Title: Ron Paul Liberty Report
Show: Ron Paul Liberty Report
Date: 2017-04-18
URL: https://youtu.be/TGvgUl7geeM
Duration: 26:00

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[00:14] [Music] hello everybody and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report with me today is Daniel McAdams Daniel good to see you good morning Dr Paul Daniel we have a great guest today uh John Karo and we've talked about him a lot on this program and he has made an effort to really reveal the truth to a lot of people about what's really going on in particular with the CIA and he has a book coming out very soon doing time

[00:45] like a spy what is this doing time that means our government put him in prison here he's a truth teller and he ended up in prison sad story but uh I want to welcome you to our program John thanks for being with us thank you so much for having me I'm thrilled to be here great I think we'll start off with you telling the audience a little bit about uh you know the book coming up uh and why this might be different than the other two books that you have written and uh What

[01:16] uh what it's all about sure I I have written two other books uh one came out in 2010 it was a memoir of my years in the CIA it was called the reluctance spy my secret life in the cia's war on terror and then I have a book coming out in June called The Reluctant Terror I'm sorry called the uh convenient terrorist it's it's uh written with Joseph Hickman a former Guantanamo guard and um we we hoped that that book would be the definitive account of the the capture

[01:47] interrogation torture and Detention of Abu zubeda who um who I captured in Pakistan in 2002 uh but this book is different this is doing time like a spy how the CIA taught me to survive and thrive in prison uh I went to prison because I blew the whistle on the cia's torture program as you've been so kind to uh to tell your viewers over the past couple of years uh I expected to go to a minimum security Work Camp and indeed when my when my attorneys asked the

[02:19] judge to order me to a minimum security Work Camp she did so with no objection from the prosecutors now with a Work Camp there are no bars on the windows the doors are not locked you can work in town and you're on your honor to uh to spend the night in the actual prison camp building so when I got to prison I I just literally drove up and and knocked on the door and and said I'm John kiraku I'm here to turn myself in the guard began leading me around to the back of the actual prison that was across the street from the camp and I

[02:51] said no no I'm supposed to be at the camp across the street and the guard laughed kind of chortled and said ha not Accord according to my paperwork you're not and I told myself all right take it easy there's nothing you can do don't complain so five days later I got uh access to a telephone and I called one of my attorneys and I said hey they put me in the actual prison with the pedophiles and the murderers and the the drug King Pins what do I do and he said

[03:23] wow well we could file a motion with a court but it'll be two years before we get a hearing and you'll be home by then he said I'm sorry but you're going to have to tough it out and I decided on that day that I was going to use the skills that the CIA had taught me over the years to make sure that I remained safe and remained at the top of the social Heap in prison and that's exactly what I did wow wow Amazing Story what can you give us give us maybe your top

[03:54] five things that you had to to take out of your bag of tricks when you realize you were in a different situation than you thought you were sure number one is recruit spies to steal Secrets or anything else you need and indeed on your very first day of CIA training this is exactly what they tell you to do recruit spies to steal secrets that's the only way you can get promoted it's the only way you get ahead in life at the CIA well in prison it's the same way um if I need something from let's say uh

[04:27] the Supply Closet for example High lighters are banned they're considered to be Contraband but I know somebody who sweeps the floor in the uh warden's office or in the Administrative Office I work on recruiting that person so he can steal me uh a highlighter or an eraser or a pen it sounds so ridiculous now but it's actually pretty important when you're in prison um but you get more than that you establish a relationship with this person you establish a rapport and with a rapport comes information and

[11:10] it carries with it the death penalty if you can imagine this and this was for saying that the CIA was torturing its prisoners and that torture was illegal not only illegal but it was morally and ethically wrong and let me add one other thing uh Dr Paul one of the great things about working on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is you get to have lunch with foreign diplomats all the time and just have really great in-depth conversations about what's going on in the world and so I got a call one day from a Japanese

[11:41] Diplomat uh who invited me to lunch so I went to lunch and we had a lovely conversation about Israeli elections and Turkish elections and whatever the issues of the day were and at the end of the conversation he said to me uh so what's next for you and I said well actually I think I'm going to resign soon I promis Senator car that I would give him two years and it's been two and a half and I think I'd like to go back into business for myself very excitedly he said no no don't do that if you give me information I can give you money and

[12:12] I said I said shame on you what's the matter with you pitching me cold pitching me like that and I went directly to the office of the Senate security officer and I reported that I had been pitched by a foreign intelligence officer he called the FBI the FBI came up and interviewed me and they asked me to call him back and invite him to lunch and try to get him to tell tell me exactly what information he wanted and how much he was willing to pay for it so I did that and then I wrote them a memo and then they asked me

[12:43] to do it a third time and a fourth time and a fifth time which I did and finally he said to me well I've been transferred to Cairo it's a dream job best of luck I said okay best of luck and I never saw him again A year later after my arrest we received Discovery from the justice department and in that Discovery we learned that there never was any Japanese Diplomat he was an FBI agent undercover pretending to be a Japanese Diplomat and trying to get me to commit

[13:15] real Espionage and I said to my lead attorney why would they do such a thing I'm a patriot and he said they did it because they had no case and they knew they had no case and they wanted to get you doing something that they could legitimately prosecute you for well now that all this time has passed and I'm home from prison now for for just over two years two of the 12 FBI agents who worked against me have very discreetly reached out to my

[13:45] lawyers and they've apologized and they've said that this was a political case and that they were ordered to do it and that they were very sorry that they hoped that there were no hard feelings Daniel well that's an incredible story it's hard to hard to well you know the you uh no i' I've read interviews where you've urged other whistleblowers to go up the chain of command and not do what you did and I apparently I mean obviously it's from the story do do you feel that way what would you what would you tell someone now because as you point out well first of all the media is going to be hostile

[14:16] often times to whistleblowers uh the oversight committees on the Hill are not that much better if if any better at all what do you say to a future Ed Snowden who's out there thinking about exposing uh the next uh torture thing or something of that nature well the very first thing that person has to do is hire an attorney who's skilled and experienced in National Security whistleblowing there are a half a dozen of them in Washington hire the attorney first before you say anything now you can go through this

[14:47] process in two different ways uh and first we can look at Tom Drake the NSA whistleblower Tom Tom did indeed go through his chain of command he went to his boss after that he went to the uh inspector General at NSA then he went to the general counsel then he went to the Pentagon Inspector General and then he went to the house permanent select committee on intelligence what he ended up with was nine felony charges including seven counts of Espionage so that's what happens when you do it by by the book you do it the way that you're trained and supposed to do it um in my

[15:20] case my chain of command had created the cia's torture program I knew that I couldn't go through the chain of command so um I went to the press and again if you go to the Press you're going to be charged under the Espionage Act at least you were during the Obama Administration so there's really a situation where you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't there are a lot of um important media outlets now I say important because they're widely read things like the the New York Times The

[15:50] Washington Post even uh the guardian or The Intercept that have uh encryption Keys listed on their websites and so if you are a national security professional who wants to report waste fraud abuse or illegality and you don't want to go through your chain of command or you don't want to go publicly to the Press you can do it by sending the encrypted information directly to the journalists uh I fear that that's the only way to do it otherwise you literally take your

[16:21] your life into your own hands John I want to go back to your description about uh What uh Bush didn't do and what Obama did and I you're challenging stereotypes there because most people would think the Law and Order people are the Republicans uh our our channel here sort of takes uh an opinion that uh they're all the same different blends Republican Democrats policies end up but actually you put you put a picture there that even surprises me to a bit because

[16:52] uh you know we try to give benefits to even a Democrat if they're saying the right thing so this is pretty pretty amazing that uh uh but believable that all of a sudden the Democrats are the ones doing that you weren't even a republican you know if it was political or something but uh this this this is astounding have you thought about that or thought of uh well this is just an incident they're all the same or is there a difference in a much different way than the general population believes

[17:25] yeah I I've come to a conclusion I think about this kind of thing all the time I I concluded back um even before the 2012 election that there really are very few major differences between the two parties the Democrats and the Republicans they can Tinker around the edges of issues but neither one of those parties is really talking about Liberty about Freedom about civil rights and civil liberties and human rights and so I decided before the 2 um well before the 2012 election that

[17:59] um I was throwing my lot in with the libertarian party and I understand that it's a small party I understand that it only gets a handful of percentage points in the national elections but you know I I've come to the conclusion that that a vote for the lesser of two evils is still evil and and you have to vote for for the people who you truly believe mean the best for the country and to me those were obviously the Libertarians uh I I was struck as you

[18:30] say Dr Paul at at the nixonian obsession with National Security uh leaks under the Obama Administration you we talk a lot about the Espionage Act the Espionage Act was written in 1917 to combat German sabator during the first world war and indeed it was never updated never it doesn't even mention the term classified information because the classification system wasn't even invented until the mid 19 1950s now between 1917 and 2009 three

[19:04] Americans were prosecuted for um passing classified information to or they call it National Defense information to to journalists just in the eight years of the Obama Administration he prosecuted eight National Security Professionals almost three times all preious presidents combined well to me that's not the most transparent president in history his that's a president who's Waging War on transparency that's a president who is Waging War on Truth

[19:35] tellers and on National Security whistleblowers and that's the kind of president that you have to stand up and fight um John I want to get your your take on Wikileaks you know uh Mike Pomo the CIA director uh said this past week he considers Wikileaks a quote a hostile intelligence service he said Julie nange is a narcissist who has created nothing of value value it strikes me that he wasn't just being hyperbolic it seems to me as if classifying classifying him

[20:05] even in a speech to csis as he did as a hostile intelligence Service uh has a lot of implications as to how you would fight it as opposed to declaring it a a a publisher which is what Wikileaks tries to or or believes that it is what is your take on Wikileaks and and and pmo's recent comments on it I think you make a very important Point here um think there really was an underlying message coming from director Pompeo and the message is that Wikileaks will be treated here in the US in the

[20:37] court system as a hostile uh intelligence organization and I think that what that speech was was director Pompeo laying the groundwork for a a probable Espionage Act case against Julian Assange likely in the eastern district of Virginia where I was prosecuted where Jeffrey Sterling was prose uted where charges have been filed against Ed Snowden the eastern district of Virginia in Alexandria Virginia is known as the Espionage court and it's it's called that because no National

[21:08] Security defendant has ever won a case there um the judges are hanging judges uh the government knows that not only will it win but if a defendant elects to go to trial the jury will likely be made up of people from the district from the CIA the FBI the Pentagon the the in Ence contractors the Department of Homeland Security so if you're charged with a national security crime in the eastern district of Virginia you don't have a prayer and I think that that's what director Pompeo is preparing the

[21:40] American public for now is Julia nange a narcissist sure he is I don't personally like Julian Assange but with that said Julian Assange is actually doing a public service and he is exposing waste fraud abuse or illegality or threats to the public health or public safety which is the legal definition of whistleblowing I think that this is going to get much uglier before it gets any better and I think that it will play itself out in the eastern district of Virginia John uh we're gonna have to go

[22:10] in a little bit but I do want to ask another question I think we could uh do this for a long time I I hope we can get you to come to one of our conferences someday because you'd be fantastic count me in I would love what great uh I do have uh one one one question I want to follow up on I imagine and you said you do go out and you do speeches you go to the college campuses I assume talk to some young people what do you sense because when I go to the campuses I think I end up with a select group and

[22:40] they're very sympathetic but and you if if you've talked to some young people in general are they open to your views or have you been demonstrated against uh by you know the extremists on the other side what kind of receptions have you received yeah I I'm I'm going to use my most recent speech as as an example because this was typical of the way things have gone for me I spoke two weeks ago at Youngstown State University in Youngstown Ohio and the University was actually very worried about my speech I actually had to send them three

[23:12] references before they allowed me on to campus and the references went to the chief of the campus police department which I I actually said to my host it's a little fascist no that I have to get the cops permission to speak to a university but anyway I said fine I'll fill out your forms you can call my I referred them to a federal judge who's a friend of mine the director of security at the Commerce department and um and a former Ambassador so they they all vouched for me but anyway I the keynote address was was in a church off campus

[23:46] because they decided on campus that I was too controversial they expected 50 people I had 125 that showed up and and these students Dr Paul could not have been any more respectful attentive they asked smart questions I I will acknowledge that I shocked a lot of them they didn't expect to hear the story that I told but um but they were all ears and standing ovation at the end I sold a bunch of books I've I've received letters and and emails in

[24:18] the interim so that's really been typical of of my um college and university speeches people really do want to hear the story they have open minds and uh and they're willing to come around to to our line of thinking well I think we're going to finish up on that very positive note because I I think there's a lot of people out there looking for the truth and I think that's very important I want to congratulate you on your activities and what you're doing especially on your book coming up doing time like a spy

[24:50] hope everybody buys that book but thank you very much for being with us today thank you so much for having me it was it was just a great pleasure great and I want to thank our audience for T tuning in today and uh I I think it's a powerful message here on what's happening to our country what's going on with our civil liberties what the challenge really is but also it's an issue not by political partisanship and a few different people in Washington this is a philosophic issue about what the role of government ought to be it

[25:21] should be there to protect us protect our liberties and not trying to run the world and police our own people I keep think thinking of the term uh truth is treason in an Empire of lies and we live in an Empire now for political International reasons and personal Liberties being challenged and uh if you challenge it it's treasonous just look at what John has gone through in America by telling the truth I mean that is such abuse that's a powerful message and we in this channel intend to continue with

[25:53] this message loud and clear and I want to thank you the audience for the support you have given our viewership is growing by Leaps and Bounds I hope you can help us continue to do this to gain credibility and thank you very much for being with us today to come back soon to the Liberty [Music]

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