Title: Ex-CIA Officer Exposes the Torture Program
Show: ScheerPost
Date: 2023-09-22
URL: https://youtu.be/72EuwXMxSAQ
Duration: 92:00

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[00:00] Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer Intelligence and I'm bringing back an old guest, one of the people I've had I don't know a number of times and it's just somebody I have such enormous admiration for and and he's gone through John Kiriakou. Let me just cut to the chase. John, when did you you were recruited out of what? George Washington University to Right. go work for the CIA. What year was that?

[00:33] I was recruited in 1989 and I started working for the CIA in the first week of January of 1990. And you stayed there until when? I left in the spring of 2004. 2004, so that's what? 15 years, 14 years? Yeah, about 14 and a half years. Yeah, and the you had and you learned Arabic. I did. They taught me Arabic. And and amazingly enough, the reason I wanted to talk to you

[01:04] I I teach at the University of Southern California and I showed the film The Report which I think is excellent and it's on the the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on torture. Yes. And Dianne Feinstein who was the chair of that committee over with Republican objection but she was the head of the committee and the Democrats controlled it and they did this study

[01:36] where did the torture come from? What was it all about? And they actually theoretically had the cooperation of the CIA. And they came up with an a view I know I put it in contrast to that the Hollywood movie Zero Dark Thirty which said that torture somehow worked and got us help the US capture Bin Laden and then kill him and so forth and none of that turned out to be true. And but the fact of the matter is I can't refer listeners to the

[02:08] torture report that they paid for. How many pages was it? The report itself was about 5,500 pages long. Yeah, and when did it come out? It came out in December 2014. Okay. So it's almost a decade ago and the only part that was released was the introduction heavily redacted. The report itself may not even exist anymore. I don't know. There were a couple of copies, right? And what

[02:39] happened to it? Yeah, that's that's really a very important issue that I think most Americans either don't know or have forgotten about. The CIA only produced six or seven issues or copies, I should say, of the of the full report. What we saw was a heavily redacted version of the executive summary of the report, which was about 500 pages. But the report itself was owned by the CIA. The CIA maintained

[03:09] ownership and control, final word, over the actual report itself. So there there was a report in the New York Times about 3 years after the report was was finally written saying that the CIA was going to begin taking back the copies that had gone to places like the Executive Office of the President, the Office of the Vice President, the Senate and House Intelligence Committees, etc. And they were going to begin

[03:39] destroying them. Well, we don't know if that ever happened. So it may exist, it may not exist. We just don't know. What we do know is that it probably will never be declassified. So, the reason this is so critical is without getting into any conspiracy theories, although conspiracy theory is kind of a way of just alluding to hypothesis that either have been explored or have not or can be documented or not, but the

[04:11] fact of the matter is the main evidence that would be available about what happened on 9/11, how we got into a war on terror, what Al-Qaeda was all about, what was his relation to Saudi Arabia. After all, 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi troops or whatever they were, they're young men from Saudi Arabia. And just this week as we're recording this, the president of the United States

[04:42] who spoke at the UN about we represent democracy and just about every other country in the world is not in Western Europe or not a former major colonial power represents authoritarian governments whatever they are. And ironically, it's the same week in which he said he's going to develop an alliance with Saudi Arabia to protect them militarily. So, here's this self-proclaimed you know great democracy and we still really don't know the details of what happened at 9/11 as far

[05:14] as Saudi Arabia's relationship to they certainly you know citizens of Saudi Arabia who were living there actually uh 15 of the 19 were from there. Uh none from Iraq. Uh none from Afghanistan so that we countries that we invaded. So, that that you know you would expect that when you capture people uh you would learn something about what they are and then you would have a trial hopefully a public trial of these people. That didn't happen.

[05:46] And you figure into this historic story, maybe, you know, certainly one of the most the major one of the three or four most important events in American history, changed a whole nature of our government to national security state, solidified it. You were then in the CIA, you were an Arabic speaker, and let's just begin with that. You were involved in the first major capture of somebody who was said at the time to be uh the number three person in Al-Qaeda. And and

[06:18] and the movie The Report deals with the interrogation of that person. And the reason I felt some urgency in doing this is in my class that I was teaching and I showed The Report, I was shocked that it's a class of about, you know, I think 68 students, all very sharp, great SAT scores, and none of them knew about this report, and none of them were really familiar through their high school or years of college education about what

[06:50] had happened, the torture, the torture program. That's shocking to me. yeah, and here's the president of the United States talks, we are the great democracy, but we're the great democracy that did the torture program. You were there. Let's set this historically. Yeah. Just cuz people don't know that story now, John. Uh tell us what happened. How did you get the call? Why were you the person that received this uh prisoner? And what happened to him? Right. Well, really, like so many of

[07:20] these stories, it begins on 9/11. Um like everybody else in the CIA, I volunteered that very day to go to Afghanistan and fight or do whatever was required of me. Um I volunteered repeatedly, stressing that I was I was fluent in the Arabic language, and certainly they would need people to carry out these uh these uh interrogations and interviews and debriefings and they just ignored me. Every time I

[07:51] would I would volunteer, they'd say, "Thank you very much." and they would ignore me. Well, it turned out in those early days immediately after 9/11, um they they weren't they weren't interviewing people. They weren't interrogating anybody. They were killing them. And so, finally, I made what really was an idle threat. I went into the office of the Deputy Director for Counterterrorism who was a friend of mine and I said I said, "Look, if you don't send me to Afghanistan right now, I am walking

[08:24] straight to Exxon with my Arabic and I am not looking back." And he said, "Oh, relax, relax. Okay." And I had been volunteering to him, you know, for months at that point. And he said, "Can you go to Pakistan?" I said, "Yes, when?" He said, "Tomorrow." I said, "Yes, what do you want me to do?" He said, "I want you to be Chief of Counterterrorism Operations." I said, "Okay, done." And I walked right over to the travel office and made a reservation, called my then girlfriend This is at uh in Langley. This is at the

[08:56] CIA. At the CIA's headquarters, yeah. Told I called my girlfriend who was also a CIA officer, told her I was going to Pakistan the next day. She said, "How long?" I said, "I don't know, 6 months, 12 months, I don't know." She said, "Okay, I'll meet you at your place and help you pack." And the next day I flew to Pakistan. So, we began doing counterterrorism raids very slowly. I had been there about a week. I'd come up with a standard operating procedure for taking down a suspected safe house and in the first

[09:26] raid that we did, of course, we partnered with the FBI because 9/11 was still an open criminal investigation. We partnered with Pakistani intelligence because, after all, it's their country. And so, um we broke down the door of of this house at 2:00 in the morning and and grabbed two 18-year-olds. Both of them began crying. One asked if he could call his mother. It was pathetic. And it was easy. And so, about a week later, a friendly

[09:57] Arab intelligence officer passed me a slip of paper with an address on it and he said, "I think this is an Egyptian Islamic Jihad safe house." I said, "Great. Thank you." That night, we broke down the door and grabbed two members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad. So, I said, "You know, this is going pretty well. But, um we're going to be here for 50 years if we're going to be breaking down doors and grabbing one guy or two guys." So, I came up with this idea. We had CIA officers all the way up and down the

[10:30] Pakistan-Afghanistan border, uh in in every little border village, just sort of standing there with with binoculars to see if uh there were Al-Qaeda people trying to cross the border. So, I said, "I had this idea. Let's pull all of our guys off the border. We'll let Al-Qaeda come into the country because you know they're going to all go to the same handful of safe houses. You know they're going to make a mistake, probably an electronic mistake, and then we can raid the house and catch 20, 30,

[11:00] 40 of them at a time." So, we did that and then started having success. Well, on the night of uh March uh 22nd, 2002, we did we carried out 13 simultaneous raids at 2:00 a.m. And in the course of those raids, we captured Abu Zubaydah, who we believed at the time was the number three in Al-Qaeda. We captured the commanders of both of Al-Qaeda's training camps in uh Kandahar and

[11:31] Helmand provinces in southern Afghanistan, and we caught dozens upon dozens of of low-level Al-Qaeda fighters. Now, you said something that's important. You You talked about Guantanamo for a moment, and I want to tell you about the first time I heard anything about Guantanamo. I mean, I knew since I was a kid that Guantanamo was this American base that we maintained in Cuba that the Cubans hated, and that was pretty much all I knew about it. So, after the Abu

[12:01] Zubaydah raids, we had captured so many people that my Pakistani intelligence counterpart called me one day and said, "Listen, the jail is full. We just can't squeeze one more person into the jail. You're going to have to do something with all these prisoners." So, I called CIA headquarters, the Counterterrorism Center, and I said, "Rawalpindi jail is full, and the Pakistanis want us to get these guys out. What should I do with them?" And the response was, "Put them on a C-12 transport plane and send them to

[12:32] Guantanamo." And I said, "Guantanamo, Cuba?" And he said, "Yes." I said, "Why in the world would we send them to Cuba?" And he said, "Oh, we came up with this idea. We're going to send everybody to Cuba for a couple of weeks until we can decide which federal district court to try them in." You don't mean You don't mean actually the country of Cuba. You mean a portion of Cuba that the US had seized through its colonial connection. Right. Guantanamo, yeah.

[13:02] I mean, but it's in It's in Cuba. Yeah. Yeah, but was obviously controlled by the US. Right. It's US base in Cuba. So, the idea was to was to divide them up and try them in either Boston, uh, the southern or eastern districts of New York, the eastern district of Virginia, or the federal district of Washington, D.C. I said, "That's a great idea. And so we started loading people on onto plane after plane after plane and sent

[13:34] them to Guantanamo. In the end we sent something like 770 people to Guantanamo. Um, it turned out that the Vice President at the time, Dick Cheney, didn't have any intention of ever allowing any of those people to go on trial in the United States. And then later on, of course, Congress acted and and formally banned the transfer of any prisoner from Guantanamo to the United States even to face trial or to be transferred into a US prison. So that just never happened.

[14:06] Uh, and so one of the the prisoners who's still there is the man you captured. Yes, Abu Zubaydah. Abu Zubaydah And for people who haven't watched it, I'm trying to encourage people to watch the the report. Uh, and Annette Bening is in it. Uh, help me here with the movie. It's Adam Driver is the star. Annette Bening is terrific as as Dianne Feinstein. I have to tell you I I didn't

[14:37] watch this film when it first came out because I was afraid that you know, it would upset me, it would make my heart race, it would give me, you know, PTSD or something. I ended up watching it on a plane and I couldn't tear myself away from it. It was so wonderfully done. And the point they made though in this film, which I've heard you make, is that when you were in charge at that time and then that you they brought in the FBI a serious person who knew how to do interrogation. You actually got the only

[15:10] useful information that was ever obtained in that process. And when the torture guys from the CIA took over and they excluded the FBI or the FBI pulled out cuz they wouldn't do torture, They didn't get any more information and that prisoner that prisoner without trial uh who turns out not to have actually been officially a member of Al-Qaeda is still in Guantanamo. Yeah, this is this is a big problem for a lot of different reasons. Abu Zubaydah was first taken to a secret uh prison

[15:41] where he was um he was interrogated by an FBI officer named Ali Soufan. Um Ali Ali was a a terrific uh translator, an experienced interrogator, and over the course of many weeks, something like 6 weeks, he established a rapport with Abu Zubaydah, a relationship that allowed them to carry on a normal human-to-human conversation. And in the course of that conversation, Abu Zubaydah gave us information that we had never been able

[16:12] to collect before uh at the CIA or at the FBI. He gave us, for example, the Al-Qaeda wiring diagram. Now, that may not sound like a big deal, but I assure you it's a very big deal because we knew about Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri and we really didn't know anything else. So, one of the examples that I like to give of of what I mean by the wiring diagram is Ali asked uh Abu Zubaydah, "If you were going to do an operation in

[16:45] Düsseldorf, how would you do that?" And Abu Zubaydah responded that, "Well, there's this guy Muhammad and he's at this address and Muhammad is good at organization and he has a friend Ahmed and here's Ahmed's phone number and Ahmed has access to weapons and uh there's another guy Abdurrahman. He's Ahmed's cousin. He has access to explosives. So, then we could call the Germans and say, 'Listen, you have a problem in Düsseldorf and here's the information.' And they could wrap up that cell. Well, we we didn't know that

[17:17] these cells existed. We suspected that they did, but we didn't have definitive information, and especially lead information, as to how to locate and capture them. Abu Zubaydah gave us that. Abu Zubaydah also identified to us Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. We didn't know that name until Abu Zubaydah gave it to us. We knew that there was a very bad man out there somewhere who went by the nom de guerre Mukhtar.

[17:48] Mukhtar was the mastermind of what was called the Bojinka operation. It was a plan to hijack six 747s from Manila and fly them into buildings up and down the West Coast of the United States. Uh the the operation never took place because a housekeeper stumbled on the plans while cleaning the apartment of one of the uh one of the would-be hijackers. And she called the police, and the

[18:19] police raided the apartment, and then it just never happened. So, we knew this Mukhtar was out there planning terrible things. We didn't know who he was. Abu Zubaydah was amazed that we didn't know that Mukhtar was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. And so, once he told us who that was, we could target Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and we ended up capturing him in uh Rawalpindi, Pakistan, in August of 2002. And the interesting thing, you said you didn't know they didn't know Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,

[18:50] but he had been a student, I believe, in North Carolina, an engineering uh student, and uh actually kind of a normal Yes. uh person. Lived with an American family when he was a student in North Carolina. Somehow had gotten radicalized after uh that, but was actually knowledgeable about American culture and so forth. Oh, yes. Yeah. Very much so. So, and so you came up with this information and and then you discovered that

[19:23] he wasn't actually Abu Zubaydah was not actually a member of Al-Qaeda. Right. That that was one of the one of several surprises for us. He he had never formally joined Al-Qaeda. He had never pledged fealty to Osama bin Laden. He had never sworn an oath. So, he was not the number three in Al-Qaeda. He was a bad man. And he did a lot of work on behalf of Al-Qaeda. But he was never a member. Now getting back to to Ali Soufan. The CIA was jealous frankly at the progress that Ali was making. And every

[19:56] day at the end of the day he would write a cable back to FBI headquarters recounting the conversation that he had had that day with Abu Zubaydah. Well, even post 9/11 the CIA and the FBI hated each other so intensely that even their computer systems were not compatible. And so Ali is writing these cables back to headquarters back to FBI headquarters every day. And the CIA is not seeing them.

[20:26] Once in a while the FBI would write a memo and send it over to the CIA saying, "Yeah, we're talking to him. So, here's a memo." Well, the CIA was upset. This is a very serious bureaucratic kerfuffle between the two organizations. And so in late July of 2002 George Tenet who was the CIA's director at the time went to President Bush and asked President Bush to to turn primacy of the case over to the

[20:59] CIA to take it away from the FBI and give it to the CIA. Why George W. Bush agreed to do that is something that I don't think we'll ever understand. He's never talked about it. It wasn't in the torture report and George Tenet has never talked about it, but that's what happened. And so, the FBI knew that the CIA was going to begin torturing him. And so, to protest that, the FBI withdrew all of its personnel, not just from the secret site, but from

[21:29] the country that the secret site was in. On August the 2nd, 2002, the CIA began torturing Abu Zubaydah and he immediately clammed up. He was so upset, so angry, and disgusted when they started torturing him that he just went silent. But, the two contract psychologists, uh James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, to whom the CIA had paid $108 million to

[22:00] come up with the torture program, had to prove that it was working, even if it wasn't. And so, what they did is they took all of the reporting cables that Ali Soufan had written, retyped them in the CIA's database, sent them back to CIA headquarters and said, "Oh my god, look. We only waterboarded him one time and look what he told us. He gave us the kitchen sink. He gave us Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. He gave us the wiring diagram. Somebody

[22:30] should call the Germans and tell them they have a problem in Düsseldorf." Well, after a while, they had reported which you had already done. No, I I was I was out of it by then. No, I mean, but the Germans had already been called by By the By the FBI. Yeah. Yes. But, what I don't understand, by the way, there was a movie cuz the the CIA was very involved in the making of the Zero Dark Ferry. And they violated and there was even a

[23:03] a report uh uh special prosecutor report or about what they did wrong, but they revealed the identity of Navy SEALs who had captured Bin Laden, jeopardized their security a two the people working on the movie the right the screenwriter and the director. Yeah. What happened was Kathryn Bigelow who was the director and executive producer of Zero Dark Thirty and Mark Boal who was the lead writer

[23:35] for Zero Dark Thirty were able to go to the CIA to receive classified briefings in violation of the Espionage Act over a classified mock-up of the Bin Laden compound. They based the the movie on what they had been told in those classified briefings. And then when it was all over they were invited to an attaboy session in the CIA's auditorium called the bubble. The speaker was the CIA director Leon

[24:06] Panetta and in his speech Panetta outed the Navy SEAL who had killed Bin Laden as well as several other Navy SEALs. Panetta later said he didn't realize there were uncleared people in the audience. That was nonsense. It was Panetta's office that had invited them to the event. And so the CIA's office of public affairs went back and not just redacted the names of the SEALs. But they redacted 27 lines of otherwise classified

[24:38] information. Again, that was in violation of the Espionage Act, but there was never any price to pay and to make matters worse to thank the CIA analysts for giving them classified information for their movie Boal and Bigelow sent tickets to the to the movie's premiere in West Hollywood and uh and for the people who couldn't make it to the premiere bought them watches. If you can imagine anything so corrupt

[25:08] taking place at the CIA. It's it's just even in retrospect it's crazy to me. And in the Inspector General's report they pointed out there was even chats about who would play Padilla, who would play other people. And and I have to point out cuz I didn't do it in the introduction. You refused to participate in the torture program or be trained for it. They asked you to do it. And you became a critic of the program after leaving the CIA. And you are the only

[25:39] person who has served time for being having any connection with the CIA and torture program. Not that you tortured anyone, but because you were accused of having revealed some and then you served just about 2 years Yes. in prison. That's right. Are you going to tell what's funny? When when I got out of prison the first interview that I gave was to the BBC Hard Talk, I think is what it's it's a it's a kind of a hard-hitting mean-spirited talk show. And the host

[26:12] kept trying to provoke me. And he said finally, "Well, you're not showing any remorse for the crime that you committed." And I said, "No, because I have no remorse. It's not a crime to reveal a crime. The crime was committed by the CIA. The crime was committed by the torturers. I'll never apologize for what I did." I said, "John McCain got up on the floor of the United States Senate to thank me for providing a public service to the American people. I'm glad

[26:43] that I did what I did." John McCain who had been tortured who had been tortured, that's right. And talking to the New York Times and and the and ABC News is is not espionage. Sorry, it's just not. Well, it's good to know that despite prison and being the only person who and the irony of it, the only person who served time for the torture program is the person who was accused of having exposed it.

[27:13] Uh so much for respect for the truth. I just want to bring up one little footnote in this connection. Before 9/11, there was a good Hollywood movie made about the terrorism called The Siege with Denzel Washington. All right. I right. I happen to have a bit part cuz our show that actually was done for KCRW that we're doing this for for Left, Right, and Center. Ariana Huffington was on that show. So, the the principal people on the show we did we we did a reenactment for that movie. This is

[27:45] before 9/11, you know, year maybe two two years before. And but the hero in that movie is an FBI agent who speaks Arabic. And and he tries to say you can't round up every Arab in Brooklyn to to solve this problem. It's not done. But it's interesting. And then the real life hero here in in your story and in the movie The Report was another FBI person who at least knew the language. These doctors

[28:16] that were paid, what did you say? 100 108 million dollars. Yeah, psychologist. Uh they didn't know Arabic. They didn't know what they admitted it. They didn't know anything about the countries or culture or anything. Right? Not a thing. Yeah. And yet going to what mass media does amazingly, this movie gave them and their torture it justified torture. Yes, it did. Yes, it did. And to make matters worse when the torture report came out, um a big group of retired uh senior CIA

[28:48] leaders, George Tenet, Jim Pavitt, big important people, Jose Rodriguez and Cofer Black. They they all attached their names to a rebuttal. A book that was published saying torture worked, torture saved lives, we would do it again if we could, we didn't make any mistakes. It was this outrageous Did they admit but they didn't admit it was torture? They called it enhanced

[29:18] They called it enhanced interrogation techniques. That's right. Yeah. You know, I want to know, John, how did you survive? You you lost your pension, you served your marriage broke up and your wife then was in the CIA. You all sorts of family problems. And actually, frankly, you haven't looked better than you do right now. You've lost 100 lb. I don't know if I'm at liberty to discuss this. You look you you look like a a sad old

[29:50] bureaucratic veteran the last couple of times I talked to you now vigorous young man and you even have your humor back and some of it gallows humor. How how the hell did you survive? You know what, Bob? It's it's been a process and it's taken me years. But I have to be honest with you. I like myself. I'm pleased with the way I turned out. I'm never going to be wealthy. I'm never

[30:23] going to live in a giant house. But my children respect me. I'll tell you my my third son just started college 2 weeks ago. And he's going to Miami University of Ohio and he called me I don't think we should get too specific here. Okay. No, that's okay. You are a controversial figure. Well, he called me the other day to tell me he was he had just walked out of his very first philosophy course. And um or philosophy class. And he said, "Dad, I just walked out of my first ever philosophy class." And I

[30:54] said, "Oh, I hated philosophy. It was so boring." And he said, "No, no, no, listen." He said, "There are like 300 kids in the class and the professor starts talking about um about uh um ethical dilemmas." And he said, "There's this guy, John Kiriakou. He was a loyal CIA officer and he saw that the CIA was committing the crime of torture. And he knew what would happen if he went public, but he also knew it was wrong. And so he went public

[31:24] anyway." And he said, "How many of you would have gone public?" And he said, my my son said, "I wanted to jump up and say, 'That's my dad.'" And I said, "Well, I said, you know what? Tell him tell him that uh tell him privately that next time I'm in town to visit you, I'm happy to talk to his class." But that makes me proud. That makes me happy. My children respect me. I can sleep at night with a clean conscience. And you know, I I'm fine. I don't need a new car every couple of years. I don't

[31:54] need the big fancy house. I I like the way my life turned out. Well, except uh you know, it's not been easy. No. And and and you know, I mean, the fact of the matter is you're in a small group of whistleblowers. I mean, so small. It's a pathetic Yeah. comment on on American culture and society because after all, if we're the democratic society that that President Biden celebrated uh this week in his UN

[32:25] speech, if we have the special sauce and all these other people, if they weren't European colonialists, you know, England and France or Germany or the whatever, uh you know, that are also in the Democratic mix, but that doesn't include India now because Modi, their leader, has nationalist feelings, and it doesn't include South Africa cuz they refuse they get along with Russia. Does clearly doesn't control influence or connect with Russia or China. You know, so most

[32:55] of Brazil sort of excludes a majority of the world, but this special sauce, if nothing else, I just happened to reread Justice Roberts' opinion on why surveillance is bad, believe it or not. The a Republican appointee Chief Justice who wrote a brilliant opinion about why the police can't crack into your cell phone and get information. And he quotes from the trial of James Otis and written about

[33:27] by, you know, our second president Adams. And And he says the American Revolution was fought over protecting the right of the individual to inform themselves, to speak out, to have the sanctity of their homes. But we've seen what whistleblowers, you know, reach really respected people who were at the NSA and so on. The FBI breaks into their home, pulls them out of the shower and everything. And you have to really ask yourself a question,

[33:58] how could a culture that prides itself on this individualism and free, you know, the heroes of the free people speak truth to power and act. We have a handful, you know, Daniel Ellsberg just died recently. He gave us the Pentagon Papers. He said he had to wait 50 years for other whistleblowers. A document we had every right to read, we had paid for. It was an academic study on the basis of inside information on how we got into Vietnam.

[34:28] You You got You know, help me out here. Yeah, Bill Binney, Kirk Wiebe, uh Tom Drake at NSA. Uh we've got Daniel Hale at the Air Force and Lisa Ling in at the Air Force both in the drone program. We have We have uh Ed Snowden from NSA and CIA. They're the shame is, as you just said, even after 50 years or 50 years after Dan Ellsberg, you can count us on two hands. That's it.

[34:59] So, that's that many. And what what you guys knew, thousands of people knew who were in the government. Oh, yes. Uh right? How many people really I mean, even Dianne Feinstein, we give her a lot of credit for the report and doing it, but she knew. And she didn't go public. Yeah. Sure, she did. You know, people ask me all the time, "Well, why didn't you go through the chain of command?" Well, my chain of command created the torture program and implemented the torture program. Well, why didn't you go to the oversight committees? Because the oversight committees approved the torture program and then financed it,

[35:31] appropriated funds for it. So, there were no good guys in this scenario. The only place to go was the media. You know, we should explain the reason we believe in freedom is not that it's a luxury. The whole basis of the American Constitution, for whatever its flaws, its limitations, those wigged white guys and everything else, we know all of the problems. But, there was a brilliance to the insight,

[36:03] which is that you have to beware of power, that power corrupts, and that we have a constitution that is designed uh to prevent the very people who authored the Constitution, when they become the government, from exploiting their power Yes. over the individual, even the humblest individual in his abode. That's why we have a Fourth Amendment. That's why we have the First Amendment freedom. The idea is that's not a gift to the people. That's a protection of freedom. That that that that is a necessity. It's not

[36:34] an indulgence, this freedom. But it is treated as an indulgence. We'll let you have privacy. We'll let you have free speech when we're not at war, when there there's no great risk, when there's no danger, when everything is tranquil, maybe we'll let you have it then if you say the right thing, if you do the right thing, if you favor the torture program, you'll go on MSNBC. You'll become a star. If you oppose the torture program, you end up in prison like John Kiriakou. You lose everything.

[37:05] You lose your pension and what have you. And in your case, they then can turn around and smear you cuz the only place you could get a job and and and be able to do what you do well, you're so well informed, so knowledgeable, you know more about the this area of the world, you speak the language that's supposed to be terrorizing us, but you have to end up on Sputnik, a Russian radio station that has very few listeners because in our supposedly free

[37:35] society, we cut back their access to to people. So, you are now as just like with Edward Snowden, oh bad guy. You know, Snowden tried to you know, take refuge in I think 30 different countries. He ends up in Russia. So, he's now a bad guy, right? Right. Oh, you know, that's a pet peeve of mine. People say that all the time, "Well, Snowden defected to Russia." No, he didn't. Snowden was in the transit lounge of Moscow Airport on his way to Ecuador when John Kerry canceled his US

[38:06] passport and stranded him at Moscow. a a hero of opposition at one point to the Vietnam War was then Secretary of State and he canceled him. Yeah. And so, that's how he end up in Russia. You know, that's so important because as we talk about what's real news and fake news and everything and you know, it's so easy to blame Donald Trump for every bit of distortion, but we've been very good at lying. We lied about of course to Vietnam where we lied about you know,

[38:37] why the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We lied about lots of things and you and very effectively so. Actually Trump is probably one of our worst liars. You know, he's so blatant and boorish about it. We you know, Harry Truman was a very effective liar. He said he never wanted to see Oppenheimer again because Oppenheimer did question the wisdom of destroying mostly innocent civilians with these bombs and so forth and worried about it even though he helped

[39:07] create it. And and so we have this weird sense of our own history and it's important to make Edward Snowden a villain. What Edward Snowden revealed to us is that private companies which do have a right to gather information and so forth. It's not doesn't rise to a challenge to our constitutionally guaranteed freedom, but they weren't doing it privately. The US government was invading the machinery of of Google and Facebook and Apple and everybody else and grabbing the information actually

[39:39] jeopardizing their position as companies that have to have the trust of people around the world, breaking into their cables, breaking into general cables and spying on the American people in clear violation of CIA's operating rules and and That's right. mandate. And yet he's he's now the the bad guy. Right? Because he takes refuge in the one country where he was trapped and and because we we didn't let him go to Ecuador where probably he would have been like Julian Assange probably you know, would

[40:10] have been Oh, yeah. He would be in a He would be in a prison in the United States now had he actually made it to Ecuador because there's been a change in government there and that pro-US government turned Julian Assange over to British authorities and that's why he's at Belmarsh prison. And Julian Assange who of course was not an American citizen was not working for an American agency like Edward Snowden or or John Kiriakou. He I just can't they the five major newspapers that published the information I don't want to get agitated here but you know the five

[40:43] major organizations who's the New York Times have issued a statement saying that what Julian Assange revealed and then they printed was legitimate news that we had to have. Democracy requires it. However, they made that statement but generally shut up about the fact that the guy who did their journalism was a publisher like them is has been almost driven out of his mind in in a prison and now we want to get him and put him in a maximum security prison in the United States even though

[41:14] the Australian government is objecting to that and says well wait a minute, he's a citizen of our country. So to put you in historical context John, I have to say I began this by saying I admire you as much as any anyone I've ever interviewed Thank you so much. That means a lot to me Bob. Thank you so much for that. But I've interviewed a lot of people. I interviewed you know Bobby Kennedy and then Jimmy Carter and you know people all over the world and you know people you might not like you know the Fidel Castros or you know all sorts of people.

[41:46] You know it's what I've done for a living but I've interviewed you a bunch of times. I've followed every aspect of your story and you are the great American hero. You are. You are you know you are the boy scout you know who who stuck stuck to the idea which was not America Uber Alles but quite the opposite you know America has to stand for values even if the last man standing or last woman standing believes in those values. And and you know, how they can

[42:19] That's what really got me to want to do this interview now because I was so shocked that my students that through their education and they've gotten, you know, some of the best access, you know, we're top you know, top 25 school or something at USC. They're very smart students. They want to learn. And we had a movie, an important movie made, the report, and I was shocked that not one single person in my class even knew of its existence.

[42:51] You know, not one. Amazing to me. Yeah, and and you know, and their whole life has been shaped by what you were doing, right? I was in the area. They were born then. Mhm. That that that's what their age is now. They you know, this is where they're they're 23 if they were born or 22 if they were born that time. And and so their whole world, our world, but their life world has been post 9/11. Yes. That's it. They are the children and it's funny, in my mind 9/11 was practically, you know, last Tuesday.

[43:23] That's how fresh it still is in my mind. It's just crazy. Well, when you just said at the beginning of the of the podcast that we're coming up on a decade ago that the torture report was was released, I thought, "Oh my god, how's that even possible? A decade." But you're exactly right. All of these all of these students are are post 9/11 Americans. They're the post They're the 9/11 babies. Mhm. That's what they are. They're 9/11 babies. So I'm there Tuesday It was

[43:54] Monday, actually. Oh, sorry. It was Wednesday. Let me be very clear about my facts here. Monday, yes. And I showed this movie. You would have thought that I had just acquired some document, you know, it's available. You can get it on I think I got it on Amazon Prime, you know, I was showing it straight there. I didn't break into any safes or anything, but you can't read the report. No. You know, you can read a part of of of it. Uh why don't you tell let's pay tribute to the movie.

[44:25] What does it get right? You go I don't want to send you to jail again now. Oh no, that's okay. Well, you know, I'm going to make a recommendation first and say um that the reports out there, the executive summary is out there. Again, it's heavily redacted. But if you really want to understand what it is the investigators were trying to convey, read the footnotes. The footnotes are so critical to our understanding of of what it is that the CIA was was doing. I

[44:57] think the most important thing to take from the the report, I think the thing that Americans should be most appalled by or most shocked by is the fact that CIA officers went far beyond what they were permitted to do under the Justice Department's terms. You know, the Justice Department said, "You can do these 10 things and this is how you have to do each one of them." And the CIA just just tossed that off to the side and did

[45:29] literally anything they wanted. We we only learned in the report that Abu Zubaydah, for example was to use the CIA's terminology rectally hydrated with hummus. Now, doctors came out immediately and said there is no medical benefit whatsoever to forcing hummus into somebody's body rectally through a tube. They did that to humiliate him and to torture him.

[45:59] Uh there are a couple of And, and to humiliate his culture. Yes. Oh, yes. They threatened They threatened to use pages of the Quran as toilet paper. Uh, they uh, made uh, prisoners The prisoners, of course, were all Muslim. They made them stand naked in front of female soldiers. Anything they could think of to insult them. Trimmed their beards. Trimmed their beards. That's right. That's right. Yeah. So, it was deliberate

[46:31] uh, humiliation. But, let me get back to the critical point about the functioning of a democracy, which is that the truth will set you free. Yes, indeed. after all, it's not uh, okay, let's have a little democracy with our steak. Uh, it's nice to have. No. You The reason we have this Constitution with its amendments is that the founders, again, whatever their failings, the founders said, "We are going We have the potential to be the bad guys." Yes. And if I'm not the bad guy, it'll be my

[47:02] colleague over there. Or And And And what we want to do is protect the society against us. Yes. Precisely. Right. Precisely. We're either going to be a country that respects the rule of law, or we're not. It's as simple as that. And there isn't anything in between because you have the ability to always be corrupted. And they knew this because, after all, they were making a revolution against England, which they had admired more than any other country

[47:33] in the world, most of them, right? And And yet, now And And the English, who they admired, would be hanging them from the nearest tree if they lost this revolution. And actually, quite a few people in this country wasn't a country yet, but in the colonies had doubts about it, or didn't want to do it, you know? But, this was the group that wanted to do it, the Washington so forth. And Washington warned us in his farewell address after being president for two terms about the impostures of

[48:04] pretended patriotism. That's This is what George Washington, the general, just like General Eisenhower, warned us about the military-industrial complex. That's what we're talking about. We're talking about the military-industrial complex, the impostures of pretended patriotism, and what they do with their torture, with their censorship, with their classifications is prevent the average American citizen, or in fact the vast, vast, vast majority of American

[48:34] citizens from knowing what happened. Knowing who are the enemy. Well, how do they work? What do they think? That's what a trial would do. That's what giving journalists access would do. And having lawyers and being able to publish it. What was this terrorism about? Why this ally of ours, Saudi Arabia, which now President Biden, out of nowhere, as we're preparing for a war with China, which kept us alive during the pandemic, and we don't like China cuz they're

[49:05] maybe a more successful capitalist country. Whoever's running it, really, they're cleaning our clock on on making stuff, including, you know, electric cars now crashing through the home market. Okay, so we're going to have a war, and in Orwellian terms, we have to find the enemy, you know, and Putin's the great enemy, even though Putin is the anti-communist that our own government backed when he was against Gorbachev and when he was, you know, Yeltsin's guy. So history gets just turned. Now we want communist

[49:37] Vietnam, which we once fought this bloody, decades-long war. We want now iPhones made in in Vietnam, communist Vietnam, because China is communist and they're too nationalistic, so we'll go to Vietnam. I I if just play with history, and what people have to remember is this idea of freedom and limits on power is not an indulgence of a sane democratic society, it's the essential oil, okay? And that's what everybody forgets, you

[50:07] know? And so really without spawning conspiracy theories, we really don't know what this whole thing was about. This war on terror and so forth. You know, after all, if we was really about Muslim fanaticism, we wouldn't have gone to war with Iraq. Everybody forgets this. I always ask people, what did Iraq have to do with 9/11? What? You know, not one single one of the hijackers was from Iraq. Uh Saddam

[50:38] Hussein was a a sworn enemy of Al-Qaeda. It was the one country in the Middle East where Al-Qaeda couldn't function cuz Saddam Hussein was a ruthless dictator who'd kill them. Uh you know, anytime. So, what we're really talking about is information we not only have a right to have but a need to have. And this great adventure that happened like now, maybe we'll end up in a nuclear war with Russia and China then we but we'll never know. How does this

[51:10] happen? How does this happen? Why did we all of a sudden have big fights about Russia with its borders and Ukraine? I mean, everything. You we we don't get the information. We don't get the information. And and in your case, let's just maybe wrap this up with the fact of the matter is you don't get on MSNBC, the so-called enlightened more what? Democratic Party influenced station. I mean, I don't know. You know,

[51:40] So, where do you get on? Sputnik and then you're condemned for it, you know? If you if you don't shut up and Washington Post listened to my show and said that I was weakening our democracy. Oh. And what's the reason? Because I was criticizing a crooked judge in Pennsylvania who took bribes to send children to for-profit prison. He was convicted and sentenced to 22 years. I was I was saying it's terrible to have

[52:11] crooked judges. And the Washington Post said you were weakening our democracy. Yeah, I see. Uh and And the Washington Post, which has been a a conduit for both information obtained by whistleblowers and yet for the government that then wants to persecute them. I mean, the same Washington Post that printed the Pentagon papers, but you know, the current Washington Post wouldn't defend a Julian Assange

[52:42] who was, as Daniel Ellsberg pointed out, directly in line, as he pointed out about you, as whistleblowers who were directly in line with what he was trying to do. You know, I could go on a long time with you, John. I I It is so encouraging that you know, that they didn't get you down. Uh not a chance. If they thought they that they would, they didn't know me at all. Well, you know, maybe we should conclude on that. You know, how

[53:14] you know, you you're kind of a even though you have a Greek background, but then again, most of us in this supposed melting pot have some other background, but really you you're kind of as American as apple pie. I like to think so. No, but I mean, just take us back. I mean, who was John Kiriakou and how did you end up being a truly major major figure in American history? Uh thank you. uh You know, I'm just I'm just a normal average guy. I I grew up in Western

[53:45] Pennsylvania, nuclear family. My parents were public school teachers and uh, you know, grew up with baseball and football and church on Sunday and um, my dad, when I was 8 years old, my dad bought me a shortwave radio at an auction for 50 cents. I still remember it. And that radio, that beat-up old radio opened the entire world to me. As soon as the sun went down, I could listen to the BBC or Radio Moscow or

[54:17] stations, you know, in in China and Cuba and Europe and all over the world. And I decided then that I wanted to see the world. I wanted to go to school in Washington, D.C. and I wanted to see the world. And that's what I ended up doing. And you saw the world and then you felt that your fellow Americans had a right to see parts of the Right to know. You know, after my whistleblowing, uh, a journalist who also happens to be a psychologist, uh, told me that in his

[54:50] own studies, he found that whistleblowers have an unusually highly defined sense of right and wrong. It's far more highly defined than it is in the general populace. And he said, "It's almost like whistleblowers can't stop themselves." And I said, "That's how I felt." I couldn't stop myself. I couldn't sleep at night knowing that this was happening in our name. That the government was carrying out these crimes in our name. So, I had to say something. And even though they don't call it

[55:22] torture and even though it is clearly defined even in the introduction to the report, you still have your top people, including a former liberal congressman Yes. Like Caneda. Yes. You know, when I knew him, he is. He was kind less liberal congressman in California, you know, but defending him. Mhm. The this thing and lying about what it supposedly accomplished even though the report destroys even the part that we can read, the redacted part. I want to mention

[55:52] something about Daniel Ellsberg and and his partner at the Rand Corporation was paid for by the Air Force and Daniel Ellsberg had been in the Marines and been in the military and then now was working you know, for the government and Tony Russo, his partner. Tony Russo, people don't know this. I happen to was this expert witness. I'd been to Vietnam. I knew a lot about it. So, I was an expert witness for Tony Russo if it had gone to trial. Wow. But but because the judge

[56:24] had been offered the job of being head of FBI, went into a mistrial at that point. But Tony Russo turned against the Vietnam War while he was working for the Air Force Air Force contract evaluating the interrogation of Vietnamese prisoners in Vietnam. Wow. And he saw and recognized that they were being tortured. And then he saw also that they they were not giving bad information, that it was not in any way even justified. So,

[56:57] torture was done in Vietnam and Tony Russo who was worked with Daniel Ellsberg to get the papers printed and give it to the New York Times, then the Washington Post. That's what he was moved by. That torture aside from being totally heinous, also was counterproductive. I was telling the Americans what they wanted to hear about pursuing the war that ended up in our most ignominious defeat. And and so from Daniel Ellsberg and Tony Russo to

[57:29] to you, John Kiriakou, a straight line and we have like a I said I'd keep this a half hour, I'm going to keep it to 1 hour. We got 2 minutes. I want to talk just for the last 2 minutes about Julian Assange. Yes. Because I mean, here is a guy who did what a journalist is supposed to do, what a publisher is supposed to do. You know, he wasn't in the CIA. He hadn't taken an oath. He's not an American. And he he found, "Hey, you're shooting up and killing a Reuters correspondent. You're killing innocent civilians. You know, you're laughing

[58:00] about it in your helicopter." We have information, I'm going to reveal it. And that guy has a We can use the word torture. The UN has said Daniel that Julian Assange is the UN rapporteur on torture big report is being tortured. And he's now the most visible victim of of this Orwellian nightmare where torture becomes enhanced interrogation. You know, uh Yes. You're absolutely right. And you know, I

[58:32] I know on on podcasts and and things like this we try not to be specific to a certain day, but I'm going to be specific to a certain day. Today, six Australian parliamentarians, uh including four senators, two members of the lower the lower body, the house, including a former deputy prime minister came to Washington. They held a rally this afternoon at the Justice Department and and a vigil. And they brought with them a letter signed by 60 members of

[59:03] the Australian Parliament asking President Biden to drop the charges against Julian Assange and let him go home. And I'll tell you another thing, forgive me if I go over our 2 minutes. I don't know if you remember the name David Hicks. David Hicks was an Australian national who was was a troubled teenager. At the age of 18, he he to Islam and then made his way to Afghanistan to um um fight alongside the Taliban. He ended up being recruited into Al-Qaeda,

[59:34] and because he didn't speak Arabic, uh they just gave him a gun and told him to stand guard at the Kandahar Al-Qaeda training base. He happened to be in Pakistan on 9/11, and as soon as he saw the news, he ran back to Afghanistan to help Al-Qaeda fight the Americans. Okay, he was almost immediately captured by the United States. And we sent him to Guantanamo, where he was tortured mercilessly. Now, the Australian government came to us and said, "Whoa, wait a minute. You

[1:00:05] can't torture an Australian citizen. This is a Five Eyes citizen. You have to let him go." So, we put him on trial at Guantanamo, we found him guilty, we sentenced him to time served, and we turned him over to the Australians. Well, he was a genuine bad guy. What about Julian Assange? Why aren't the Australians in the streets over Julian Assange Assange? Now, it's getting better than it was 6 months ago even.

[1:00:36] But, more needs to be done to to impart to the White House that this is a This is an issue worth falling on the sword for. We have to release Julian Assange. But, the government that wants to bring him back, uh certainly the Trump administration wanted to, but that's that's uh Joe Biden. Yes. Who, by the way, voted for wars that were based on lies. That's right. And so forth, you know, but now we're all going to be encouraged to shut up and go along with the program that we

[1:01:07] need uh cuz there's no other old white person we can mail, we can find. We have to go with the one we got, otherwise all hell will break loose, and the you know, source of all evil, Donald Trump, will come in and so forth. I want you to talk finally about good guys about uh Barack Obama. You went You went to prison, right? When When Barack Obama It was Barack Obama uh the Barack Obama

[1:01:38] administration that sent me to prison. know. When you're president, Yeah, you're right. president, the buck stops with you. I I'm trying to be nice, but you're absolutely right. you probably voted for the guy. I certainly did. I got teeth shirts. I contributed to his campaign. I took my kids to the inauguration with my youngest on my shoulders to see this great this great new president who was going to fix all of our problems. And instead, he he makes John Brennan uh CIA director. John Brennan, who was the executive director of the CIA during

[1:02:08] the torture program, was one of the founders, the fathers of the torture program. And you know, Barack Obama is the one that just allowed the drone war to explode. In George W. Bush's last month as president, he killed 24 people with drones. In Barack Obama's last month as president, he killed 440 people with drones. Like, is that really the country we want to be? What's trial by drone? That's right. Yeah, and and but but I wanted to make

[1:02:39] it little personal at the end here. You know, uh we're we're talking about Okay, maybe we could have an argument with with the Biden is a good guy, but I never doubted that Barack Obama was a good guy. He was civil libertarian, law professor, concerned about all these issues, talked about limits on power, promised us he would not lie and would respect the Constitution. And here is John Kiriakou,

[1:03:10] and your What is your crime anyway? They claimed you gave the name of a of a of a open member of the CIA to a news to ABC. And really they tried that at first. They they said, "Oh, you gave the name of a CIA officer to to ABC." And I said, "He's He's never been undercover. He's on LinkedIn as Central Intelligence Agency." So, it's no secret. Then they charged me with violating the Intelligence me just Let me just stop there because I did follow that case. And every time you

[1:03:41] tell me something, I then go and spend hours Oh, wait a minute. Now, I like John, but you know, okay, what is he pushing here? So, it's actually was a case where you were asked by this reporter, as I recall, who would Would there be someone in the CIA who knows about all this who disagrees with you about the torture program? Do I have that right? Close. Close. He asked me He sent me a list of 12 names. is the he we allowed This is Matthew Cole.

[1:04:11] He gave me a list of 12 names, and he said, "I'm writing this book about the rendition program. Can you introduce me to any of these 12 people?" I said, "I don't have any idea who these people are." Then he sent me another list of 12 names. And I I said, "Look, I don't know any of these people. You clearly know this issue better than I do." I said, "Kidnapping wasn't my thing at the CIA. I was always the good cop. I don't know anything about the rendition program." And then he said, "Well, what about the guy that you mentioned in your book? I think his name is John."

[1:04:42] I said, "Oh, I said, yeah, that's John Doe." I said, uh "I I don't know. Whatever happened to him, he's probably retired and living somewhere in in Virginia." Well, I had confirmed the last name in the email. Now, that name was never made public. That's why I said John Doe just now. The name was never made public. And after the fact, the CIA director, um David Petraeus, revealed the names of 10 CIA covert operatives to his adulterous girlfriend.

[1:05:15] He was never charged with that, but they charged me with a felony. And that's what I ended up going to prison for. So, I'm uh we have to understand that. You were already a controversial figure because you had spoke as you had a right to Yes. about what was wrong with the program, right? Torture, right? So, you were contributing to the public dialogue. Yes. Your crime uh for which you end up in the prison with I think some mafia figures you know. Oh, yeah, very senior mafia figures.

[1:05:46] Yeah. Oh, yeah. and suddenly uh David Petraeus, by the way, who was somebody who's been a a professor at different university including USC a very distinguished The New York Times loves him. They seem to have a profile about him every couple of months. There must be a a schedule of how great David Petraeus the greatest general and all that. And he had these black books just just be clear about that which were for presidential briefings that were the most important secrets. Right? This is

[1:06:17] not for certain. Literally the most highly classified information in the US government. With these black books. Yes. And he let his mistress you know, I don't want to be puritanical here about his adulterous girlfriend or something. That's That's you know, I'm not interested in condemning his personal behavior, but but his mistress uh right? Uh did not have the clearance. No. Yes. So, he gave the most prized secret

[1:06:49] current information that he was responsible for giving to the president of the United States. And he let his mistress who was going to write about this, right? Mhm. Right? She was writing a biography about him. Yeah. And so, she could read this to see how great he was and how knowledgeable he was, and he gets his a slap on the wrist. Yes, he got he ended up getting a misdemeanor. He took a plea to a misdemeanor count of improper

[1:07:21] improper Oh, improperly securing classified information. He got 18 months of unsupervised probation. And at his sentencing, the judge came down from the bench to shake his hand and thank him for his service to the country. Right. Same thing the judge did with you, right? Right. The judge said to me, "If I could give you 10 years, I would." And you had actually risked your life out there and you know

[1:07:51] in the center of the war on on terror. Mhm. And so that double standard is what should alarm people. Yes. That that you know, if they were really stern taskmasters and you reveal class This is what bothers me about the Trump thing. I I am absolutely convinced that every president who left office left with all the documents he might need to write his book or anything like that. I mean, I've been I've interviewed a lot of these people. I interviewed Richard

[1:08:21] Nixon after his president You know, I I I've seen Jimmy Carter before and after his president. Ronald Reagan I talked to very extensively as a journalist. Ronald Reagan had no trouble at all bringing up all sorts of things that were classified or something. He had been president. He got to talk about what he wanted to talk about. I'm not going to sit here defending Donald Trump, but my God, you know, oh, he he he's got papers he's not supposed to have I mean, you know, so there's

[1:08:51] something so annoying about the double standard that it's okay it's okay for Petraeus to give his mistress these books which she was fully intending to use. It wasn't just a "Hey, honey, read this while I go take a shower." No, it's you're you're writing a book. You can read this. Top secret. You're like the president. John Kiriakou who gives the name of a known CIA person mentioned on LinkedIn and so forth and you serve hard time.

[1:09:22] Yes. The only one. Now, that is what the history books have got to record. None of the other people involved with the torture program, none served any time. No, none of them. In fact, they all went on to great riches. They all got got seven-figure book advances and positions on corporate boards. on it. Who? Who? Oh, sure. George Tenet got 6 million for his book. Jose Rodriguez got 4 million for his book. And this just goes on and

[1:09:53] on and on. They're on the boards of of American defense contractors and um they're talking heads. John Brennan's a talking head on MSNBC, you know, getting at least 100,000 just to be on call for that. Uh they've done very well for themselves financially. end let's end by talking a bit about John Brennan. He's the guy who who threw you under the bus, right? Yeah, you know, I I've known John Brennan for 30 32 33 years. And um

[1:10:28] um never really liked him. I thought he was over in over his head intellectually at the CIA, but he was a political player. He rose through the ranks. And uh you know, I thought, well, you know, John Brennan, I don't really have anything to do with him. He doesn't have anything to do with me. But then when I was arrested and we received discovery from the Justice Department, 15,000 pages of classified documents. There was a memo from Brennan to Attorney General Eric Holder about me. And it said, "Charge him with

[1:10:59] espionage." And then Holder wrote back and said, "My people don't think he committed espionage." And then Brennan wrote back and said, "Charge him anyway and make him defend himself." And so they did. And then they waited until I went bankrupt and then they dropped the espionage charges. Here's Eric Holder who I've had dinner with on occasion, uh presents as a very progressive open Well, let's let's get to the chase. And the liberal community of Hollywood,

[1:11:31] Eric Holder was much admired. Uh I'm not going to drop other names, but I I was at dinner with some very well-known liberal people. And here's Eric Holder who even though he did not believe and the people working for him did not believe you had committed espionage, was willing, at the head of our secret police agency, the CIA, to charge you in the hopes of breaking you. Mhm. Breaking you. Yep. People have got to understand this

[1:12:02] language. We know it when the Chinese do it, when the Saudis do it, when the Russians do it. We say, "Oh, yeah, yeah, that's totalitarian. They break them. They destroy them." You know, uh what are we trying to do with Julian Assange? Yeah. Drive him crazy. Sure. You know, uh Make him kill himself. Yes. So they don't have to worry about it anymore. And that's what they tried to do with you. Here's so here's John Brennan, the darling of MSNBC, uh which you know, we have one monopoly corporation owned thing. That's the bad guys. That's Fox and then

[1:12:33] there's this is the liberal one. And this guy is telling uh the Justice Department to charge you, right? Right. Right. There's supposed to be separation of these agencies. Justice Department is supposed to be interested in justice. The CIA is supposed to be, you know, a spy agency that we're watching very carefully so they don't overstep and they're not supposed to be be spying on Americans. Yeah, and then you know, in the end, and I mean the very end, the Justice Department made their final final offer.

[1:13:05] Best and final offer, they said. Now, I was facing 45 years, they offered 10, then eight, then five, then three and a half, then two and a half. And my lead attorney said, "You know, I've been a lawyer here for 52 years, and I've never seen them come down in time. Usually, if they offer you 10 and you say no, then they offer you 12, then 15, then 18." And I said, "Well, why are they going down in time?" He said, "Because they have a [ __ ] case and they know it's shit." He said, "We're going to go to trial."

[1:13:36] Well, I believed we were going to go to trial because I believed I hadn't done anything wrong. And so they make their best and final offer of two and a half years uh in prison, and my my wife and I stayed up all night to talk about it, and we decided I'm going to turn it down. And so I emailed the attorneys at like 6:00 in the morning. I said, "I I've decided I'm going to turn it down. Let's go to trial. Once I get in front of a jury, they're going to see how ridiculous this is, and I'm going to win." The attorneys drove to my house and got

[1:14:07] there at 7:00 in the morning. I put on a pot of coffee. The lead attorney was very blunt. He said He said, "You stupid son of a [ __ ] take the deal." And the attorney who I liked and respected the most got right in my face, and he said, "You know what your problem is? Your problem is you think this is about justice, and it's not about justice. It's about mitigating damage. Take the deal." And then the third attorney, who was

[1:14:38] really very much a southern gentleman, um said, "If you were my own brother, I would beg you to take this deal." And I said, "Well, listen, realistically, let's say I don't take the deal, I go to trial, and I'm convicted. Realistically, what am I looking at?" And he said, "12 to 18 years. Take the deal." And so, I took the deal. So, just for people who have not followed your case, and for that, I blame the mass media, and I blame

[1:15:11] politicians of the right and left and Republican and Democrat, and I blame Barack Obama. Let's lay it out there. too. Yeah. I just Barack Obama will put you through this ordeal. Uh and a lot of other people that someone like myself uh probably met at different receptions and interviews and so forth, as I did with Eric Holder. Uh but, I just want people to understand the power, the power of the state, the

[1:15:43] power of government. And And I saw it with Daniel Ellsberg and Tony Russo, because I say I was a I've been involved in that trial. And And Daniel Ellsberg, a literally a Boy Scout Marine, gung-ho, pro-Vietnam War at the beginning, you know, blah, blah, and everything, suddenly up against, "Hey, this guy Nixon, President Nixon, he can put me away for 140 years or so." I forget the exact Yeah, that's that's what it was. Right. And he never did get that trial.

[1:16:15] He probably would have lost it, you know. And uh uh and and so, you're in this position where you're you still believe that this is a fair You are still naive enough to believe that you could turn down an an offer to I did in in October of 2012. Yeah. I I believed it. But, now I'm I'm a realist now. No, the I would the whole system is

[1:16:45] rigged. this would be a good way to end Well, who is John Kiriakou? I don't have this the skill set to write a great movie about you. Uh but, you really are I I just put it right out there. I think unquestionably one of the great American stories. Thank you. And I would like to get inside your mind. We have a few We can take as much time we want. Hell, they're not going to send us to jail, I don't think. So, uh but but seriously, uh what's going through your mind? You know what?

[1:17:16] You know, six What did they say? 14 years in jail? 16 years? What were you Uh yeah, 12 to 18 he told me to expect. they stuck to their word, they could have gone for more. I mean, you know, look at Julian Assange. I mean, how many is he facing? Uh Oh, like 100 and something. Yeah, yeah. And what did he do? He He revealed an embarrassing, deeply embarrassing story casting our military in a bad light. Yes. So, uh in your case, uh just take us the the Boy Scout,

[1:17:47] you know, uh it's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. And this is you you you still believed Mhm. you you still believed I did. I believed in the system. I don't at all anymore. Not at all. And it to tell you the truth, it it got even worse under Trump. You know, this is this is not a partisan issue. Both parties are are equally uh you know, culpable in this this assault on our civil liberties.

[1:18:17] Um you know, uh pardons were for sale, for example, under Trump. Uh Trump is celebrating WikiLeaks during the campaign and then and then actually files charges against Julian Assange. And then Joe Biden has the opportunity to drop the case against Julian Assange and he picks up the Trump case and keeps it going. It's just not fair. Yeah, it's it's it's startling. Um

[1:18:50] Okay, well, I don't know where to I guess we'll just end it, but uh I don't I wouldn't have your courage. Uh Oh, I find that hard to believe. No, no, come on. I look, I've I I'm I'm not a veteran of imprisonment. I've been in a few jails for a couple of nights here and they actually wasn't jailed even uh in Lithuania, Russia, Soviet Union and I and uh I was in China during the Cultural Revolution being lectured to.

[1:19:21] That was pretty scary. I've been I've been around Algeria, a few things, but those were all a few days here, a few days, scary. Uh but, you know, really for you and then you you know, uh you're still relatively young, you got young kids and everything and you could take a deal. I probably would have taken the first deal. Okay, what was that? 20 years? 10. 10? Okay, I probably would have said steal and maybe they'll give me a break, maybe they'll I'll get parole or something. You know, really,

[1:19:53] uh and to have that naivete that you actually thought I think it's absurd to think you would have won your trial. Yeah, it is absurd. Yeah. It is absurd. Yeah, just cuz you happen to be telling the truth. Yeah. It doesn't make any difference. No. Yeah. I didn't have a chance. I didn't have a prayer to win that trial. Right. And and and And the lawyers knew it. I want people to understand this. I mean, first of all, the great thing is we have, you know, we can search everything. I tell my students, you

[1:20:24] don't have to believe a word I said. Go out there after class in a half hour you could find out if I'm full of it. And you know, that's the great thing about the internet. You can find a lot of bad information, but you certainly want to see whether this is a lot of crap, whether your professor's lying to you. Go. If it takes you a half an hour, so it'll take you an hour, you know, two hours. You got time. Okay. So, anybody can check out John Kiriakou. They can begin by listening to some of our podcasts that I have that are here on KCRW. It's still up there, but you know,

[1:20:55] they can check it out. You've written a couple of books that are available and so forth. And and they will encounter smears. Oh, the guy's a Putin agent or he's on Sputnik or Yeah, yeah. Okay, but but people are learning to cut through the bull. I I I can tell you that. Like my students, they're suspicious as they should be of me from day one. Yes, this guy did this, but I also read a critical article. I also saw that So, that's the positive thing about the internet. We people are are developing

[1:21:25] their own [ __ ] detectors. And and yeah, and you can get to the bottom of it. So, I invite anybody listening to this Let's just assume Shears you know, being paid off by this guy or something or by the Putin or whatever. Let's go check it out. Let's go check it out, you know? And there's a lot to check out here. Let's check out, you know, what did they learn about the war on terror? And what about Zero Dark Thirty? And go watch this I you know, first of all, what's the other thing you

[1:21:55] said they should read? I want to put that up there. The introduction The the the executive The executive summary. Yeah. I'm going to try I'm going to try to post that. And that's that's readily available even if it's heavily redacted form. You can still get a sense of what they they were trying to impart. Right. And then and watch the movie The Report. It's one of the best things that's come out of Hollywood. And unfortunately, as I learned, that's why we're doing this today, I was shocked that a very smart,

[1:22:27] large group of students had never even heard of it. It's not part of the culture. There's no accountability. And these these zealots from the CIA and others who lied to us and everything, they're honored by being on what is supposed to be the more progressive mass media outlet of MSNBC. You know, how many times have you been invited to be on MSNBC? It's been a very long time. The last time I was on MSNBC was with Daniel Ellsberg and I'm going to say it was probably six years ago.

[1:22:59] It's been a long time. So, oh, there it is. People got to have their own, you know, editorial page and their own guidance and so forth. But I I just really believe In fact, the most chilling thing I learned from today because you reminded me when you say explain what your crime is. Let's Let's end on that. You what When you say what what was your crime? Why How could they And the Justice Department was right. What is

[1:23:29] the crime? Where is the espionage? What What What? You know, why did Barack Obama he must have spent 20 minutes looking at your record? Did anybody ever say what what was Barack Obama thinking? You were not You were well known. You were well known. We were told um by uh an attorney at the National Security Council that Obama had a Nixonian obsession with national security leaks. And uh he was perfectly happy to come down on

[1:24:01] me like a ton of bricks, not because it was me, not because of what I had done, but because he wanted to scare anybody else who might be thinking about going to the press with classified information. Okay. That may be the most important revelation of this right now hour and 24 minutes uh interview that I promised we would keep to 30 minutes, but I still have my Obama t-shirts. I believe I paid $200 a

[1:24:32] piece for them. Famous artists not originals but copy. I remember I bought it from a bundler. Uh I went to a dinner in San Diego. I was speaking to the ACLU and they sat me next to a woman who was a bundler for Obama and I said it's in the bag and she said, "No, we really need money." And I wrote a check for $500 or $600 I think for two or three t-shirts which I didn't have. Had to go kind of check to do that the next day. But anyway, you know, you're

[1:25:03] telling me something about Obama that I really didn't know until this moment. And tell me what you learned and how you learned it and I mean to think of I mean here is the constitutional law professor. Right. And you know, I I should say I interviewed Nixon after he was president some length and he wrote some good books and Nixon was pretty complex person. I'll I'll give you that. But Nixonian is about as bad as it gets. Nixonian's vindictive Well, remember That's the heart of the story.

[1:25:34] From the enactment of the Espionage Act in 1917 until Barack Obama was elected president, three Americans were charged with espionage for uh speaking to the press. Just in the eight years of the Obama presidency, eight people eight whistleblowers were charged with espionage for speaking to the press. That's almost three times the number of all previous presidents combined. That really

[1:26:04] encapsulates it for me. This wasn't an accident or a one-off. This was a policy. Who were the eight? Uh let's see. Tom Drake, Chelsea Manning No, let let's go slow. Well, I'm going to have to Google it now cuz I can't remember them all off the top of my head. the ones you can remember. Tom Drake was a highly respected employee of the National Security Agency, right? Yes. And he did go to congressional committees with this information.

[1:26:36] Yes. Right. Well, he did go to the congressional committees with with his information. And um and uh they arrested the congressional staff member. On top of arresting Tom Drake. So, let's see. There's Tom Drake. There is Shamai Leibowitz from the FBI. Uh Bradley Chelsea Manning. Stephen Kim from the State Department.

[1:27:06] Jeffrey Sterling from the CIA. John Kiriakou from the CIA. Let me see see who else is here. That's six. Did I say Ed Snowden? No. Okay, Ed Snowden. Oh, and here's the other one. Uh Don Shackle Shackleford

[1:27:36] from the Navy. Yeah, Drake, Leibowitz, Kim, Manning, Shackleford, Sterling, Kiriakou, and Snowden. And their crime was speaking to the press. And that's called espionage. Right. are they telling the press? This is worth noting. Yeah. This is worth the This should be on the midterm. Really, this is worth noting. What is the crime of these eight people that Barack Obama, an enlightened

[1:28:06] constitutional law professor, who for many Americans and certainly for me for for quite a long time, we thought was really the most principled guy we'd had run for president Yeah. and win. Yeah, we all believed that. Well, at least a lot of us. So, what was the crime of the eight people that he brought Espionage charges compared to the three by all the presidents before him and ever since the act was passed? Yeah. Well, it was revealing things like

[1:28:38] warrantless wiretapping. That was a lot of it. Uh torture. Uh war crimes in Iraq. Um politicized analysis on North Korea. Um the FBI wiretapping Americans uh without uh court approval. You know all about the Snowden revelations, of course, which confirmed everything that Tom Drake had told us.

[1:29:08] Um Yeah, and then and then later on, I mean, under Trump, you have to add uh Daniel Hale, the drone whistleblower, who ended up with 46 months uh in a federal uh prison for for telling the press that that we more often than not we kill uh civilians, women, children, elderly people instead of the uh intended target of these drone attacks.

[1:29:39] So, it continues. Information we have not only a right but a need to know if we're going to be citizens, if we're going to be a democratic society. All right, John Kiriakou, uh I love it when you take us to school and uh you do it. Oh, I love doing this. Yeah, but I mean, the idea that you have been not been crushed, that you know, that that the bastards couldn't let them to you. No way. give bastards a bad name, but I mean Uh you know, I

[1:30:10] I uh I have same kind of origin myself technically, but you know, so I've always offended using that word, but that slogan, don't let the bastards get you down. Yes. Really really applies to you. It is really quite you know, I don't want to be gushing here or anything, but you know, I interview a lot of people and frankly I go back to like the first time I interviewed you and I thought, man, this guy's going to be a head case in no time. Really, I just couldn't

[1:30:40] imagine it. I couldn't imagine what you're up against. I don't I I could have gone that way. I could have gone that way. Yeah, and then you had some really bad encounters, car crashes, things happening. Oh yeah. Yeah, and uh you know, they really tried to destroy your life and you know, hey you haven't looked better in all the time that I've talked to you, so Thank you very much. leave it at that. Good to see you. Yeah, and I want to thank uh Laura Condi Rajian and Christopher Ho at KCRW for

[1:31:12] posting these shows. We've been doing it for I guess about 6 years now. Joshua Sheer has been our executive producer all that time. Diego Ramos who writes the introduction, Max Jones who puts up the video, and the JKW Foundation in memory of the late Jean Stein, a terrific and fiercely independent uh writer uh who puts up some funding for this. So, till next week with another edition of Shear Intelligence, that's it. And thank you, John, so much. Thank you. Yeah.
