you we knew that there was a military torture program certainly there was never a CIA program at Diego Garcia there's no CIA presence at Diego Garcia that was entirely military well it has been reported that there were I'm almost

[03:16] certain that the ghost prison black sites story that was originally reported in The Guardian in like 2004 included secret CIA prisons on ships at sea as well as I don't think they had named Morocco and Romania and Poland yet but no they had yet existed they came later and Tyler was there there was no CIA program on ships at sea that was that was a conclusion that the media had drawn that was you know they it's like

[03:47] they were they were on the right trail but they were just getting the details wrong you know boy was we still knew that there were CIA black sites and that the I mean wasn't it the case even in the Mora report and all of that from Abu Ghraib it all this started with the CIA and it bled over to the military yes that was true it started the CIA of course had had that one black site in the very beginning and yeah there were there were military personnel who were aware of the

[04:17] program and it did bleed into the military and it was only because of a military whistleblower who happened to be the the general counsel for the Department of the Navy who finally blew the whistle on me on the military's torture program that was the Alberta morale thing ya know when the blacks are you talking about the salt dungeon in Kabul North Dakota are you talking about in Thailand you know what I'm not allowed to the CIA has never Declassified the location of any of

[04:48] these places even though they've been reported on extensively in the media and so I'm just I can't say the word you say it go ahead I I love that you say it the song that is saying it and in these locations soap it started off early so I'll Pitt started off before the other secret prisons and it was because soap it had already already existed you know first under the Soviets and then later under under the Taliban and so we just took

[05:19] over this godforsaken Taliban dungeon and torture chamber and used it for our own purposes hmm yeah the the base in Poland where you guys to put it loosely tortured people was a former Soviet base as well no comment all right now so look um you write about in the book how you were involved in the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi bin al-shibh and Abu

[05:50] Zubaydah right those three in Pakistan no just Abu Zubaydah oh just debated not the other guys yeah no no just I was a beta yeah I was the leader of the team that caught Abu Zubaydah I had gone back to CIA headquarters and then we caught Khalid Sheikh Mohammed the best of my recollection it was in August of 2002 and then Ramzi been his ship right about the same time I think he was in Karachi okay so then I screwed that up anyway so that you got you got zubeida

[06:20] he end up writing a book about this guy you turn him over now so the CIA I know originally allowed the FBI Ali su Phan to come in and interrogate the guy and apparently was getting some stuff out of them and then that was all cancelled and Mitchell and Jessen and the torturers were brought in but at this point what you went home and weren't involved in any of that right we caught up as a beta March 22nd 2002 I went back to CIA headquarters on made

[06:51] first Abu Zubaydah went to the secret site he recovered from his gunshot wounds for about six weeks and then you note correctly that that Ali Soufan of the FBI began interrogating him remember at the time the 9/11 attacks were still an open criminal investigation and so even though normally the CIA has the lead on cases overseas and the FBI has the lead on cases domestically the FBI had the lead in that one and so Ali Soufan did what the FBI does so well he

[07:25] established a rapport with Abu Zubaydah it took weeks but he ended up getting up as a beta to start talking and and he was providing actionable intelligence for whatever reason in late July 2002 George Tenet who was the CIA director at the time went to President Bush and asked Bush to expelled the FBI from the secret site and let the CIA take over there was no reason to do that but he did it anyway and Bush agreed and so on August 1st the FBI withdrew from the

[07:57] secret site and not only just the site they actually left the country because they knew what was coming and they didn't want any part of a torture program and so the CIA began torturing of a zubeida on August the 1st he immediately clammed up and provided nothing else that went on for months and finally Ali Soufan went back out re-establish this relationship with him he started talking again and then Mitchell and Jessen did the whole thing all over again and really they they

[08:27] tortured him just for the sake of of torturing him they called it learned helplessness and it was far less about gathering intelligence than it was about just ruining this guy's life well you say here he was not the number three he had never even joined al-qaeda and he never pledged loyalty to bin Laden and erect at what point did the CIA know that well the CIA will tell you that that Joe Hickman and I made that up

[08:58] they're lying we're telling the truth so it became apparent early on in the interrogate Asians that Abu Zubaydah just did not have the information that we expected him to have and the truth of it was was this it was that he has a first cousin whose name is also Abu Zubaydah he had lived in the United States he fled to Jordan as soon as as trouble started after 9/11 and when you put their two files together you know not knowing that

[09:29] it's two people this looks like a terrorist Superman in fact it wasn't it was one bad cousin and I was a beta himself the one that we caught was a bad guy but he was no worse than than many of the other people that we caught and who have subsequently been released he had founded al-qaeda's two training camps in southern Afghanistan he had founded the house of martyrs the al-qaida safehouse in Peshawar but he was not the number three in al-qaeda he was he was not the terrorist mastermind

[10:01] that we said he was he had never joined al-qaeda as you said he had never pledged fealty to Osama bin Laden and we knew that I'm gonna say bye-bye the late by the later part of the year of 2002 early 2003 that this had been a mistake mm-hmm and now Bush famously at least accorded by Ron Suskind told George Tenet was was briefed on this by George Tenet and said to him well you're not gonna make me lose face on this are you

[10:31] I said he was important this was the guy Bush brought up over and over again when defending the torture program this is why we have to torture we have people like Abu Zubaydah who we have to torture into telling us the truth it's not torture but yeah it's torture and anything less wouldn't do the job and it was all a lie and you know one of the important things Scott that we learned in the Senate torture report not even in the body of it but in the in the footnotes which to me is where the real story is told was that George Tenet had

[11:02] gone repeatedly to the White House to brief President Bush on the program and repeatedly had been rebuffed by Dick Cheney and then Cheney finally went to tenet and said i briefed him everything's good it was only later in and five that it became apparent that Bush was never briefed by George Tenet that he was purportedly briefed through Cheney and Cheney just lied about the entire thing you're saying even

[11:33] including that so-called conversation that Susskind reported that that never happened that never happened at least according to the torture report it never happened that's it's crazy this is not how to run a government this is not how you run an international terrorist catching program you can't have a president who's so aloof and so cut off that was in the movie of the report to that Oh Bush did you know till oh six well Abu Ghraib scandal broke in 2004

[12:05] and all this stuff started coming out then yes so specific point about that Susskind quote because it's a very particular quote you're not gonna make me lose face on this is it is it possible you think that there was some kind of debriefing at least on the issue of Abu Zubaydah where tenants said to Bush hey you really should stop bringing up this debate agai because it turns out he's not that sure deal and that Bush sure that's does the report say that that didn't happen no no it doesn't it

[12:36] doesn't refer specifically to that conversation what it what it's talking about is the overall program you know I remember when when the program was first approved and George Tenet said in a meeting repeatedly he would just open his mouth and say I can't believe the president approved that program like he they asked for the moon and the stars thinking well you know somebody at the White House is gonna take this out they'll take that out and they'll strike this out and that out and they didn't they just approved the whole program and and if the agency they couldn't believe

[13:08] it had all been approved and so as it turned out Bush hadn't approved it Cheney had approved it and said that it had come from Bush and that's what we learned in the Senate torture report hey guys Scott Wharton here for my Swanson's great book the war State it's about the rise of the military-industrial complex and the power elite after World War two during the administration's of Harry Truman Dwight Eisenhower and Jack Kennedy it's a very enlightening take on this definitive era on America's

[13:40] road to world empire the war state by Mike Swanson find it in the right hand margin at Scott Horton org hey yo Mike Swanson is a successful Wall Street trader with an Austrian school understanding of the markets and therefore he has great advice to share with you check out Mike's work and sign up for his list at Wall Street window dot-com and that's what you'll get a window into all of Mike's trades he'll explain what he's buying and selling and expecting and why I know you'll learn

[14:11] and earn a lot Wall Street window calm that's Wall Street window calm all right now so on the subject of Zubaydah's torture what they do to him oh wow what what didn't they do to him talk about learned helplessness you know in addition to the to the the the torture techniques that we know about those ten techniques waterboarding walling the cold sell the attention grab the

[14:44] attention slap you know all these different kinds of techniques there were other things that they did they learned for example that he had this irrational fear of insects and so they put him in this this coffin with a diaper they left him in there for weeks but they would open it up periodically to change his diaper and then they would throw in cockroaches right a box of cockroaches just to make him crazy they they won by

[15:17] the way say for example you don't have a phobia of insects in any particular way but the CIA locks you in a coffin with a box of cockroaches it's just about as bad as having a phobia like that already oh yeah yeah he'll come out with a phobia without a doubt it's sick that's all there is to it it's just sick they would keep him in this dog cage it was a large dog cage like for a German Shepherd but you know you're all cubed up in that kind of thing and they would leave him in there

[15:48] for weeks and he would soil himself and he couldn't stretch he couldn't lay he couldn't stand they would chain him to an eyebolt in the ceiling for the same reason just so he couldn't stand or I'm sorry he couldn't the sit or lay down and get comfortable and they would leave him like that for four weeks at a time you know with music blasting and the lights on all the time and and your strip naked and the the cell is chilled to fifty degrees and they throw ice water on you and it got to the point

[16:20] where as soon as either Mitchell or Jason would enter the cell he would just start to cry and curl up into a ball and that was the whole point and then that was the whole point but then would they say to him okay now tell us the secret and then would he he would tell them literally anything he thought they wanted to hear just to get them to stop so where he was telling Allie so fun real intelligence he was just babbling gibberish to to to Mitchell and Jessen

[16:54] you know with all these super fun I only would ask him a question like this and let me preface this by saying what he gave I Lisa found that was so important was two things number one was the identity of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed who we only knew as more thought right we knew that there was this bad guy somewhere out there in the world named muck thought and he had masterminded the the Bojinka operation where they were going to hijack 747s out of Manila and then fly them into buildings along the

[17:25] u.s. west coast that was in 1996 and it was disrupted so we knew more thought had been the the mastermind of that but we didn't know that most otters real name was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Ali Soufan got that from Abu Zubaydah number one number two he gave us Al Qaeda's wiring diagram which we had no idea of we didn't know what it looked like we didn't know who reported to whom we didn't know where they were located and so Ali would ask him and I'm just making

[17:56] this up as an example if you were gonna do an OP operation in Dusseldorf how would you do that and Abu Zubaydah would answer well I know this guy Mohammed and here's his phone number and Mohammed has a friend Abdullah and Abdullah is an expert in you know bomb-making and Abdullah's got a friend Raschid and Russian knows these people that get weapons and and then we could call the Germans and say listen you've got a problem in Dusseldorf here's who you need to round up and then they could disrupt that cell that's the

[18:27] kind of information that he was giving to Ali sooo fun but then twice Ali and the rest of the FBI were thrown out of the secret site and Mitchell and Jessen took over and all of the information dried up now the way they were able to get to get along with this lie by perpetuating this lie for so long is remember at the time the CIA and the FBI still hated each other with a special passion and the computer systems weren't compatible and so ali's doing these

[18:59] debriefings he's putting all the intelligence into an FBI cable he's sending it back to FBI headquarters and the CIA is none the wiser so what Mitchell and Jessen did is once Ali and the FBI guys left they pulled all of Ali's reporting they retyped it in the CIA computer system and they said oh we waterboarded at one time he cracked and look at all the amazing information that he gave us that's how they pulled the wool over our eyes for so long and by our you mean you were

[19:30] back a CIA headquarters approving all this well I was at CIA headquarters reading all of it and I said to a colleague of mine I said you know maybe I'm wrong about all this because I said I said not only was torture immoral and unethical and in my view illegal but it didn't work and then they're sending these cables back saying oh not only did it work but it worked fantastically here's the information he's giving us and I said you know maybe I'm wrong about this I still object to it on on ethical and moral grounds but maybe it

[20:02] it does work if he's given us this kind of information well in fact he wasn't giving us that kind of information he was given it to Ali's who fun and we stole it from Eileen and just put it in C a channels and when did you find out about that that that was where they were getting over not until 2009 when the inspector general's report was released and then so I want to go back to the salt pit torture dungeon for a second because that's where gold Raman died and right there was another guy

[20:34] this is Abu Ghraib was the military prison in Iraq but it was the CIA that murdered a guy named al Jamaat II there by hanging him from the ceiling with his arms behind his back and suffocating him to death something the Nazis used to do okay thanks for the clarity on that and now according to Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson and then later the AP confirmed his same number a hundred and eight people were killed by the military or at least died

[21:05] in in military captivity after being subject to torture to one degree or another as far as I know I don't know about you as far as I know the CIA killed two oh no because there was the guys that they killed down at at Guantanamo two in 2006 the three guys down there that that your partner hitman wrote all about that's right so you can add those three so there's five murdered by the CIA at least during illness and

[21:35] it's a the truth I always believed it was more than five I mean I only when I was at the CIA and I my last job at headquarters was I was the executive assistant to the associate deputy director for operations so I'm reporting briefing all this stuff in the morning there were the the two early on that I briefed in 2002 and then Hickman reported on the other three at Guantanamo but you know there were people sort of just dying in the process all along and I always wondered if we

[22:08] were killing other prisoners off the books and just simply not reporting it you know if you're in a place like salt pit for example which is literally hell on earth what's to keep you from killing somebody and just burying them there and just not reporting it and I often wondered if that was the case but do you have any kind of estimate on the numbers of people that you would hear about dying I I don't but if you know Larry Wilkerson who I have incredible respect

[22:39] for um is saying that the number was as high as that whether it's all military or a combination of military and CIA I'm gonna believe Larry Wilkerson yeah well and the AP confirmed his exact same number 100 now there you have it and yeah but supposedly those are all military that excludes the CIA ones that doesn't count even the two Raman and Ramadi much less the three that died at Guantanamo that they still won't admit to and by the way I should clarify here I do hope people will google this and

[23:11] read about the Guantanamo murders but it's the other Scott Horton the heroic human rights lawyer from Harper's Magazine in Columbia University who did all that great journalism I just interviewed him and Hickman about it so I don't want anyone to get confused I wouldn't you know that's that's his great journalism on that case and it's pretty ironclad to with his follow-up articles and everything yeah and and with Hickman's book about what happened there but you know it was John Durham who was brought in by Obama and Eric

[23:43] Holder just affirmed the cover-up there which is exactly what he did yeah that is exactly right and and now John Durham finds himself in the news again and you know it's kind of fun to think that you would have this bulldog proxy they keep calling him a bulldog yeah this Bulldog prosecutor come in and you know do something heroic like and he has the power to indict and prosecute John Brennan who guess who I see go to prison john-boy what a great day in

[24:17] American history would that be yeah but I dare not hope or believe there's just no way this is the same guy that let John Brennan and friends get away with murder here he is he is yeah John Durham is the US attorney for Connecticut he's got this reputation as being a pit bull I've not seen it yet I hope that he is a pit bull on this issue I will say that that I have hung my hat on this one book of hope and that is that three or four weeks ago John Durham said that his investigation was not an

[24:49] inquiry it was an investigation and that it had become criminal in nature so the New York Times yesterday reported that Durham is specifically investigating John Brennan that he has asked the CIA to turn over Brennan's emails Brennan's call logs and copies of contemporaneous notes that Brennan took during meetings with other senior officials including former FBI director Comey so you know we can hope that these allegations that that Brennan

[25:21] was telling Congress one thing and telling colleagues the opposite thing might result in a in a couple of charges we'll see mm-hmm well so there's this CIA officer I'm sorry his name is escaping me it's Larry Johnson yeah Larry Johnson yeah former CIA John searcher I'm sorry he's another great researcher so he had a story that he wrote over at Patrick Lang's blog another former intelligence

[25:51] official there dia and I forget if CIA too but anyway a lot of these intelligence guys hang out over Patrick Lang's blog Sic Semper Tyrannis and Larry Johnson said that he had a single source and he wasn't claiming to know it he was he was describing it as a single source story but he was saying and I don't know if there have been follow-up since then I know there was one follow-up that was no more conclusive but what he says is that his source tells him that John Brennan created a task force in early 2016 for the purpose

[26:23] of entrapping Trump and drumming up this Russian gait plot in the first place and and and actually that's one part of that a side point on that was he said that when it comes to going after Brennan now that Geena Haspel is on board because they've got beef from before and so she has every reason to want to one ingratiate herself with Trump and to get back at Brennan by telling the truth about him so I wonder if I'll shed any light on any of that um still geraldi

[26:53] tells the same story that there an actual formal taskforce that John Brennan set up at the CIA for the specific purpose of going after Donald Trump I I don't know if that's true I actually kind of hope that it is just because I'd like to see Brennan get what I believe he has coming to him for a whole bunch of different reasons I believe what you're saying about Geena Haspel not because but because jeana's the savior of of you know all that's

[27:24] right and just and true but because they're all sociopaths over there and they care only about themselves and this is exactly what a senior CIA officer would do to another senior CIA officer if she thought that he was getting in the way of her legacy so I absolutely believe that well that's good because that means she does have the rope to hang him with but I guess you know what would have to happen here would be Trump would have to say to bar hey bar I

[27:54] really really really really mean it I want you guys to pursue this thing to the bitter end and then bar would have to really mean it when he said yes sir and turn around and tell Durham hey if we got a tear down all of Langley Virginia we are doing this thing you know you had my full support and my full insistence that you go all the way with this anything short of that it's not gonna happen it's not and don't forget too that John Durham

[28:24] now is accomplished enough and famous enough and has enough support on Capitol Hill that he's got to see himself as a future Attorney General so he's gonna want to really put a cherry on top of this thing - yeah well but yeah I mean I that's where his political interest is in not crucifying these guys because look at how bad what they did is I mean if you really prosecuted John Brennan for framing Trump for treason I mean what's right you'd have to put

[28:57] him in prison for life you'd have to banish him and his family from the country forever you'd have to you'd have to turn DC upside down turn wood you would unless they decide to to charge him with crimes that are going to result in whatever like the george papadapolis sentence of 14 days or were sixty-five days in jail like rick gates got the other day but with that comes a felony conviction the loss of a firearm the loss of a federal pension the loss of the right to vote you know the little

[29:29] final paragraph on your wikipedia bio that you finished your career by going to to prison for two weeks or two months or two years or whatever it was so who knows I I'm I'm kind of enjoying this you know friend of mine at the agency told me one time that he really believed in that old adage the bigger they are the harder they fall we were talking about the former CIA director under Bill Clinton oh my god his name escapes me right now see but Huck no it was after Wolsey it was he he he wanted to write

[30:02] his memoirs and so he took an agency laptop with him after he retired charged John Deutsche okay I'm sorry I thought he was come for Wolsey part me no remember Wolsey was the first one in he lasted about a year and a half and then he he resigned or was forced out and endorsed bob dole for president yeah and the anecdote there was that Bill Clinton met him once and said I don't want that guy anywhere near me ever can ya understand he just sympathize with old bill but when it comes to Jim Woolsey

[30:33] young with him oh yeah oh yeah yeah I agree anyway sorry so John Deutsch you were saying yeah so John Deutsch he ended up he ended up taking a plea they bumped it down to a misdemeanor just so he could save face but it ruined his reputation and nobody ever heard of the guy again he required he retired quietly to Massachusetts and that was the end of it right well you know I don't know I hadn't noticed this I'm not much of a film buff but someone was pointing out to me spoiler alert for anybody who

[31:05] hasn't seen the report yet I'm about to ruin one part of it which is that John Brennan is played by the guy that played the psychopathic murderer in the Silence of the Lambs she puts the lotion on her skin if she gets the hose again got that guy to play John Brennan which was just perfect and they really do a great job of showing you know his temerity to spy on the Senate and falsely accused so staffers of breaking into CIA computers to have them prosecuted and all that oh yeah I mean

[31:37] that's you know I was the script consultant on that film oh yeah the writer director yeah Scott Burns he's an old friend of mine and he he came to me in 2015 and said that he was going to write a spec script for HBO he had a first-look deal at HBO and he was kind of looking for something to do he's written huge blockbusters he wrote The Bourne Ultimatum for example the informant he had some big big blockbuster movies under his belt but he was looking for something more serious

[32:07] and he wanted to both write it and direct it so um he came up with the script and HBO just wasn't interested in it and so he he held on to that script for years two three four years and then finally Amazon said that they would take it now it's a big hit yeah it is it's really great too and you know I gotta say cuz I'm interested in all of this stuff and so the whole time that Diane Feinstein's committee was writing this report and doing their investigation you

[32:38] know me and my guests we would cover it all the time all the news stories about it and whatever and yet still they're these faceless bureaucrats somewhere these kind of imaginary people in some basement somewhere supposedly doing some work and then we find out after the fact they wrote a 7,000 page report but they're still completely opaque these characters and yeah and so this movie I really appreciate the way it was all brought to life and it's kind of weird that weird guy from the new weird Star Wars movies is in it driver I guess he's

[33:09] a big star these days so that's good that it's driving people to the movie and showing that part of the story terrible upon there but uh ya know I hated episode 7 and 8 and I'm probably gonna hate nine when I see it in an hour so but I got to respect that guy now cuz he did do a good job of bringing that character to life I think and I really gave a bunch of that I'm really glad it was made and and I guess I'm really glad that you helped consult on it and make sure that it was tight thank you

[33:41] he did a good job he really did he took the whole thing very very seriously and he he wanted to be completely true to the record and any was yeah was that your idea to get that guy from Silence of the Lambs to play John Brennan I wish how perfect what you know this is the this is the strength of a really great casting director right you know like how the Sopranos was perfectly cast yeah and Goodfellas perfectly cast that's how this was it was perfect casting yeah

[34:12] skill you know I I did hear I tried to get ahold of guy I haven't been able to I need to double down on that but I did hear the interview with Daniel Jones that's the character that the movie based around there by Jeremy Scahill and it was really good he had a lot to say it was really did you by the way you know him or did you spend time working with him or talking with all of this stuff he's he was said he was uncomfortable meeting me and so I just left it at that okay well you were involved in a way right so he wants to I

[34:44] guess keep any conflict interest out of that yeah and that was cool I testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee back then not before the Intelligence Committee and the truth is that the Intelligence Committee was in up to its neck with the torture program they had approved it and financed it and then they expressed outrage that it had gone as far as it had gone hmm which was kind of funny to me just because they were all in on it you know this is this is my beef with Diane Feinstein Diane

[35:15] Feinstein was one of the foremost cheerleaders for the CIA on Capitol Hill there were very few people Democrats or Republicans who loved the CIA as much as Dianne Feinstein did and in fact when Obama became president remember he had trouble finding a CIA director he had offered the job to three or four different people nobody wanted it he couldn't name Brennan because the progressives were up in arms Brennan had been the number three at the agency during the torture program under george w bush and so finally leon panetta agreed to take the job but Diane

[35:47] Feinstein said she would vote for Panetta only if Panetta chose Steve kappes as his number two but why would you name Steve kappes when Steve kappes was one of the Godfather's one of the creators of the CIA torture program but he got that job because Dianne Feinstein insisted that it be him so to have Dianne Feinstein portrayed in this movie is this great champion of Human Rights it's just nonsense yeah well and as you say she was the I

[36:17] guess the Republicans were in the majority the North Senate oh no actually because Evers had switched right so she was the chair yes all of the Senate Intelligence Committee from the time of the start of the terror war on because Jeffers has switched before 9/11 even that's right he became an independent so she was not just the ranking member she was the dirt no she's the chairman she was the chair she was the chair cuz I was trying to think I guess there were some senators

[36:48] who had come and gone by then but uh right no so and so she really had to prove this all along so she she I guess we give her the credit for ordering this investigation up yeah you know I do I give her credit for that but then I fault her but its own I the thing is she created it in the first place so yeah and I felt Wyden and and I felt Udall for not going public with the whole damn thing at the end especially Udall Udall had given up his seat he was retiring he could have put the entire five thousand plus page

[37:21] torture report in the in the congressional record and just Declassified it in the in a matter of seconds yep and he refused to do that yep and well for that matter there have been at least dozens of people in DC with access to this thing and at the beginning I know that they turned over copies of the report to the Department of Justice and I'm not sure which other agencies and then they ended up giving them back we don't even want this thing in our safe take it yeah and and if the intercept is

[37:53] to be believed most of those copies have been destroyed yeah well good point if they're to be believed but yeah depending on you know as long as it's not Jim risin the Russia gate truth there lunatic who gave up all of his credentials as an investigative reporter money all right but or Murtaza al-qaeda over there certainly not him right but the rest of them they're okay though a lot of them most of them yeah well we can agree to disagree on that well oh yeah I guess

[38:25] there's Matthew Cole who got you put in prison yeah there's Matthew Cole and not just me he got reality winner put in prison and he got Terry Albury the FBI was a blower put in prison I've always maintained that that once is an accident twice is a terrible coincidence three times you're secretly working for the FBI yeah you know what he did great work on the Navy SEALs war crimes in Afghanistan but then again maybe that was all fraud too probably not though I

[38:56] don't trust the guy yeah well I still like Greenwald I do too I like Greenwald I went to college with him he's a good guy serious journalist dogged researcher I have a lot of respect for him yeah and I think people are under the false impression that he runs that thing which he is no he's not no he's not I see you know whenever he says anything I see people attacking him for reality winner all along and you can tell it he's tired of saying that he also very

[39:29] much disapproves of what happened in that situation but it really wasn't him yeah yeah he still has a job there yeah all right so you know what we didn't even talk about these pictures can we mention real quick these drawings of Abu Zubaydah that finally were published here before yeah you bet so I was beta has been drawing pictures of himself being tortured in a variety

[40:01] of different horrific positions and these pictures were finally brought out of Guantanamo by his attorney mark 10 bro mark is a professor of law at Seton Hall University in Newark and has long been a boozy beta's one of several pro bono attorneys representing Abu Zubaydah how in the world he ever got them Declassified I don't know and and he said that it took years to do and it's funny the CIA insisted on blacking out the

[40:32] faces of the stick figure drawings of the torturers that I was a bayit Abu Zubaydah had done funny to me like you can't identify your torture from a stick figure and that's what it is too but they insisted on putting black boxes over the the faces of the torturers and the drawings still these are very very powerful they ran in the sunday New York Times a couple of weeks ago and and there's been an outcry justifiably so that we really should never have been

[41:04] involved in this kind of thing in the first place yeah it really is something to see it like even in the drunk the the expressions on the face of Zubaydah's drawing of himself as he's going through this and that kind of thing you know it's I'm not much of an artist or a critic of art but it you know sometimes a real simple drawing can have so much expression in it you know we see

[41:34] the horror on the guy's face and listen I I don't have time I really got a runt but I do want to mention this great article that someone forwarded to me this discussion came up in my reddit room and it's called Marty God's felt another whistleblower in solitary confinement and he's been in solitary for more than nine months now not just in solitary but in something called a CMU the communications management unit

[42:07] so he's not allowed to send or receive any mail except to the court he's not allowed to send or receive any make or receive any phone calls he's not allowed to have any visits they've really completely cut this guy off and this is something that done we talked about in the past people will check on this site you can find my interviews with willpotter on this and this is something that they use you know in the name of people like ramzi yousef or the shaykh rahman these kind

[42:38] of people they go ahead and like this against left-wing political activists oftentimes what we see here yeah and it's it's funny Marty considers himself to be a conservative journalist and and he truly is a whistleblower I mean this is like a definition of whistleblowing what he did he he brought to light evidence that that a young teenage girl was being abused at Children's Hospital in Boston and it turned out that everything he said was right now they they charged him with computer crimes because to to bring

[43:09] attention to the case he took down the the children's sentence he got 10 years and not just 10 but 10 in solitary and CMU man all right well listen I hope people look at that it's at Mynt Press news Marty God's felt another whistleblower in solitary confinement that's from last March and then the subject of our interview today mostly here is Consortium news.com those torture drawings in the NYT thank you again John thank you Scott good to talk to you

[43:41] alright y'all thanks find me at libertarian institute.org at Scott Horton org anti-war calm and reddit.com slash Scott Horton show oh yeah and read my book fool's errand timed and the war in Afghanistan at fool's errand dot us you
