Title: Silenced - John Kiriakou
Show: CovertAction Magazine
Date: 2021-10-07
URL: https://youtu.be/3wxqeMSCttY
Duration: 8:00

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[00:00] [Music] [Applause] [Music] after september 11th i became the chief of counter-terrorism operations in pakistan i was told on my first day to come up with the standard operating procedure for taking down a terrorist safe house so i literally sat at a desk with a legal pad thinking well how how am i going to do this what would what would be the first thing i i would want to do if i was going to take down a safe house well i would want it to be dark so let's say two o'clock in the morning

[00:31] we'll do it so i wrote o200 at the top of the page and then little by little i came up with this plan finally we got a report from headquarters that abu zubaydah was somewhere in pakistan now at the time we thought that abu zubaydah was the third ranking person in al qaeda and all we knew was that he was somewhere in pakistan but pakistan is the size of texas he made one mistake that allowed us to narrow his location down to 14 different sites

[01:03] so we brought in a large team from headquarters half cia half fbi we brought in weapons and electronics and walkie-talkies and we hit all 14 sites at exactly the same time and he happened to be in one of the houses he tried to escape by jumping from the roof of his house to the roof of the neighboring house and the pakistanis shot him three times in the stomach the groin and the thigh and he was very gravely wounded he was out of it for

[01:35] a day and a half before he finally came out of a coma but i was the first person to speak to him at first he asked for a glass of red wine and then a couple hours later he asked me to smother him with a pillow once he sort of had his bearings and he realized oh my god the americans have me he wanted to know what was going to happen to him where he was going to be sent he was he was very frightened

[02:06] um i think of of the unknown i didn't know where he was going to go and i didn't know that he was going to be tortured i didn't have a need to know [Music] he would recite poetry to me that he had written [Music] he cried at the thought of he said never knowing the joy of fatherhood never knowing the touch of a woman i remember telling him i should hate you and i should want to kill you and i don't

[02:37] i said you're pathetic i mean he was just a young guy he wasn't even 30 years old and all he did was cry and i remember saying to a colleague of mine this is the fearsome al-qaeda this is what we've been so worried about and so frightened of it was a revelation to me they're just guys they're just and not even that they're just young illiterate guys that had nothing else to do and believe me when i say 99 of them had never read

[03:07] the quran they weren't true believers they they hadn't pledged fealty to osama bin laden they just wanted to get out of that village in yemen and maybe make a couple of bucks it made me think the mission wasn't all it was cracked up to be and then a colleague came in and said headquarters is sending in a private jet to pick him up and take him to his next location at about three o'clock in the morning we wheeled him out he was so upset he asked

[03:38] me to hold his hand he asked if we were going to kill him and i said no no we've been looking for you for a long time in fact i said you're going to get the best medical care that the us government has to offer and so the doctor gave him a shot of demerol and it knocked him out and we loaded him onto this private jet one of the guys who had flown out to escort him to his onward location got off the plane the guy was dressed completely in black black mask black hat

[04:11] black sweater and he said my name he said john and i said who are you and he lifted up his mask and he was a former supervisor of mine in headquarters and he said what are you doing here and i said oh i'm chief of counterterrorism i said what are you doing here he said i'm gonna take your prisoner onward he said who is he anyway and i said i'm sorry man you don't have a need to know and i said where are you taking him and the guy said i'm sorry man you don't

[04:42] have a need to know and i said well safe flight and the plane took off and i never saw him again when i returned to headquarters from pakistan i was told that the cia had begun a program that they were calling enhanced interrogation techniques and did i want to be trained in the use of these enhanced interrogation techniques uh i had a visceral problem with it

[05:14] first of all let's call it what it is it's torture they can they can call it whatever euphemism they want but it's torture so i went back to the counterterrorist center and i said i have a problem with this and i don't want to be involved and then i heard rumors that we had created this system of secret prisons around the world that even the heads of state in these countries didn't know that we had these secret prisons there that these were deals struck between the head of the cia and the head of whatever that country's

[05:45] service was these weren't meant to be permanent facilities they were just meant to extract information where we didn't have to worry about laws or human rights but you know those of us who weren't read into these programs only got this in bits and pieces i had no idea how extensive the secret prison system was until a couple of years after i left the agency and i read about in the press

[06:21] because we're americans and we're better than that but at the time you didn't feel that way at the time i was so angry and i wanted so much to help disrupt future attacks on the united states that i felt it was the only thing we could do and with zebedee you think that was successful it was i had been misinformed by the cia the cia told those of us in headquarters that they had waterboarded abu zubaydah one time that he had cracked and that he had provided actionable intelligence he

[06:53] answered every question just like i'm sitting here speaking to you so in your view the waterboarding broke him i think it did yes and did it make a difference in terms of it did the threat information that he provided disrupted a number of attacks maybe dozens of attacks that turned out to be untrue and we know it was untrue because in 2009 the cia inspector general's report was released indicating that abazo beta had been waterboarded 83 times

[07:23] and still did not provide actionable intelligence believe me for the life of me i wish i could take that back but i talked about the issue with the information that i had at the time and the information was just simply incorrect abbas abu zubaydah may never have been an al qaeda member now in retrospect we're finding out he may have been somebody who supported al qaeda's goals he may have been someone who was a

[07:54] professional logistician where he was helping them procure medicine or false documents we don't really know but he was not the senior al qaeda official that the cia and nsa and the white house wanted us to believe
