Title: Uncovered US Torture Program
Show: Graham Elwood
Date: 2019-09-06
URL: https://youtu.be/hbFXhHbMOHQ
Duration: 14:00

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[00:00] hello everybody my name is Grand mell with the political vigilante I'm obviously not in my studio I'm in an illustrious hotel room on the road Ron Falcone and I are doing our progressive comedy tour and I have very special guests here former CIA whistleblower John Kerry aku and John thank you so much for taking time today my pleasure first let's give people just some context to know who you are tell us your history with the CIA and what happened

[00:30] when you did the whistleblowing and when and what brought all that and what was the kind of fallout from that sure my name is John Kiriakou I spent 15 years with the CIA the first half in analysis the second half in counterterrorism operations after 9/11 I was the chief of CIA counterterrorism operations in Pakistan and in that capacity I led a series of raids that resulted in the capture of a guy named Abu Zubaydah who we believed at the time was the number three al Qaeda it turned out he was not

[01:01] the number three okay although he was a bad man we captured him and he was sent to a secret prison where several months later he was tortured he was the first person to undergo waterboarding and a wide variety of other torture techniques I left the CIA in 2004 and in 2007 after having waited three half years for somebody to come out and say something about the torture program I decided to

[01:34] just do it myself and so I agreed to give an interview to ABC News in December of 2007 in which I said three things I said that the CIA was torturing his prisoners I said that torture was official US government policy not the result of a rogue as President Bush had said and I said that the torture program had been personally approved by the President as you can imagine the FBI began investigating me the very next day they investigated me for a year from

[02:04] December of oh seven until December of Oh I had not committed a crime and so they closed the case three weeks later Barack Obama becomes president and appoints an old nemesis of mine John Brennan as the deputy national security advisor I did not know that John Brennan then secretly asked the Justice Department to reopen the case against me and so for the next three years I had no idea that I was under 24-hour surveillance that my emails were

[02:36] being intercepted that my phone calls were being monitored and in January of 2012 I was arrested and charged with five felonies including three counts of espionage coming out of that ABC News interview espionage is one of the greatest crimes with which an American can be charged and it sometimes carries with it the death penalty I was looking at 45 years in prison I fought it up until the bitter end I hadn't committed

[03:07] espionage until eventually the government as as onerous as it was for me they had to find the admit that I hadn't committed they dropped those three charges but I typically to a lesser count just to make the thing go away I did 23 months in a federal prison got out in 2015 and I've been working on things like prison reform sentencing reform human rights civil rights civil liberties ever since Wow yeah they can't charge you for espionage

[03:38] because you have to work with a like an enemy of country right like a foreign country that's a well yeah I mean that's that's what in the past there was a dangerous precedent okay so my judge said that she would not respect that precedent for a foreign country she said that she was going to she was going to define espionage as providing National Defense information to any person not entitled to receive it and my lawyer said your honor Reese thing that a

[04:09] person can accidentally commit espionage or that a journalist in commit espionage and she said that's exactly what I'm saying and so we kind of knew we were doomed from the beginning there was no getting out of it you know I I'm gonna I'm gonna cut to the chase early on in this talk my lawyers told me that was a bitter pill to swallow we first said it but it turned out to be so wise and so correct I decided to turn down the government's author of 23 months in prison and to go

[04:40] to trial because I believed that once I could get in front of a jury they would see how ridiculous this was I am a patriot I'm not a criminal and I certainly didn't commit espionage and he stopped me and he said you know what your problem is your problem is that you think this is about justice and it's not about justice it's about mitigating damage take the deal and I took the deal Wow yeah well that's that's fascinating to me on so many levels I want to ask you

[05:12] later a little bit what your opinion of Gina Haspel is but who didn't she not create the enhanced interrogation program or indeed she did you know when Gina was I worked for Gina she was my boss in the CIA's Counterterrorism Center we called her bloody Gina bloody Gina hassle and it was because she went out to the secret site just to sit and watch a torture session just for the hell of it just because she wanted to she later became the chief of the zebra sight and she was later after that the

[05:44] chief of Guantanamo base but yeah Jeter was one of the godmothers of the of the torture program she was in up to her neck when she was named CIA director Washington Post called me and they asked me to write an op-ed they told me they gave me 1,200 words which is unheard of and so I did I wrote it I said look you know I think it's wonderful that the president wants to name a woman as the CIA director the CIA's been run by by

[06:15] white men for the past 70 years just not this woman there are a dozen two dozen other women out there who do terrific CIA directors but naming Gina Haskell sends a message to the work force and the message is that you can commit war crimes you can commit crimes against humanity you can carry out a torture program or open up a series of secret prisons launched an international kidnapping operation called rendition and not only

[06:46] are you not going to be prosecuted you can be promoted all the way to director that's exactly the message that we should not be sending either to the workforce or to our friends and allies yeah because I mean I told I had read not only did she go to these black sites to watch the torture she like enjoyed it like she enjoyed it yes that's correct you know what kind of psychopath was sitting on a torture

[07:16] session just for the heck of it if you fly halfway around the world to watch a man be tortured and humiliated just to say that you did one people don't do things like that yeah that's that's that's alarming but also in some ways not surprising that that's who the CIA would want to in charge of them of their organization as someone that's basically a sociopath and you know one of the things that was that was a shock to me was in her her confirmation hearing

[07:49] before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence she was pressed by Senator Ron Wyden the Democrat of Oregon and she finally finally admitted that the program was a mistake that it shouldn't have been done and it didn't result in a collection of any actionable intelligence and that was funny to me and Shawn King because she was one of those counselors who had been trying to perpetuate this lie from 2002 onward that the torture program did result in the collection of actionable

[08:20] intelligence it just didn't that was a lie and they kept repeating the line hoping that it was stick right because as we know I mean I think even John McCain said this I mean you can torture I mean you could get me to say anything you know you can get anyone to say anything if you torture them enough right especially if they're sleep rived or whatever they just want it to end and even if that or even as a victim the torture victim tells you what you want to hear even if he tells you the truth he's going to tell you so much that you have to turn

[08:50] all that / - a team of analysts and it's going to take them six months to figure out what was true and what was nonsense and what was just made up and what was partly true and partly not true or speculation or whatever and by then the bomb you were trying to defuse has already gone off and killed 200 people Wow Wow so what yeah this is hold ticking time bomb scenario this comes right out of Hollywood there is no such thing as a ticking time bomb scenario you can't

[09:21] torture someone and say you know give me the code to shut the bomb off and then he gives you the code really doesn't work like that let me be really specific here - the actionable intelligence that that Gina Haskell and Jose Rodriguez and other pro torturers CIA officers clean - extracted from Abu Zubaydah thanks to these torture techniques was actually information that was gathered by an FBI agent and at least some fun now I'm me

[09:53] some fun was I work about me in Pakistan and believe me it's like a kid a gut to have to complement the FBI but they're really really good right so they know what they're doing so what Ali did is once Abu Zubaydah was healthy enough to be interviewed he sat across the table from him he offered him a cigarette and a cup of tea and some dates and he engaged him in conversation and it took weeks before I was a day to finally opened his mouth

[10:23] and started talking but once he started talking he gave all the information that was new to us on the structure of al-qaeda on the location of al-qaeda cells in Europe on the name moved on who it turned out was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks but CIA was frustrated because I he was taking a long time and so George Tenet the CIA director asked President Bush to expel all the FBI agents from the country the secret site he did that and

[10:54] so to contract psychiatrists Mitchell and Jessen took over and immediately within two hours began to torture I was a beta well they started with the techniques they started with waterboarding when we stay we're supposed to actually finish with not start with he convulsed he went into seizures his heart stopped beating he had to be revived well they couldn't say that to headquarters so they wrote to headquarters we did the techniques he cracked he told us everything and what

[11:26] they did is they just repeated at least some funds information because they knew that the FBI computer system and the CIA computer system were not compatible and so they were not sharing information so the FBI was thinking boy obvious if I'm did a really great job and at the CIA they're thinking wow this torture program really works it was all a lie that's that's amazing that's amazing to me haha I mean how do you look at like today's CIA and what's happening and

[11:57] where in what war and eight or nine countries yeah are they effective at all are they just causing more problems they're not effective at all and I say that you know with like a pain in my heart because I devoted the better part of my adult life to the CIA I like I say I was a patriot I wanted to serve my country I wanted to do the right thing and keep Americans safe and it'll turn out to be [ __ ] you know doesn't need to be easy anymore they miss they have missed all of the major global political events of the

[12:28] last century from you know the Berlin Wall to the Iranian Revolution to the collapse of communism you name it they've got it wrong time and time again you got it wrong and so it's time to do something different what would you suggest that be well John Kennedy famously said that he wanted to break the CIA to a thousand pieces and scattered to the winds that was repeated in 1976 in a book by daniel patrick

[12:58] moynihan a senator from new york one hand was mocked when that book came out in 1976 but he was onto something you have the best analysis and the intelligence community does not come from the CIA comes from the State Department's Bureau and research well there's also a human collection outfit at the Pentagon called DHS not the Department of Homeland Security but defense human services defense human intelligence services they recruit spies to steal secrets just as

[13:29] well as the CIA does and in terms of of tech issues and interception I mean that's what that's all gonna say does so why you have this redundant organization Langley that is actually sort of in charge the fact that we charge of the intelligence community when they're the ones getting it wrong all the time wow that's an excellent that is an excellent point so

[14:03] you
