[00:04] [Music]
[00:49] Welcome. I'm Lynn Newsome and Steve Newsome is where? There he is. I we are the co-directors of Quaker House Military Counseling Center. We've existed since 1969 to provide counseling and support to service members and veterans. We have a GI rights hotline to provide counseling specifically about issues of discharge and other problems that service members might be having. We have domestic violence, sexual assault,
[01:21] and moral injury counseling here. Mindfulness classes. We have a a group that works against the use of torture and we do anything we can. And one thing our previous director Chuck would you stand up and Chuck if you wouldn't mind why don't you introduce John because you were the or the the originator of the crusade to help John. How did you ever hear about
[01:53] me? Um Exhale. Uh-oh. Another hour. You sitting there can't see this, but on the wall here, we have all this, you know, we have all these uh displays about stuff that we do. And this little this section over here is about torture. And torture was not on Quaker House's agenda when I came at the end of 2001. But then along came Abu Grave and all that sort of stuff. And I didn't know
[02:24] anything about it, but I was reading about it like everybody else was. And it was like dots. All these dots started to accumulate and they also started to connect. And not all of the dots, but a lot of the dots crossed Fort Bragg. And they also crossed further north, Smithfield, Johnston County. So it seemed pretty clear that torture was something that had a lot of connections here. So it was part of the deal. And so it ended up being on our agenda
[02:57] and um so it's on the agenda and there's another little group formed based in the triangle called stop North Carolina stop torture now. It's for the network and I joined that group. They've been working this is their 10th anniversary really. Oh wow. And so between the two of us, we followed a lot of this stuff. And um in addition to that, not directly to torture, but the work that I did, Steve
[03:29] Lynn, do and our counselors, Steven Lenor, do with soldiers. Sometimes it ends up getting them in trouble. Sometimes they go awall and things like that. And so several of them in my time ended up in jail. Fort Bragg doesn't have a brig. Why? I don't know, but it doesn't. And Camp Lune did out on the coast. And so several of the folks in my time ended up at Camp Lun. And I would go visit. They were pretty good about letting
[10:17] any ideas about joining the military, but I wanted to do something. And then in graduate school, I had a professor, an adviser who was actually undercover as a professor. He was actually a CIA spotter, which I did not know. uh and his job was to uh teach a class and pretend to be just your everyday normal college professor when in fact he was looking for grad students who he thought would fit in well to the CIA
[10:49] culture. That's illegal now. We have equal employment opportunity laws in this country. But back in those days, that's how you got into the CIA. you know, you went to a good school, you met with the right people, you showed an aptitude, and you were in. And so I was in. Nobody ever asked me about my politics ever. A CIA psychiatrist told me many years later that the CIA actively seeks to hire people who have sociopathic
[11:20] tendencies. Those were the words that he used, not sociopaths, but they look for people with sociopathic tendencies, meaning they like to hire people who are comfortable working in moral or legal gray areas. Killing, not killing, but breaking into your house to steal your stuff, take photographs of your private papers, and then slipping back out again. But I was hired as an analyst, so those kinds of issues never came up. My job
[11:51] was to sit in a cubicle, become the expert on Iraq, write papers for the president, the vice president, the secretaries of state and defense, the national security adviser, and uh think the big thoughts. But that got very boring after seven years of Saddam Hussein. You get tired of Saddam Hussein. It was clear to me Saddam Hussein wasn't going anywhere by 1997. And so I I switched over in a very unusual move. I switched over to operations and just to really put a
[12:24] cherry on top, I switched over to counterterrorist operations, which were the most demanding and the most dangerous of the operations that the CIA was doing, but I really didn't give it as much thought as I should have. I really wanted to go to Greece. Um, and the reason why I made the switch was because a job in Greece just happened to open up and they were looking for someone who either spoke Greek or Arabic. And it turned out that I was the only person in the entire CIA who spoke
[12:56] both Greek and Arabic. and they said, "Wow, it's a lot easier and a lot cheaper for us to take a linguist and teach him operations than it is to take an operations person and teach him how to speak Greek and Arabic." So, I got the job and found that I actually had a knack for it. Um, and it was fun. Got to see the world. Went to 65 countries, you know, went to places I only dreamed about as a kid. got to live in Greece, you know, establish a relationship with
[13:27] long lost cousins and aunts and uncles. I apologize for that. It was actually a lot of fun. A lot of fun until September 11th. And September 11th changed everything. I really believed stupidly in retrospect that eventually things would return back to normal after September 11th. not really appreciating the importance of the Patriot Act, the so-called Patriot Act,
[13:59] and uh and things didn't return to normal. But, you know, in in the immediate aftermath of September 11th, I really wanted to go to Afghanistan and do whatever I could to help the cause, right? To avenge the deaths of 3,000 American citizens and and to fight the good fight. So, I I volunteered over and over and over again, and they just wouldn't take me. And I kept saying, "But I'm fluent in Arabic, you know, and I'm an experienced case
[14:29] officer at this point. They wouldn't take me." And I didn't understand why at first. Before September 11th, I had been doing some work in the Middle East with an old Vietnam vet, a man who uh is now well into his 80s. Uh, but at the time he was a contractor at the CIA and he told the most amazing stories, most of which were pro probably apocryphal, but lots of fun. And I noticed that he had a
[14:59] personalized North Carolina license plate. It said 17 hits and it had the purple heart next to it. And I said, "Billy, are you are you saying that you have 17 purple hearts?" And he said, "Yeah." I said, "That has to be some kind of a record." And he said, "No, there's some sorry son of a [ __ ] in North Carolina who has 18." So, I had been working with Billy in the Middle East and we were actually going out to the Middle East every other week
[15:31] and then I just lost touch with him on September 11th. Finally, I ran into him in the hall about three months later and I said, "Billy, where you been?" He said, ' Afghanistan. I said, 'What are you doing in Afghanistan? And he looked at me like I was crazy and he said, "I've been killing people. What do you think I've been doing?" And I thought, "That's why they haven't sent me to Afghanistan because that wasn't my thing, right? This is a The CIA is an intelligence collection and analysis
[16:01] organization. Our job is to recruit spies to steal secrets, not to kill people. We're not a paramilitary organization, I thought. At least we weren't until September 11th. So, finally, um, my complaints got to the right ears and I went to Pakistan as the chief of counterterrorism operations for the CIA. And in that capacity, to make a very
[16:31] long story short, in March of 2002, I led a series of raids, 14 simultaneous raids, 2:00 in the morning on March 28th, in which we captured 52 al-Qaeda fighters, including Abu Zuba, a Palestinian, who we believed at the time was the number three ranking person in al-Qaeda. That turned out to be incorrect. He was certainly a bad man. uh he had created al-Qaeda's two training camps in southern Afghanistan
[17:02] and um he was the procurer of false passports, false visas, airline tickets for people who needed to get from point A to point B. So he's a bad guy, but he was never a member of al-Qaeda and he certainly was not the number three in al-Qaeda. So we caught Abu Zuba and we sent him on to a secret location And I didn't know what that location was at the time. I didn't have a need to know. I was actually told that I didn't have a need
[17:32] to know. And so we put him on the plane and sent him on his way and I never saw him again. A few months later, I got back to CIA headquarters. I was assigned to the counterterrorism center and I started a job as the chief of counter intelligence in the Osama bin Laden unit. And my job in that capacity was to was to try to determine out of all these people who are walking into American embassies around the world and saying, "I'm a member of al-Qaeda. If you give me a million dollars, I'll give you Bin
[18:03] Laden." to determine which of them were liars, which were intelligence peddlers just going from embassy to embassy to try to make money, which ones were the real McCoy, or which ones were probes looking to see where the security cameras are, how thick the doors are, who's armed, uh who comes to see you when you walk into an embassy because it's always the CIA, even though they're wearing State Department badges, right? So, I was in the cafeteria one day and
[18:37] one of the senior officers from the counter terrorism center came up to me and said, "Hey, I wanted to ask you something. Uh, do you want to be certified in the use of enhanced interrogation techniques?" I said, "What's that mean?" He said, "We're going to start getting rough with these guys." He said very animatedly. I said, "But what are enhanced interrogation techniques? What's that mean?" He said, 'Well, we came up with this list of techniques and we're going to start using them. And he told me what the techniques were. I said, 'Ooh, that
[19:08] sounds like torture. I don't think I want to be involved in that. I said, but you know what? Let me think about it for a couple of hours. So, I went up to the CIA 7th floor, the executive floor, and I was friendly at the time with a very senior CIA officer under whom I had served in the Middle East, and I said, "Hey, listen. I was in CTC." and they approached me and they asked me if I wanted to be involved in this. What do you think of this? And he said, and I've said this in the past, he has repeatedly
[19:39] denied that this conversation ever took place because he's come out publicly in support of torture. He's not he was not in support of torture. He was opposed to it. But, you know, there's this, you know, the police say the thin blue line. Same thing in the CIA. He told me, first of all, let's call it what it is. They can use whatever euphemism they want, but it's torture. And torture is a slippery slope. And you know what's going to happen. An officer is going to kill somebody during an
[20:10] interrogation 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. He said, "Do you want to go to prison?" And I said, "No, I don't want to go to prison." Well, it turned out I'm the only one that went to prison. But I said, "No, no, I don't want to go to prison." So, I went back downstairs and I I told this senior CIA guy, um, I I'm not interested. It's torture. I have a moral problem with it. I don't want any part of it. He had approached 14 people. Two of us said no.
[20:41] And of the two, one changed his mind and ended up doing the training and then actually torturing people. Um, I was the only one who said no. So, I resigned from the CIA two years later. and went to work in the private sector. I took this secret with me. I I didn't say anything for three and a half years. No, that's not right. I didn't say anything for four and a half years. I said three and a half earlier today. And then in December of 2007, Brian Ross
[21:13] of ABC News called me and he said, "I have a source who says you tortured Abu Zuba." I said, "That is absolutely untrue. I have never tortured anybody. I didn't lay a hand on Abuza. In fact, I said I was the only person who was kind to Abuza. And he said, "Well, you're welcome to come on the show and defend yourself." And I thought, so I'm thinking about it over the course of this week.
[21:44] And then a couple of days after I spoke with Brian Ross, President Bush gave a press conference in which he looked directly into the camera and said, "We do not torture And I said to my wife, who was also a CIA officer, he's lying. He's looking us right in the eye and he's lying and I know it's a lie. And a couple of days later, he told another reporter, "Well, if there is torture, it's the result of a rogue CIA officer." And I said, "Oh my god,
[22:16] they're going to pin this on me." Brian Ross must have spoken to somebody at the White House and they said that I tortured Abu Zuba. So I called Brian Ross and I said, "I'll give you your interview." So he flew to Washington and I went to the ABC News studio and we sat down and he asked me directly um are we torturing prisoners? And I said three things that have changed the course of the rest of my life. I said we are torturing prisoners. Torture is official
[22:49] US government policy. It is not the result of a rogue CIA officer. And that policy was approved of and signed by the president himself. 24 hours later, 24 hours later, the CIA filed what's called a crimes report against me with the Department of Justice, and the FBI began investigating me. They investigated me from December of 2007 until March of 2009. And in March 2009,
[23:23] they determined that I had not committed a crime. Right? It's illegal in this country to classify a crime. Right? There's a legal definition of whistleblowing. Whistleblowing is bringing to evidence any I'm sorry, bringing to light any evidence of waste, fraud, abuse, illegality, or threats to the public health or public safety. Torture is illegal in the United States.
[23:53] There's a law called the Federal Torture Act. It's illegal. In addition to that, the United States is a signatory to the United Nations Convention on Torture. There's a definition of torture in that convention. Furthermore, we wrote the UN Convention Against Torture. So, it's pretty clear that torture is a crime. So, for me to go on TV and say we're torturing prisoners, well, you
[24:23] can't commit a crime by exposing a crime, right? It's not a crime to expose a crime. So, the FBI determined that I had not committed a crime. The CIA said, "Keep looking." Now, I didn't know this until 2012 when I was finally charged with five felonies, including three counts of espionage. Uh, and I'm getting to that in a minute.
[24:54] Uh, the FBI continued investigating me. I had no idea I was under investigation. None. They used to do these things called uh target letters in which they would send your attorney a letter saying your client is under investigation for XYZ. They don't do that anymore. So you have no idea that you're under investigation. But there were indications of it. Indications that I was too stupid to really appreciate at the time. A reporter called me one day, a reporter with the Conservative Washington Times.
[25:27] I was working for John Krey on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff at the time and I had promised Senator Kerry that I wouldn't have any unauthorized contact with the press. That was a rule in the office. So this reporter emailed me and said, "Let's have uh lunch." I hit the delete key, but he was persistent and he emailed me a second time and I deleted it again. But then he emailed me a third time. So, I said to my boss, who is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journal, was a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. I said, 'You
[25:58] know, this son of a gun keeps emailing me. He's really persistent. I don't know what the deal is, but he may have something that he wants to pass to me. So, my boss said, I'll authorize the lunch. Go ahead and have lunch with him. So, I went, had a delightful lunch with him, talked about Turkish elections, talked about the Middle East peace process, and finally at the end, I said, "Wow." I said, "This was really delightful. Thank you so much for inviting me to lunch. And I stood up to shake his hand and say goodbye. And he said, "No, wait a minute. I have something to tell you." And he kind of looks around and he says, "You're under
[26:30] surveillance." I said, "By who?" "The FBI." I said, "Come on. I was a surveillance instructor at the CIA. I think I would know if I was under surveillance." And I said, "Why would that the FBI have me under surveillance?" He said, 'They think that you're the source uh for the Adams project. The John Adams Project. I said, 'What's the John Adams project? And he said, 'You know, this is really not the response that I was expecting. I said, well, I never heard of this John
[27:00] Adams project. He said, it's it's an ACLU project to provide aid to the Guantanamo defense attorneys. I said, I've never met a Guantanamo defense attorney. I'm not providing aid to anybody. I don't know what you're talking about. And he said, "Wow, okay, my mistake." He said, "I have a source in the FBI." He laid it all out for me. I I guess I'm just wrong. I said, "Okay, well, thanks for lunch." Well, it turned out I was under surveillance. Not only was I under surveillance, but they were listening to my phone calls and they
[27:30] were intercepting all of my emails. I had no idea. So, I went back and I told my boss what had happened and he said, "Oh, no." He said, "I don't believe this because if you were under FBI investigation, I was a senior staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the most important and prestigious committee on Capitol Hill working directly for the chairman, right? A former Democratic nominee for President of the United States." He said, "If you were under FBI investigation, they would have told Senator Kerry as a as a courtesy, and he
[28:01] would have told me." Well, they didn't tell Carrie anything, which didn't keep Carrie from running screaming from the room when I was finally charged. Thanks a lot, John Kerry. Fake liberal. Anyway, let me tell you about John Ky. You know the famous story about how he threw his medals over the uh White House fence, right? When he came home from Vietnam during a protest, he threw all of his silver star, two bronze stars, purple bar, threw them over the White House fence. First time I ever went into his
[28:33] office, you know, his office is like a it's a it's a shrine. It's a chapel, a shrine to John Kerry. So, he there's a credenza when you first walk in and there's a picture of of he and John Lennon in an embrace, right? And then there's he and Peter Paul and Mary and then there's a shadow box with his medals in them. Uhhuh. It was all a big fake publicity stunt. You got her back. I said to my wife. I said, "No, it wasn't my wife. It was my mom when I first started working for him. I said, you know, he's not nearly
[29:06] as liberal as people think he is. He's actually quite conservative and really he can out hawk the best of those the best of those hawks in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Anyway, totally different story. Sorry for my digression. So, I made a mistake in the summer of 2008. a journalist who was writing a book about the CIA's rendition, detention, and interrogation program uh asked me, he sent me an email with a with a dozen
[29:38] names, and he said, "Can you introduce me to any of these people? Um, I'm writing a book about this CIA kidnapping in uh in Italy." And I said, "You know, kidnapping really wasn't my thing. I I really didn't associate with the kidnappers at the agency, so I don't know these people." and they always get their man whether he's innocent or not. They or guilty or not rather they always get their man. So, uh he a couple weeks later sent me another email saying, "What about these dozen names? Can you introduce me to any of these people?" And I said, "No, I
[30:08] don't know these people." I said, "Look, you know this issue so much better than I do. I really can't help you." And then he said, "What about the guy you mentioned in your book?" Uh, and there was a a short story in my book uh where I had run into a former colleague on the tarmac as we were as we were loading Abu Zaba onto the plane and I said he said to me I think his name is John and I said oh sure that's John Doe. I said I don't know what ever happened to him. He's probably retired living in Virginia
[30:38] somewhere. That was a felony. That was a violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1981. Okay, I'm only the second person in American history to be charged with violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. Now, the Intelligence Identities Protection Act was created to stop the next Philip Agro exposing hundreds of names of CIA operas uh at least two of whom were later killed after AG had outed them. Uh the
[31:10] author of the IIPA uh is Dr. Morton Halprin uh famously of Richard Nixon's enemies list. Mort was the head of the ACLU in the early 1980s and he co-wrote that law in order to try to protect civil liberties. When I was arrested and charged, Mort called my attorneys and volunteered to testify on my behalf for free, saying that this is not why we wrote the
[31:40] Intelligence Identities Protection Act. This arrest, he said, and this case is a political case, not a criminal one. Um, there was also a journalist who said that he knew that the reporter had already had the name and that's how he had the first name. He was baiting me for the for a confirmation of the last name, but he had already gotten the name uh from a New York Times reporter with whom he was having an affair. And the New York Times
[32:12] reporter had gotten it from, we l we later learned 10 months later, from a disgruntled former CIA officer who had been fired from the counterterrorism center in uh in 2007. The FBI had all this information and they knew that this disgruntled officer had provided 15 names and addresses of CIA officers involved in the torture program. In fact, when I was being interviewed by the CI by the uh FBI, and I'll get to
[32:43] that in a minute. This is a story I have not told. Um they showed me 15 photos, like surreptitiously taken photos, and said, "Do you know any of these people?" Well, I didn't know a single one of them. And I said, "I'm sorry, guys. I don't know who any of these people are. Can you give me their names?" Well, they gave me their names. I said, "I don't recognize any of those names." In fact, I said, "Are these pseudonyms or are they actual real names?" Cuz we use both at the CIA. They said, "No, these are true names." I said, "I don't know these people."
[33:15] Well, it's because this disgruntled officer had provided all these names to the press. Not to the press, but to the reporter who was actually secretly working for the Guantanamo defense attorneys at the John Adams Project. The FBI knew I hadn't given them names, but the reason they didn't they didn't arrest this other officer was because he hadn't blown the whistle on torture and they let him get away with it. David Petraeus leaked the names of 10 covert operatives to his girlfriend and then lied to the FBI about it, ironically, on
[33:46] the day of my sentencing. But he wasn't charged with any such crime because David Petraeus didn't blow the whistle on torture. And that's why I was always certain that mine was a political case. Even one of my attorneys said, "This case is so much bigger than John Kuryaku. This case comes down to basic constitutional rights and civil liberties." And he said, "I urge you to go to trial." And I said, "Oh, I'm going to trial." Right? They charged me with three counts of
[34:17] espionage, one count of violating the IIPA, and one count of making a false statement. and we were never actually sure what the false statement was supposed to have been. It ended up being dismissed anyway. The three espionage counts were actually very novel. The um CIA said um sent a an attorney to uh court for one of my hearings and this attorney said, "Your honor, we've asked the Justice Department to charge Mr.
[34:48] Kuryaku with espionage because he revealed to a New York Times reporter information that was classified at the top secret code word level. And my attorneys and I are looking at each other like what? And I'm thinking, what did I say? I don't remember saying anything. I remember having lunch with that New York Times reporter. We talked about torture, but I don't remember saying anything classified. And he said that the CIA had asked the Justice Department to declassify the information solely for the purpose of
[35:20] prosecuting me. And the information was that after the September 11th attacks, the CIA was trying to kill or capture members of al-Qaeda. Top freaking secret. They all and the judges they should have arrested Bush when he was Yeah, they should have arrested Bush. They still should. The other two espionage charges were this. They were
[35:50] equally ridiculous. This New York Times reporter was seeking to interview a former colleague of mine who had never been undercover. He was an overt CIA officer, which most analysts are. He was an analyst. So he asked me, "Do you know how I can get in touch with this analyst?" I said, "Boy, ever since I came out against torture, he he has stopped speaking to me. So I I don't stay in current contact with him, but you know what I said? I know he resigned from the agency and I
[36:21] think I have a business card that he gave me." So I photocopied the business card and I sent it to him. I got an espionage charge for that. And then about a month later, um, Brian Ross asked me, "Do you have contact information for this guy?" I said, "Yeah, sure." I emailed them the facts again or the scan. I got a third espionage charge. So, when my attorneys finally objected well well into the process after after Senator uh,
[36:52] Kit Bond Kid Bond said I should be executed for treason on NPR. Come on. Um, My attorney said, "Your honor, we we uh would like to offer a motion to dismiss all of these espionage charges." He said, "They're ridiculous and they're not based in in points of fact." So, he said, "Two of these charges are because Mr. Kuryaku provided a a business card, an unclassified business card to two journalists uh for a former colleague who had never been undercover." And the
[37:23] judge says, "Well, I find that very hard to believe." And she turns to the prosecutors and she said, "What do you say to that?" And the prosecutor said, "Well, your honor, Mr. Kuryaku should have known better than to engage with reporters." And she said, "Wait a minute." And believe me, this judge was no friend of mine. She said, "Was the business card unclassified?"
[37:54] Well, yes, but you know, no CIA officer should ever be talking to the press. And she said, "I'll entertain a motion to dismiss." So, we had all the espionage charges thrown out. That was a little bit of a weight off my shoulders, but I was never really afraid of the espionage charges because I hadn't committed espionage. Let me let me digress just a moment about the Espionage Act. And I'm sure
[38:24] that I'm not telling you anything new and I'm probably preaching to the choir, but the Espionage Act was written in 1917 to combat German saboturs during the First World War. It has never been updated. Congress toyed with the idea of updating it after Julius Rosenberg were executed, but it's not been updated. In fact, it's so outdated that it doesn't even mention classified information because the classification system had not yet been invented. It only talks about national defense
[38:55] information. But national defense information is not defined in the act. It says that any person who provides national defense information um is guilty of espionage if he provides that information to any person not entitled to receive it. But it doesn't explain what national defense information is. And so I believe it's unconstitutionally broad. Now over the course of American history since 1917, the Justice Department has agreed that it's unconstitutionally broad. And so between
[39:27] 1917 and 2009, only three people have been charged with espionage. Since Barack Obama was elected president, nine people have been charged with espionage. None of whom have been accused of providing national defense information to any foreign government. These are only people who have spoken to the press. Is that really espionage? The most heinous crime in our constitution save
[39:59] perhaps treason. Really? Do you know you know the weight on your shoulders when you when you're carrying an espionage charge? I wanted to jump in front of a subway train. Seriously. Literally, I was watching the train come through the tunnel and I thought, I can't do this. I can't fight this. 45 years in prison. I have five kids at home. How am I going to How am I going to make it through this? But I didn't. I said, "Nope, I'm not going to give them the satisfaction.
[40:29] That's what they want me to do." That's what Aaron Schwarz did. They charged him. Aaron Schwarz was one of the creators of Reddit. They charged him with like wire fraud or some crazy And the poor kid went home and killed himself. So I fought it and the justice department came back and said, "We want to make you an offer. You plead guilty to espionage and you do 10 years." I said, "I'm not going to do 10
[41:00] days and I'm going to make you guys put on the table in front of all of America what you have on me cuz you don't have anything." There's actually a name for that. It's called gray mail. And I was going to milk it for everything it was worth. That was on a Monday. On Wednesday, they came back and said, "Plead guilty to espionage and do 8 years." I said, "Forget it." And then on Friday, they came back and said, "Plead guilty to espionage and do 5 years." And I said, "I did not commit espionage and I'm not
[41:34] taking a plea to anything." One of my lawyers, my lawyers were legal titans in Washington. My lead attorney was was John Mitchell's attorney during Watergate, right? And Monica Lewinsk's attorney and Aldrich Ames and people in the, you know, newsmakers from the second half of the 20th century. So I said to him, or he said to me actually, he said, "This is highly unusual. Usually they come in with an offer 10 years. And if you say no, they
[42:06] come back with another offer 12 years, 15 years. Okay, you're going to turn this one down 20 years. He said, "But these guys keep coming down lower and lower, and I've not seen that, and I've been practicing law for 55 years." He said, I said, "Well, what does it mean?" He said, "It means they have a [ __ ] case, and they know it." So, we're not taking any, please. So we didn't and then they let like six months pass and then they came back and said three and a half years and I said
[42:39] no I'm not doing it. So I just continued to fight, continued to rack up $1,000 an hour legal bills. Lost everything. They took my pension. My friends stopped talking to me, had to move out of my house. It was not good. There was one stretch for three months where we actually had to go on welfare. I remember sitting
[43:10] with my wife um it was on a Friday night and she said to me, she was looking at the checkbook and she said, "I'm not sure how we're going to buy food next week." And I said, "Really? Are we in that bad a shape already?" And she said, "Yeah." So Monday morning we went to the welfare office and we qualified for everything. Food stamps, baby food, free milk, cash payment, Medicaid. They gave us an extra supplement because she was a nursing mother and she needed vitamins, you
[43:42] know. And then I went to the unemployment office. I said, "I'll do anything. Any job. I've applied everywhere." I said, "But I'll do anything." They got me an interview as a baggage handler for US Air. And then they rejected me when they heard I had espionage. Oh my god, are you a traitor? We can't hire a traitor. So things were bad for a long time. In the meantime, we had received this information that there was this disgruntled CIA guy in Bethesda, Maryland, and he had provided all of
[44:13] these names. So I said, I'm I'm ready to go to trial. Finally, they came back and they said, "If you don't take the three and a half years, we're going to upgrade all of the espionage charges so that they're like super espionage charges, right? There's like grade A, B, C, and D. D is the death penalty." So, they had charged me with B, which is like, ah, you shouldn't have done that, right? But C is you're going to die in prison. And I said
[44:45] 30 years, 40, 50, 100 years. What's the difference? I'm going to die in prison. I face 30 years. I face 100 years. It makes no difference to me. I'm going to fight. So, they upgraded all the charges and they said, "This is our final offer. 2 and 1/2 years. This is after the judge threw out the espionage charges. 2 and 1/2 years or we go to trial and we're going to ask for 45."
[45:16] So my wife and I stayed up all night long. Part of the problem with researching this law is that I was only the second person that was ever charged with it. So there's no case law. There there are no court decisions. There are no appeals. There are no uh scholarly journal articles. Nothing. Nothing. There are certainly, you know, commentaries. Joe Biden of all people voted against it and then wrote an op-ed
[45:47] in the in the Christian Science Monitor in 1982 saying this law is unconstitutional and it causes a chilling effect on freedom of speech. But it had never been challenged in court. So I said, "Let's go to trial. Let's fight them and then I'll appeal and we'll win. If not at the Circuit Court of Appeals, we'll win at the Supreme Court." And my attorney said, "That's great, but you can only appeal postconviction, and they're going to demand that you
[46:17] appeal from prison." So he said, "Look, realistically, you're going to get 12 to 18 years. Do you really want to throw the dice?" And then one of the other attorneys said, "If you were my brother, I would beg you to take this deal." Good lord, I'm really sorry about this. I said to him, "But I haven't done anything wrong." In the meantime, I owed them a million dollars.
[46:48] And they said, "If we go to trial, it's going to cost at least another million." But this is what the Justice Department banks on. You know, let's say you do one thing wrong. They'll charge you with five different things. And then they say, "Okay, you know what? We'll dismiss these other four if you take a plea to one." because they know that you don't have the money to go all the way to trial and you've been so beaten down with depression and stress and anxiety over the course of this whole nightmare. They know that in the end you're going
[47:18] to take a deal to make the whole thing go away. So he said to me, "I beg you to take the deal. It's going to cost another million at least and we're going to lose a million. Really? I still owe them $880,000. They'll never see it. I'll never earn $880,000 to give them. Never. There's a book written by an Israeli journalist by the name of Al Press called Beautiful Souls. It's a book about four
[47:49] whistleblowers through history from the first the second world war rather uh until like uh the Enron collapse. And he he looks at the motivations of each person, why they decided to really throw their lives away in order to tell the truth. And one of the conclusions that he draws is that even though history always vindicates the whistleblower always, they never make a financial comeback ever. And they die broke.
[48:20] And so I said, "Well, I can't afford the first million. I'm not going to be able to afford the second million. I'd like to put my kids through college someday." And so I took the deal. What was I going to do? We actually sat there, my wife and I, with a calculator figuring out how long could the family survive without me bringing in some income. And we figured with the help of
[48:52] my wife's father and my brother, we could do it for three years. And they were offering two and a half. I knew I'd probably get out somewhere short of two, somewhere short of two and a half rather. Wait, short of two. I did 23 months and then I could try to start rebuilding and uh that's where I found myself. You didn't mention to them that your wife lost her job, too. My wife was a CIA officer and and she was fired the day of
[49:22] my arrest only because she was married to me and that's why we were both unemployed for the first 10 months of this nightmare. She finally uh found a fantastic job and has thrived in it, which has taken the pressure off of me. You know, I thought I would be able when I got out of prison to just step right back into my life and and and hit the ground running again. And that's just not how it works. First of all, I didn't even realize how depressed I was when I got home. I just thought, "Oh, thank
[49:52] God. I'm home. Not really home. I'm in this terrible rental house, but I mean, I'm with my family and I can see my home across the street over there and I'll get back there maybe in the next couple of years." Um, but you know, I'm a convicted criminal. I'm a convicted felon. lost my pension, lost my civil rights, can't vote until 2023, and that's if the governor tells me I'm allowed to. Um, you know, what was the charge that you finally played to? Uh, Intelligence Identities Protection Act.
[50:24] Yeah. So, time to rebuild. But one of the things that I wanted to do, one of the very first things that I wanted to do was to come down here and thank all of you for the support, the cards to the president, the letters, you know, couldn't have gotten through it. Could not had no idea what friends I had. No idea. You know, my wife says all the time, she said, you know, in a way this has
[50:55] really been a blessing because she said, 'You've always had to hide your politics. Which is true. I always kept my mouth shut at the CIA when people would talk about those effing liberals. Why do they hate America so much? you know, I just stood there or a criminal mind and she said, "And you have the most wonderful and committed friends."
[51:25] I was telling Lynn about an hour ago that Medadia Benjamin, who's one of the co-founders of Code Pink, well, actually, let me tell you the first time I ever I ever heard of Medadia Benjamin. Um, Senator Kerry asked me to uh to do a hearing. You're like a producer. You just make all make sure the trains run on time, right? To do a hearing on uh I forget what. And I invited the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to come and talk. It was about Afghanistan.
[51:56] So, I invited the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to to come and talk. And I noticed all these women wearing pink t-shirts. Well, that can't can't be a common sense. Who are these people? So, I I leaned over. I was sitting directly behind Carrie. I leaned over. I said, "Who are all these women wearing pink t-shirts?" And the guy next to me said, "It's Code Pink." I said, "What is that?" Cuz again, I had been sort of sequestered at the CIA. I wasn't paying attention to what anybody else was doing. And he said, "Oh, it's a peace group. They, you know, they oppose the
[52:27] Iraq war. They disrupt our hearings all the time." So, they're angry angry. So, so the hearing's going on and the chairman is sitting there, you know, he has he has so many medals that just kind of weighs him down and he's got the four stars on each shoulder and he he really he's a very handsome man, very dignified. And um then Media walks up to him and she throwsund$1 bills into the air and she shouts, "No more blood for oil."
[52:59] and and then all the other code pink women start chanting and yelling and without realizing it I finally noticed that I was smiling and I looked around and nobody else was smiling. So I'm watching this thing unfold and Senator Karen turns around and he said, "You think this is funny?" And I said, "No, no, I don't think it's funny. You think she's funny?" He said, I said, "No, I think she's very
[53:30] courageous." And who has the guts to throw $101 bills at the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff? I said, "She's very courageous." He said, "You keep your opinions to yourself." Okay. Wow. Feels a little threatened, it seems. That was the first time I ever heard of Media Benjamin. Well, when I got arrested, Code Pink was right there next to me and they had a going away party for me, the Aerys to the Pittsburgh PL Glass Fortune rented
[54:03] the roof of the of the Hey Adams Hotel, the finest hotel in all of Washington. And it was a just a giant conglomeration of just the the hard left from around Washington. Code pink and the Institute for Policy Studies and some lesbian group I never heard of and a couple of CIA like dissident who had quit years ago and denounced the place. And they
[54:34] even did this song. Do you remember the old Peter Paul and Mary song? Have you been to jail for justice? It's an awesome song. But they changed the words to uh do you know John Kuryaku and it was so much fun. I was leaving for prison the next day. But it was so much fun. And the Washington Post covered it and and they interviewed me and I said, "I am unbowed. I have nothing to be ashamed of. Mine was a political case. It was because I blew the whistle on torture
[55:05] and I am not going to let them defeat me." That just pissed them off. I didn't care. So the next day, my attorney, one of them, Jesseline Raak, Tom Drake, the NSA whistleblower, Daniel Ellburg, um my cousin, uh and his son-in-law drove me to prison and dropped me off. And so I went in and I said, "My name's John Kuryaku. I know
[55:36] where to report to prison. The guy said, "Okay." We go outside. They wave goodbye. Jesseline's crying. Okay, goodbye. I said, "Don't worry. I'm going to the minimum security camp. It's not It's going to be easy." I said, "Goodbye. Thank you. Goodbye." We start walking around to the back of the prison. I said, "No, no, no, no. I'm supposed to be at the camp across the street. That's what the judge said." The guy says, "Not according to my paperwork, you're not." and the judge's opinion doesn't mean anything in the
[56:06] Bureau of Prisons. You're going to the prison. And I thought, "Oh my god, I'm going to the actual prison, the one with the guard towers and the concertina wire. I'm not going to be working at the university in town, right? Mowing the lawn or whatever it was I thought I was going to do. I'm going to be in the actual prison." So, I said, "Well, take it easy. there's nothing you can do.
[56:36] I didn't have telephone access for five days. So, when I finally got telephone access, I called my lawyer and he said, "We could file a motion. We might get a hearing date in 2 or 3 years." Wow. You're just going to have to tough it out. So, I did. But one of the things I set out to do and I ended up doing very successfully was to make strategic alliances in
[57:07] prison. We were talking about it there. Uh to make sure that I stayed at the top of the heap in prison. Again, I was not going to be cowed or institutionalized and I would show respect when I received respect. And so I gave as good as I got in prison. And when I say that I mean visav the guards. Somebody sent me a book called In
[57:38] Defense of Flogging. It was written by uh a professor, Dr. Peter Moscow, a professor of criminal justice at John J. College. and he said that the Bureau of Prisons is really little more than an employment agency for unemployable semi-iterate rural white men. And that is exactly what the Bureau of Prisons is. These are losers who came out of the military, can't do anything else. They were bullied as kids, so
[58:09] they're going to take it out on this guy now because this guy can't fight back. And so, as my wife says, I you have the nastiest passive aggressive. And I So, I that's how I was. They gave it to me. I gave it right back to them. One time a guard got into my face. And he said in his stupid white trash cliche way of speaking, "This is my house." And I said, "This is my
[58:41] neighborhood. Do you know who I am? Do you know what I've been trained to do? You really want to go down this road? Let's do it cuz I'm not going to be here long and I know where you live. I should have gone to solitary for 6 months for that. Instead, he said, "Uh, I'm sorry. I I overreacted. I I should should have talked to you that way." I said, "Yeah, don't let it happen again." There was another guy, another guard
[59:12] named Blue, who had a reputation as being a satist. In fact, he was the only guard who wore a stab vest under his jacket uh because he was so abusive that he just assumed somebody would stab him eventually, but he was always respectful to me. I became very close to the Italians. And when I say Italians, as we were saying earlier, I mean Gambino, Banano, Genevese, Lucasy, those Italians.
[59:44] And one of my Italian friends said to Blue, "Oh, hey Blue, you're working up in central unit." My friend John's up in central unit. And he said, "Is that the CIA guy?" And my friend said, "Yeah." And Blue said, "I never mess with that guy." And my friend said, "Yeah, why?" And he said, "Cuz that's all I need. I mess with him. I work my 8 hour shift. I go outside and CNN's standing next to my car. I said, "You're damn right they're going to be standing next to your car." So, they never messed with me. Um,
[1:00:17] how much time do we have? We should probably say questions. Yeah, that's good. It's 8:00. Yes, sir. Your attorney, Jesseline. Raak. Yes. Was she the one who was forced out to Yes. Yes. Jesseline Raak, one of my attorney, I had 11 attorneys. One of them was President Reagan's deputy attorney general, Bruce Fine, a champion of civil liberties. Uh, spoke to him this morning. As a matter of fact, he's a giant giant in Washington. Um, anyway, Jesseline Raak was one of my attorneys
[1:00:48] who handled whistleblow. We called it press outreach. It took her a year of hard full-time work to get the mainstream media to stop calling me CIA leaker John Kuryaku and to start calling me CIA torture whistleblower John Kuryaku. It was hard work. Uh but Jesseline had been the director of ethics at the Justice Department uh immediately before and after September 11th. And
[1:01:21] in early 2002, there was an uprising at Kat Ejangvi uh fort in northern Afghanistan in which John Walker Lind, an American citizen, was captured. So as soon as they captured him, uh somebody from the Pentagon called Jesseline and said, "What can we do with this guy? He's an American citizen." And Jessine said as clear as day, you have to read him his rights, right? Well, they didn't even though she said it and
[1:01:52] she put it in writing. Further to our conversation earlier, you have to read him his rights. So, they didn't. And of course, he incriminated himself, right? He's been shot in the stomach. You're withholding pain medication. and you're telling him, "Well, we'll give you the pain medication and we'll take the AK-47 round out of your stomach if you confess to your crimes." And he said, "All right, all right. I joined the Taliban. All right. Okay. Please give me my medicine. That's illegal. It's
[1:02:23] unconstitutional. It's unethical. It's unethical." And the director of ethics at the Justice Department said, "You can't do that. You have to read him his rights." So a couple of days later, Attorney General Ashcroft gave a statement saying gave a press uh conference saying that he read his rights. He was read his rights. He waved his right to an attorney and he issued a confession. That was a lie.
[1:02:55] He had not waved his right to an attorney and he had not voluntarily given a convent a confession. The confession was coerced. Well, there were there was a flurry of emails between Jesseline and the interrogators and the military, and she said the file was this thick. Finally, she went to her boss and said, "We've got a real problem with this John Walker Lin case. The guy was never read his rights, and this confession can't be used against him in court." And remember, they were talking about charging him with treason, which I think
[1:03:27] wouldn't have held up because there had never been a congressional declaration of war against Afghanistan. And the constitution is very clear that it has to be a time of war for a person giving aid and comfort to the enemy to be charged with treason. But people in Washington bandandy about this word like it's nothing. Oh, he's a traitor. Well, you know what? You're accusing somebody of something that that calls for the death penalty. Yeah, I don't do that lightly. I would never call someone a traitor. I would never say someone's committing treason unless he was actually committing treason as defined
[1:03:58] in the Constitution. So her boss told her, "You need to just back off. This is political now. It's out of our hands and you need to keep your mouth shut." So she went back to the file because she was going to make a copy of every email back and forth. The file had two pages of documents in it. There were two innocuous emails. It had been purged. And then she went to the computer to call them all back up so
[1:04:29] that she could print them and they had all been deleted. So she called God, what was his name? Mark Eisen Mark Eisen something at Newsweek. Mark, it'll come to me. Mark Isakov Mike. Thank you. Mike Isakov at Newsweek. and she told him what had happened and he said, "Well, can you at least send me the two emails that are left?" So she sent him the two emails
[1:05:03] and um he said, "Do you want me to protect your identity?" She said, "Yes." So he wrote an article in which he said, "An anonymous source provided these emails. It appears that the files been purged. Here's a a scan of the emails and it says from Jesseline Raak, Office of Ethics to, you know, whomever. He had forgotten to black it out. So, she was escorted out of the Justice
[1:05:37] Department and told she was put being put on administrative leave. Then they called her and said, "You need to hire a criminal defense attorney." So she hadn't done anything illegal. In fact, she was the one that was pushing to maintain the legality of the entire process. She was so upset by what was happening that she had a miscarriage. She was 6 months pregnant and she had a miscarriage. In addition, Jesseline has suffered from multiple sclerosis from a
[1:06:08] very young age. She was 22 when she came down with MS. And so she was really suffering and struggling through this whole thing. So, she resigns from the justice department and she goes to work for one of the big law firms in town and one of the partners went up to her and said, "Hey, we got a call from one of the assistant attorneys general saying that they're thinking about charging you with espionage because you had passed this information to the press. So, we're going to have to
[1:06:40] escort you out and please don't ever come back here or try to contact any of us. So, she said her mind is spinning. She's she's going to go to prison. She hasn't done anything wrong. Uh, next thing she knows, she gets a letter from the uh District of Columbia bar saying that there are disbarment proceedings now petting against her. The Justice Department had moved to have her disbarred. So, she decided she needed to get away.
[1:13:26] appeal. So now that we have these politicized espionage cases, this is our chance to try to get one of the courts of appeal to rule it unconstitutionally vague, in which case Chelsea would would be released from prison. This is really something that the Supreme Court needs to take up, but nobody until Chelsea has had standing to appeal it that far up the chain. So with $100,000, she can do that. And that's the goal right now. So,
[1:13:58] it's Daniel Ellsberg and it's um Norman Solomon at Exposed Facts, uh the Institute for Public Accuracy. There's something like a third of the way there, but I think an appeal is going to happen. Yeah, I was going to add one more thing. Um God, where do I even start? you know, as part as part of our job at the uh Senate Foreign Relations Committee, all of us would would meet regularly with foreign diplomats, have lunch, talk about
[1:14:30] whatever happens to be in the papers. I got a call one day from a Japanese uh diplomat, and he was uh his portfolio was the Middle East, and I'm I'm proud to say I used to be one of the American government's leading experts on the Middle East. So, he said, "Oh, let's have lunch. We'll talk about the Middle East." I said, "Great. I used to do it all the time. So, we went to this restaurant on Capitol Hill and had a nice lunch. Talked about the Arab Spring and Tunisia and Egypt and what was happening in Syria. And then finally, at
[1:15:02] the end of the lunch, he said, "So, how long have you been with the committee?" I said, "Uh, you know, I promised Senator Kerry I'd give him two years. It's been two and a half. I think I'm ready to move on." And he says, "No." He whispers, "I can give you money if you give me information." And I said, "You know how many times I've made that pitch? Shame on you." He said, "So disrespectful." [Applause]
[1:15:34] So I said, "Thanks. No thanks." I got up. I left. I went directly to the office of the Senate Security Officer. I said, "I was just approached by a foreign intelligence officer." He says, "Is it that damn Russian again?" I said, "No, actually, it was in Japanese of all people." And he said, "Really?" I said, "Yeah, Japanese." He said, "Well, you know, sometimes they're a little on the aggressive side when it comes to economic intelligence." I said, "Well, here's what the guy did." So, he said, "Do me a favor. Write it up as a memo.
[1:16:05] They have a standalone computer there, so it doesn't have any viruses on it or anything. Write it up as a memo. I'm going to call the FBI and report it. I sat there. I wrote it up as a memo. He calls me. He said, "The FBI is going to send two guys up day after tomorrow and they're going to want to ask you a lot of questions." I said, "Fine. I've worked with the FBI my entire adult life." So, the FBI comes, two young guys. They look like they were in their 20s. And I told them what happened. They said, "Okay, here's what we want you to do. Call him back. invite him to lunch and
[1:16:36] try to get him to tell you exactly what information he wants and how much money he's willing to pay for it. I said, "Okay." idiot that I am, I said, "You want me to wear a wire?" And they said, "No, no, we're going to put two guys at the table next to you and then they can listen, you know, chain of custody, whatever." I said, "Okay, fine." I called the guy. I invite him to lunch. The FBI guys call and say, "Something came up. we're not going to be there. Just write us another memo and tell us
[1:17:06] what he says. I said, "Fine." So, we have lunch. I get the information. I write it up as a memo. I send it to the FBI. They call me back. They ask me to do it a third time and a fourth time and a fifth time. So, I did. So, finally, the guy says, "Uh, I'm being transferred to Cairo. It's my dream job. I'm going to be the deputy chief of mission. It's a big promotion for me. I said, "Okay, congratulations. You know, good luck. Safe travels." I get up. I walked out.
[1:17:37] That was in March of 2011. That was in April of 2011. A year later, we get discovery after my arrest. And we see in discovery that there never was a Japanese diplomat. He was an FBI agent trying to get me to commit real espionage. Oh my gosh. But I
[1:18:10] kept writing the memos and sending them to the FBI so they couldn't charge me. Oh my goodness. We didn't realize until then. They knew that these espionage charges were made up. They also sent us memos between the CIA and the Justice Department. The CIA said, "Charge him with espionage." The Justice Department responds, "But he hasn't committed espionage." And the CIA answers back, "Charge him and make him
[1:18:40] defend himself." So they thought, "Well, he hasn't committed espionage. You know what? We'll entrap him into committing espionage, and then we can really get the 35 or 45 years But I kept reporting the contact. There's one thing that I would like to hear you say to this group that I read in Chuck's interview, and that is is there's still torture and extraordinary renditions going on.
[1:19:14] I think that there are most definitely extraordinary renditions. Does everybody know what an extraordinary rendition is versus a rendition? No. No. A rendition is let's say I'm the chief of operations in Pakistan and I go into an al-Qaeda safe house and I catch you and you're Egyptian and I say let me see your passport. You don't have a passport. You don't have a passport and you don't have any plausible explanation for what in the world you are doing in an al-Qaeda safe house in Pakistan. Right? So I'm
[1:19:46] going to send you back to Egypt. That's a rendition. I render you back to your home country. An extraordinary rendition is I go into this al-Qaeda safe house. You're an Egyptian. I catch you. You don't have a passport or a plausible explanation for what you're doing there. And I send you to Syria or Libya or Morocco or Jordan where they're going to pull out your fingernails and they're going to pull out your teeth and they're going to rape your wife in front of you and they're going to see what kind of information
[1:20:17] you give up. That's an extraordinary rendition. That is illegal, right? It's a violation of both US law and international law and we do it all the time. There's a Canadian professor by by the name of Maher Aar. Maher is a a naturalized Canadian. Somehow one of the monsters in the CIA's counterterrorism center got it into her
[1:20:50] head that Mahar somehow was supporting al-Qaeda. So Maher was flying from I think it was London or Paris to Toronto but through JFK. So the FBI at the behest of the CIA snatched him off of the plane at the gate at JFK and sent him to Syria to be tortured. So this is a Canadian citizen with a Canadian passport in the United States
[1:21:24] where most people would assume he has constitutional rights like anybody does in the United States. We sent him to Syria where he was tortured mercilessly for 18 months. We have not even so much as apologized to that man. It turned out, of course, that he was innocent, was mistaken identity, was somebody with a similar name, right? All those Arabs look and sound the same, right? Time for a commercial. Okay.
[1:21:55] Quaker House is part of North Carolina's Stop Torture Now, which is a very, very active group in North Carolina to work against torture. They have a web page. If you would like to be involved, contact us at QPR Quaker.org and we will put you in touch with the organization. It's been a very very hardworking organization has had very
[1:22:27] good results from what work has been done. So please think about being a part of this organization. Great organization. Again I am forever indebted to Quaker House as an organization and to these wonderful individuals as people for helping get me through this. And this is not a oneshot thing for me. This is my life from now on. And I want to be involved with Quaker House, even from a long distance.
[1:22:58] I hope to be able to come down here again and help in any way that I can or just come down and have a good time. That's a very good time. [Applause] [Music]