[00:00] Plot Toe Radio
[00:30] Greetings, everyone. This is the Sound Health Option Show where Richard talked to me, Guy. And Sherry Edwards. Good morning, Sherry. Good morning, Richard. You usually ask me how I am. And so I'm just going to tell you without you asking. Thank you. After I read our guest book, I'm perfect. Exactly. I had the same like, things are not so bad. I feel great. Yeah, exactly.
[01:01] This author has written a very enlightening but good grief scary book. So we're going to have him on. He's absolutely intriguing. He's a CIA whistleblower. He's going to tell us how to get along in jail. And maybe he can tell us how to stay out of jail because from his book, I have learned that the government can put you in jail for anything they want. They make up stuff, and that's a scary part of it.
[01:33] And I woke up free this morning, so I'm happy. We are being sponsored by the Institute of Biocoustic Biology and Sound Health. That's the largest alternative health, I guess, institute in Ohio. We don't know what to call it. We are an institution. We're a research facility. We train doctors. We see clients.
[02:03] So look us up on the website, soundhealthoptions.com, and there's going to be lots of information about this show there under radio, but there's also a lot of videos about people we work with. So we invite you all to be part of the projects that we're doing. One of them is Fibromyalgia, and we are providing free Fibromyalgia evaluations for anyone who thinks they have Fibromyalgia or just for anybody who thinks
[02:35] they want to test themselves or see what it's all about. So go to soundhealthportal, P-O-R-T-A-L.com, and there's several projects up there. There's a nutrition one. We can test your nutrition every day. The one that we are looking at this week is the Fibromyalgia one. We're happy to do that as a public service for people. We are working on Leipedema. We'll have that up in a week or so. I have the database almost completed, and then by popular request
[03:09] from an international magazine, we are going to be decoding all of the pathogens associated with AIDS. That's a scary one, but we're going to be doing it. We are not simultaneously broadcasting. What other announcements that we just need to get out of the way? Oh, you have some skitter Twitter stuff you talk about, Richard. Yeah. This is one of those shows.
[03:40] I've read John's book, and John's story is amazing on so many levels that I know people are going to want to re-listen to this and or share this with their friends. You can do that easily. You can re-listen about 15 minutes after we end the show. It takes about that amount of time to render. You can go to soundhealthoptions.com, click on the Radio tab, and then click on Blog Talk Radio. The show replay link will be there. There's also a tab for Blog Talk Archives,
[04:12] and the player with the last five shows will be there. You can also go to any of your iTunes-like aggregators, podcast aggregators, depending upon what platform you run on, whether you like Stitcher, which is a free one, which is cross-platform, which is easy to not only listen to and follow shows you want to listen to, you can go to Stitcher, or iTunes, or Pocketcast, or Dogcatcher, or I could probably just do a show, you know, podcast player titles for an hour,
[04:43] and search for Shari Edwards and find just about 500 shows. I think we just peaked over 500 shows, so they're all there, and this one will be at the top of the list. And it's easy to do. Don't be afraid, everybody, especially Stitcher is free, so I recommend those highly. You have another announcement, Shari, I can tell. Yeah. I just looked at the stats for our show, Richard.
[05:13] We've had over a quarter of a million listeners. Does that just flabbergast you? I'm trying not to think about it. I can peek sort of at thinking about talking to maybe 10,000 people, but 250,000, that's like mind-blowing. I think it's because we are really for the public. We don't put a lot of commercials in here. We do this because we love it and we love our audience. And there's a chat, by the way, up on Blog Talk Radio. We're going to ask you to chime in and answer a question.
[05:45] But first I want to tell you that we have another two-day free class. We've been doing this for two years now. It's on May 11th and 12th, but we've changed the format somewhat. We used to charge $1,200 for this class, because that's how much all the computer equipment costs us. And now we've paid for the computer things. So if you pay us $300 to take this two-day course, we're going to provide you a microphone
[06:16] and five softwares that you can use for a year. If you take the free portion of it, you only get to use them for 30 days, then you have to start paying for them. And if you pay us the $300, which really pays our expenses, we're going to give that back to you when you take our larger class that is really designed for you to set up a biocoustic center in your community. Now, how many of you can take a free class?
[06:46] You have to buy a microphone if you don't pay us. And set up a business that you can make $30 to $50 an hour. So that's the incentive for all of you left-brained, entrepreneurial, money-making kind of people. But for the right-brained people, it's going to be your job to test your community and keep it in good working order because biocoustics is predictive.
[07:18] And even if it's helping you, helping somebody find the right job, that software is free, the Nano Voice, on our website. So we think you have a right to know about your own perceptions, the perceptions of others. We just did Donald Trump again. We just did his health issues. We just did Nunez and what his real intentions are about the intelligence community.
[07:49] So you can do that too, and that's all of these videos that Richard is talking about. They're all demos on how to use our software to look at pre-vaccination risk, to look at heart, to look at your eyes, to look at seizures, to look at Parkinson's. We just did a big Parkinson's project and most of the people coming in here that are diagnosed with Parkinson's or we don't have Parkinson's. The guy we just did last week really had tetanus.
[08:20] So that's the kind of thing that we can provide from our research facility. I think that is the last of my soapbox. Do you have any community announcements before we start with our very special guest, scary guest? John is not actually scary, although he could be considering his training.
[08:51] I think he could probably be fiercely scary. I do have actually, this is in the world community, I've been trying to have more positive actions that are happening in the world, whether it be, and this is of course environmental again. This is about a, the title of the article is, Colombian community resistance defeats mining giant and the company will leave the country. So a group of people in Colombia voted, got together, and they voted to ban this mining operation
[09:23] that wanted to come and, you know, pillage their area. And they actually got together as a group, about 10,000 people, and forced this giant beast of the mining company that was going to come shred their world for gold to end, you know, 14 years of exploration. I mean, they actually got together and got organized and voted and convinced the government. And now this group, they say, they'll, we're not through working up, you know, all that kind of stuff.
[09:53] But currently they're banned. That's the bottom line. You know, I'm seeing more of this kind of action happening. We just had the big, you know, March protest on Saturday, we've had Earth Day, solar energy is coming up, you know, there are things where we're really getting together, not just in the United States, but in other locations, and saying, look, no, you're not, no, taking back our power. It's an amazing thing. And for me, it fits right in with what Sherry's talking about,
[10:24] with something like the NanoVoice. It's an amazing piece of software that we can use to take our power back so that we're not relying on someone else. When we need them, they can be there, but we can actually begin to take care of ourselves, just like this group in Columbia kicked out this mining operation. We can use NanoVoice to really take care of our own health and manage things in a way that, you know, really look like, oh, that's something weird. I should look into that ourselves.
[10:54] We don't have to go to somebody. We can actually begin to take care of ourselves. And our planet, dammit. Okay. Yeah, and who's buying and who's spin? Yeah. We, the people, that's where we're coming from. I think one of the most fantastic things that we've done here at the center is to put out a software that will test people from Fukushima radiation and what to do about it nutritionally and all of that on our website under downloads for free. And Richard helped us put that one together.
[11:26] That was a great experience or experience. At first it was an experiment. When Fukushima happened, Sherri said, would you be willing to try the software that she'd put together? And I would take a vocal print every morning, meaning just a recording of my voice and run it through the software. Or send it actually in the very early stages and send it to Sherri and she would run it through the software. And she would give me back a report that would show what was elevated where let's say cesium was elevated or one of the other radioactive materials
[11:57] because I live in the Pacific Northwest and we were getting exposed first. And I would then, at that time, there was a chart that showed me supplements or foods that I could take that would help counterbalance that. And then I would test myself or send Sherri my vocal print about an hour after I did that and see if I needed to do more. And it was so empowering to be able to have that, not be freaking out. I mean, I was freaking out anyway. But I mean, to have that as a tool,
[12:27] it's, you know, having like, then back to the NanoVoice, I mean, having the NanoVoice on your computer, it's an amazing thing. And those are free for you to download and use. And there's textbooks there and information and videos. That's another public service from the Institute of Bioglucic Biology. Okay, we're ready for this adventure, Sherri. Yeah, I was gonna give a survey question, but I think I'll wait. Okay, okay.
[13:00] Our guest today is John Carriaco, Carriaco. On February 28th, 2013, after pleading guilty to violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, I didn't know that was an act, John Carriaco began serving a 30 month prison sentence. His crime, blowing the whistle on the CIA's use of torture on al-Qaeda prisoners. Doing Time Like a Spy is Carriaco's memoirs of his 23 months in prison. Using 20 life skills he learned
[13:30] in the CIA operational training, he was able to keep himself safe and at the top of the prison's social heap. Including his award-winning blog series, Letters from Loretto, Doing Time Like a Spy is at once a serene journal of daily prison life and an alternately funny and heartbreaking commentary on the federal prison system. And that's all true. I read the book. It's like, it is everything that really is an amazing thing. And I'm gonna read just a brief quote off of John's website, johncarriaco.com.
[14:04] The title of this is A Badge of Honor. I am wearing my conviction as a badge of honor. I am proud that I stood up to our government. I stood up for what I believed was right, conviction or no conviction. I am not a criminal. I'm a whistleblower. The thing that blew the whistle on is now law of the land. Torture is illegal and it's officially abandoned in our country and I'm proud to have had a role in that. John Carriaco. Good morning, John. Good morning. Thanks so much for having me.
[14:37] I loved your book. It was so enlightening and scary and funny all at the same time. Thank you so much. There are people who are having difficulty with this name. K-I-R-I-A-K-O-O. Is that how you- O-U. Yeah, even I can't get it right. So if they're going to go to your site, then it's just John Carriaco. K-O-U at the end. A-K-I-R-I-A-K-O-U.
[15:09] And there are some commentaries there and even in the book that are so heartfelt but scary. And one of the things, the most memorable thing in your book to me was this man that they went after and he refused to testify. So they threatened his grandmother and his son because they lived in the same house
[15:42] and made him bow down by threatening his family. How would you tell that story and how often is that used? Oh yes, to answer your second question first, this is used every single day in the American judicial system. And this is part of the reason why the federal government wins 98.2% of its cases according to ProPublica. But this was a cellmate of mine who to make a long story short
[16:15] had inadvertently accessed a secure government database. When I say inadvertently, I mean because he had won a government contract but his personnel officer had forgotten to put him on the security list. But when he called to get the password, he was given the password. So they charged him with unauthorized access to a secure database, which is a felony, believe it or not. Well, he said, listen, this was a mistake.
[16:46] I thought my security officer had put me on the contract. It was an oversight. And I didn't do anything wrong. They said, well, we're offering you nine months in prison. You're in, you're out, you never do it again. And he said, no, because if he took a guilty plea, he would lose his security clearance and really lose his ability to make a living. Well, he so angered them by not taking a plea that they started digging into his past.
[17:16] And what they found was that he and his wife had gone to a car dealership a couple of years before because his wife needed a new car. She picked the car she wanted. She wanted it in a different color. So instead of buying it off the lot, they ordered it. In the meantime, he and his wife owned a home in England. She was British. And so she went back to England to get the house ready for the summer. In the meantime, the car dealer calls his name is Dave and says, your car's ready.
[17:47] He goes to pick it up. He signs the contract. They said, where's your wife? She needs to sign the contract too. He said, she's in England. The dealer said, that's okay. Just sign her name here. So he signed her name. So they charged him with one count of mail, I'm sorry, of wire fraud for signing his wife's name and two counts of aggravated identity theft. And then because the car came with a $1,500 rebate, they also charged him with wire fraud. So he had been looking at nine months in prison.
[18:21] He ended up taking a plea to nine years and four months in prison because they said, finally he kept refusing a deal. I didn't do anything wrong. So finally they said, well, your grandmother and your 16 year old daughter were in the house when you access the database. We're gonna charge them with being accomplices to accessing the database and we'll charge them with conspiracy if you don't take a plea. And so he took a plea. And that's how our government works.
[18:52] They do these two other things. One is called charge stacking. Let's say maybe you really do something wrong. You really do commit a crime. Instead of just charging you with that crime, they'll charge you with five, 10 felonies, right? And they'll add conspiracy and making a false statement and wire fraud and mail fraud and all these what are called throw away charges. And then they'll make you defend yourself. And after you finally go bankrupt,
[19:23] because believe me, you're gonna go bankrupt having to defend yourself against all these charges. They'll come to you and they'll say, all right, we wanna offer you a deal. We'll dismiss all of the charges but one, if you take a guilty plea. Well, of course you're gonna take a guilty plea because if you go to trial, yeah, you know, juries in this country, they're gonna find a baloney sandwich guilty. So, do you take the deal? Or do you risk winning, you know, knowing that you have a 1.8% chance of winning
[19:54] and if you lose, you're gonna spend 20, 30, 40 years in prison. That's charged. Another thing they do is called venue shopping. In my case, and in the cases of other whistleblowers like Jeffrey Sterling, for example, from the CIA, or even Edward Snowden, we're all charged in the Eastern District of Virginia. You don't even have to ever have been in the Eastern District of Virginia. But the Eastern District of Virginia is known as the Espionage Court, because no national security defendant has ever won a case there.
[20:25] And so that's where they charge all the national security cases. If there's a judge, for example, who's particularly tough on bank robbers, they'll charge you with bank robbery in his or her district. So that's venue shopping. They charge you in the district where they know they're going to get a guilty verdict and they know they're going to get the stiffest sentence. And that's not justice. That's politics. Wow.
[20:56] I read that. I read that part and it blew my mind then, and here you spell it out. It's like just appalling. But I want to redirect slightly for people who aren't familiar with your story. What was your journey to becoming a counterterrorism expert? I mean, from that story, you sound like a whistleblower, and I mean that in the most positive of ways. But you really went in and were dedicated to the CIA and highly trained, I mean like highly
[21:29] trained. Highly trained. You sound like a really nice, easy going guy. Let's have a beer. But I mean... Yeah, that's all part of the job. You have to love people and you have to love being around people. Even bad people, because your job is to recruit spies to steal secrets. And then to use those secrets so that the CIA and analysts can analyze them and provide the policymakers with the top finished intelligence possible. So you really have to ingratiate yourself with people to get them to trust you and to like
[22:04] you to the point where they're willing to commit treason for you in some cases or to commit espionage for you. Wow. And did you... Were you always inclined this way? I mean were you affable before you got into being trained by the CIA? Were you always this personality and they just took advantage of it? Oh yeah. I like to think my personality hasn't changed. I really do love being around people. I love talking to people. I draw strength from being in groups of people. I've always loved it.
[22:34] When I was in graduate school, I went to George Washington University in Washington D.C. for both my undergrad and graduate degrees. I got a bachelor's degree in Middle Eastern studies and then I stated GW to work on a master's degree in legislative affairs but with a focus on foreign policy analysis. And I was taking a class called the psychology of leadership. And it was being taught by an eminent psychiatrist who's still around in practicing Dr. Gerald Post. He had a PhD in political science, a PhD in psychology and an MD.
[23:07] And he assigned us a fascinating paper one day. We were supposed to shadow our bosses and write a psychological profile on our bosses. At the time I was working for a labor union, the United Food and Commercial Workers Union at their international headquarters here in Washington. And I worked for a guy who I was a little bit afraid of. He was one of these old school union organizers. He had had his back broken during a strike one time, just a big, mean, tough guy.
[23:42] And we didn't necessarily get along very well. He wasn't really my cup of tea, but I was shadowing him for the week. And then halfway through the week, we had an argument. And I called him a racist, which he was. And he got so angry, his face got red and he bawled up his fist. And I remember putting my hands up and recoiling a little because I thought, well, for sure here it comes, he's going to punch me. And instead he exploded and he shouted, my penis is bigger than yours.
[24:15] And I said, you're nuts, and I quit, and I walked out. And I wrote my paper and I did not say in the paper that I had quit, but I said that my conclusion was that he was a sociopath with psychopathic tendencies and he was potentially violent. So a week later, I get the paper back. And my professor had written a note in the column. He gave me an A and he wrote, I've never done this before, but I urge you to quit this job. I agree with your assessment that your boss is a sociopath with psychopathic and violent
[24:48] tendencies. Please see me after class. So I went up to him after class and I said, Dr. Post, did you want to see me? Yes, he says, come to my office. So I go to the office, he closes the door and he says, look, I'm not really a professor here. I'm a CIA officer undercover as a professor here. And I'm looking for people who might fit into the CIA's culture. I think you would fit into the CIA's culture. Would you like to work for the CIA? Now of course, that's illegal today.
[25:18] We have equal employment opportunity laws in this country. But this is the proverbial old boy network. And I said, yeah, I'd love to work for the CIA. And so I started going through the motions of a battery of tests, written, psychological, medical, polygraph, comprehensive background investigation. And eight months later, I was working at the CIA. Wow.
[25:48] And what happened to the legislative part? Is that sort of, do you think that's part of your background too? I mean, you have, you seem, and from your story, we will get into talking about prison. But I mean, you seem like a kind of a rabble-rousing organizer, even though you have this affable, you know, nice guy, but I mean, you do have that undertone of, you know, you seem like you want to be a changemaker and have people pay attention to truth. Well, my wife says that I never saw a bridge I didn't want to burn, which I think is
[26:18] not entirely fair. But you know, the older I get, I do tend to see more things in terms of black and white, sure. At the CIA, we're taught that everything is a shade of gray. And I've concluded that that's just simply not true. Some things are right and wrong. And in my case, torture was wrong. It was wrong. It was illegal. And it was morally and ethically wrong. And I decided to take a stand on it. And when did torture float up into your view?
[26:53] I mean, how did that become, again, for the backstory for people, this was part of, you know, this is why you went to jail was because they, as I will say, you'll have different ways of saying it, you know, they came after you for like disclosing this information about torture that you had a position. When did that float into your view and why and why did you take such a strong position? Well, in the aftermath of the 9-11 attacks, I became the CIA's chief of counterterrorism operations in Pakistan.
[27:25] And in that job, I led a series of raids in March of 2002 that resulted in the capture of Abu Zubaydah. And I'm not allowed to say the number, but many dozens of al-Qaeda fighters. Abu Zubaydah, we believed at the time, was the number three in al-Qaeda. And this was the highest-ranking terrorist capture that we had ever made to that point. So I finished that tour in the early summer of 2002. I went back to headquarters and a senior officer in the CIA's Counterterrorism
[27:57] Center asked me if I wanted to be what he called certified in the use of enhanced interrogation techniques. I had never heard the term before. So I asked him what he meant. He explained what these techniques were. And I said, wow, I said, that sounds like a torture program to me. I don't think I'm interested. But let me think about it for an hour. So I went up to the CIA's executive floor, the seventh floor. And there was a very, very senior CIA officer for whom I had worked in the Middle East about a decade earlier. And I went to ask him his advice.
[28:29] And he said, first, this is a torture program. They can use whatever euphemism they want, but this is a torture program. Secondly, torture is a slippery slope. And you know how some of these guys are. Somebody's going to go overboard and they're going to kill a prisoner. And when that happens, there's going to be a congressional investigation, and then there's going to be a justice department investigation. And somebody's going to go to prison. Do you want to go to prison? And I said, no, I don't want to go to prison. As things turned out, I was the only one who went to prison. But I said, no, no, I don't want to go to prison.
[29:00] So I went back downstairs and I told the counterterrorism officer, this is a torture program. I'm not interested. Well, it turned out they had asked 14 people if they wanted to go through the training. And I was the only one who said no. So that was in June of 2002. On the 1st of August 2002, we started torturing Abu Zubaydah at a secret prison overseas. And I kept my mouth shut. I kept my mouth shut from 2002 until December of 2007.
[29:34] And then finally, Brian Ross of ABC News asked me to answer some questions. He said he had a source who said that I had tortured Abu Zubaydah. I said that was absolutely untrue. I was the only person who was kind to Abu Zubaydah and never tortured him or any other al-Qaeda prisoner ever. And he said, well, and this is an old reporter's trick, he said, well, you're welcome to come on the show and defend and yourself in the meantime president bush gave a press conference at that very same week
[30:06] in which he looked right into the camera and he said we do not torture and i knew that that was a lie that was a bald-faced lie and then later in the week in response to a reporter's question he said well if there is torture it's the result of a rogue cia officer and i said to my wife brian ross's sources at the white house and they're going to try to pin this on me and i decided that i would do that interview and that whatever he asked me i was going to tell the truth i believe that that program was wrong
[30:37] and it was illegal and i was going to tell the truth and i did well within twenty four hours the fb i started investigating me and they investigated me for a full year and then in december two thousand uh... they closed the case and said that i had not committed a crime what i did not know was that three weeks later when president obama was inaugurated the cia asked the justice department to reopen the case against me secretly and um... and they did and they investigated me for another three years
[31:12] and then they finally charged me with five felonies uh... in january of two thousand twelve wow uh... you you've also talked about a difference in uh... i'll call it style but that seems so bad when we're talking about torture and or interrogation is there a difference in style between that lean toward torture in the cia verses how the fb i only yet
[31:43] you know interrogate them at a different yet talk about that would you please you bet the fb i uh... has been doing custodial interrogation since the end of the second world war uh... but i mean they've been doing them since the twenty's but they've been doing them in a certain style since the end of the second world war when they were uh... interrogating uh... nazi prisoners of war and this style is actually quite simple it's that you you sit across the table from your prisoner you establish
[32:16] uh... rapport with him or a relationship maybe you are from a cigarette or a piece of fruit or you ask him how his family's doing and although this may be time-consuming over a period of time he's going to eventually open up to you and the fb i and they've done this for generations the fb i is actually very successful in getting people to talk this way well at the cia we had no uh... history in interrogation and uh... we subscribed at the time to the ticking time bomb
[32:50] uh... theory something terrible is going to happen and the clock is ticking and we really need to get the information to disrupt the next attack george tenet who was the cia director at the time convinced president uh... george w bush to remove the fb i from the secret prison location and to turn up with the beta interrogation over to the cia president bush did that and within hours we began torturing him he immediately clamped up and gave up no actionable intelligence
[33:22] nothing the actionable intelligence that i was a bit of provided he provided to the fb i before the torture started it was an utter failure and uh... it leaves me slightly speechless don't they understand that i mean what why is there still the sort of the the thuggery attitude that torture works demonstrates that it doesn't and you also talk to in the book about
[33:54] also when you're torturing somebody or somebody being tortured they'll say anything any so they could be doing out any kind of information they could be residing the alphabet they could be giving all sorts of names they're just saying that you can get the torture job yeah yes and then you're gonna have to tie up a team of analysts to pour through all this nonsensical information to see what's true what's fault and what actionable so you actually waste more time by torturing the printer
[34:26] he i think all the time to the reason why there's still this drumbeat from former cia officers at the very highest levels who were involved in the torture program is because this is their legacy i mean these are these are men and women who have devoted their entire adult life to the cia into the national security and they made this one terrible mistake by implementing the torture program because it's their legacy they have to double down when when their obituaries are written their obituaries are going to say that they were responsible for this
[34:58] abomination in policy and so they have to double down and keep repeating the lie that it worked over and over and over again to try to convince the american people that it's true also you've committed to their it's like lying you have to commit to the line once you're enrolled in the story of the lie you have to keep perpetuating the lie to a certain extent can you imagine a former cia director saying you know what it was a mistake my bad i'm sorry
[35:28] now i i mean i don't never happen never ever happen i can imagine anybody in government actually saying that all my bad i made a mistake but along that's not happening um... so let let's talk about let's talk about your jail time haha oh my god your jail time it's an amazing i can't wait until it turns into a tv series i don't know if it actually could it's pretty from your lips to god's ears pretty i mean it's really an amazing
[35:58] you do have a uh... a dark sense of humor i guess i would call it because it is i mean the the thing about how the book is how you talk about it is it you describe it so well because of your training that's why i really want to talk a bit about your training because you really describe people so well because you've been trained to observe people i mean like you said you're pretty you you like people to begin with you like hanging out with people but i think you didn't think during any of your training that you end up
[36:29] jail in jail time using the certainly not and you know in in my sentencing my attorney's asked the judge to send me to a minimum security work camp and the judge agreed and the prosecutors agreed and so in a minimum security work camp there are no bars on the windows the doors are not locked you can work in town and you're kind of on your honor to not have scondi you know you're supposed to come back and make sure you sleep there in your bunk uh... so when i got to the prison
[37:00] i turned myself in i you literally just go knock on the door and say hi i'm john kiriyako here to turn myself in and so uh... the corrections officer c o starts uh... leading me back around to the back of the actual prison which is across the street from the camp and i said no no i'm supposed to be at the uh... at the camp and he laughed and he said not according to my paperwork you're not so i told myself just take it easy there's nothing you can do if you make a scene you're going to go to solitary
[37:31] so i just tried to relax and five days later i got access to a telephone and i called my lawyer and i said hey they put me in the actual prison with the pedophiles and the murderers in the drug kingpins and he said oh my god i'm sorry he said well we can file a motion but it'll be two years before we get a hearing and you'll be home by then he said i'm sorry buddy you're gonna have to tough it out and so i decided that day that i was going to rely on my cia training and make sure that i could protect myself
[38:02] and so that's what i did wow you're going to have to tough it out well not what i know what i wanted to hear will be done this is not how we think of you know in the movie this is not how the legal system works you don't have your attorney say oh you're gonna have to shut that out get back you know see in three you know thirty months and i you know i figured out later how how it happened why it happened i found a freedom of information act request on myself and they sent me back two hundred and fifty five pages and almost all of it was
[38:33] just nonsense it was my medical records and my visitors list and just silly stuff but there were eight pages in there that were clearly stamped at the top and bottom for a exempt do not release to inmate either somebody was really bad at their jobs in the foyer office at the bureau of prisons or someone felt sorry for me and stuck it in there just so i could get to the bottom of this and um... there was one the page that had
[39:03] these huge block letters and it says caution inmate has access to the media and i thought well that's what it was that's what it was and then there was another one it was a memo from the warden to all the guards telling them to be especially careful around me because um... i was so highly trained and i had ready access to the press and they wanted to keep me away from the press well the irony of that is if they had sent me to the camp
[39:35] i would have minded my own business i would have kept my mouth shut kept my head down i would have done my twenty three months i would have gone home because they screwed me and stuck me in the prison i was determined to tell my story and so that's exactly what i did wow and and i mean that is... let's uh... you know spend time talking about the prison time because that's really amazing i hadn't even thought about that angle after
[40:06] adding that in is really true that they pissed you off i mean they put you up with enough wanted to be pissed off you know what it was it was energizing it gave me something to look forward to uh... the the worst thing about prison i mean besides the obvious the violence and the loneliness uh... it's the boredom it's it's groundhog day every single day you get up you eat you you know watch tv you walk around the track that there's nothing to do and and people actually go crazy
[40:37] i read a study saying that eighty five percent of people in american prisons suffer from some kind of mental illness and that's certainly exacerbated once you're inside so you know you have to keep yourself from going crazy well one of my attorneys asked me before i went in i would write an open letter to my supporters there was something like six hundred people who had signed up for uh... an email list uh... saying that they just wanted to hear how i was doing so she said when you feel comfortable
[41:08] write a letter i'll scan it and send it around to the email list and i said okay and i waited about six weeks before i did that eight weeks maybe uh... and so i wrote it and and i included two things in this letter which i called a letter from loretto uh... two things that i had no idea really how important they were when i was writing them in fact i was exposing a federal crime that had been committed against me by two of the guards
[41:38] uh... i just figured well i'm in prison there's nothing i can do the guards are going to mess with me this is just prison life well in fact they had committed this this crime so i i wrote this letter and i sent it to my attorney she gave it to jane ham sure who was maintaining the list jane ran a website called uh... fire dog lake dot com well i didn't realize that jane was close friends with ariana huffington and when she received it she sent the the uh... the letter to ariana and ariana put it on the
[42:09] on the uh... huffington post and it went completely crazy i ended up getting more than a million hits with that first letter and the warden ended up getting requests from cnn msnbc sixty minutes the bbc and then the newspapers began calling and by the end of the week it was in the magazines it was in the economist and playboy and and the atlantic monthly in time magazine and so i established myself right off the bat as the enemy of the prison administration
[42:42] i had far more trouble with the the guards and the prison administrators than i did with other prisoners isn't that a major talk about that somewhat i i was going to ask you about that was there were you actually uh... i don't think you were ever afraid i mean your you're kind of a big guy to begin with our church at six something okay you're already physically one of the yep yet you've been physically imposing and that you're trained
[43:13] to do bad things but that's all i'm gonna say you're really trained point and that with that first time i was called into the cops office i had been in prison for like five days night i've been told to dread being called to the lieutenant's office and i was on the track walking around the track with the with a guy and i hear my name kiri aku report to the lieutenant's office and i i thought oh my gosh i haven't done anything but i gave very quickly i gave this guy my home phone number and i said if i'm not back in fifteen minutes call
[43:43] my wife and tell her i'm in solitary so i went to the lieutenant's office i walk in there and they've got uh... a copy of my book on the desk and they have copies of dvd that i've appeared in documentaries that i've appeared in on the desk and they have uh... another prisoners photograph up on one of the computer screens so one of the cops says uh... you know this guy and i said i don't know him i met him last night and he said would you say to him and i said well we were speaking in arabic and i said uh... tashara
[44:16] but if that gets nice to meet you but what did he say to you i said he said that i should have been with that guy and it's nice to meet you too and then what i said then i walked away well after you uh... met this guy he called a number in pakistan and they told him to kill you and i said come on i said i could kill this guy with my thumb well now don't do that the cop says uh... we've been looking for a reason to ship him out he's the uncle of the time square bomber
[44:48] and i said oh okay i said all right okay thanks for the heads up i left so every time i passed this guy in the hall i'd give him the stink guy and he'd give me the stink guy but the more i thought about this the less sense this made the the the time square bomber and the uncle of the time square bomber were pakistani and pakistanis don't speak arabic and this guy was an iraqi curd and only spoke arabic so that didn't make any sense to me and uh... i thought well why wouldn't iraqi curd call a number in pakistan that
[45:20] doesn't make any sense either he would call a number in iraq or in an arab country so finally i saw him outside and i i approached him i put my hands up this just to show that i didn't mean him any harm and i i said hey uh... let me ask you a question after we met did the cops say anything to you about me and they said yeah he said they they told me that after we met you called a number in washington and they told you to kill me so i told him well they told me that you called a number in pakistan and they told you to kill me
[45:54] and we kind of laughed about what ham-handed moron these two were i went to the law library and i looked this up and this is a federal crime it's a class d felony it's conspiracy to incite violence in a federal facility so i wrote this up in the first letter from loretto well the the warden finally approached me when the thing went viral and he promised me that he would do an investigation but in fact the investigation was of me and how i got access to the press
[46:24] and so what they did is they began monitoring every single one of my phone calls for the rest of the time i was in prison they monitored my incoming and outgoing mail they they deployed rats they transferred rats into my my cell to uh... to rat me out to to tip off the cops when i was planning to uh... to do another letter from loretto uh... and they put a five-day delay on my emails coming in and out so they could monitor all of it
[46:55] but it all that it was energized me i never gave up at what point when did you click into the c a a mode meaning uh... you talk about things being operational thinking and talk about operational thinking and and when did that click in for you were you in shock when you went to jail oh yeah i thought you were shocked but when did it when did your sort of like go back when did you this light switch go on and you moved into operational mode and what is that
[47:27] it took me about a week before i got into operational mode what anytime somebody goes to prison you're in shock uh... at least for the first couple weeks you you can't believe that you're there it's just such a completely alien place and and alien state of mind and i you know with prisons the last place i ever expected to find myself for the first week i was pretty well in shock and i told myself on the very first day just to keep a low-profile don't talk to anybody get the lay of the land
[47:59] well when i was being processed in the only thing that the cop said to me was was uh... if someone enters your cell uninvited that's an act of aggression sure enough i'm in prison for something like two hours and to neo-nazis walk into my room one has an enormous swastika that takes up the entire front half of his neck and i jump up and i put my fist up and i said what do you want and the big one says take it easy are you the new guy i said yeah
[48:30] he said uh... are you a fag i said are you a rat i said no i didn't have anybody in my case are you a chomo i said i don't know what that word means he goes chomo child molester i said no i'm not a child molester and he said okay just give us a copy of your paperwork and you can sit with the area in the cafeteria and i thought uh... my god okay well i guess i'm with the area
[49:00] and then about five days later two members of the nation of islam walked into my cell and again i jumped up and put my fist up and one of them like very gingerly hands me a newspaper it was the nation of islam newspaper and um... he said just wanted to tell you that reverend fair con says you're a hero of the muslim people and you're not going to have any trouble with us and i said oh okay i have the area i have the nation of islam
[49:31] and four of my cellmates when i first got there were members of various mexican drug gangs very violent murderous mexican drug gangs and i helped one of them right in appeal and so he put out the word to the mexicans that uh... that i was okay so i knew that i didn't i knew early on that i i wasn't gonna have to deal with violence and so with that aside i decided to uh... to start thinking about myself and my own my own comfort and when did you you tell some amazing stories about how you you
[50:10] profiled people so you took your skills you know it seems like your skills are getting to you know float to the top once you got through the shock and you profiled people and in a tell but you know without any of the bad words because there are some bad words in this book I'm warning you yeah yeah I told my kids they're not allowed to read it we're not kidding around we're in jail and so you set up an officer a mean CO you know and so you profiled that person and you know tell that story that I mean because that really shows you know a combination of
[50:42] training and and you know thinking which I think is this operational mode that you go through the process of really learning the deal her deal and then setting her up you know with harm to none I mean no actual harm but I mean you like moved her it's an amazing yeah I got her transferred actually am I allowed to swear on this show or no not so much okay so I'm yeah thank you the language is very blue I won't I won't use the language you can read it in the
[51:13] book there was a there was a female CO about my age I'm 52 now who was in my housing unit and I say in the book this this woman had a look you you may have heard people describe some women as as having been ridden hard and put away wet and that's how this woman looked she was just she was just ragged and covered in tattoos poorly done tattoos and she was just a bitter angry three time
[51:45] divorced mean mean person so so she was in charge of the afternoon shift in my housing unit and she would do mail call every day at four o'clock she could never pronounce my name she would butcher it and I think it was on purpose she did it just to be disrespectful and to try to humble me so finally I was walking to dinner one night and she stops me and she says are you the MF her
[52:17] whose name I can't pronounce and I said karaoke and she says how about if I just call you F face and I walked away and the guy I was walking with said classy and I said white trash is more like it but she heard me call her white trash and so after dinner she and another CEO shook me down not just me but everybody in my cell they threw our food all over the floor they threw the
[52:49] pictures I had of my children stepped on them clothes everywhere and that was my very first shakedown and I wrote about this in in my first letter from Loretto this is one of the two incidents with the other being the Pakistani you know Iraqi Kurd and so when this appeared in the Huffington Post and went viral I'm called again to the lieutenant's office and they said that
[53:21] they needed to take a statement from me so I said okay I'll give you a statement well what happened when she called you these names so I told them the story well in fact in the days before being called to the lieutenant's office I had gone back down to the law library I was a regular down there and I looked up the regulations the internal Bureau of Prisons regulations on abusive language and it is clearly clearly prohibited for corrections officers to speak to prisoners that way the first offense is a warning the
[53:54] second offense is 14 days without paying the third offense is firing so so I put my right hand in the air and I swore to tell the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth and I laid out the entire story well pending investigation they transferred her to a Jeep outside the compound where her job for the next six months was just to drive in these giant circles around the compound and make sure nobody was trying to escape so I got some real
[54:25] satisfaction for six months that enraged her and we had a couple of confrontations in the months that followed but I got right back into her face and told her I'm not afraid of you you can't do anything to me you can't hurt me they're watching you more than they're watching me and she backed down each and every time well I'd like to go ahead Jerry I want to ask a question that's better left at
[54:56] the end but we only have six minutes so we may go over you want to go ahead Richard I was just gonna say you know there's a number of stories I mean so was there anybody in your jail time that you actually were afraid of or feared for your life that's a really good question um no there were there were people who were incredibly dangerous I tell one story about a about a man who was
[55:32] probably a serial killer of of prostitutes in in the West they couldn't get him on the on the murders so they got him on multiple rape charges instead this was in the days before DNA he had done 20 years and then they gave him another 20 on on gun charges fell in with the gun charges so altogether he got 40 years although they couldn't they just couldn't nail him on these multiple murders out in Colorado he was a psychopath and a very dangerous and
[56:06] violent one and yeah I always sort of slept with one eye open when he was around there were a couple of contract killers that I came into a contact with and it wasn't very friendly contact but you know I I ended up cultivating a very close relationship with the Italians in prison and when I say the Italians I mean Italians named Gambino, Colombo, Lucchese, Bonanno and we had a really great relationship I consider myself still to be friends with
[56:39] them once I became a part of that Italian community everybody else in the place knew it was hands-off. So that's advice for anybody coming into prison? Oh the easy answer to that is yeah read this book you know this doesn't have to be the nightmare that you think it might be be true to yourself take care of yourself think about yourself make strategic relationships
[57:10] and otherwise keep your mouth shut. There's a lot of good advice for anybody doing something they think they might be put through the system about there's great advice in here but I have a question that I don't exactly know how to put but when you talk about this what I get from your voice is this is something over here removed that you're going to use for a purpose like the
[57:40] story happened to you but it's not relating to you now so have you let go of that past and you see it as something that you're going to use to get through are you moving forward what's happening to you? Yeah you know I feel like I've put this all behind me this was this was an aberration in my life and writing about it and and talking about it has been therapeutic so yeah I you know so many people come out of prison with post traumatic stress
[58:13] disorder and I don't feel like I have any of that I it almost feels like a dream like it really didn't happen to me so I think that's I think that's healthy yeah I have moved on as soon as I got out I was hired by a think tank here in Washington to write about counterterrorism issues intelligence reform and most importantly prison reform I've got a syndicated weekly column that runs on readersupportednews.org and most importantly I've been able to
[58:43] parlay many of these stories into television options I've sold three TV series in Hollywood in the two years since I've been home they're in various stages of development but I think that's really what my future is television that explains what I'm hearing out of your voice I want everybody to know that your book is coming out May 11th they can pre-order on probably any of the big guys Amazon Barnes & Noble do you have a website that you want people to
[59:19] know about and how sure I can think that's what yeah it's a it's www.JohnKiriaku.com it's J-O-H-N-K-I-R-I-A-K-O-U.com and let me make one correction the book is coming out on May 16th but yes it's a it's on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and Target and all these other sites it's doing time like a spy how the CIA taught
[59:49] me to survive and thrive in prison well I love the book because what we do here is being threatened and given people freedom about their health. So it relieved me a lot of what I may expect and how I can counter it. The book is so clever in how you countered some of the things that people were trying on you. So it's fascinating, it's entertaining,
[1:00:21] it's enlightening, it's scary, but it is also a relief to read your book. Thank you very much for that. It means a lot to me. Thank you. Well, it's such an interesting training manual. I mean, who would have thought that a story about being in prison would give so many, I mean, yes, I mean, you paint amazing characters. Back to what I said at the very beginning, you know, I can see it as a TV series, because you paint really great
[1:00:54] profiled pictures of people, and I use profiled intentionally. But I mean, you really give great descriptions of characters and peoples and how to work with them and handle them and work around them and, you know, to really, I mean, yes, you're a big physically imposing guy. However, you really don't get into physical confront very much. It's more like you really go in looking at, oh, he knows him, and there, you know, I mean, you really are observing and from that observational position, you choose your actions. And it's a really
[1:01:29] great, I think it's a great training manual on a certain weird way. I think it's very, very good. Thank you very much. Thank you. I wouldn't have thought. I'm very pleased that you enjoyed it. Very, very happy that you enjoyed it. You know, about halfway through, I'm thinking, oh my God, we're going to hear about some other setup. I mean, guys with knives coming at you and the thing and the stuff and the, oh my God, and now we're doing this and, you know, wow. But as you back up and you, you know, in the context of the story, there is, as Sherry just said,
[1:02:02] there's a lot of great information on the how to of dealing with, you know, a bureaucracy. That bureaucracy happens to be prison. But it's, you know, it's a very good story. I recommend it highly. Thank you. Oh, I appreciate it very much. Okay. I can't believe we're out of time. Wow. That went fast. Yikes. Any other closing thoughts, Sherry? I'm good. I'm full. Right. I feel like I need a little piece of angel cake or something light
[1:02:36] and friendly because it's a great story, but it's not for the, you know, faint of heart. I mean, there is, you know, blue language in here and it's, it's prison life. I mean, it's serious. I had in other worlds in the restaurant business, I'd work with a number of ex inmates and they all not nearly as articulately as this, but really painted a picture of, it is a thing you're going into a world you won't believe that is developed as it is. And a lot of guys come out with that same and women that I've known
[1:03:08] come out with that same thing that really it's the guards and the COs that are almost scarier than the people you're in with. It's really, it's an amazing world and it's a great story of it. So thank you so much, John. That was great. Thank you so much for having me. My pleasure. You bet. All right, everybody. We'll see you on Tuesday and we're talking about something I can't remember as we all know. All right, everybody. Have a great rest of the weekend. Thanks. Bye-bye.
[1:03:38] Later. You