[00:00] This is hell. Somebody has gone to jail in the wake of the U.S. torture program that was instituted and maintained during the Bush administration. Unfortunately, the only person to go to jail for it isn't one of the torturers themselves. It isn't their commanding officer who ordered the torture. It's not the person who came up with the torture policy, and it's definitely not anyone in the upper reaches of the Bush administration who endorsed and supported torture. Nope, it's the person who tried to stop torture by revealing it to the public that waterboarding was taking place.
[00:33] And despite already serving time, the government still isn't done with persecuting our first guest here to tell us about his case as well as other whistleblowers and what all this means for the future of the U.S. post-election day. John Kiriakou is co-chair with past guest Tom Drake of the Whistleblowers Public Exchange Campaign. You can find out more about that at johnkiriakou.com. Welcome to This is Hell, John. Hey, thanks very much for having me. It's great having you on our show. It's really an honor. Thank you so much for being on our show.
[01:03] John is an associate fellow with Institute for Policy Studies. One of our correspondents, Laura Carlson, our correspondent in Mexico City, is also a member of that organization. John was a CIA analyst, case officer, senior investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and counterterrorism consultant for ABC News. John, you were recently given the Sam Adams Award for integrity and intelligence. An award named after Samuel A. Adams, a CIA whistleblower during the Vietnam War. And it's an award that's given out by a group of retired CIA officers, many who have appeared here on This is Hell.
[01:37] Adams blew the whistle on the CIA in military purposely under-reporting North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troop levels. He believed this was being done to give the impression the enemy was weaker than it was and thus get political approval for continuing the war. Adams also testified in the Pentagon Papers case in defense of past This is Hell guest Dan Ellsberg. Before we get to your case and why you were given the Sam Adams Award, while I'm certain it varies from situation to situation depending on where it occurs or within what organization, how much has whistleblowing changed since the Pentagon Papers Vietnam era?
[02:11] Is it now easier or more difficult to be a whistleblower? You know what, I think it's just as difficult now as it was for Dan Ellsberg back in 1970. And it's because there's really no mechanism, especially if you're a potential whistleblower in the national security realm. There's just no mechanism to blow the whistle. Look at my situation, for example, everybody's taught to go through the chain of command, right? Tom Drake went through the chain of command at NSA and it bought him nine felony charges. My chain of command created the torture program.
[02:43] So the only place for me to go with this information was the press. And of course that bought me five felony counts, including three counts of espionage. So really it hasn't changed since Dan Ellsberg. He was charged with espionage by the Nixon administration. So when we hear people who are critical of the way in which the Obama administration has gone after whistleblowers, how fair is that? Because has it changed much? How would you rate Obama's record on whistleblowers and how much it has changed since George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush, Reagan?
[03:15] Is this a consistent policy against whistleblowers or has it actually changed during Obama? It's not. It's accelerated under the Obama administration. Between the original passage of the Espionage Act in 1917 and Barack Obama's inauguration in 2009, three Americans were charged with espionage for quote-unquote leaking classified information to the press. One under Nixon, one under Reagan, and one under Clinton.
[03:46] But since Obama became president, he has charged nine people with espionage, all of which were accused, or all of whom I should say were accused of leaking information to the press. So it's really accelerated under Obama. And I've said this in writing. I've said that Obama is even more Nixonian than Nixon was in his obsession with leaks. So what you leaked to the press, could you go back in history and find cases in which people leaked even possibly more dangerous information to the press that was not prosecuted in the way that you were prosecuted?
[04:26] Oh, oh, listen, we don't even have to go back very far. Let's look at General David Petraeus, the former CIA director. You know, I was charged and convicted of confirming the name of a former CIA colleague to a reporter who never published the name. And I was facing 45 years in prison. I ended up taking a plea and being sentenced to two and a half years in prison. David Petraeus leaked the names of 10 covert CIA operatives to his adulterous girlfriend, who he was trying to impress, as well as having given her access to what are called the presidential black books.
[05:05] These are the most highly classified documents that the CIA has created, the most highly classified documents that exist anywhere in government. But he was charged with a misdemeanor. He got 18 months of unsupervised probation, a fine, and at his sentencing, the judge came down from the bench to shake his hand and thank him for his service to the country. So to you, what explains the difference in treatment? You know, I've always blamed it on Eric Holder. I think it was really Eric Holder who had this incredible obsession with secrecy, especially secrecy of issues and operations that had nothing to do with the Obama administration, but were holdovers from the Bush administration.
[05:51] And I think that Holder successfully argued to Obama that this was something that needed to be done for the bigger picture so that potential whistleblowers saw the price that whistleblowers were paying and would decide to keep their mouths shut. I think that's really what the end game was. When you were giving the same Adams Award, the CIA retirees who gave the award to you noted in 2002, quote, you led the team that located Abu Zubeda alleged to be a high ranking member of Al Qaeda.
[06:27] It later transpired that Zubeda was waterboarded 83 times. You were the first U.S. government official to confirm during a national news interview in December 2007 that waterboarding, which you described as torture, was used to interrogate all Al Qaeda prisoners. Kariakau subsequently faced persecution by the U.S. government for his act of truth telling and was sentenced to a 30 month prison term ostensibly for revealing classified information. To this day, Kariakau remains the sole U.S. government official past or present who has gone to jail over the issue of torture in the post-911 era.
[07:01] Your claims of U.S. torture practices were later confirmed by President Obama, who in 2014 publicly acknowledged that we tortured some folks. As The New York Times reported back in January 2013, and as you were saying, you were given this 30 month sentence as part of a plea deal in which you admitted violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act by emailing the name of a covert CIA officer to a freelance reporter who, as you were pointing out earlier, did not publish it. Why did you believe it was necessary to reveal a CIA operative's identity to a reporter?
[07:34] Well, it wasn't necessary and it was a mistake. It was a momentary lapse in judgment. But let me explain how it all happened. This reporter, this freelance reporter who later went to ABC News, was writing a book on the CIA's rendition detention and interrogation program. And he asked me if I could introduce him to anybody who had been involved in renditions, which is just a fancy word for kidnapping. And I said, no, I've kidnapping wasn't my thing. I really didn't know any of those people when I was working at the CIA.
[08:06] So he sent me a list of a dozen names. And he said, can you introduce me to any of these people? I said, no. I looked at the names. I said, I don't have any idea who any of these people are. About a week later, he sent me another list of another dozen names. And I said, I don't know any of these people. You obviously know this issue so much better than I. I really can't help you. And he said, well, what about the guy that you mentioned in your book? You call him, I'll say, John, can you introduce me to him? And I said, oh, you're talking about John Doe. I think he's probably retired and living in Virginia somewhere. I don't have any idea.
[08:40] That was the felony. That was the crime. And they came down on me like a ton of bricks for it. Wow. So when you were saying those words, when you were communicating that message to him, did you immediately realize that you had just found him? Did you immediately realize that you had just violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act or did you feel that it didn't fall underneath that law at the time? No, it never even occurred to me because the Intelligence Identities Protection Act says that the officer being referenced has to either be overseas undercover or have been overseas undercover in the previous five years.
[09:13] I just assumed he had been retired for a decade. I had no idea that he had been overseas, let alone overseas undercover. But it didn't matter. My judge said in my very first hearing that she was not going to respect legal precedent that I had to have criminal intent when committing the crime. And my attorney stood up and said, Your Honor, are you saying that a person can accidentally commit espionage and then be charged and tried for it? And she said, that's exactly what I'm saying. So I knew in that very first hearing that I didn't have a prayer.
[09:47] If I had elected to go to trial, I knew that I was going to have to really fight at the appeals level because I was going to lose at the district level. You know, we are recently speaking to an attorney who has represented some of the Gitmo detainees. And he was talking about this concept that he has, this idea that he has, that the war on terror has now not only, you know, seeped throughout the national security apparatus of the United States, but it has gotten into the Justice Department.
[10:17] It's gotten into the way in which we execute justice here in the United States today. Do you think that the war on terror, this permanent war footing, has now had an effect on the way in which our criminal justice system works and the way our court system works? Oh, I do. Very, very much. I agree with that strongly. And I'll explain why. The Justice Department has developed two techniques that they use, and this really started in the immediate aftermath of 9-11. And now we see it everywhere in the court system,
[10:47] at least at the federal level. The feds do two things. One is called venue shopping, where they look to charge you in the district, the federal district, where they believe they are most likely to get a conviction and where they believe you will get the longest sentence. For example, almost all national security cases are charged in the Eastern District of Virginia, which is based in Alexandria, Virginia. No national security defendant has ever won a case in the Eastern District of Virginia. I was charged there,
[11:20] Jeffrey Sterling was charged there, and Ed Snowden's case is being charged in the Eastern District of Virginia. Now that doesn't really make any sense, because when Snowden made his revelations, he was officially a resident of Hawaii, which is the Northern District of California. And NSA, for which he was working, is located in Fort Meade, Maryland, which is the federal district of Maryland. So Maryland and Northern California, but Snowden is charged in the Eastern District of Virginia, because the same judge that Jeffrey
[11:51] Sterling and I had, Judge Leanne Brinkama, reserves all national security cases for herself, and she's never acquitted anybody. So that's one thing. The other thing is called charge stacking. Let's say that you actually have done something, and I'll use my case. I really did confirm the name of that former colleague. So I probably was guilty, well, I didn't have criminal intent, but I technically was guilty of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act.
[12:21] But the government charged me with five felonies, four, I'm sorry, three counts of espionage and one count of making a false statement. And I was never really sure what the false statement was supposed to have been. But anyway, I had to defend myself against five felonies. So what they do is they'll drag this out for a year until you run up a million plus in legal fees, and then they come back and they say, okay, tell you what, we'll drop four of these five charges if you take a guilty plea to the one charge. Well, the government wins 98.2% of its cases,
[12:54] according to ProPublica. And my attorneys told me, we can go to trial and throw the dice, you have a 1.8% chance of winning, and it's going to cost you another two to three million. So what do you want to do? If you're convicted, you're realistically facing 18 to 24 years, or do you want to take their 30 months and you'll be home in 23? So it becomes really an economic decision. And this is new. This is why the government wins so many of its cases,
[13:25] because the deck is stacked. Why would juries find the government, you know, side with the government in so many of these cases? What explains to you juries agreeing with the government 98% of the time? Well, they don't necessarily. 95% of that 98.2% are the results of plea bargains. And the plea bargains are the result of charge stacking. But just to be on the safe side from the government perspective, they charge these national security cases in the Eastern District of Virginia, because they know that
[13:59] in the unlikely event that the case goes to trial, as it did with Jeffrey Sterling, that the jury is going to be made up of people who have friends or family working at the CIA, the FBI, DOD, the intelligence community contractors. You just don't stand a chance. You know, you write that in June 2013 in an open letter that you gave Edward Snowden some advice, and you repeat it, you write, FBI agents will like, trick and deceive you. They will twist
[14:30] your words and play on your patriotism to entrap you. They'll pretend to be people they are not, supporters, well-wishers, and friends, all the while wearing wires to record your out-of-contact statements to use against you. The FBI is the enemy. It's part of the problem, not the solution, beware. In your opinion, can reform save the FBI or does it need to be done away with completely and replaced with a completely different agency? Yeah, I actually like the British MI5 model where they've got this domestic investigatory organization, but it does not have
[15:03] arrest powers. Let me tell you something else about the FBI. This happened to me when I was still working on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff. It was early 2011. As part of that job, we used to have lunch with foreign diplomats all the time, two, three, four times a week. And you talk about the events of the day, exchange information, opinions on developments. In my case, it was in the Middle East. Then I got a call one day from a Japanese diplomat who wanted
[15:34] to have lunch. And I remember the lunch very distinctly. We talked about Israeli elections and Turkish elections, and we talked about the Arab-Israeli peace process. And at the end of the lunch, this Japanese diplomat says to me, so what's next for you? And I said, well, I think I'm going to resign soon. I promised Senator Kerry that I would give him two years. It's been two and a half, and I'd like to go back into the private sector. And very excitedly, he said, no, no, don't do that. If you give me information, I can give you money. And I said, you should be ashamed of yourself or of yourself. You know how many
[16:09] times I've made that pitch? So I ended the lunch and I went directly to the office of the Senate Security Officer. And I said, I was just pitched by a foreign intelligence officer. So he asked me to write it up as a memo. He sent it to the FBI. Two days later, two FBI agents came to interview me. And they said, here's what we want you to do. Call him back, invite him to lunch, and try to get him to tell you exactly what information he's looking for and how much he's willing to pay for it. And I said, okay, you want me to wear
[16:42] a wire? They said, no, we're going to be at the next table. I said, okay. Well, the day of the lunch, they called back to say that something had come up and they weren't going to be at the next table. But just to go ahead with the lunch, write it up as a memo and send it to them. So I did that. And they asked me to do it a third time and a fourth time and a fifth time, which I did. And so finally, this diplomat told me that he had been promoted. He had been transferred to Cairo. It was his dream job. I shook his hand. Best of luck. Never saw him again. A year later, after my arrest, we received discovery from the Justice Department. And it turned out that
[17:17] there never was any Japanese diplomat. He was an FBI agent pretending to be a Japanese diplomat and trying to get me to commit actual espionage. But I kept foiling them because I kept writing these memos. And the memos were utterly comprehensive. So when we saw this, I said to my lead attorney, why would they do something like this? And he says, because they have no case against you and they know they have no case against you. You have it committed espionage.
[17:47] So they were trying to force you to commit real espionage. So that being fresh in my mind is what I was warning Ed Snowden against. You can't trust anybody. As recently as three weeks ago, I got a call from a guy who claimed that he and I were colleagues overseas about 20 years ago. The name just did not ring a bell to me. But he used a couple names of people that I had been friendly with. And he said he no longer works for the agency and he wants to do some research.
[18:20] He wants to hire me to do his research because he's living overseas now. The story just didn't make any sense to me. And he kept making mistakes with some of the CIA lingo, which made me think that the guy's not a CIA officer. And I don't remember him. But he mentioned an FBI agent that I used to work with overseas in this post that I can't say where. So I called her. And much to my surprise, she actually called me back. And I said, hey, I heard from, I'm
[18:51] going to say again, John Smith. And she says, which John Smith? I said, the one that we used to work with overseas. And she goes, Oh yeah, yeah, you're talking about the FBI agent. And I said, Yeah, the FBI agent. Yeah, how's he doing? I said, Oh, he's okay. He's overseas. He just called me. I just wanted to tell you that he says hello. So it turns out here they are, after I've done my time, I've finished my sentence, still trying to entrap me. The guy offered me $5,000 a month to do classified research. I don't have a security clearance
[19:23] anymore, obviously. So he wanted me to go back to my CIA colleagues to try to draw classified information out of them so that they could charge me with espionage again. So this is something that not just I have to deal with, this is something that the likes of Tom Drake has to deal with, and Kirk Wiebe, and Bill Binney, and Jeffrey Sterling, and Chelsea Manning. Even after you're convicted, even after your case is over, they still come after you. That is really remarkable. But you had as a CIA operative in the past,
[19:55] you had worked with the FBI on many occasions, in fact. When they called you up one day and they said that they want to discuss an investigation with you, you immediately went down, you went and helped them out, and what they were doing while they were talking to you, you figured out that you were the target of the investigation because they told you that they were using a search warrant back on your home. So the crazy thing is when they called me and asked me to come down to the Washington Field Office, my exact words were, anything for the FBI, they said, we're working
[20:27] a case and we need your help, and I said anything for the FBI. I didn't bother to call my lawyer. I went straight to the Washington Field Office, and it was an hour and 20 minutes into this interview before I realized that this investigation was against me. And when I said, wait a minute, wait a minute, you guys think that I have been leaking information to Al Qaeda, which is what the accusation was. And they said, well, we should tell you that as we're speaking, we're executing a search
[20:59] warrant on your home. And sure enough, they had sent a dozen FBI agents to my house and they were just ransacking the place. How much did your experience then, when this occurred and then after your arrest, how much did your opinion change of the FBI? In retrospect, do you think that you were naive in the past to be so supportive of the FBI? Oh, yeah. Oh, sure. My position, my attitude toward the FBI changed dramatically.
[21:31] You know, frankly, when I was working with the FBI, I just always thought they were idiots. And the CIA and the FBI have had this rivalry going back to the creation of the CIA in the late 1940s. And we just always thought they were idiots because we were working together overseas and the FBI is trying to build a case against John Smith. We don't care about any case. We're just trying to disrupt the next terrorist attack. And I always thought, well, they don't prosecute these cases anyway. This is a waste of time. I don't even know why we're cooperating with the FBI.
[22:02] But we humored each other and we were friendly and we would have dinner together and go out together and do joint operations together. And now, I believe that the FBI is a malignant force. I think that it is anathema to the American way of life. It's a domestic spying agency. They prosecute cases as if we have a National Secrets Act, which we do not. They are very happy and willing and quick to use the Espionage Act to target anybody who is a dissenter in any way.
[22:35] You know, all of us who don't toe the party line or disagree with this policy of constant perpetual war that we have, you're in danger of an espionage investigation. You write that, I've come to the conclusion over many years of working with, working against and watching the FBI that the only way they make their cases is to entrap people. Remember they can only get promoted if they make arrests and the arrests stick. If that means entrapment or trumped up charges, so be it.
[23:08] How much do you think the FBI depends on entrapment? Because there are many critics of their role in the war on terror and the alleged entrapment of terrorist suspects or terrorist acts that they either never would have conceived, attempted or been even remotely capable of doing without the FBI. So how much do you think the FBI actually depends on entrapment? I think the FBI depends almost solely on entrapment. Sure. We're going to have the occasional cab driver who's trying to get in touch with ISIS or
[23:40] trying to make his way to Aleppo or whatever. You know, you're always going to have idiots doing things like that. But those aren't the cases we're talking about here. We're talking about cases like the Cleveland Four, for example. There were four idiots in Cleveland sitting in a bar when another guy came in who they knew, although they didn't know he was secretly an FBI informant. And this FBI informant said, hey, you know what we should do? We should stick it to the man. We should blow up the Route 82 bridge. And these half-drunk idiots said, yeah, yeah, we should blow up the Route 82 bridge.
[24:14] So the FBI informant provides the explosives, which were inert. He provides the detonator, and they all go and put the explosives on the Route 82 bridge outside of Cleveland, and it doesn't go off. And the FBI arrests them. And they're sentenced to 20, 20, 25, and 30 years in prison. This wasn't their idea. This was the FBI's idea. These guys would have never had anything to do with the Route 82 bridge. If the FBI hadn't tasked its informant to go into that bar and
[24:45] to recruit them into this operation. But that's how the FBI works. That's how it operates. That's how FBI agents get promoted. So can the FBI be trusted in your opinion? And if not, what does that say for law enforcement and criminal justice in the United States? I really have come to the conclusion that the FBI cannot be trusted. Not for any reason, which is a shame because terrorism is real. And terrorism is a threat.
[25:15] But I have advised people and I've gone down on record in writing as saying that I don't think any American should ever speak to the FBI for any reason. We are speaking with John Carriacau. He is co-chair with past guest Tom Drake and of the Whistleblowers Public Education Campaign. You can find out more about that by going to John's website, JohnCarriacau.com. That's K-I-R-I-A-K-O-U. Back in September when you won the Sam Adams Award, you said,
[25:47] our country is in crisis, whether it is because of our apparently seamless escalation into a permanent wartime economy, our inability to wage peace in the Middle East and South Asia, or our national compulsion to prosecute and humiliate national security whistleblowers. The quest for peace must be a part of our presidential election. Instead of arguing which candidate would be more likely to use drones, more likely to bomb our enemies, reel or perceived, or more likely to use the stick rather than the carrot, we must demand that those candidates commit themselves to the pursuit of peace both here and abroad without peace.
[26:21] We will continue down the long road toward anarchy and hatred. So let's discuss the run for the White House. How much do you think this 2016 presidential campaign reflects our current permanent wartime footing? Do you think the campaign on both the Republican and Democratic side reflects what you see as a long road toward anarchy and hatred? Oh, I do. Um, boy, where do we start on this? Right, right. You've got an unhinged lunatic on the one side and a neocon criminal
[26:58] on the other side who effectively stole the nomination from Bernie Sanders. We now know, thanks to WikiLeaks, it's like there's no chance, there's no hope for any of us. But in fact, I think there is some hope and it may not be obvious yet. But Bernie Sanders did very well against the institutional candidate. So there's some hope there. And for the first time, really since Ross Perot, which is, you know,
[27:33] a while ago now, 20 years, people are taking third parties seriously. We have to wait and see what the final numbers are going to be, but I think both the Greens and the Libertarians are going to do vastly better than they did four years ago. And even on the Republican side, you know, Rand Paul was taken seriously. And although he didn't last until New Hampshire, there is a movement within the Republican Party that just abhors overseas entanglement.
[28:03] So I think that that's something to look for. But if you go one level down, you go a little bit deeper, you see that thanks to Ed Snowden's revelations about NSA and NSA's crimes against the American people, we've got a group of Republicans on the far right, like Justin Amash, for example, or Mike Lee, and Democrats on the far left who really believe in civil liberties and have joined together to actually repeal some of NSA's programs
[28:36] that Ed revealed to us back in 2013. So it's a long process, but I think that public opinion is very slowly starting to turn. But for me personally, I really liked both Jill Stein and Gary Johnson. And both, I mean, this was selfish of me, I admit, but both have said publicly that if elected president, they would pardon me and Ed Snowden and Tom Drake and others. So I very much liked that.
[29:07] And the libertarians are on the ballot in all 50 states. When I was in prison, I got a letter from Gary Johnson. I had been in prison about two weeks. Gary Johnson wrote me a letter and he said that he thought I had been screwed. And he was very sorry that I had ended up there. What I didn't know was that he had also sent letters to the attorney general and to the director of the Bureau of Prisons saying that they should be ashamed of themselves and that I should be released to my family at the very least for home confinement.
[29:38] That was a very generous thing to do. And then about a week after I got home from prison in February of last year, Gary Johnson called me and asked if I would be on the board of directors of the Libertarian Party and if I would travel with him. So I said that I would. I appreciated the support. And actually, I just got back last night from the West Coast I've gone to about a dozen and states with him over the last month or so. You were among a group of US intelligence veterans, the veteran intelligence professionals for sanity who signed a letter to President Obama back in May urging an expedited report
[30:12] on Hillary Clinton's emails. Past guests on our show who also signed the letter along with you include former NSA technical director William Binney, former NSA senior executive Tom Drake, former Foreign Service officer Matthew Ho, former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, former deputy national intelligence officer Elizabeth Murray, former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, former Foreign Service officer Peter VanBuren, former NSA senior analyst Kirk Wiebe, and former US diplomat Ann Wright. In that letter it says, what is already known about NSA's collected all electronic practices
[30:46] over the past several years strongly suggests that NSA and perhaps the FBI already know chapter and verse what is in Secretary Clinton's emails. It is virtually certain they know what was in Secretary Clinton's emails including the ones she thought she had deleted. It is likely that they have also been able to determine which foreign intelligence agencies and other hackers were able to access the emails. What ignores this at one's peril? Secretary Clinton's security violations can have impact not only on whether she becomes
[31:18] your successor but also on whether she would in that case be beholden to those who know what lies hidden from the rest of us, perhaps even from you. Do you believe that the NSA and FBI could do to Hillary Clinton something that you have suggested that they are doing to all US citizens and that is building a case against her in case she gets out of line? How vulnerable do you believe she is to blackmail? Oh yes, I think that's exactly what could happen. Listen, even though J. Edgar Hoover's dead, the spirit of J. Edgar Hoover lives
[31:50] on and I think that that's exactly what we're seeing. When NSA has the ability to save the telephone metadata, the text messages and the emails of every American man, woman, and child for the next 500 years, that's just too much power. It's too much authority and of course they can do with it what they want. They have in the past with impunity what's to keep them from doing it in the future.
[32:23] When the vested interest really is the FBI and NSA and CIA and their associated agencies, presidents come and go but these organizations live on forever and their primary goal is to protect themselves. So yeah, I see there's a bad moon rising to quote Creighton's Clearwater Revival. What would you say to somebody who says that, hey, I don't have anything to worry about, I'm not concerned about NSA or FBI surveillance of me because I don't commit any crimes and
[32:55] so why should I be concerned about this? Why would you suggest that all citizens should be concerned about the kind of surveillance and the kind of, as you say, the way in which they could build a case against people by using NSA and FBI surveillance? Tom Drake likes to point out in his speeches that the first person to pose that question publicly, why should I worry because I haven't done anything, was Joseph Gerbal in 1936. But I would say beyond that, we should look at Dr. Harvey Silverglate, a professor of
[33:29] law at Harvard University who wrote a book in 2012 called Three Felonies a Day and he argues that we are so over-legislated, so over-regulated and over-criminalized in our country that the average American on the average day going about his or her normal business commits three felonies. The point being if the government doesn't like your politics or doesn't like your face or doesn't like something about you, they can come up with what appear to be
[34:00] legitimate charges and they can ruin your life. They can silence you, they can imprison you, they can ruin the lives of your children and your spouse, because that's just the way the system is now. So yeah, I think we should all be afraid. All Americans need to be vigilant against our own government. There is an issue where you find all the politicians getting it wrong. In mid-October, you wrote an article titled Why Do None of Our Politicians Understand Syria? In it, you write, one major complaint I had about the George W. Bush administration
[34:32] when I was a CIA officer was that I had never seen a president work so hard to not talk to other countries. Don't like Iraq, don't talk to Saddam Hussein just invade. Don't like the political positions of Western European countries, insult them as old Europe and court Eastern European countries in their place. When Washington has poor relations with other countries, that makes the CIA's job of collecting intelligence to inform policy harder. That failure to collect intelligence leads to poor analysis, which leads to poor policy decisions at the State Department and the White House.
[35:02] But don't poor relations win votes? Isn't negotiating with the enemy a loser at election time? And how much do vote-winning policies? How much does politics undermine good policy decisions? Well, you know, I would say that in a perfect world, good diplomacy ought to win elections. I mean, it was Nixon who went to China, right, in 72. It was Nixon who ordered negotiations with the North Vietnamese that essentially ended
[35:34] any chance that the Democrats had to have foreign policy as a campaign issue. Our problem is that this neo-conservative, or in the case of the Democrats, neoliberal, militarist foreign policy has become the norm. And so even people like John Kerry—I worked very closely with John Kerry for two and a half years. I got a receipt into John Kerry's thinking on foreign policy, and I remember coming home
[36:06] and telling my wife one day, the American people have no idea how conservative John Kerry is. He's no liberal. I saw it with my own eyes. Another problem with Kerry and with Clinton and with others of their ilk is that they always think that they are the smartest people in the room, and so they don't take advice from any of their advisors. Well, why have advisors if you're so smart that you know exactly the right thing to do? And then they act on their own. As a result, we have war in Syria.
[36:39] We have war in Iraq. We have war in Libya. We have chaos in Egypt. We have a never-ending war in Afghanistan and Pakistan. We're involved in a civil war in Yemen. And somehow we're supposed to think that this is what the State Department is supposed to do. It's just simply wrong. When you write about the Bush administration's shortcomings when it comes to foreign policy, you're right that I thought that would change when Barack Obama was elected president. After all, he had already won the Nobel Peace Prize, but under the leadership of Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, the State Department and American diplomatic policy have proven
[37:12] to be little more than extensions of what we had under George W. Bush. This is most clearly exemplified in U.S. policy towards Syria. Now, I know that you were talking about Jill Stein and Gary Johnson earlier, but how different would that situation be under a President Donald Trump? Oh, you just sent chills up my spine. Yeah, I think it would be, wow, I can't even believe I'm going to say this. I think it would be even worse, as if it could get any worse.
[37:44] What was it that Trump said, we need to bomb the crap out of him recently? He knows more about ISIS than the generals know. Yeah, I mean, look at Trump's foreign policy team. It's like besides John Bolton, who's an arch neocon, who are these people? I mean, I've been in Washington since 1982. I spent almost my entire adult life in intelligence, either living in or working on the Middle East. I know a single one of Donald Trump's foreign policy advisors, besides John Bolton, who I
[38:17] believe happens to be a war criminal. So yeah, I think things would be even worse under Trump. But things are going to be bad enough if Clinton wins, but even worse under Trump. Right, because you've been very critical of the potential appointment of Michael Morrell, who you used to work with in the CIA. What do you think that Michael Morrell, if he became the CIA director? If Hillary Clinton won the election, and one of her first announcements of her cabinet members was Michael Morrell as her CIA director, what would that tell us about the upcoming
[38:52] four years of Hillary Clinton as president? I think that that would be the clearest possible indication that absolutely nothing will change from the George W. Bush and Barack Obama intelligence policy. Mike Morrell was the executive director of the CIA, the number three ranking officer of the CIA under George W. Bush. Under Obama, he was the deputy director for intelligence, and then he was the deputy director of the whole CIA. This is something that many Americans forget, that at the sub-cabinet level, personnel
[39:25] really don't change over. So you have these people who came of age in senior leadership positions under George W. Bush, and then were promoted by Barack Obama. So now they've risen to the point where they're ready to join the cabinet under a president Hillary Clinton. I think this is an extraordinarily dangerous development, a very dangerous policy, and something that really needs to be looked at. But then that leads to another problem, and that's the problem of the utter lack
[39:56] of congressional oversight. You know, I say this all the time in speeches. Frank Church is dead. Otis Pike is dead. Ted Kennedy is dead. There's no real congressional oversight anymore. You have the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence that are supposed to be in charge of making sure that the CIA operates within the confines of the law. But instead what you have is those committees acting solely as cheerleaders for the CIA and literally letting them get away with murder.
[40:30] One of your criticisms as is many people's criticism of the Bush administration is that the rock war was politicized. So how much has war been depoliticized since the end of the Bush administration? And can it really be depoliticized? Is this something that more reflects a bigger cultural issue within intelligence? I do. I think that there's been this transition among the American populace where we just have come to expect war.
[41:00] It's just a normal thing for us to bomb other countries, to invade other countries, to send special forces into other countries. It's the norm now and it was never the norm even under presidents like Ronald Reagan or George H.W. Bush. So why does war win votes? You know, it makes us seem like we're tough. Americans tend to be jingoistic and these chants of USA, USA ring true for a lot of people.
[41:32] I think people like being the big boy on the block. And when they're not sending their own kids into battle to be killed for no apparent reason, I think it's an easy thing to do. We have been speaking with John Carriaco. He is co-chair with past guest Tom Drake of the Whistleblowers Public Education Campaign. You can find out more about that campaign by going to John's website, johncarriaco.com, where you can also purchase his book, Reluctant Spy, My Secret Life and the CIA's War on Terror. John, for every one of our guests, our final question is always the question from hell, the question we hate to ask.
[42:07] You might hate to answer our audience is going to hate your response. Our question from hell for you is, who do you think is more of a danger to the national security of the United States, Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump? Oh boy. And I have to pick one? Yes, that's why it's the question from hell. Oh jeez. Hillary Clinton. And I say that because I think Donald Trump is more likely to be impeached quickly. And removed from office.