Title: Ep 4439 — Torture Program & His Time in Prison
Show: Scott Horton
Date: 2018-02-06
URL: https://youtu.be/UXfZPr-fRB8
Duration: 40:00

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[00:00] hey I'll Scott here ever wanted to help support the show and own silver at the same time well a friend of mine libertarian activist Arlo pinata has invented the alternative currency with the most promise of them all cue our silver commodity discs the first-ever QR code one out silver pieces just scan the back of one with your phone and get the instant spot price they're perfect for saving or spending at the market and anyone who donates $100 or more to the Scott Horton show at Scott Horton org slash donate gets one that's Scott Horton org slash donate and

[00:30] if you'd like to learn in order more send them a message at commodity disks comm or check them out on facebook at slash commodity discs and thanks okay guys Scott Horton show full archives at Scott Horton org 4,000 something interviews there Scott Horton org and its fundraising time at the libertarian Institute check it out libertarian Institute org slash support for that and on the line I've got John Kiriakou former CIA officer the only one to go to prison over the George Bush

[01:01] administration's torture program not for being a torturer for talking about it and since then he has become an author and oh did I say yeah he went to prison for two years and now he's got two books the reluctant spy which I wish I'd known about I would have read it already by now I think and there's a brand new one doing time like a spy that's coming out here any day now I guess welcome back to the show how you doing John hey thanks thanks happy to do

[01:33] it thanks for having me happy to have you here and then Oh May 15th so here in just a week your book will be on the shelves at amazon.com their virtual shelves are doing time like a spy okay good and yeah we could talk about that so geez there's so many different things I want to ask you about first of all I don't think I know the answer to this because I haven't read your book I know that you were there I know that I think

[02:05] we even talked about this before when you were on the show once before about how you were involved in the rest of Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan and your to some degree and I'm not sure the timeline or what-have-you on it your witness to his interrogation by the FBI agent Ali su Phan and then also to some degree by the CIA officers who tortured him but I guess I don't know whether you were involved in his torture

[02:36] or or even his transport to Thailand I don't know really much about that other than what I just sort of outlined so could you really fill us in about what all exactly you know about the torture of Abu Zubaydah in Thailand and how you know sure starting in January of 2002 I was the chief of counterterrorism operations for the CIA in Islamabad Pakistan and in that capacity I led a large team in a

[03:09] series of raids on the night of March 22nd 2002 in which we captured up as a beta and I'm not allowed to say the exact number but many dozens of other al-qaeda fighters and - camp commanders as well as others people even involved in the Kashmiri separatist movement Abu Zubaydah was shot and severely wounded the night of his capture he was shot by a Pakistani policeman and and we rushed him to a hospital for emergency surgery

[03:39] and from there we airlifted him to a Pakistani military base nearby I sat with him for the first 56 hours of his captivity and spoke to him at length after he came out of his coma after about 24 hours after the 56 hours were up the CIA landed a private jet at this Pakistani military base three FBI agents and I put up as a beta onto the plane and he was taken to his onward location

[04:12] which was a secret prison you mentioned Thailand I'm not even allowed to confirm or deny that it was Thailand but certainly that's what's been in the press so I I was the chief of CIA counterterrorism ops in Pakistan until around the 1st of June 2002 I went back to headquarters and I was in the cafeteria one day and a senior counterterrorism center CTC officer approached me and asked me if I wanted to be certified in the use of enhanced

[04:43] interrogation techniques I had never heard that term before so I asked him what he meant and he said very excitedly he said we're gonna start getting rough with these guys and I said what does that mean so he delineated these these ten torture techniques for me I said that sounds like a torture program but let me think about it for an hour why I consulted with the senior officer like a very very senior officer who said listen this is a torture program you know how these guys are somebody's gonna go overboard they're gonna kill a prisoner and someone's gonna go to prison you

[05:15] want to go to prison I said no I don't want to go to prison and as you said I was the only one who went to prison as it turned out but of the 14 people they approached asking if we wanted to be trained in these torture techniques I was the only one who said no and and so I was removed from the compartment so I there was a period where I didn't have access to any of the Abu Zubaydah information but on the strength of that capture I got promoted and I was named executive assistant to the associate deputy director for operations and then

[05:47] I got access to the Abu Zubaydah information again well what was happening was there was an FBI agent at the secret prison by the name of Ali Soufan who was using a tried-and-true FBI method of interrogation where he builds a rapport with the prisoner and in a relationship and little by little Abu Zubaydah began to open up and I was a beta gave Ali Soufan actionable intelligence that disrupted attacks and

[06:17] saved American lives it is well documented in this in the Senate torture report using primary source CIA documents but the CIA hated the fact that overseas the FBI had primacy in the case where normally the CIA has primacy over-seasoned the FBI has primacy basically so George Tenet who was CIA director at the time went to President Bush and asked President Bush to remove the FBI from the country and for

[06:49] whatever reason that's never been explained that's exactly what Bush did and so that happened on August the 1st 2002 and within hours the CIA started torturing Abu Zubaydah and immediately he clammed up and never again provided any actionable intelligence well you know I read a thing there and I guess I don't know if you count this this is what you mean or no but I read a thing that said that the first thing that they did was they just threw him in one of these little boxes and left him yeah more or less in solitary for three

[07:19] months they actually even get it interviewing him at all they said well the first thing we have to do is break his entire humanity and so we lock him in the dark for three months and no one's asking him anything at them and no one ever bothered to even discuss the legality of this kind of thing I mean back at headquarters certainly people were talking about the legality or the illegality and we know that that by being you the two attorneys at the Justice Department were we're doing

[07:49] summersaults to to try to to make this legal despite the fact that it had been illegal since the end of the Second World War you know in in 1946 we executed Japanese soldiers who had waterboarded American prisoners of war that was an executable war crime in 1946 in 1968 The Washington Post ran it was January 21st 1930 I'm sorry January 18 1968 The Washington Post ran a front-page photograph of an American soldier waterboarding a North Vietnamese

[08:21] prisoner and the day that that photo was published Secretary of Defense McNamara ordered an investigation the soldier was arrested he was tried on charges of torture he was convicted and sentenced to 20 years well the law never changed we changed so my question back then as it is today is why was this torture program illegal in 1946 and illegal in 1968 but then not illegal in 2002 if the

[08:52] never changed well of course Ronald Reagan's Justice Department prosecuted the Texas sheriff for waterboarding in 1983 as well you're absolutely right that's that's different than a national security circumstance but I don't know if that makes it different under the law or not I don't think it does yeah there but in our law though there is no national security exception and you know this is one of these issues where I really believe that reasonable people can agree to disagree but torture is clearly illegal it's always been illegal and if you want to make it legal then

[09:24] you have to change the law plain and simple you can't just pretend that the law doesn't exist well and the thing is about it too is that in US law it's the US Constitution the first law bans torture the Bill of Rights bans it twice in the Fifth Amendment the self-incrimination clause and the Eighth Amendment cruel and unusual punishment clause that's right right then and there and then so this is my question too is some will you ask it rhetorically but I guess I'm asking it more lawyerly it's the other Scott Wharton who actually

[09:55] really knows the answer to this stuff it seems to me like it doesn't matter what any of those memos said it doesn't matter what any executive orders said that the log I mean never even mind the US Constitution that you had federal laws from the 1980s in the 1990's enforcing the war crimes act and enforcing the anti-turn and it seems like well as you said there's no national security exception the anti

[10:26] torture convention explicitly says and there shall never be and we don't want to hear it and anyone that you try to make is hereby null and void it's right where you try it etc like that so but then there's the detainee Treatment Act of 2005 and then now there's the Feinstein McCain amendment of just last year am i right that that's right read bans torture it set that I guess I'm not really altogether clear on how that is I mean I know in the 2005 detainee Treatment Act they

[10:56] left the loophole they said and I guess this is what I read about the the 2017 amendment to to the it's the appropriations bill an amendment to the appropriations bill is that they say that you can't torture you have to follow the Army Field Manual but the army theater annual now allows torture they rewrote it as a loophole so John McCain has now passed two different things one in oh five one in 2016 but apparently they don't make any difference because they're still allowed to yes all this other stuff yep

[11:29] technique in fact he he wrote it he wrote her not that in today's New York Times saying exactly that that that he knows what an abomination this is and if we're going to be serious about being this global leader in human rights that we like to tell other countries we are then we really do have to be serious and and the first thing we have to do is to ban torture outright I mean III think that it actually is already banned that's certainly what what previous

[12:01] congresses have have voted in and what past presidents have signed into law and as you pointed out not only are we signatories to the international conventions against torture well but we were the primary drafters of that international law and there are federal toosey right that's right it's not just that oh there's this international treaty it's that then in accordance with that treaty the Congress has then passed laws that the presidents have signed enforcing those treaties so precisely

[12:32] yeah now we're up against where we started here where you're the one who went to prison for telling the truth about it and that's because there actually is no such thing as law at all that all there is is power and these people do whatever they want and in fact the lady that destroyed all the tapes of the torture is now the deputy director of the CIA right right exactly there's no accountability at the CIA there never has been and I don't think that there ever will be it's just the nature of the

[13:03] of the organization but the reason why it's allowed to be that way is because there hasn't been leadership on the oversight committees on Capitol Hill since Frank Church was in the Senate yeah well I mean in vice Feinstein is relatively on torture but that's it and she she doesn't seem to take the rest of her job very seriously yeah I I feel the same way Scott she's good on torture but otherwise she's been nothing but a cheerleader for the CIA on Capitol Hill she's exercised no oversight at all yeah

[13:34] well and in fact when they were acting as though they were a co-equal branch with the Senate over their spying on her staffers and all of that she should have staight them into the ground and intercepted their role okay I guess you guys are a co-equal branch with the Senate by now who's kidding who here it's 2017 this is CIA they're a lot more powerful than the Senate that's just a ceremonial thing for c-span and if you were serving the CIA yeah both the CIA and the Senate filed crimes reports

[14:06] against each other yeah and in the end they had the effect of basically canceling each other out there was never any serious Justice Department investigation yeah and what we have is is the CIA spying on elected officials and their staffs nothing short of that right well then of course the whole thing is well who do you think you are oh they're the CIA honey of course they you know I forgot if this was from the movie about James Jesus angleton the Matt Damon movie The Good Shepherd where

[14:36] they say how come you guys say CIA instead of these CIA and he said cuz you don't say be God in other words that's the real government of America it's out in Langley and all this stuff all this white marble in Washington DC is just for the rubes yeah what's sad the true man all right well I I over state the hell out of it and then the former CIA officer says yeah no you're right that's about that's about the shape of it all right so let me ask you this then I count five murdered by

[15:07] the CIA in the torture program in the George W Bush years three at Penny Lane at Guantanamo Bay one in Abu Ghraib prison and one in the salt pit north of Kabul but there must be more than that so tell me I I don't know to tell you the truth uh I I know that there are at least five Joe Hickman who's a former Guantanamo guard and a friend of mine and who has written about this believes that there are more and I've seen I've seen press articles

[15:38] indicating that there may be dozens I think it's one of those things we're just never going to know now Larry Wilkerson has said that a hundred and eight different people died in military custody right so we can separate those out but you're saying that you've heard that dozens perhaps died in CIA custody yeah and again there just hasn't been any accountability on the hill why why are the oversight committees not dant not demanding this kind of information why aren't there investigations to get to the bottom of

[16:09] these questions alright so now Donald Trump ears he says hey Harry no law can stop me and the tougher the better that's just the way he looks at all of this stuff I say that old Mad Dog Madison out of reinstituting a torture program I guess they do have McCain breathing down their neck about some of this stuff so but that obviously just raises the question of whether they're just gonna ship them all off to field marshal seesi in Egypt and have him

[16:40] drive them all to death see that's the wild card right there that's the wild card I really do believe that mattis and general Kelley at Homeland Security are gonna be the adults in the room on this issue Mike Pompeo is not Mike Pompey is a follower but I think the Trump was serious when he said that mattis had talked him out of it and then Kelley sort of reiterated what Matt has had to say with that said what's to stop the CIA from sending prisoners to places like Egypt where they are routinely tortured and and the

[17:12] way that works too is the CIA will always will always tell these third country partners now remember you're not allowed to torture them so you have to promise us that you won't and then there's a smile and they say yes yes we promise we won't torture well of course I mean that's that's why we send them there we set them there to be tortured right hey L Scott here if you've got a band a business a cause or campaign and you need stickers to help promote check out the bumper sticker calm at the bumper sticker calm they digitally print

[17:44] with solvent ink so you get the photo quality results of digital with the strength and durability of old-style screen printing I'm sure glad I sold a bumper sticker com2 Rick back when he's made a hell of a great company out of it there are thousands of satisfied customers who agree with me to let the bumper sticker come help you get the word out that's the bumper sticker calm at the bumper sticker calm well yeah I mean she's there was that kid in Saudi Arabia were the FBI agents even sat there and watched and be tortured Abu Ali into his

[18:14] fake confession his obviously laughable confession that he was plotting to murder george w bush and they sat there feeding the Saudis the questions and watching through the one-way glass according to the reports they were in on that one and that was the so-called pure of snow FBI agents right right they were the ones that are supposed to be so clean that they can't even be in the country when such a thing takes place yeah and then that was the one too where they let all his testimony be read out before the jury but they didn't let the defense explain that it was tortured out

[18:45] of him by Saudi you know secret police right or anything like this so the jury went along with it that was when I actually forgot about for a while for some reason that just reminded me about the oh yeah the turn and look away right like my friend's dad letting me steal a cigarette out of his pack when I was a kid you know go ahead and torture him to death and will pretend to not notice so pretty much the same thing right all right now so who else might they rendition these guys to then if they're

[19:18] not going to do if if we're presuming for the sake of argument that they're not reopening CIA black sites around the world who else other than Egypt would we look at for possible rendition trips you know to tell you the truth that's one of the CIA's holy of holies that's one of the things that we can never ever talk about in our lives liaison relationships sources and methods and anything having to do with NSA so I think I'm gonna have to take a pass on that one well yeah I don't want you to go back to

[19:48] prison but no but if I said to you though but you know I read in the papers in fact my wife nailed down one of these stories about the former Nazi then so yet then CIA base in Poland that's kind of nice and then there was Morocco and Romania Thailand and boy the stories of what they did to poor Binyam Mohammed in Morocco can you confirm those things or you say you're not even allowed to say that what I read

[20:19] in the papers is right on those questions yeah in fact I've written about this a couple of times and because I'm a former CIA officer I have to send everything I write into the CIA's publications Review Board for a clearance and they routinely redact all of it all of it even if it's been reported in the press even if it's been confirmed by you know quote-unquote so sources they redact it you know when I write it all right I don't want you to get you in that much trouble okay so let

[20:51] me ask you this the story of Jeffrey sterling this guy doesn't seem to get too much attention not really sure why but there are a couple of big aspects to his case one of them is he's accused of leaking the Merlyn katastrophe story right well it didn't turn out to be much of a catastrophe because the Iranians never wanted to make nuclear bombs anyway that's right what could have been a catastrophe the the giant botched Merlin plot to James rise into the New

[21:22] York Times but then also there's all these accusations of racism and racial discrimination and I guess one thing that I read said you know what they didn't even care about the Merlin thing it was that he was suing them and calling them suing them on the basis of discrimination that that was why they went after Jeffrey sterling and persecuted him and I wonder if you can explicate that voice a little bit there yeah and in fact they never even bothered to defend themselves in in Sterling's suit what they did is they went before Judge Lee any brinkema who

[21:52] ironically ended up being Jeffrey Sterling's trial judge and sentencing judge and they said your honor we can't defend ourselves in this suit national security issues we can't talk about it and she says dismissed with prejudice just like that so Jeffrey sterling never got his day in court I I know Jeffrey sterling very well and confident that he was a victim of racism I confident that he was passed over for promotion and eventually fired just because the color of his skin and I

[22:23] don't say that lightly I believe that to be the case truly so Jeffrey sterling ended up in prison convicted on seven seven counts of espionage for allegedly having conversations with Jim risin of the New York Times there's been literally zero proof that he ever talked about operation Merlin with Jim risin the only evidence against him was metadata of 52 telephone calls between

[22:55] Jeffrey and Rison over two and a half year period but it was the same period during which Jeffrey had his civil suit pending against the agency and that was a story that risin was covering but the judge didn't want to hear that and the prosecutors called Condoleezza Rice to the stand to to have her talk about what a catastrophe this was for national security that that this operation Merlin

[23:26] was blown to the Iranians there was never any evidence that Jeffrey sterling did that and indeed you know Jim Jim risin is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner he's even said no New York Times reporters gonna take one source and just run with it you have to have multiple sources and in fact he has said that he spoke to current and former foreign and domestic intelligence officers well and that's part of that story too is for people who aren't familiar this was the thing where

[23:57] they accidentally gave nuclear bomb blueprints to the Iranians because they're trying to entrap them with it basically and catch them having it in their files where but this was a huge freaking thing so there's no mystery why Jim Rison had multiple sources for this it's not like this was some tiny little deal this was I mean not that I doubt anybody actually got in trouble for it but it's the kind of thing where if it wasn't the CIA somebody would have got in trouble for that one that was a big screw-up so it was the idea that it was all

[24:28] him even if he was I mean he might have been account for confirming source or maybe he was the original one but still that would be far from the whole story you're absolutely right and so here's Jeffrey sterling just just stuck sitting in prison now thank goodness he's gonna he's gonna come home at the end of this year but this is a guy who's right and we're here at least sick to you very sick he had a heart attack about six months ago and has had multiple heart episodes is what they're

[24:58] calling them ever since and again right now as we speak he's being denied his his heart medication so the only thing that saved he is being denied his heart medication oh yeah this is an ongoing issue he's filed multiple suits he's filed complaints with the regional national offices at the Bureau of Prisons repeatedly they've denied him is his medication and then last weekend they put him in solitary confinement for three days because they said that he was he was rude to a guard which is

[25:28] ridiculous I wonder if they're trying to kill him you know he thinks they are he thinks they are you're in prison so you have experience I'm just gonna say gee I wonder how that works but I could ask you how that works I hate to say it but doesn't really sound that different than probably how most people with heart conditions are treated right you might get your medicine if we feel like it's a the guards oh no what my bunkmate in prison was the former mayor of Cleveland

[26:01] right awesome guy I love the guy Frank Russo terrific guy in on a corruption charge they gave me 28 years he was 65 years old he had congestive heart failure history of heart attacks and they give him 28 years in prison so we're sitting in our cell one day just talking and he says that he's having such terrible chest pains he feels like somebody's sitting on his chest I said Frank you're having a heart attack let me walk you down to the CEOs office and maybe we can get you down to medical so we go to the CEO and he says

[26:32] I think I'm having a heart attack the CEO says tough luck buddy he said sit call is Monday Tuesday Thursday and Friday from 6:00 to 6:15 a.m. you're gonna have to wait and go down tomorrow so he went down the next day they gave him Tylenol which is what they always do they always give you Tylenol and this went on for a period of about four weeks well finally he just collapsed of a massive heart attack in while standing in insulin line one morning and ended up spending eleven

[27:03] days in a hospital he had open-heart surgery while he was chained to a hospital bed and then just today that that was three years ago just today I got a text from his one of his daughters saying that he had another heart attack he's now at a at a prison hospital in Massachusetts he had another heart attack and another surgery yesterday they don't care if you live or die there were four people who died while I was in prison every one of them

[27:34] from a treatable illness or a treatable Mally you know the real scary part of that is they don't care if you're a mayor and nobody is good enough in the club oh yeah even deserve the slightest like you know you would like to think that geez if you're a mayor at least you get off easy but nope in fact that's what I hate about mayors is that they always get off easy but no it sounds like not so much no it's it's what it is is it's impersonal enough right either

[28:05] either this guy's sentence was personal or it was completely impersonal but either way it's pretty bad it seems like a pretty stiff sentence for an old man and his brothers a federal judge and even his brother can't exert any influence to try to get medical treatment for him Wow that there's just there's no hope literally when it when it comes to medical treatment in prison there's just no hope and now with Trump wanting to to revive the the the policy of contracting

[28:39] with private prisons it's just gonna make it worse because the only way those prisons can make money is by not spending money on prisoners and the number-one cost is health care yeah boy I'll tell you what Shane Bauer really embarrassed the hell out of himself promoting war with a couple weeks ago but his undercover report on the incentive systems in the private prisons being even worse than in the government-run ones is really something to behold oh yeah and ya know I yeah the part that

[29:11] that really sticks out of my mind about that was I guess what seemed to me the most innocent person in there that he profiles that I remember was a man woman whatever name China who was in there on a prostitution charge in prison I run a prostitution charge and then who ended up dying of I believe he has medical neglect and this is a death sentence for someone in the prime of their life over something that's not

[29:43] even a crime in the first place and yeah and just boy thought she might as well have been a fly on the wall that got swatted for all it mattered to anybody you know that's our system and it's all you got to do is to stop and think for a minute what would our government say if it was one of their enemies that they wanted to destroy just think about all the hype that Kenneth Roth would put out about why we need a regime change them for running this system they drew we had I had a I had a

[30:15] cellmate who was homeless man he was living in a cardboard box under a bridge in Pittsburgh and it started to get cold so he purposely violated the terms of his probation so that he could spend the winter indoors and on the first day in our cell he said guys I gotta be honest with you he says I am severely mentally ill but I'm on my medication right now I'm afraid they're not gonna give me my medication and if they don't I'm gonna go nuts and I want to apologize in

[30:46] advance and sure enough they took him off his medication and a week later he was certifiably insane and because he was insane they put him in solitary because they treat mental illness as a disciplinary problem not as a medical problem well he was only supposed to be in prison until until April this was October to April for violating the the probation but because he went so nuts and got so violent that they ended up

[31:16] keeping him for a full year just by adding time because every time he did something they called it a new crime man you know you end up you end up having people in prison who are only supposed to be there for short periods of time and he'll end up spending the rest of their lives or big chunks of their lives incarcerated just because of infractions over nothing yeah that was Nathaniel Penn's recent piece about solitary - where yeah you bumped my shoulder yeah now you're into the hole with you for

[31:47] ten years because some guard claims you brushed into him you know yeah we there was a doctor I on my in my unit he was a Medicare fraud guy and he got 12 years and he literally just brushed up against a guard in the cafeteria capture is very crowded you know you got 1400 guys coming and going all at the same time you just barely brushed up against him and ended up costing him for weeks in the hole and he apologized an accident

[32:17] I'm sorry I didn't mean to touch you yeah four weeks in solitary man well alright so talk about your book then a little bit here doing time like a spy this is advice for the millions and millions and millions of Americans yet to be caught up in our criminal justice system basically here yeah in a way you know when I was sentenced my attorneys asked the judge I had judge brinkema just like Jeffrey sterling did to send me to a minimum-security work camp and

[32:48] the minimum security camps have no bars on the windows there are no walls or concertina wire you're free to come and go as you please you're on your honor not to abscond so she agreed and the prosecution had no objection so I got to the prison and and turned myself in and they start walking me around to the back of the prison I said no no I'm supposed to be at the camp across the street and the cop kind of chortled and said not

[33:19] according to my paperwork you're not so I told myself take it easy there's nothing you can do just wait until you get a phone so it took me about five days to get access to a telephone I called my lawyer and he said he said man we can file a motion but it's gonna be two years before we get a hearing date and you're gonna be home by then he said I'm sorry you're gonna have to tough it out and so I decided on that very first day that I was going to use these twenty life lessons that the CIA taught me in

[33:51] training in order to keep myself safe and to keep myself at the very top of the social heap in prison um I asked several a list Hollywood people to write blurbs for this book and a couple of them declined because they said I come off as such an in this book that they didn't want to be associated with it but I wanted to I wanted to be utterly truthful you know prison is a nasty place it's nasty and it's dangerous and it's ugly

[34:23] and you're in there with murderers and pedophiles a third of the prison was pedophiles and organized crime and drug kingpins and so I really tried to make it as bare as raw as I could and so in other words well I mean I guess give us a few not don't list the whole 21 or anything but give us an idea what you mean yeah sure I mean well the first one is is recruit spies to steal secrets or

[34:54] anything else that you need and the bottom line there is you just have to be very adept at manipulating people to get what you want and in prison I mean this is gonna sound stupid because we're not in prison we're in real life but you might need a paper clip or a pen or a highlighter or an envelope and all those things are contraband and so you've got to recruit somebody let's say somebody who mops the supply room or somebody who sweeps the warden's office to steal it for you and maybe

[35:26] he's gonna steal it because you're gonna give him stamps that he can use to gamble or because he likes the thrill of it or because he hates the warden you have to figure his vulnerability figure out his motivation and then use him to do your dirty work there were others like when calm is not to your benefit chaos is your friend about stirring up the pot seek and utilize available cover there was one that we treated as a joke at the CIA that actually was very serious in prison

[35:56] it was admit nothing deny everything make counter-accusations mm-hmm I used that all the time and so I tell I tell stories associated with just about all of these rules and and how I used them to to get through two years in prison well I mean since so many of us I mean really all of us are living under the threat of such a fate at any moment it sounds like there's that book three felonies a day about how you can't get

[36:26] out of bed without fine labor yeah and that's a very important book three felonies a day by Harvey silverglade who's a Harvard Law School professor say he says that the average American on the average day going about his or her normal business commits three felonies because we're so over criminalized in this country hmm well and I think this one is apocryphal I've heard it so many times as you know first person or second person there you know second hand told we're FBI agents say in fact I'm

[36:58] confused as to whether one of them actually told me this like someone in my cab at some point or something like that back when that just look at just pick a random person on the street if I want to I can put them in prison for twenty years and absolutely that's the way that they can start they can just start with their target whose life do they want to destroy and then that's it you just grab anyone at random just point at someone and they can do it and they'll brag about it and not even think it's wrong absolutely true if they really want to

[37:28] get you they're gonna get you and there's almost nothing you can do to protect yourself man it's funny because when I started doing this shows like man we better hurry up and stop the police state for it gets so bad that I can't do this kind of thing without really being afraid to go into prison and now it didn't work and here we are and I'm of going to prison yeah not that I'm a criminal but you know anyway I guess all you send me your book it ever comes at

[37:58] that point I'm gonna start knocking on wood and hang up this call seriously thank you very much for coming on the show John appreciate it my pleasure thanks for having me all right you guys that is John Kiriakou and he's got a couple of books here the first one is the reluctant spy and the brand new one coming out in a week is called doing time like a spy how the CIA taught me to survive and thrive in prison I'm Scott Horton check out the archives four

[38:28] thousand and something interviews at Scott Horton org slash interviews questions and answers stuff I got a new one coming out for you here soon I guess at Scott or nut org slash show and then check out the libertarian Institute at libertarian Institute org and it's our big fundraiser right now so help support at libertarian Institute org slash Scott Horton show it's me and the great Sheldon Richmond and Gerald LaBelle over there used to be will anyway check us

[38:59] out libertarian Institute org follow me on Twitter at scott Horton show thanks hey y'all sky here for rye guys t-shirts reigai says w ry guys calm great irreverent thought-provoking t-shirts upholding a pro freedom perspective inspired by such classic humorous is Mark Twain HL Mencken and Oscar Wilde they invoke the wit and wisdom of the past to satirize modern myths these high-quality shirts for men and women look good and feel good and they make great gifts use the coupon code scott for 15% off my guys t-shirts a try guys

[39:30] calm that's w ry guys calm hey i'll scott you're on average how much you think these interviews are worth to you of course i've never charged for my archives in a dozen years of doing this and i'm not about to start but at patreon.com slash scott wharton show you can name your own price to help support and make sure there's still new interviews to give away so what do you think Toob it's a buck and a half they're usually about 80 interviews per month I guess so take that into account you can also cap the amount you'd be willing to spend in case things get out of hand around here that's patreon.com/scishow

[40:01] and thanks y'all you
