Title: re-upload \"Pt 1\"
Show: FlyingOverTr0ut
Date: 2017-03-07
URL: https://youtu.be/yL8rVbWniW4
Duration: 17:00

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[00:00] we are joined by John Kuryakin former CIA officer and chief of counterterrorism operations in Pakistan he was the first CIA official to confirm the agency's use of torture so John what was the your role at the CIA and what were the events that led up to you blowing the whistle on waterboarding and then the consequences for that well really the whole story started in Pakistan I arrived in Pakistan as the chief of CIA counterterrorism operations in January of 2002 and in March of 2002

[00:31] we got word that Abu Zubaydah was somewhere in the country in the country Abu Zubaydah we believed at the time with the number three in al-qaeda so we tracked him we hunted him for several weeks we finally found him and a lot of al-qaeda fighters many dozens I'm not allowed to say the real number or the actual number we captured him and sent him to a secret prison I'm going to make a very long story short and tell you that I went back to CIA headquarters in

[01:04] the summer of 2002 as soon as I arrived a senior officer in the CIA's Counterterrorism Center asked me if I wanted to be his words certified in the use of enhanced interrogation techniques I had never heard the term before so I asked him what that meant and he delineate it for me ten different techniques that we were going to begin using against prisoners I said that sounds like a torture program to me but let me think about it so I went upstairs to the seventh floor

[01:35] which is the executive floor of the CIA and I went to see a very very senior officer for whom I had worked in the Middle East about a decade earlier and I said hey I need to ask some advice they just asked me downstairs if I want to be certified in these enhanced interrogation techniques what do you think of this and he said first let's call it what it is is a torture program they can use any euphemism they want but this is a torture program second tortures of slippery slope and you know how some of these guys are somebody's

[02:07] going to go overboard and they're going to kill the prisoner in custody and then there's going to be a congressional investigation and then there's going to be a Justice Department investigation and somebody's going to go to prison do you want to go to prison I said no I don't want to go to prison ironically I'm the only one who went to prison but I said no I don't want a good prison I went back downstairs and I said this is a torture program I don't want any part of it and as it turned out of the 14 people they asked I was the only one who declined so I went about my business on August 1st 2002 the CIA began

[02:41] torturing Abu Zubaydah at the secret location other prisoners were also subsequently tortured but I kept my mouth shut now I left the CIA two years later in 2004 and I went into the private sector in December 2007 right five and a half years after I was asked if I wanted to to be trained in these techniques five and a half years later I get a call from Brian Ross at ABC News and he said that

[03:11] he had a source who said that I had tortured Abu Zubaydah I said that was absolutely untrue I had never touched other Zubaydah or any other prisoner I said your source is either misinformed or evil liar and well Brian Ross says you're welcome to come on the show and defend yourself which I didn't know was a reporter's trick so I said I'd think about it in the meantime President Bush gives a press conference in which he looks directly into the camera and says we do

[03:43] not torture but I knew that was a lie in fact my wife who is also a senior CIA officer at the time we were watching that press conference together and I turned to her and I said can you believe this and she said bald-faced liar and then a few days later he said in response to a reporter's question well if there is torture it's the result of a rogue CIA officer and I said to my wife Brian Ross's sources at the White House and they're going to try to pin this on

[04:14] me so I called Brian Ross and I said I'll do your interview and I decided in the lead-up to that interview that no matter what he asked me I was going to tell the truth and so I gave that interview in December 2007 within 24 hours the CIA filed with the FBI something called a crimes report indicating that they believed I had committed a crime the FBI investigated me from December of 2007 to December of 2008 and then in December 2008 they

[04:46] dropped the case they closed it and they determined that I had not committed a crime what I didn't know was four weeks later when President Obama was inaugurated the CIA asked Eric Holder to secretly reopen the case against me which they did I didn't know that I was under investigation for the next four years and then in January 2012 I was charged with five felonies including three counts of espionage what

[05:19] responsibilities do you think the media plays or should play and how they perform in getting out stories from the White House from sources within the government and then having an adversarial role or recently you know anonymously sourced CIA stories that russians hacked the 2016 presidential election yeah I mean how do they perform with you and how do you see their responsibilities now this this is such a tough and complicated issue because

[05:50] there are so many different and competing angles involved in it first let me talk about whistleblowing because there's a big difference between whistleblowing and leaking there's actually a legal definition of whistleblowing it's bringing to light any evidence of waste fraud abuse illegality or threats to the public health or public safety leaking is just leaking classified or proprietary information and people do that for a lot of different reasons they do it in order to impact an ongoing debate they do it

[06:22] to make themselves look good they do it to kill a program or to damage an adversary they do it because they love the excitement of being the guy providing the information but there's no benefit to the public health the public safety there's no targeting of waste fraud abuse or illegality it's different so you know while it may be interesting that for example in a conversation

[06:54] between President Trump and the Prime Minister of Australia that Trump was rude to him and Trump hung up on him the person who leaked that story within five or ten minutes of the phone call it's not reporting on waste fraud abuse or illegality it's fun it's interesting but it's not whistleblowing it's a leak and I can understand any president having great frustrations with with leaks I mean nobody was as Nick Sounion besides

[07:27] Nixon as Barack Obama was but it's my understanding that the Trump is pretty upset about leaks too now Obama is you know he's still held in high regard people are loving the you know images of him going on vacation after you as president we people came to love that of seeing a president former President George Bush as well he's known Jimmy Kimmel Live yeah DeGeneres Show yeah showing his painting his image should seem to be rehabilitated and among the left among liberals potatoes

[07:57] Bill Maher says you know he was better than we thought no these were the good old days why they're the wealth sticking to Obama he said he doesn't most transparent administration ever he couldn't yeah people couldn't Democrat say well at least he was smarter than Bush and smarter than McCain and Romney better we could trust him with lemon I'm a third-generation Democrat and I am a die-hard progressive I believed in the whole hope and change thing it was all a lie nobody was more an enemy of

[08:31] transparency than Barack Obama was we have a law in this country called the Espionage Act the Espionage Act was written in 1917 to combat German saboteurs it was never updated it doesn't even mention the words classified information because the classification system wasn't invented until the 1950s and it's so broadly written that in order to commit espionage a person has to only provide National Defense information to any

[09:01] person not entitled to receive it that's what the law says well that can be anything or anybody right and so Barack Obama used it as a political weapon now between 1917 and 2009 three Americans were charged with espionage for providing information to the press just during the Obama administration he and Eric Holder prosecuted eight people for providing information to the press all charged with espionage espionage is a

[09:34] grave crime one of the greatest crimes with which an American can be charged and in many cases it carries with it the death penalty so if you want to clamp down the leaks that's one thing but to use the Espionage Act to clamp down on people whose message you don't like you know Tom Drake is a great example Tom Drake was a very senior NSA officer very senior and probably our country's leading thinker on issues of Internet

[10:06] privacy Tom Drake reported exactly the way he was supposed to up his chain of command an instance of waste fraud and abuse right it was a program called thinthread and he realized that since read while a complete waste of the taxpayers money was being doubled back against Americans and instead of spying on foreign nationals and on terrorists the NSA was spying on American citizens so he went to his supervisor and was told to mind

[10:38] his own business he then went to the inspector general and was told the same thing he complained to the general counsel and was told he needs to stay out of it he went to the Pentagon inspector general because NSA is a Defense Department agency they destroyed the evidence that he brought with him and reported him to the FBI and then he went to the Congressional Oversight Committee to report this waste fraud and abuse now every single step of the way this is exactly what you're supposed to do and what happened to Tom Drake he was

[11:08] charged with nine felonies including seven counts of espionage all nine of those felonies were dismissed but not until he lost his job he lost his clearance he lost his family he lost his pension he was ruined he's never recovered now he works at an Apple Store in Maryland he has never been able to recover financially socially professionally and that's what the Obama Justice Department was trying to do the issue is not let's

[11:41] Lock this guy up for the rest of his life they don't care about that but they care about making an example of you so if somebody else sees waste fraud abuse your illegality they keep their mouth shut they say look what happened in John Kuryakin look what happened at Tom Drake you know those guys were facing 45 years in prison they ran up two million dollar legal bills they lost everything why would we want to do that we're going to keep our mouths shut that's the

[12:11] legacy of Barack Obama couldn't a case be made because there are people who say well you went through the legal process Thomas Drake went through the legal process the law ultimately works and now when you had your day in court how did that play out in terms of okay you had your chance to present your evidence Thomas Rowe no no you don't have your chance to present your evidence because although we have something called The Whistleblower Protection Act in this country national security whistleblowers are exempt from it so there is no whistleblower protection if you work in

[12:43] national security you literally take your life into your hands that's why in many cases many people will conclude that it's better just to keep their mouth shut so national security whistleblowers don't get their day in court and even when you go through the formal process you still end up with felony counts now I didn't go through the formal process because my formal process created the CIA's torture program so my choices were very stark my choices were to keep my mouth shut or go to the media and I

[13:14] elected to go to the media what were your options as far as what evidence you could was admissible for your court case and also what kind of testimony you could get yeah your self I was greatly hampered by my my judge I was charged in the Eastern District of Virginia which is known as the espionage court the reason it's called the espionage court is that almost every national security case is argued in the Eastern District of Virginia because no national security

[13:44] defendant has ever won a case there prosecutors are the ones who win every case 100% of the time so when we went with our defense our defense motions to the judge we made seventy motion these were 70 different classified documents that we needed to have Declassified in order to defend myself so we went to court we blocked off two days for the hearings and the judge said that she had

[14:15] read the motions and she said I'm going to save everybody a lot of time I'm denying all 70 motions so the whole process took about ten minutes not two days and on the way out of the courtroom I said to one of my attorneys what just happened here and you said what just happened is we have no defense you can't defend yourself she won't allow you to defend yourself and I said well what does that mean and he said that means we have to talk about a plea well you know it becomes an economic decision if the

[14:47] judge won't allow you to defend yourself because the information is classified and God forbid you should say something that's vaguely classified in a court of law even if even if the courtroom is closed and sealed the CIA doesn't want any of that information out so you can challenge it and you can appeal to the Circuit Court of Appeals if you lose there you can appeal the Supreme Court but as my attorneys advised me we're talking about a two or three million dollar legal bill I already owed them a

[15:18] million dollars I don't have a total three or four million dollars to defend myself and then the government comes in and says all right 30 months to do 23 so do I roll the dice and face 45 years with a realistic expectation of of 12 to 18 or but a possibility of as many as 24 years or do I just take the 23 months and be done with it and that's exactly why the government wins 98 point two percent of its cases according to Pro Publica because they

[15:50] heap on these charges friendly judges don't allow you to defend yourself and you're faced with this economic decision you know do I lose my family and risk dying in prison or do I just take the 23 months and be done with it couldn't we say that well at least these were dangerous terrorist suspects you were dealing with waterboarding could be necessarily know that how do we know that opposite a 9/11 night when we were attacked on 9/11 we were and and which

[16:20] of the people that we have in custody was responsible for 9/11 let me tell you something about other Zubaydah I was a bait it was not the number three in al-qaeda I was a beta never joined al-qaeda he was certainly a bad guy he ran some safe houses he ran one of the training camps sure but this man's never faced his day in court we're supposed to be a country of laws we're supposed to be a country that respects his Constitution that we're supposed to be this beacon of human rights around the world and we're not not when we decide that justice is OK for some people but

[16:53] from the people we're not going to allow justice we just put them in Guantanamo to live the rest of their lives and die in a cage that's not what the Constitution's about we're either going to be a country of laws or we're not and that's a political decision we have to make and if we're not we shouldn't bully the rest of the world to live up to our standards that's just simply not fair now if there are terrorists out there that we capture let's do what Americans ought to do and put them on trial not strike them from drones without the

[17:26] benefit of facing their accusers in the court of law which we also do to American citizens I might add let them face their accusers in court you
