Title: John Kiriakou on the Persecution of Daniel Hale (Ep. 5533)
Show: Scott Horton
Date: 2021-06-01
URL: https://youtube.com/watch?v=2tU2jvrjAx0
Duration: 53:50

---

[00:03] [Music] all right shall welcome to the scott horton show i'm the director of the libertarian institute editorial director of antiwar.com author of the book fool's aaron time to end the war in afghanistan and the brand new enough already to underend the war on terrorism and i've recorded more than 5 500 interviews since 2003 almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at

[00:34] scotthorton.org you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at scott horton youtube.com all right you guys um you know how i'm always telling you that uh even though gareth porter wrote a book called the cia insider's guide to the iran crisis from cia coup to the brink of war that doesn't make garrett the cia guy it's his co-author john kiriakou the torture whistleblower who's the cia officer and they co-wrote the book

[01:05] together that's the thing of it and man is it good too now manufactured crisis by gareth porter of course is the book on iran's civilian nuclear program but this one is all about that and more and the entire american policy and updated through the trump years and all that the cia insider's guide to the iran crisis by gareth porter and john kiriakou former cia counterterrorism officer welcome back to the show john how are you thanks doing well thanks happy to be

[01:37] back with you well good i'm happy to talk to you again and especially on this important topic hardly anybody knows this name it hasn't seemed to have caught on as a viral cause celeb with anything or anything like that maybe someone needs to tell pamela anderson um yeah that uh this guy daniel hale is going to prison he's already in prison even though he hasn't been sentenced yet um poor daniel for telling the truth about american atrocities especially in afghanistan and in pakistan i think um so go ahead

[02:10] tell us the story and tell us why it is that he's already in prison if he's supposed to be out on bail right now you got it so daniel hale was an nsa contractor who was involved in the drone program as a targeting analyst and he recognized very early on that the drone program was carrying out illegal strikes on civilian targets all over the place yemen afghanistan somalia

[02:40] all over and um he went to the intercept to jeremy scahill uh and he he wasn't you know covert about it he he was pretty well out there to the point where he even appeared in a documentary with jeremy and on a college campus to talk about the drone program he was immediately arrested and charged with multiple counts of espionage and um and has been fighting it ever since so

[03:13] you know daniel as you might expect uh has been depressed very depressed at the prospect of going to prison um what makes it worse is that he's broke and he's represented by uh federal um public defenders now the federal public defenders even in the eastern district of virginia are terrific they're cleared they're experienced but like any public defender they're

[03:43] overworked and underpaid and they have other cases to worry about too so the guy is just petrified at the prospect of spending a good chunk of the rest of his life in prison so i've been in close regular touch with him and here's what happened uh earlier this month you know what i'm going to back up to march 31st march 31st he decided to do something that was very unorthodox on his lawyer's advice he decided to

[04:14] plead guilty to a single count of espionage which carries a maximum sentence of 10 years there are four other espionage charges pending against him but his calculation was if i plead guilty to this one count which essentially covers everything that he did the other four counts were just heaped on he was hoping that or is hoping that the judge takes pity on him gives him a short sentence and dismisses the other charges well because he decided to take this plea on

[04:45] his own and not as part of a deal with prosecutors the prosecutors have refused to drop the other four charges so instead of facing under 10 years which is what he was hoping he's still looking at 50 years in prison so in early may um he and i got together and he was telling me that he's he's very depressed but he's committed to fighting this thing he explained his reasoning behind the plea deal and said that his lawyers kept bandying

[05:18] about the number five five years you know maybe a little bit less and i said daniel five years is a steal and there's a trick to doing this i said if you've got a problem with drugs or alcohol you go into something called the rdap program the residential drug and alcohol program that the bureau of prisons runs you sit there every week for a year and you watch a dvd of the a e network show intervention and they take 12 to 18 months off your sentence and

[05:50] then with good behavior they take another 15 off and then six months and a halfway house next thing you know you're out in two and a half years well for whatever reason the court appointed shrink that they ordered him to to talk to every week decided you know what this guy's depressed and maybe he's suicidal just in case i'm gonna have him locked up for his own safety well i can tell you from personal experience

[06:20] he was not suicidal now he is because he's in solitary confinement quote unquote for his own safety and um and he's stuck there he's not going to be sentenced until july uh 13th and then you know what's he going to get is he going to get 5 10 50 we don't know and so that's what he's most worried about yeah you got to love the idea that if somebody really is suicidal the way

[06:52] we put them on suicide precautions is to lock them in solitary ridiculous ridiculous and to make matters worse um even if he wasn't suicidal which he isn't because of covid these holding facilities are all uh uh locked down so he would be in solitary confinement no matter what well the united nations has said that the u.s practice of solitary confinement is a form of torture

[07:22] and we know that when people are isolated in prisons they become suicidal but then again maybe that's the calculation maybe that's what they were trying to do yeah was to make him suicidal who knows and anybody i mean if you just think about this for a second um you know people say sometimes imagine being locked in a thing the size of your bathroom but everybody's got kind of a nice bathroom porcelain thrown and shower and right uh cushy thing on the

[07:53] floor you know uh the bath mat and all that that's a bad analogy i like the one about a parking space imagine being locked in something the size of a parking space by yourself for an indefinite period of time there and that's a fate worse than death i'd figure out a way to kill myself immediately i'll tell you what circumstance pretty much scott i i don't know immediately but if i if i knew i wasn't getting out of there anytime soon yes well guess i had my chance of being alive and now it's over

[08:24] i spent 10 days in solitary confinement one time and you know it was difficult but not crazy because i knew it was gonna just be ten days um but what made it hard was uh they took my glasses from me and i'm blind without my glasses so i couldn't read anything there was literally nothing to do 24 hours a day they would let me out for one hour every day to um take a shower and to exercise otherwise what i decided to do

[08:57] was to get 10 000 steps a day now this this cell i was in was six feet by 16 feet so like you say it's a parking space and i would just walk in circles all day long and you sleep on a steel bunk with no mattress no pillow so i had to like ball up a bath towel just to use as a pillow but it would make my back and hips hurt so much laying on a steel slab that i

[09:29] would get up three or four times a night and just keep walking in circles any more than 10 days yes you're going to start going nuts and then because you're locked down um you know breakfast is is a little bit of oatmeal and maybe a an apple and then lunch and dinner are a baloney sandwich a bag of chips and a and a little half pint of kool-aid and that's it every single day yeah you know i think it's pretty easy to uh

[10:01] can see if anybody ever read the encyclopedia of serial killers or anything about the worst sorts of true crime stuff people who commit horrendous atrocities against children something like that you think you know i don't care what happens to them right but there's a lot of people in prison who aren't the worst of the worst like that at all and get sent to the hole for pretty much anything and in some states like in louisiana and i was reading i think in michigan you just keep people in there for years at a time sometimes and for the slightest thing and these are

[10:33] people even if they're convicted of the very worst crimes that just means that the d.a prosecuted them that doesn't mean they did anything at all as far as i'm concerned uh that's right you know unless there's obvious open public proof beyond a shadow of a doubt i don't trust a d.a and a judge and a jury to do the right thing and so totally and really right like even even someone that you know beyond a shadow of a doubt is guilty of the worst crimes against helpless innocent people then still it's wrong

[11:03] it's obviously a huge mistake to empower anyone to have the authority this the supposed authority then to treat them in this way because you see how they abuse it and probably who deserves to be in the hole more than anybody else the people who are throwing people in the hole amen so true anyway and this guy is an american hero this guy and that's the bottom line that's the bottom line this guy sacrificed everything that he has in his life to make this important information public remember

[11:34] and i know that this is a mantra with me and people are probably tired of hearing it but it is illegal to classify a crime if something is a criminal uh event right if the government is doing something that is that is criminal like killing civilians in something is in a zone an area that has not been declared a war zone that is illegal and because it's illegal it's illegal to classify the program and so as far as i'm concerned the guy

[12:05] hasn't committed a crime in the first place yeah oh and clearly they're killing innocent people and the the way that and this is everybody can read this at the intercept um the assassination uh no the drone papers it's called at the intercept and the book it's the same thing in book form is called the assassination complex and i relied on his leaking uh you know in my book fool's errand about the war in afghanistan and the way he talks about how they're just blindly killing people based on

[12:37] not even cell phone numbers but numbers of people who ever were associated with a cell phone that ever called another cell phone that ever called another cell phone this kind of thing and then whoever they kill they just label them all enemies killed in action unless it's proven otherwise which it never is because they don't go to investigate how guilty they are and so um but then they also admit that they have this incredibly low score on their so-called jackpots where they

[13:08] actually kill the guy they're trying to kill presuming that their intelligence saying that he's an enemy is even correct at all and it's infinitesimally small compared to the amount of collateral damage so it's not really the same as the full-scale invasion of iraq or something like that where a million people were killed but still it's thousands and thousands and thousands and probably tens of thousands of afghans certainly thousands and thousands of pakistanis and somalis and yemenis in the drone wars of the obama years

[13:39] yeah you're absolutely right and you know there's no media outrage outrage uh nobody's marching in the streets yeah aside from code pink and the answer coalition maybe uh but this is not an issue that the american people have latched on to if it weren't for daniel hale we wouldn't even have any idea really that it was going on hey you said he was featured in a documentary which one was that yeah it's called um national bird oh okay yeah it's i haven't seen that in a long

[14:11] time now but i'll have to go back and look and he's he goes so this goes to what you said too about he was pretty open about this and you know the intercept has gotten a lot of people caught and i know this is an entire sub-speciality of yours john um you know matthew cole the guy that got you busted works there and he's the same guy that got reality win or busted um but so you know this has been lumped in in the same way that jeremy scahill or the intercept somehow failed this guy daniel hale but so i wanted to follow up on that do

[14:42] you really think it's the case that this guy just got himself caught he wasn't being careful enough got himself caught correct so it wasn't anything that the interceptor scale did sloppily or anything like that no and believe me i i'm happy to be the first one to point the finger at the intercept but uh no that that's not what happened in this case he daniel decided that he was going to go public and be public about the drone program right they didn't blow his identity and guys you have to see national bird everybody it's so important and i don't know how

[15:12] to find it online but i'm sure it's at one of these things you know what there's there's at least a trailer on youtube and i see here you can actually rent it on youtube and on amazon oh great uh yeah it's a it's an absolutely terrific documentary award-winning documentary yeah yeah it's really something else and you know it addresses the issues of ptsd and what psychiatrists are now calling moral injury right and those are two really important themes that have run through this cases

[15:44] hey wait so let me tee that up for you a little bit oh come on a bunch of cowards hiding in a trailer in nevada murdering people hiding on the other side of the planet from the people they're killing they have ptsd like they're the infantry on the ground come on john kiriyaku you know you'd be surprised people act like tough guys and they're really not tough guys they're they're human beings so they spend all day killing people like they're playing a video game

[16:14] and then they go home to their families and they act like everything is is normal i i was giving a speech at a at a college in saint paul minnesota a few years back and a guy came up to me after the speech and said that he had been a drone operator and that there was there was an event that had sort of pushed him into activism he said that he was sitting there with his his little joystick and uh and his screen in nevada his boss was at mcdill air force base in tampa

[16:45] and they were both looking at their screens and they identified what they thought was the enemy and uh the boss said fire and the guy said i can't fire there's a child there and the boss said that's not a child it's a goat and he said it's not a goat i'm looking at it it's a child and the guy says i'm ordering you to fire and he said i can't fire if there's a child there and the guy threatened to uh to court-martial him and he said i'm not

[17:15] gonna fire and he didn't fire and it was a child and so he was given a general discharged and pushed out of the military but he said you know we kill people all day long every day i have to be able to convince myself in my own mind that i'm only killing bad people i can't just kill a child and pretend it didn't happen pretend that it was a goat and you see this kind of thing all the time there's a lot of footage in national bird about where they've got audio of the

[17:48] drone operators talking to each other saying go ahead and fire no i think i see a kid ah it's not a kid no i think it's an infant i think the woman's holding an infant oh are we supposed to shoot women too well she is with the bad guy you know these kinds of conversations yeah where everything is black and white it's all very stark and then they end up firing and just killing everybody right and you know and then what is that one of their comments too was you know if you're flying uh an f-16 or something like that and f

[18:18] uh uh whatever the hell and dropping a bomb on somebody you don't even really know if you hit your target till you get home or you know you don't know much about it right but when you're a drone pilot you're sitting there hovering around following these people around sometimes for weeks and you see their life you know who they are where they work you see them with their friends you see them with their family and you start even though it's all from a bird's eye point of view you start to kind of you know understand that their humanity and fill in the gaps with your own imagination about who they must be

[18:49] and and what it is that and then now you kill them and so yeah you're hiding behind the entire diameter of the earth i said circumference earlier i meant diameter but uh so you're not in danger but still it's the moral injury it's not the um it's not the uh mortal fear it's the guilt for looking back at those people that you killed and then in fact like even on the children thing like obviously we want to rule you don't kill children but then that sort of de facto means that any adult is fair game

[19:21] you know if they do jumping jacks or you know carry a bag of something over their shoulder that's the signature of a terrorist and now you kill them will that be murder in any other circumstance in the world in that murder and these drone operators are very clear too that that any male over the age of 12 is a target is a legitimate target because any male over the age of 12 can pick up an ak-47 and shoot an american soldier so it doesn't matter in many cases if there are children there they're perfectly happy to kill the

[19:52] children too you know you see a lot of wait a minute wait stop for a second stop for a second just to be clear here we're talking with former cia counterterrorism official john kiriakou and you're telling me the rule is 12 years old yeah yes and and in national bird you'll hear these drone operators talking about it like well is the target old enough oh he looks like he's older than 12. he can pick up a gun and then they just fire can pick up a gun yes not that they have

[20:25] the gun but that they could pick up a gun that makes them a legitimate target see and this isn't this is that anything is that any different than the gestapo rounding up all the people that they want to murder in the center of town and just machine gunning them all to death yeah you're you're absolutely right when i was at the cia i worked for a guy who um was in a very very senior position an agency-wide leadership position and he had authority over

[20:57] the kill list and so he only lasted in the job about six weeks because they would call him in the middle of the night and say um you know we've got the guy in our sights the drones right on top of him request permission of fire and he would say well you know let's think about this is his wife with him are his kids with him uh are we sure that it's the guy are you sure you're on the right you know jeep or whatever and then by the time he's made up his mind the guy's gone and they said look when when people are

[21:29] asking you for permission to launch that's just a formality you're supposed to say launch and he wasn't willing to do that and they fired him there was another guy i used to sit you know 10 feet away from and every day we'd say hey man how you doing hey how was your weekend how's your family what's new what's going on and then i said to a colleague i said you know he's such a nice guy but i don't even really know what he does for a living here i sit 10 feet away from him and my friend said john he works in the special

[21:59] activities division what do you think he does here and i thought oh crap yeah he's out killing people every day like he'll disappear for a week at a time and come back hey buddy how you doing and i'm thinking now geez how many people did you kill over the last week good grief man yeah but it's all to keep us safe right okay you guys check it out the new book is finally done enough already time to end the war on terrorism it's available in paperback and kindle

[22:31] also the audiobook is coming although that might take a little while for all those who participated in the big fundraiser of 2019 i have the list and you will be getting all your stuff as soon as my boxes of wholesale copies arrive thank you so much to everybody for your support of the show and of the libertarian institute and i hope you like the book hey guys scott horton here for expanddesigns.com harley abbott and his crew do an outstanding job designing building and maintaining my sides and they'll do great work for you you

[23:02] need a new website go to expanddesigns.com scott and say 500 bucks hey guys check out listen and think audio books they're listeningthink.com and of course on audible.com and they feature my book fools aaron time to end the war in afghanistan as well as brand new out inside syria by our friend reese ehrlich and a lot of other great books mostly by libertarians there reese might be one exception but essentially they're all libertarian

[23:32] audio books and here's how you can get a lifetime subscription to listen and think audiobooks just donate 100 to the scott horton show at scotthorton.org donate listen we're going to get back to daniel hale in a second but your job was grabbing the actual co-conspirators in the 911 attack out there in pakistan in the early days of this thing so yes on some level and i read one of your books i forgot if i read two i got what biden's got nowadays kariakou

[24:04] forgive me um but uh so obviously you're gonna defend some of what you did there as absolutely necessary but then at what point you're telling me the real terror war ended and the bogus one began then that's a great question you know right after 9 11 when i was sent out to pakistan to head counter terrorism operations there my orders were very simple my orders were to capture and send them to uh to guantanamo

[24:35] where they would wait for two three weeks before going on trial in the united states in the federal districts of boston new york and washington that was the original plan and when what when we made our first captures i called headquarters and i said well we got these guys what do you want me to do with them and they said oh put them on a c-12 we're going to send out a c-12 and send them to guantanamo and i said guantanamo cuba and they said yeah i said why in the world would we send them to cuba

[25:06] and they said we're just going to hold them there for a couple of weeks until we can figure out which federal district court to send them to for trial and i said oh okay that's a great idea so my job was to was to take them alive put them on a plane and send them home for trial and that actually never happened guantanamo became a permanent weigh station nobody went on trial and i recognized relatively early on that this just wasn't going to work i recognized it when we captured abzu

[25:38] beta march 22nd 2002 he was shot and wounded and we sent him to a secret prison and then began torturing him on august 1st 2002. so it was clear to me then that the system that we knew and loved as americans that was enshrined in the constitution was not going to work these guys were not going to get the constitutional rights that that they you know deserved and of course they're still

[26:10] being held down there the people who are actually guilty are still yet to be convicted of that crime that's the ones who really deserve it right like ramsey been all she been colleague sheikh mohammed exactly how many more of those guys are really guilty john down there out of the 40 that are left at guantanamo you know probably around a dozen were were truly bad guys but then you have people like muhammad udlahi from mauritania i've become friendly

[26:40] with with muhammad um you know this this poor son of a gun the reason why the cia grabbed him was because he had a cousin who was a low-level nobody in bin laden's circle and the cousin had called him on a cell phone to ask him to check in on the cousin's dad because he heard

[27:11] that his dad was sick so he calls muhammad rude slali slahi and says hey can you go in the village and check on my dad i heard he's not doing very well and he's like sure i'll go check on your dad and the agency grabs him you got a phone call from a a known cell phone near bin laden and the poor guy's 14 years in guantanamo well there were a lot of people like that and a lot of people who had done even less than that who ended up in guantanamo man i interviewed a air force colonel

[27:43] who was representing you know was the mandated attorney defense attorney representing a guy who was in there i guess this would have been in 2014 or something like that so he'd done a good dozen years in there or more and they finally admitted the evidence against him with salt and sugar or the precursor chemical weapons you know al-qaeda terrorism links that he had yeah see what they do like you said a minute ago scott that there are some bad people down there khalid sheikh muhammad is a bad guy

[28:14] he has the blood of 3 000 americans on his hands but how do you put a guy on trial when his confession and most of the evidence you have against him uh you you collect it as a result of torture you know what why don't they just parachute him into the idlib province to join forces with abu mohammed al-jalani and his friends there the moderate rebels against assad exactly he must be so jealous of jelani right that's not fair cia gives this guy a

[28:45] billion dollars i'm languishing in prison down here right and and he's legitimately al-qaeda oh yeah um well and in fact i can't wait till the the full front line documentary comes out but uh you know he says oh yeah no we're not really part of al qaeda anymore but martin smith evidently did not say to him oh yeah we'll denounce i'm in al zawahiri right now and let's hear it you know yeah i didn't hear it that didn't come up anyway let's talk

[29:16] about my man here um 50 years so tell me i i understand he was throwing himself on the mercy of the court and the doj bad call they prosecute him on the espionage act so his lawyer just could not get a deal they just would not give him a deal so he just decided to plead guilty anyway and just hope that somehow that would you know change their mind a little bit they would go easy and they're just not so he's essentially and and he's going to be sentenced in what two months

[29:47] yeah july 13th um the feds would not budge off of 10 years and daniel the last time i talked to him he was so distraught he just kept saying i can't do a decade i can't do half a decade i can't i can't get through it and i kept telling him daniel you're far tougher than you realize you are and then with rdap and good behavior and house arrest and and halfway house it's not going to be

[30:18] a long period of time i said listen i was in prison for like a week and the acting boss of the banana crime family asked me to take a walk with him it was snowing it was evening it was dark and we're just walking in circles around the outdoor basketball court and he said to me how much time do you have and i said 30 months and it feels like 30 years and he said let me give you some advice if someone asks you how long you have

[30:48] you tell them you have five years because if people find out that you have a sentence that's so short they're gonna kick your ass because they're they're jealous so tell people that you're here for five years and then he says to me two and a half years are you crazy he said you can do that standing on your head between good behavior and halfway house you're gonna be out in a year and a half maybe two and i ended up going home after 23 months he's like you could do the time on the surface of the moon for 23 months

[31:21] and he was right you know it was just depression clouding my my judgment and i tried to convey this to daniel too it seems like a lifetime but it's not you know i was facing a maximum of 45 years but realistically 12 to 18 years had i gone to trial and one of my lawyers said he told me to take the deal for two and a half years and he said this can be a blip in your life or it can be the defining event of your life make it the blip and i know that's what

[31:53] daniel's trying to do but he's still so close to the issue that he just can't get past the idea of five to ten years now with that he's really lucky to have a friend in you though john to give him all this advice from you know your first person point of view there oh thank you that means a lot to me i i'm i i i'm so worried about the guy i'm so worried about his mental health i'm afraid he's gonna do something out of desperation and i'm trying to get him to just relax but how do you do that in solitary

[32:24] confinement well you know i think you told me before too that the italian mobsters all really liked you because they're really patriotic and they like cia oh you're seeing all right you can you know be friends with us does that work if you're nsa too yes i'll tell you who it doesn't work for is fbi i freaking hate the fbi as much as i do and that was one of the reasons we were able to bond like we did in fact i'm still in touch with all these guys we're meeting up again in a couple of weeks in atlantic city maybe i shouldn't even say that but

[32:55] but you know the they're they're honorable guys they're they're criminals in their own little worlds but honor and duty and patriotism mean something to these guys yeah all right well let's change the subject now um daniel ellsberg has not exactly recently leaked a document he he posted on the internet two three years ago when his book on nuclear weapons came out the doomsday machine yeah

[33:25] and i think from what i read in well it's charlie savage so you never know but in charlie savage's uh you know rendition of the story in the new york times um he posted a footnote in the book that said hey listen you can go and look at this document and it's got things that are not in the redacted version but nobody really noticed that or picked up on that i don't remember that but then apparently a historian at the national security archive at george

[33:55] washington university did notice it and went and found it and then somehow i forget exactly the cause and effect where uh this came back to ellsberg's attention and ellsberg decided to promote it and give it to savage uh to publish in the new york times and it's a document describing the debate over whether to nuke china over taiwan in 1958 yeah right ellsberg also

[34:27] said to charlie savage you tell the department of justice i said indict me oh and people if people are wondering he stole this document back he liberated this document back when he liberated the pentagon papers yeah uh this was one of the few that he was able to hang on to on the nuclear weapons topic he apparently lost most of him he says but he's 90 years old now john yeah he celebrated his 90th birthday a few weeks back i'll tell you what i i'm i'm almost 57 years old so i'm sort

[34:57] of beyond the age of having heroes but dan ellsberg is my hero he's sort of the the godfather to all national security whistleblowers but i am so honored to be able to call him a friend uh i i i see he listens to this show too he tells you're kidding me walking on my treadmill listening to your show scott and that's just the highlight of my life oh that's wonderful yeah dan is a wonderful patriot hi dan uh he's a patriot and you know

[35:30] even after all these years all these decades now to stand up to the to the justice department and to the national security apparatus like he is doing is inspirational yeah and by the way we're going to have him on the show next week he's busy writing an op-ed for the new york times right now oh fantastic but then uh so we're going to have him on the show next week to talk about this and he is essentially i mean the plan this to be very clear for everybody here john the uh he is trying to get indicted

[36:00] and prosecuted on what could be a life sentence charge for leaking this top secret information about nuclear war although it is out of date it's still highly classified and he's daring them to indict him and prosecute him and convict him for espionage the same way they did to you the same way they're doing to daniel hale right now the same way they did to thomas drake and so many other great whistleblowers of this century so far and then he wants to take it to the supreme court and he's confident that the first

[36:31] amendment will protect him and that the supreme court in the case of ellsberg versus these pigs will finally strike down this practice once and for all you know he and i had a conversation back in 2013 or 14 about appealing an espionage act conviction to the supreme court in order to try to have it ruled unconstitutional which i i believe it is it and my lawyers did too it's unconstitutionally broad and unconstitutionally vague it's it was

[37:01] written in 1917 to combat german saboteurs and it doesn't even mention the words classified information because the classification system hadn't been invented when it was written it refers only to national defense information and then doesn't define what national defense information is so he said that that the problem with appealing it is that there were only two people with standing who could appeal it one was chelsea manning and the other was jeffrey sterling

[37:32] because they had gone to trial and were convicted at trial but then you know chelsea said she just couldn't do it like she just didn't have it in her to go all the way to the supreme court jeffrey sterling was excited about it for a short while and then said the whole process was so depressing he just wanted to get past it and so once he lost at the appellate level in the in the fourth circuit in richmond that was the end of it so here's dan you know in the twilight

[38:04] of his of his years trying to write a historical wrong and using himself as as bait for the justice department the guy guy's a giant yeah the guy's a giant and i know that history is going to be very kind to him yeah well everybody already loves them and everybody already knows that he's the guy that ended the vietnam war yeah and he's on top of all that he's just a really great guy yeah he is yes you know he's a guy that

[44:45] he's the second or third least worst reporter at the times you gotta grade these things on a scale uh no before you agree uh before i let you go here i gotta let you say a word about julian assange yeah uh julian's dad and and uh brother are coming to dc soon uh they're in they're gonna be in boston next week dc the week after uh and this is after having completed a speaking tour around australia you know

[45:18] what can you do besides shake your head i i participated in a in a zoom call the other day with a whole bunch of of journalists it was chaired by rob reiner of all people and um uh there were there were three night ritter journalists uh who were on and a friend of mine from veteran intelligence professionals for sanity asked the knight ritter uh guys why the mainstream media especially people involved in national security reporting

[45:49] uh weren't showing any support for julian assange when he was clearly a journalist now when you say knight ritter i mean knight ritter's been gone for a while but i think is that a euphemism for jonathan landay and warren strobel yeah i mean knight reuters is pretty pretty well gone but yes they were both on the call and and in unison they said that julian assange is not a journalist he's an activist and i was flabbergasted in that jonathan landay what is the matter with him damn you land i like him too but

[46:21] uh these guys it was clear that they did not want to talk about julian so you know afterwards he's an activist didn't you know kiriakou it says in the first amendment that you're not allowed to have an opinion when you do journalism like jonathan landay doesn't have any opinions about say for example how much he trusts his cia sources when they feed him a bunch of crap about donald trump and vladimir putin for example those aren't opinions that's doing the

[46:51] cia's work that's real journalism you're absolutely right you are absolutely right julian assange is an activist and then what's the s what's the rest of that sentence so he goes to solitary confinement for doing journalism while what does that even mean anyway an activist that's a pretty malleable territory confinement you know for for what reason he he won the case right the extradition case it's being appealed right now

[47:22] but he's he's still in solitary confinement pending the appeal despite the fact that the british courts on three separate occasions have upheld a lower court's refusal to extradite prisoners to the united states specifically for the reason that the united states uses long-term solitary confinement so there's no way the justice department is going to win this case in the british appellate courts there's no way but then

[47:53] the brits hold them in solitary even though that's their objection to sending them here can you imagine can you imagine i was talking to stella morris the other day julian's partner and the mother of his children and she said that his his emotional state is fragile you know even the strongest person breaks in solitary confinement his health is bad because the guy has not been exposed to sunlight for something like nine years

[48:23] and uh the longer that he's in there the worse it's going to be man you know you think about it too it's so obvious why there's no support among the people i mean i understand about a cia tool like savage or land a but for the people out in the country the partisan population of the country that swing you know left or right on this the other reasons for hating this guy right he undermined bush and the war and made the republicans

[48:53] look horrible when he put out the manning stuff and then he hurt the democrats and in essence helped to get trump elected by publishing all of the podesta and dnc emails that showed how they rigged the game against bernie and actually for trump in the primaries because they thought he'd be the weakest guy to beat in the general the pied piper strategy all that in there and um and so people have something against him but you just turn that around and go hey this guy's done

[49:24] something that your side really appreciated too right remember that time he helped take down hillary clinton remember that time he helped take down w bush so can't we agree on the positive aspect of this even if you're a partisan can't you find enough to say like hey this guy for god's sake and and for anybody who's not a partisan he told the truth about the wars in afghanistan and iraq and what was going on at guantanamo bay and all the state department files there's 30 000 news stories must have come out of that stuff

[49:55] and then he saved the world from hillary clinton exactly right he saved humanity from a hillary clinton presidency that makes him like one of the greatest heroes who ever lived and he stopped jeb bush at the same time too come on yes well he didn't really stop jeb bush that was trump but anyway bush also lost that year and it was great not that i'm a big trump guy but i'm very much an anti-bush and clinton guy and so i don't know it just seems to me like even if you're a partisan you ought to

[50:26] be able to look with favor on assange instead of just scorn you know yeah it's publishing great truth and you know what it isn't like he's a traitor who's you know like aldrich ames who's like selling out the highest level american agents who were all getting their throats cut out you know behind enemy lines or something like that this is all secret level not top secret but it's a no it was the truth is what it was it wasn't the kind of thing that got sources and methods destroyed at all you're exactly right exactly right

[50:58] we should be celebrating the guy man yeah america's really messed up right now um all right now listen you and your article consortiumnews.com saying hey people can write to daniel hale and tell them how much you love them and how badly you need them to hang in there so how does that happen yeah the poor guy um right to daniel hale he he may not be able to write back to you because he's only allowed to purchase 10 stamps a week uh they're real dicks about

[51:29] about the uh the rules over there at the federal lock-up in alexandria so it has to be on plain white paper with no lines it has to be in black ink and it can't contain any photographs he's desperate for news he asked me specifically to please please send news articles but what you have to do is cut them and paste them onto a white piece of paper and delete the photographs from them so it's just the you know the the words

[52:01] um but yeah he he said he would try to write back if he gets permission to buy extra stamps uh but he's he's lonely and he's depressed and he has no idea what's going on in the world around him man all right and then uh the address here is daniel e hale comma william g truesdale looks like it sounds t-r-u-e-s-d-a-l-e adult detention center william g

[52:34] truesdale adult detention center 2001 mill road alexandria virginia 22314 one more time y'all daniel e hale william g truesdale adult detention center 2001 mill road alexandria virginia 22314 and let me add one more thing uh you can you can get a whole bunch of additional information at standwithdanielhale.org oh great

[53:09] yeah standwithdanielhale.org all right listen thank you so much uh for coming on the show and for writing this great article and sticking up for this guy the way you are john thank you so much always good to talk to you all right have a good week appreciate it the scott horton show anti-war radio can be heard on kpfk 90.7 fm in la apsradio.com antiwar.com scotthorton.org and libertarianinstitute.org

[53:49] you
