[00:00] ok this is a recorded interview today is Monday februari 22nd in South 540 p.m. for organic news on awake radio with a CIA torture whistleblower John Kiriakou and we're going to interview you a few times before John thank you so much awake radio is having a bit of technical difficulties so I'm just recording interviews and then they're gonna play them so thank you for joining me John
[00:32] Kerry I'm sure it's always it's always great to be on this on the show thank you very much for inviting me um we you know we just had like a pretty lengthy discussion before I started recording and so you know whistle blowing and standing up for what's right doesn't really seem to be paying off much much in this free country that we call America is what we've concluded from everything that we just talked about but
[01:02] um we're going to discuss yesterday's Washington Post article on geoffrey sterling who is currently serving a three and a half year sentence in a prison in Englewood Colorado he was he went in June of 2015 and will not get out until 2018 and he has been convicted
[01:34] of leaking information about a Russian scientist trying to give faulty nuclear plans on to screw up the Iranian nuclear weapons program to James reisen of the New York Times that's rude but he um it was it was after geoffrey sterling was already fired from the CIA because he filed a lawsuit because he felt
[02:06] discriminated against while working for the CIA for almost ten years approximate right yeah and Jeffrey tells a very pointed story about that experience he is fluent in Farsi he's an expert on Iran and he was hired to be a case officer an operations officer that's a field officer field agent working against the Iranians and so he
[02:36] was assigned to go I think he said it was to Germany and then right before he was to leave his boss pulled him aside and said we decided not to send you to Germany because we think that a big black guy speaking Farsi would would stick out and he said when did you realize I was black but they ended up assigning him to a country somewhere in Africa well the officer who was going to
[03:08] go to Germany and replace if Jeffrey ended up resigning and so they came back and told Jeffrey we decided to send you to Germany instead well he had already sent off his all of his belongings to Africa no I don't want to go to Germany now I'm gonna go to Africa instead and they said no you're gonna go to Germany and if you don't want to go to journey then you could just resign or you can be fired so he resigned and filed a racial discrimination suit which was
[03:38] well-founded saying that he was discriminated against initially because he was black and they wouldn't send him to germany in the first place um the CIA did not argue the merits of that case they went to the judge and they said they that they wanted the case to be dismissed with prejudice because the only way for the agency to defend itself was to expose classified information and that's nonsense that's the national security defense and that's what they
[04:09] use all the time to protect themselves so the judge it's the Eastern District of Virginia it's the Espionage board they do anything the CIA tells them to do the judge miss Jeffries case with prejudice well James rising a two-time Pulitzer prize-winning journalist with the New York Times was covering for The Times Jeffries racial discrimination suit so because he was covering the case he ingests he had end up a Jeffrey spoke
[04:41] something like 52 times over the course of several years in the meantime risin came out with a book called bush at war and one of the chapters in that book details a botched case where the CIA tried to recruit a Russian nuclear scientist to get him to pass flawed nuclear plans to the Iranian state of war Dez dated war that's right no was it state of war would work it said in the article it was called state of being of
[05:11] war then that's what it was so um when the book was published the CIA just was apoplectic they said that the whole operation was classified at the top secret level and um oh it must have been Geoffrey who gave it to him right because Jeffrey's district disgruntled well listen i had had many private conversations with geoffrey sterling and he looked me in the eye and he told me I
[05:43] was not rise ins source now listen again Rison was a two-time Pulitzer prize-winning journalist no New York Times journalist would write an article let alone a book using one source reisen generally has dozens of sources but the agency decided to go after Jeffrey but they just they go after him because they just decided that it was him like where was the evidence and the facts you know what I'm not even sure that they did
[06:14] really decide that it was him I think that they decided that they were going to teach him a lesson right he had sued them he had spoken to the press and by god they were going to silence this guy so it becomes like a moat you know emotional and purse rather than anything facts you're right it's always personal and the goal and I said just the financial press club the other day when we did the the event for Jeffrey with his wife Holly the goal is not just to prosecute the goal is to
[06:46] ruin the person personally professionally financially to separate him from his friends and his relatives and to frighten other would-be whistleblowers so that nobody talks that the secrets are kept and that's what happened to Jeffrey um again before I started the recording I just I brought up the the case of the guy I'm sorry again I just like his name just keeps
[07:18] escaping me who they held in solitary confinement for 43 years right um in Illinois sorry and um we Louisiana and again that that case was purely personal absolutely and most of these egregious cases are indeed personal there's no justice at all no you know there was a guy in prison with me I never learned his name but I'd see him on the track
[07:50] every every every day and so in the summer time he would take off his shirt and he had this this monumental tattoo on his back that made me laugh the first time I saw but it made me think afterwards and I thought you know there's really something to this tattoo it was a tattoo of Lady Justice and she's holding her scales and she has her blindfold on but she is laying on the ground with with her right arm up as if to protect herself and the owner of the
[08:20] tattoo the guy who's back the tattoo is on is standing above her pointing a 45 out of it and he says take that and I laughed the first time I saw it it was very clever and it is your ornate but I said you know what there's a lot to this because there's no justice in the system not when we have people in solitary confinement for 43 years not only have people in adx supermax who
[08:51] have not seen another human being in eight years as the New York Times Magazine outlined you know not when we have mandatory minimum sentences for for minor drug offenses that land people in prison in many cases for for you know the majority of their lives that's not justice and this is what happened to geoffrey sterling there there's no justice for geoffrey sterling everything is a business yeah um and so the case of
[09:22] geoffrey sterling you know it signified obama's crackdown on um I wrote truth-tellers but the article says uses the word leakers uh yeah you know this is a problem with the mainstream media it's not monolithic um but but many major outlets still refer to all of us to to Jeffrey to Tom Drake jesselyn Radack and to me as as leakers rather than whistleblowers now the New York
[09:54] Times calls us whistleblowers CNN calls us whistleblowers but the Washington Post and Politico for example call us leakers the LA Times The Boston Globe called us whistleblowers but MSNBC cause us leakers Fox calls us traitors haha so you know there's really no you get no relief from most outlets in the mainstream media and unless more people like on the inside you know do what u
[10:26] geoffrey sterling and and others like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden have done the few people who do are always going to be seen as you know the troublemakers yes always always um okay I'm you know we don't have like you don't have a lot of time we have like ten minutes so it says in the article geoffrey
[10:56] sterling is tutoring other inmates um he's finishing his memoir written by hand because he can't there's he has to mail it to his wife to type it yeah yeah I wrote two books by hand and you know I sent them out to my wife and typed him when I got home but I'm talking about you know ninety four thousand words that I wrote by hand and that's exactly what Jeffrey's doing too you're only allowed to have a pen and some paper you certainly have no access to a computer
[11:28] um you know he holds his head high but he does admit to feeling low some days yeah you know this is another thing to cat is the role of depression yeah in our prison something like eighty percent of prisoners at least in the federal system take some form of antidepressant there's there's no hope for most these guys this is something that I asked Jeffrey's wife Holly to to pass back to
[12:01] him I said I know that it feels he has three and a half years and I know it feels like 30 years I know because I've been there myself but it really isn't a very long period of time once you get past that first year with halfway house and good behavior time off and house arrest I said three and a half years is really about two years once you finish
[12:32] that first year you can actually start counting down to release I think he's finally figured that out but now he's even more worried about what kind of work you know a guy who's been convicted of seven counts of espionage can hope to get to support his family you know like that's that's it just it to when you're out of prison you're not exactly free no
[13:05] no and we he's got I think it's two years of federal probation when he's when he's done but you know like all the rest of us who've been involved in national security cases he's lost his federal pension he lost the right to vote um he's an attorney and he's been disbarred because of his because of his conviction so you know where does he work he is he gonna work at Target or at McDonald's or in starbucks see that is
[13:36] he's lucky seems look you will they yeah I mean that's what I'm just going to say it I mean that's what this system wants to do it wants to just reduce everyone choose that's what I mean about your not necessarily even free like when you're out here because there's so many people out here just you know who can't who don't have really good paying jobs and are you know stuck oh you know working I
[14:08] mean lately they don't even have a decent um in a wage to pay people yeah that's right that's right you know Holly told me that Jeffrey's making something like sixteen dollars a month um no it was less than that it would it was no yeah he makes fifty cents a day tutoring wow so so he makes two and a half bucks a week ten bucks a month so um I said
[14:38] you know what I made a dollar ate a month so if he's making ten bucks a month he's doing pretty darn low for himself Wow yeah so he is inmate 3833 eight dash 0 for 4 yes and he's taking classes in checking and savings account so that when he gets some released that's going to help him to get released to a halfway house well know you'll get
[15:09] released to a halfway house regardless of what he does just because it's his right to a halfway house well it ought to be his rape yes I got no halfway house time at all because I was writing blogs from prison about problems in prison and so I did every single day of my sentence I didn't get any relief at all um but he's you know he's really doing it the way you're supposed to do it he's keeping his head
[15:41] down he's minding his own business he's trying to help other inmates fight by teaching a GED prep class um I told him legally he's allowed to have up to 12 months of halfway house time and what that really means is two weeks and then they just send you home and the rest of it converts into house arrest I said realistically you're probably going to get six months um but six months plus three months of house arrest that's nine
[16:11] months getting out nine months early and going home plus you're a good time which is fifteen percent of your total time which is another six and a half months you know that's fifteen and a half months off of a 42-month sentence so it's barely over two years I said you can do that you can do two years I mean if he if he has the support out here that will definitely help them too that's right and that's what he needs he needs the support of the community the
[16:43] guys in whistleblower he's not a criminal he's not a leaker no matter what the CIA wants you to believe no matter what the Justice Department wants you to believe the guy is the victim here geoffrey sterling is the victim right you know it's just like it amazes me how automatically like so many people just side with the system or the official story always against you know the one single person and it doesn't ever enter people's mind or maybe it's
[17:14] just too challenging for people to ever think that it's the system who is the guilty party right or the people you know working in the system like in the case of you know again is mr Wood Wood foxwood Fox who they just let out of solitary confinement for 43 years and I mean he was basically held without any evidence or fax I mean
[17:45] it literally became personal well it was personal yeah on the part of the judge he have somebody back 43 years and you know I'm amazed to and how the guy at least seems to be he seems to have his mental faculties how person cannot go completely insane after 40 years in solitary confinement and i will add that the United Nations has described solitary confinement as its practiced in
[18:16] the United States as a form of torture solutely so this guy has been tortured for 43 years and he seems to hold no bitterness he know people who did this thing well that's because he's right he's not in his right mind that that's what I what I would think but he is he is filing a lawsuit though there is a lawsuit um and also in the article on Jeffrey that is in the Washington Post yesterday it says that Rob um James
[18:48] reisen of the New York Times could come forward to exonerate geoffrey sterling but he threw it an attorney he doesn't give any common that's that's been a tough issue I know rising personally and horizon took this whole thing very very badly too I know that I know that Norman Solomon exposed faqs org who has been a great and true friend to Jeffrey and and
[19:21] great supporter has said that there are no hard feelings and there's no ill will it's true that risin could have gone on the stand and he could have said geoffrey sterling was not my source for the book and he never did that what he did was he refused to testify period now mission was if he had gone up on onto the stand and had said that Jeffrey wasn't the source that would have opened him up to follow on questions from the prosecution and if he had refused to
[19:52] answer those he could have been held in contempt of court now some people would argue that that's what a man would have done men would have stood up and he would have taken his lumps um reisen was not sent to prison for contempt of court but at the same time he didn't help Jeffrey's cause in any way uh so um his wife she's gonna stand by him and she's a rock-solid supporter they have a very strong and loving marriage and um you
[20:24] know he's going to rely very much on her when he gets home and he's liking have her just like I was lucky to have my wife so many whistleblowers don't have that kind of support somebody whistleblowers seat need the breakup of their of their family while the rest of their life is just crashing down around them but neither Jeffrey nor I had to deal with that ah so let me see yeah right it's six o'clock okay John our
[20:55] time is up oh it's great to speak with you as always yeah I mean anything that you need to share just let me know and so exposed faqs org yes expose facts org and they have something called the whisper program that's the whistleblower protection I forget what the R stands for whistleblower protection and something um but you know if you're thinking of blowing the whistle on waste fraud abuse or illegality or threats to
[21:25] the public health or public safety you're going to need an attorney and a good one and that attorneys jessalyn rate at at exposed to xorg thank you so much john kerry aku great to speak with you you too boy ok good night I'm