[00:05] welcome to this evening's celebration of 25 years of prison legal news my name is meg fiddler i'm a civilian non-combatant i'm not a lawyer nor have i ever been a prisoner i met and soon became friends with paul wright 10 years ago when he was awarded a fellowship by the petra foundation which i directed the foundation honored petrotol shattuck
[00:36] who grew up in germany in the shadow of the third reich came to this country to work as an au pair and stayed on to graduate from law school with high honors while raising a family and to devote her life as a teacher scholar lawyer and activist to advancing human rights when petra died young and suddenly in 1983 the foundation was created to recognize and encourage
[01:06] unsung individuals who were making distinctive contributions to the rights and dignity of others by taking risks and persevering without the safety net of personal privilege or institutional support paul wright was named a petra fellow for his extraordinary work from behind bars for 13 years on behalf of prisoners human rights and civil liberties
[01:37] in 1973 petra wrote the problems i see in america are fundamentally the problems of a mass democracy in which people have lost the feeling that they can influence the government and in which there's so much social and racial conflict that it is very difficult to make the old mechanisms work still she wrote i believe that if we work to put our politics
[02:08] to the test of our ideals and our values which we spell out so clearly in the constitution and the bill of rights that there would be progress and that's what we should struggle for right now i'm honored to introduce someone who has put his politics to the test of those ideals and values a friend of prison legal news tonight's keynote speaker john kiriakou john is a decorated veteran of cia
[02:41] counterterrorism operations and the only cia officer with the guts and integrity to publicly confirm that waterboarding was used to torture detainees in the so-called war on terror for upholding his sworn duty to support and defend the constitution of the united states he served almost two years of a 30-month prison sentence john
[03:16] first i'd like to thank paul wright i guess i knew paul wright before i actually met paul wright i arrived in in federal prison in loreto pennsylvania in february of 2013 and after a day or two in prison i got a nice note from paul wright saying we have this publication it's called prison legal news here's a two-year subscription and i figured i
[03:46] would be in prison about two years i thought okay well that was nice i'll send him a thank you note so i sent him a thank you note and then i sat down to read prison legal news and prison legal news literally changed the course of my incarceration it it changed the way i looked not only at my own incarceration but at the issues of mass incarceration and what a lot of people myself included called the prison industrial complex it opened my eyes to
[04:17] issues that i otherwise would never have been exposed to issues as fundamental as those of of civil liberties and human rights i joked with paul when we spoke in seattle a couple of weeks ago that the first thing i would do when my prison legal news arrived was gather about a dozen different guys in my cell and we would read the news in brief out loud i would read it out loud about things that stupid prison guards around the country have done and gotten themselves into trouble and
[04:49] we would sit and laugh and all these stupid prison guards oh this one raped a guy in the walk-in freezer and you know so we would kind of make ourselves feel better by by jumping on these prison guards but that that was just for fun prison legal news actually was very was a very serious thing for me because it showed me what really was the most important thing not just about the
[05:20] publication but also about the human rights defense center i said in seattle that i speak a lot all over the country and i know my my topics well and so i generally tend to wing it i couldn't wing it with my seattle address and i didn't want to wing it with this address either and i was thinking to myself why is it that i'm so much less comfortable talking about this issue
[05:52] and after thinking about it i realized that it's because this issue is so important and i think i i hadn't really thought through why prison legal news was so important to me personally the conclusion that i came to was that it's important because when you're in prison you really are all alone i mean you may have friends and relatives on the outside but in prison life just stands still and it's like groundhog day where every day
[06:23] is exactly like every other day it doesn't matter if it's the middle of july or if it's christmas your day is going to be exactly like every other day and you tend to forget that life on the outside is continuing to move forward so it was prison legal news that made me realize that there is support out there for people like me there there's an organization out there that is writing uh that is suing
[06:54] uh that's pursuing activism on issues that are that are important in my day-to-day life their lobbying prison legal news and human rights defense center really were our voices on the outside i can't tell you how many people don't have confidence in their own intellect to be able to challenge either their incarceration or the powers that be that are that are doing things like
[07:26] charging them 18 and 30 cents or whatever it is for 10 minute phone call for example or giving them a chase manhattan debit card with their commissary money at the end of their at the end of their incarceration but that include fees that are so onerous that really your commissary money is going to end up going to chase manhattan or to the bureau of prisons but prison legal news understood and prison legal news was out there telling people what was happening by way of background i was incarcerated
[07:57] on a national security charge i was charged actually with three counts of espionage which is one of the gravest crimes that an american can be accused of when when we say espionage we conjure up thoughts of julius knuffle rosenberg of of spying for a foreign country of of treason uh in some cases an espionage charge carries with it the death penalty i'm a patriot i've always been a patriot and i took an
[08:29] oath to uphold the constitution of the united states not to cover up the cia's dirty little secrets and so i decided in in 19 uh i'm sorry in 2007 that i was going to respond truthfully to an abc news reporter's questions i didn't know what he was going to ask me i suspected that he would ask me about torture and i i decided that if he did i was going to tell the truth and so in december of 2007 i gave an interview to brian ross of abc news in which i said three things that utterly
[09:01] changed the course of the rest of my life i said that the cia was torturing its prisoners i said that torture was official u.s government policy not the result of a rogue cia officer and i said that the president had personally approved and signed of the torture policy i was immediately