[00:03] [Music] hello everyone I'm Martin Willis your host and I'm really excited about tonight's guest on the everything else show it's John kako and uh he uh he was a a former CIA officer former
[00:35] senior investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a former counterterrorism consultant for ABC News basically what happened is uh he went to prison for 23 months uh basically on I think trumped up charges uh no pun intended and uh we're going to be talking about that um but he was charged at one point with Espionage which is a crazy uh law stemming all the way back
[01:06] from World War I um that is on the books and uh I think abused and um so some of you may think this is a controversial show um but U it's stuff I want to talk about so dagnabit I'm going to talk about it and how you doing John welcome to the show I'm doing well Martin thanks for having me and uh I actually watched a great show that you were in it was called silenced a documentary and I remember um that's when I first contacted you and you were nice enough
[01:38] to actually get back in touch with me and I I thought that was great and what a excellent movie I suggest anyone uh that's interested in this topic watch that um thank you you know what it's still available on Netflix even though it's been out for four years now it's still on Netflix and iTunes and Amazon and we were actually nominated for an Emmy last year really wow uh and you know the the uh the people that are in that show um I wanted to talk about um also in this there was uh jesline uh
[02:10] raek uh Tom Drake uh people like that that uh well Tom you know went through pure hell as well um uh he was lucky he didn't get sentence and charged um like what happened to you and let's uh first of all um just as a nutshell U for the person that's not aware of your case and how this whole thing happened can you explain exactly how this all unfolded in the very beginning and sure I gave a nationally televised interview in December 2007 to
[02:43] ABC News in which I said three things I said that the CIA was torturing its prisoners I said that torture was official US government policy it was not the result of a rogue CIA officer as President Bush had intimated and I said that the torture policy was personally approved by the president himself and within 24 hours the FBI began investigating me uh they closed the case a year later so I was investigated from December 2007 to December 2008 and the
[03:15] FBI determined that I had not committed a crime what I did not know was that 3 weeks later when President Obama was inaugurated uh the most transparent president ever uh the CIA asked him to seek L reopened the case against me which he did I had no idea that I was under investigation for the next 3 years and then finally in January of 2012 I was charged with five felonies coming out of that interview including three counts of Espionage that's amazing and
[03:48] let's talk about Espionage because uh you know that goes back to 1917 and I know it's been amended several times but um how do you think that's being used us today I mean that's that's like a tool that's being used wrongly I believe yeah it's it's an iron fist to tell you the truth um and President Obama's uh use of the Espionage Act was scandalous in that as you pointed out Martin the Espionage Act was written in
[04:18] 1917 to combat German sabator during the first World War uh between 1917 and 2009 three Americans were charged with s for speaking to the Press just under President Obama eight Americans were charged with Espionage for talking to the Press that's almost three times the number of all previous presidents combined and it was because Obama had a nixonian obsession with National Security leagues
[04:51] he did not rep uh recognize whistleblowing as in the National interest and he used the Espionage Act to prosecute political crimes amazing um so let's uh I mentioned uh jasine a minute ago and uh her statement that she makes um she wishes it could go back to a pre to uh n uh 910 instead of 911 yeah she said I want my September 10th country back right and so tell me um and
[05:23] I remember in watching silenced where uh Tom Drake says the someone in the NSA said to him this is a gift 911 is a gift now we can get all the money and more that we ever dreamed of you know and now I can understand why all these conspiracies these 911 conspiracies um you know come stem from that but uh what did you see change in the CIA um as soon as 911 happened literally everything um I was
[05:54] in the counterterrorism center at the time uh we had a few hundred employees uh by September 12th we had nearly 2,000 employees uh in the counter terrorism Center and we had a budget uh a supplemental appropriation I I can't tell you the actual number because it's still classified but it just the just the supplement dwarfed the counterterrorism center's actual budget I actually approached the head of counterterrorism um co- for black in the immed immediate
[06:25] aftermath of 911 and I said I had an idea for an operation I wanted to uh initiate in a European country and before I could even explain to him what it was he put up his hands and he said whatever it is just do it he said I have so much money I can't possibly spend it all just do it wow and so I did it and it wasn't just me I'm talking about you know case officers operations officers acting all over the world amazing
[06:58] amazing now you're book um of course we want to talk about that that was recently released doing time like a spy um how the CIA taught me to survive and thrive in prison um I do want to talk about your your stint your 23 months in prison um but first I want to talk on how um what happened between um this whole U thing initiating and how they dragged it out and I heard you say in an
[07:28] interview that they stack charges so can you talk about that yeah there there are two tactics that the justice department uses to um to break defendants and to win their cases one is called venue shopping where they will charge you in the federal district uh where they are most likely to get a conviction and most likely to get a severe sentence so if if they think that that you're going to get the
[08:00] worst possible sentence in the eastern district of Virginia that's where they're going to charge you so that's where they charged me that's where they charged Jeffrey Sterling another CIA whistleblower that's where they charged Ed Snowden that's where the rumor is the grand jury is meeting on Julian Assange so that's venue shopping the eastern district of Virginia is known as the Espionage court because no National Security defendant has ever won a case there we all lose and it's because the judges are hanging judges and they just
[08:30] deny your motions and then you end up not being able to defend yourself now the other tactic is called charge stacking let's say you actually have done something wrong or you've done something illegal regardless of what your intent was instead of charging you with that one crime they'll charge you with five 10 20 felonies and they'll make you defend yourself up to the point where you go broke and when you finally go bankrupt they'll come back to you and
[09:00] say all right we'll dismiss all of the charges except one if you take a plea well you're already broke and I I'll use myself as an example I was charged with these five felonies well I hadn't committed a crime the FBI said so that I hadn't committed a crime but the CIA insisted that i' be charged and that I had to defend myself well between January when I was arrested and October when I finally went broke um the justice department came
[09:30] back and said okay take a plea to this lesser charge we'll drop all the other charges I said no I'm going to go to trial and my attorneys pulled me aside and said listen this is how this is going to play out if we go to trial and we will if you want to when we go to trial it's going to cost you another two to three million I had already spent a million God right so they took everything I had plus I still owe them $880,000 and they're telling me it's going to be an extra 2 to3
[10:01] million if you lose and this is the eastern district of Virginia so you probably will lose you are realistically looking at uh 12 to 18 years in prison you could get 24 years but the government's offering you two and a half if you take the deal so take the deal well like I said it becomes an economic decision I have five kids and so one night my wife and I sat at the dining room table with a calculator and we figured out how long we could
[10:33] continue to make it as a family with me in prison and we figured that we could probably make it for two years wow and I ended up doing 23 months wow amazing and now the the question that comes to mind is if you you obviously had a a stellar team of lawyers um but why didn't they tell you in the very beginning that you had no chance instead of racking up the million dooll
[11:04] bill you know Martin I've asked myself that question a hundred times uh and I I don't have a satisfactory answer looking looking back on that whole nightmare experience you know I I'm a big boy I'm tough right I I spent a year kicking butts all over the world for the CIA I can handle the truth and I wish they had said to me you know when I first got arrested this is how
[11:36] this is going to play out uh but they didn't and it and it might have been because we were filing motion after motion after motion and I think maybe they thought in the beginning that we could win in fact I hired a jury consultant um I didn't even hire him he volunteered to help me he's the uh the uncle of a of a very dear friend and he had been OJ Simpson's jury consultant he was George Zimmerman's jury consultant and William Kennedy Smith so
[12:07] serious like A-list criminal cases right so he flew up to Washington and we got him a security clearance and he went through all of the discovery that the justice department had sent us and then we sat down in the attorney's office and um and he sort of gave his briefing and he said listen if we were in any other District in America America I would say this case is a winner we're going to win this thing but the eastern district of Virginia he said your jury is going to
[12:38] be made up of people from the CIA the FBI the Department of Defense the Department of Homeland Security intelligence Community contractors you don't have a chance you have to take the deal he said we could win it if we were anywhere else in the country but not here so there's and it was that that made me decide to take the deal so there's no sense of empathy between um these people um if they put themselves in your position obviously yeah the attorney I'm talking
[13:11] about say you were talking about who the jurors would be and it seems like professionally they would say boy that could happen to me it's not like that no not at all you know you hear all the time people who have sat on jues saying well if they were innocent the cops wouldn't have arrested them in the first place yeah you hear that all the time and then I read Once In The Washington Post that a jury in the eastern district of Virginia would um would find guilty a baloney sandwich if the prosecution asked them
[13:42] because it's baloney you know can you talk about how and I'm going to use this word maybe improperly but the FBI tried to entrap you oh I don't think you're using the word improperly at all uh when I was with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee one of the one of the things that I enjoyed the most was um was talking to foreign diplomats right I spent my entire adult life in in intelligence and diplomacy stationed
[14:13] overseas in a half a dozen countries and I I really love the give and take of international Affairs so I got to have lunch with foreign diplomats all the time when I was on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and one day a Japanese Diplomat called me and invited me to lunch so I accepted we went to a restaurant on Capitol Hill and as I recall that lunch I remember it being delightful we talked about the Middle East peace process we talked about Turkish elections and there were elections in Israel and we had a really
[14:43] great conversation and at the end of the um lunch the Japanese Diplomat says to me so what's next for you and I said well actually I think I'm going to resign soon I promised Senator KY I'd give him two years it's been two and and a half and I think I'd like to go into business for myself and he got very animated and he said no no don't do that if you you give me information I can give you money and I said what's the matter with
[15:13] you cold pitching me like that shame on you you know how many times I've made that pitch in my life so I excused myself and I went directly to the office of the Senate security officer and I said I want to report that I've just been approached by a an intelligence officer so he had me write it up on a standalone computer and he sent it to the FBI so the FBI a day later sent two young agents up to interview me and um I told them the whole story and they said
[15:46] okay here's what we want you to do we want you to call him back invite him to lunch and try to get him to tell you exactly what information he wants and how much money he's willing to pay for it I said okay okay do you want me to wear a wire or something they said no we're going to be at the next table we're going to listen to the whole conversation I said terrific so I called him invited him to lunch he said yes the day of the lunch the FBI called me and said that something had come up that they couldn't make it but that I should go ahead and do it and just write them another memo so I had lunch with the guy
[16:18] a second time I wrote up the memo I sent it to the FBI and then they asked me to do it a third time and then a fourth time and then a fifth time and finally in the fifth lunch the guy told me that he had been promoted that he was given his dream job his dream job and he was going to be the number two in the Japanese Embassy in Cairo so I congratulated him I shook his hand never saw him again A year later when we get Discovery from the justice
[16:48] department we get these documents showing that uh there there never was a Japanese Diplomat that he was an FBI agent and he was trying to get me to commit real Espionage and I kept foiling them because I was writing them these memos that contained a Blow by Blow by blow of the entire conversation finally after the fifth try they decided that I was not going to commit Espionage and so they dropped the case and I said to my
[17:20] lead attorney why would they do something like this and he said because they have a case and they know it's and so that's why I decided to fight they were setting me up and I was going to fight them it's really that's such an unbelievable Story I mean that they would actually do that it's $3 million of the taxpayers money they they spent to investigate me and put me in prison is society really better off was that $3 million money well spent crazy crazy now to your knowledge had they
[17:52] tried any other tactic to entrap you like that I'm not sure they tried to intimidate my wife I had I had written an oped for the Los Angeles Times right before the 2008 election and I got the oped cleared by the cia's Publications review board so there was no problem and in this oped I said that whoever's elected president whether it's Barack Obama or John McCain
[18:23] they really need to pay attention to relations with Latin American countries because the Iranians are are and the Iranians were improving relations they opened a a factory in Venezuela and a factory in Paraguay and a factory in Uruguay and they were doing all this this work in Latin America and we were ignoring Latin America so there was one line in this oped where I said that that the government of Paraguay had lifted visa restrictions on Iranian
[18:54] Nationals now I got that information from the paraguayan for Ministries website and it was confirmed in a UPI Latin America press report well my wife at the time was a senior Cia officer working on Iran and we had a rule in our house that we never talked about Iran and it was because I never wanted to put her in a bad position so um my oped runs on a Sunday Monday morning she gets called into the cia's office of security they take her
[19:26] into a conference room and there's a camera set up and and it's on and they're videotaping her and they said this is not an investigation it's an inquiry but we wanted to ask you about an oped that your husband published yesterday in the Los Angeles Times and she said my husband got that cleared and the investigator said and we appreciate that but the oped contained very highly classified top secret human intelligence and she said my husband
[19:58] doesn't have access to classified top secret human intelligence and the invest investigator said but you do and she said I'm telling you my husband um used press reports for that oped and that was it we have a policy at home we never talk about Iran and they said she could make this whole thing go away if I faxed over my sources so she called me from the car crying understand
[20:30] and I immediately faxed over a screenshot from the paraguayan foreign Ministry website and the UPI Latin America press piece and I said do me a favor I said pass them a message from me too number one apparently nobody in the CIA speaks Spanish to be able to read the Spanish press and see that this is in the press number two they apparently have what they're calling a highly placed top secret human source s who's selling them press reports and calling
[21:02] it intelligence they have a Counter Intelligence problem but they they finally dropped it wow that's really uh well it's really craziness because you know I start to think about how this whole thing came about and how you had to suffer um and what you went through and it just seems like it comes down to someone's bruised ego you know oh yeah is is that yeah if if you if you air the
[21:34] dirty laundry and you embarrass somebody at the at the you know top of government you're going to you're going to go down they're going to make sure that you go down not just go down but they're going to ruin you to make you an example for other people who are considering blowing the whistle on waste BR and abuse wow that's that's really something so are you afraid now at all are you watching what you do I I'm not afraid of anybody I know that history will judge me as having been
[22:04] right I'm right on torture they're wrong I I will say that they do sometimes engage in Petty harassment um every once in a while not terribly often but two or three times a year I'll be under surveillance and they'll follow me you know to the store to to church to work whatever um and then they drop off after a day or two uh I just assume the that they're reading my emails and text messages and listening to the phone calls I don't know but I just assume that they are but uh I have nothing to
[22:36] hide they're the ones who are hiding their dirty secrets now the law goes back quite well goes back a a ways um against Against torture um in the oh yeah torture the federal torture Act of 1946 specifically banned exactly the techniques that we were using against Al-Qaeda prisoners and so when 911 comes along now they changed it they call it enhanced interrogation is that what it is that's what they call it it's it's
[23:08] torture they can use whatever euphemism they want it's torture without a without any question and now I'm going to ask a question that um I'm almost afraid to ask but do you feel that there's a growing movement toward people wanting the Americans to use torture I do uh you know what it makes me sick to my stomach but if you look at the polls a clear majority of Americans support a torture program it's something like 54% and let me just it's something that
[23:40] as a country we ought to be ashamed of and as far as we know statistically um it does not it's not effective no no it it it just simply doesn't work I mean on top of being morally and and ethically repugnant uh it just simply doesn't work um and so let's talk about the different types of torture that is possibly being used because I think some people have died uh
[24:12] while being um interrogated so to speak um so let's talk about the different types of torture that were actually allowed for let's say alqaeda or any other uh any other prisoner of war well that there were 10 different techniques that were authorized by the justice department with the most mild being something called the belly slap so it's an open-handed smack across the belly it makes a loud cracking sound and makes a handprint on your on your belly
[24:44] um and then it went to the the facial slap and and where one where they grab you by the lapels and slam you against a wall uh and then it went all the way up to um to three really terrible uh techniques one was water boarding and everybody knows about water boarding now but there were two that I've always maintained were worse than water boarding one was um sleep deprivation scientists will tell us that people begin losing their minds when
[25:14] they get to day seven with no sleep and people begin to die around day nine and when I when I say sleep deprivation you're chained to an eyebolt in the ceiling um so that you can can't uh sit or kneel or lay down you can't get comfortable you have to stand or hang [Music] um we know that day 12 people begin to die I'm sorry day nine and and the CIA was authorized to keep people awake for
[25:46] 12 days so seven days you lose your mind nine days you start to die CIA was going 12 days and indeed indeed they killed a prisoner that way another terrible one was called the cold before we move on from that how besides um having them hang like that what are some other things they do to keep them awake oh uh they they bombard the cell with with hard rock music 24 hours a day you know at a volume of 10 just to to
[26:19] make the person crazy and disoriented and to ensure that they just can't sleep and they use these these like military strength um lights too so it's as bright as the sun you just even if you close your eyes you can still see the light through your eyelids you just can't you can't get comfortable that sounds like a just sounds like a pure hell it it is it's hell and then there's this cold cell where you're chained into that same eyebolt in the ceiling stripped naked and then every um well
[26:53] they they chill the cell to 50° Fahrenheit and then every hour a CIA officer goes into the cell and throws a bucket of ice water on you and and we killed people with that technique as well unreal now I read or I heard I listened to Dan Carlin I don't know if you ever listened to him um yeah sure and I think in one of his shows that he mentioned that uh people were brought um to actually prisoners were brought to a
[27:25] country out of the UN where it did not have um any torture statutes and were worked on there have you ever heard of anything like that uh I've not heard of a country outside the United Nations no um we certainly had secret prisons I mean like an archipelago of secret prisons around the world okay when someone is um enhanced interrogated as they say how do they monitor it I heard you say
[27:57] something about um you know has to be done a certain way but how do how are they kept in check so some someone just doesn't go berserk and and you know kill someone that's a good question um and and they were supposed to monitor it they had Physicians from The cia's Office of Medical Services there to act like Dr mangala to make sure that you're still healthy enough to keep torturing you um and they were supposed to keep check on each other um as as they were
[28:27] being being tortured uh but people went overboard and there there are at least three prisoners that we know were killed by CIA officers or CIA contractors and I've seen numbers of as many as 18 who were killed in CIA custody so this this check and balance didn't really work very well I can't imagine being um having the the mindset to torture someone and not um empathize with how it must be like
[28:58] you know I mean it must take a certain type of person um almost psychotic or someone that just does has little care for for uh can you explain how someone can torture and walk away easily easily a CIA psychiatrist once told me that the CIA actively seeks to hire people who have sociopathic tendencies um not sociopaths sociopaths have no conscience and easily pass a
[29:30] polygraph exam but they're they're impossible to control people who have sociopathic tendencies do have a conscience and so can be polygraphed but they're comfortable working in moral legal and ethical gray areas the problem is sociopaths are constantly slipping through the cracks and it's because they can pass that polygraph exam so yeah you know psychologists will tell you that it's it's the sociopath who Rises to the top of corporate
[30:01] structures in in um in business in the business World well the same thing happens in government it's the sociopath who makes his way to the top of the structure because he's comfortable stepping on people to further his own career the same thing happens in the CIA it's the lunatics who end up getting promoted and end up running the place it's the lunatics who become the torturers and then go home and play with their kids and play with their dog and and and sleep soundly at night it's because they're sociopaths well I guess
[30:32] that sadly makes sense um you know I I was really surprised uh reading things I mentioned this real quickly before we started the show and that was uh how the Obama Administration um kind of surpassed things that I used to be really upset that Bush was doing and uh H how did all that as a Democrat and everything I it just it was It was kind of shocking especially and I don't know the name of
[31:04] the act or whatever it's called but an American citizen can be assassinated on foreign soil without without any um you know trial or you know conviction or anything yeah yeah and Eric Holder said that in um in an open uh Congressional hearing on Capitol Hill he also said in response to a question from Senator Ron weiden that if the president declared an American citizen in the United States to
[31:35] be an imminent threat that the government could kill that American without benefit of trial in the United States I haven't heard that oh my god wow now that's he was saying that that's a legal theory that the Obama administration had they they hadn't actually killed anybody on American soil but they claimed legal justification for doing it had they decided to do it the thing about these these uh these laws that are created is that they're once they're there they're
[32:09] there and they can be abused look at the Patriot Act yeah the Patriot Act um for instance that's uh that changed everything um and how did that affect what you you were doing it didn't really because um it was almost entirely domestically focused it it drastically changed the way the FBI did its job um and of course we created
[32:39] the Department of Homeland Security at the same time which was really revolutionary in that in that it gave it gave law enforcement Authority more law enforcement authority to one person than at any other time in American history um for me it really didn't it didn't change the job my job being overseas but as an American citizen like anybody else in this country I objected to a lot of the Patriot acts tenants
[33:10] just because I believed that that it was a it was a whittling away of my civil liberties and and I thought you know this is something we ought to be debating in congress not not pushing through in the middle of the night so nobody notices and that that's exactly how it passed um and I have the feeling that our our civil liberties are Vanishing more and more and I I just have a feeling that that's kind of like on the track we're on seems to be oh it is you know when when the president and and the Attorney General of the United
[33:40] States um talk about using the Espionage Act to punish journalists who publish classified information I mean that's that's the end of our constitutional rights as we know them okay well along those lines um we hear you know I'm going to take some flak from this because I'm going to talk a little bit about uh Trump but um the fake news thing um it's it's almost
[34:10] like um it's similar to how a dictator would take down the media in a way um now again I'm going to take a lot of flack for saying this but um what do you feel about the way he has um well how I should put it this way how do you feel the media has treated Trump and how do you think Trump is treating the media I I think the media have been hard
[34:41] on Trump I thought the media had been hard on Clinton uh that's I mean the media was hard on me that's just what they do uh you know they're my when I was a little kid my grandfather used to say that there are no worst people on earth than doctors and Priests and I would say now that I'm an adult in my 50s that there are no worse people on Earth than journalists and attorneys uh journalists you know many
[35:12] of them are scumbags uh it's they see it as their job to be scumbags and um and I think that most of them actually are seeking the truth there's probably a political bent one way or the other to the left or the to the right just because they're human like everybody else is but yeah sure Trump has had a tough time with the Press so did Hillary Clinton um so I don't think he's getting any special treatment special anti-trump treatment not at all okay and how do you think um what do you think about his reaction by just calling them fake news
[35:43] like you know the I think that's actually damaging to the country you know the the the Press is is just as important in the governance of the country as the three branches of government are and to devalue the press as an institution I think really does a disservice to the whole country I agree that's that's really good now what do you say to I've heard the term many times that we created Isis
[36:16] um and do you think that America does indeed create you know terrorist groups no um no that's that's conspiratorial non on sense what happened was um we invaded Iraq which was which was stupid and bad policy and short-sighted and illegal under international law but we did it we invaded Iraq we overthrew Saddam Hussein and many of the al-Qaeda fighters in
[36:48] Afghanistan and Pakistan ran to Iraq to fight the Americans there and so we started rounding them up and they they formed this branch of al-Qaeda called al-Qaeda in Iraq right and um and we arrested hundreds of them and put them in military prisons all around the country well it was in one of those military prisons that uh Omar Al bagdadi and several of the other uh people who became his lieutenants in Isis got
[37:18] together they actually met in an American Military prison outside of Baghdad and decided to form this group Isis um they believed that Al-Qaeda was not radical enough that Al-Qaeda wasn't fighting hard enough and so that's why they wanted to go their own way and create this new group so did we create Isis no we didn't we it wasn't a bunch of white guys sitting around a table saying you know what we should do we should create this terrorist group to fight ourselves and you know no but our
[37:52] stupid policy resulted in the creation of Isis I see okay now for what you went through and for what you basically exposed did you actually change anything yeah yeah you know what I'm I'm actually most proud of this through this whole nightmare in um in
[38:23] 2015 Congress passed the uh McCain Feinstein Amendment which which formally uh banned torture in the United States permanently and said that that the CIA is allowed only to use the techniques that are outlined in the Army Field Manual so you know what we weren't even having a national conversation about torture until I went on ABC News and even though the price that I paid has been very high that was all worth it
[38:56] because now tort is illegal in this country can you talk about um uh I'm going to try to say his name right Abu Zab Abu zua uhhuh yeah we we believed in 2002 that Abu zua was the number three in al-Qaeda um that turned out to not be true he was still a bad guy he was sort of a logistician for Al-Qaeda he ran al-qaeda's to um uh training camps in southern Afghanistan he ran the uh safe
[39:27] house in Pasa Pakistan called the house of Martyrs he could um procure passports and travel um tickets and whatever it was that that Al-Qaeda Fighters needed to either get in or get out of Afghanistan he was the guy that you went to but he never formally joined Al-Qaeda so in March 2002 I was the um chief of counterterrorism operations for the CIA in Pakistan and I led a series of raids
[39:58] that resulted in the capture of abuaba and many dozens of other Al-Qaeda Fighters uh abuaba was the the first high value Target that we had captured and it was on abuaba that we began the torture program and they now at first you reported on some news show that um he was only tortured or he was only water boarded one time and it and you achieved results who told you that and and uh well that's that's what the CIA
[40:31] reporting uh cables said see he was being tortured by these two contract psychologists named Bruce Mitchell and um or I'm sorry James Mitchell and Bruce jessen and Mitchell and jessen were carrying out the torture and then writing the reporting cables back to headquarters well they were saying this whole time you know we did it we did it once it worked he cracked he gave us this information it saved lives we're disrupting attacks none of that turned out to be
[41:02] true they waterboarded in 83 times he didn't give any actionable intelligence that saved lives or disrupted attacks uh oh sorry okay um he didn't give us any information that disrupted attacks and the information that he did give he had actually given to an FBI agent several weeks earlier when the FBI agent was uh debriefing him so it was a lie and
[41:35] nobody knew it was a lie until April of 2009 when the CIA inspector General's report was Declassified and released to the Press so what I was telling Brian Ross on ABC News in 2007 was what I had read in the cia's reporting cables and at that time what was your stance on on torture on well the enhanced terog yeah well I said that that there were two separate issues here number one um was torture um moral and ethical and I
[42:08] said no I said it's not enhanced interrogation it's a torture program and as torture it's morally wrong I was the first person to call it torture as a matter of fact and then secondly I said there was a separate question about whether or not it worked and the CIA was saying that it worked and that second half turned out to not be true unreal now can you explain um the knowledge that you have why torture is not effective sure because your prisoner
[42:40] will tell you literally anything that he thinks you want to hear just to get you to stop torturing him it might be true information it likely will not be true but whether it's true or not you're going to have to take all this information and give it to a team of analysts to pour through it and try to figure out what's true and what's not true so if the point of the torture is like in this ticking Time Bomb scenario you know there's a there's a bomb that's going to go off in some major American
[43:12] city you got to get the information from the guy so you start torturing him and he gives you the information well he's going to give you some kind of information probably way too much information 90% of which is going to be false by the time you analyze it and figure out what it is that's true and what's not true the bomb's gone off and everybody's dead wow what was the exact charge that was the felony that gave you the 23 months and I you I know you had
[43:42] to take it as a uh plea bargain so I'm not saying that you actually did it but what is the charge it's okay it was violating the intelligence identities protection act of 1982 I um uh confirmed the name of a former colleague to a reporter who never made the name public but and even though that happens in Washington like all the time including in today's Washington Post um they decided to prosecute me for that
[44:14] and this was actually an overt right it wasn't a covert it was an overt um someone that had retired no that was one of the charges that was dropped uh they tried to charge me for outing an overt employee and like he's overt he's on LinkedIn as a CIA employee you know he he gave a speech at James Madison University as a CIA employee so the judge actually threw that charge out wow now it must be you must really go under a lot a lot of
[44:45] emotional stress um depression all that can you explain what you were going through and was it the unknown that was the worst part of it oh yeah it it's the unknown that that does you in you know Aaron Schwarz was arrested um and they did charge stacking with Aaron Schwarz too he was the one of the founders of BuzzFeed and um they charged him with something like 20 felonies related to internet fraud or wire fraud or something for accessing
[45:15] some it's some hacking related charge well the poor guy was like 25 years old 26 years old he's just been charged with 15 or 20 felonies and he went home and and blew his brains out and um you know reporter asked me if I was surprised and I said I said no the way they they charge you with these multiple felonies and you're looking at you know 75 years in prison 100 years in prison I'm surprised more people don't kill themselves when I was first charged I was looking at 45 years in prison I'm
[45:47] I'm 52 years old I I was 48 years old at the time looking at 45 years in prison that's a death sentence but that's the point they want you to face a death sentence so that you take a plea and they get a conviction that's how they get promoted that's how they get budget increases so that's the way they do it do you think um going back to the the topic I shouldn't talk about but do you think in today's world with the present Administration that anything would be
[46:17] different in what happened to you you know this may sound crazy to you but yeah I do um you know there's a there's a lot to criticize Jeff sessions uh about uh mandatory minimum sentencing uh drug sentencing the use of private prisons I think he's a terrible attorney general but he did not have this this this laser likee this laser-like obsession with using the Espionage Act
[46:49] to prosecute whistleblowers like Eric Holder did I think Eric Holder was was one of the the the Great menaces to our civil liberties over the last half a century I think honestly and I and I say this from the bottom of my heart I think Eric Holder was one of the worst Attorneys General in in American history in in terms of of taking away our civil rights and our civil liberties wow so no you know there's a lot of rhetoric coming out of the Trump White
[47:20] House about these issues especially as they relate to u to journalists but no I I'm not seeing I'm not seeing investigations initiated by the Trump Administration against whistleblowers now not not yet anyway at one time or I thought at the beginning of Obama's administration that he was encouraging whistleblowing did you ever hear that well you know the sad truth is during the uh the Obama Administration we we passed a a whistleblower protection act but it specifically Exempted National
[47:52] Security whistleblowers from coverage so Barack Obama not only did literally nothing in terms of the law to help whistleblowers he actively pursued whistleblowers for prosecution and how many whistleblowers that you're aware of in when it comes to National Security while he was in office uh eight wow and and prior to that none wow yeah zero in in history
[48:24] zero well well you know what I take that back um the Nicks Administration tried to charge Daniel ellsburg with sage but but the uh the case fell apart right right so one one in American history amazing now I I do want to talk about um what prison was like for you um in just a minute here but I also want to ask you um your thoughts on two different uh people first of all uh Chelsea Manning uh recently released I
[48:55] believe very recently right yeah uh on the uh 17th I think it was and so what do yeah and what were your thought I I'm thrilled I'm thrilled for Chelsea Manning one of the last things I did before I went to prison was I I tweeted that um I had fought as as hard as I could and I just couldn't fight anymore the president elected not to give me any kind of relief but that I hoped he would give Chelsea Manning some kind of relief and um and he did finally you know Chelsea
[49:25] Manning I think was the victim of torture solitary confinement as practiced in the United States has been declared as a form of torture by the United Nations and not only did Chelsea Manning Spend long stretches of her sentence of her seven plus year sentence in solitary confinement but she did so uh with forced nudity and that was meant just to humiliate and to control so um it's a wonderful thing that she got out of prison okay and the next one is uh Edwin um Edward Snowden oh I think Ed Snowden is a
[49:58] Bonafide American hero we would have no idea that the government was spying on us had Snowden not not told us that uh when I was in prison I I wrote I wrote Ed uh an open letter that was published in the uh was published everywhere but it started in the Huffington Post and then I followed it up with a private letter we we share several attorneys and have some mutual friends so I passed them this private letter with some lessons that I learned in my own
[50:28] experience the most important of which is don't come home you're charged in the eastern district of Virginia you will not get a fair trial they will try to lock you up in a prison for the rest of your life why don't you take that call and see if we can get good good question out of it oh no it's not my house uh no that's okay it's not a big deal um so you've have has he actually communicated with you through the
[51:00] lawyers yes um we we never put anything in writing our messages are all verbal right right um I I agree you know I I've said that a few times and kind of uh had people harshly disagree with me um that I think it's a really good thing that he's exposed I I personally you know I understand there's National National Security and I understand that we are in really strange times but I also think
[51:31] that the truth should be known um especially when it comes to um what you mentioned earlier our civil liberties you know Vanishing it it should be known and uh so in that case you know maybe there were some things that maybe he shouldn't have exposed I don't know um but I yeah we don't we don't have to agree with absolutely everything he did like for example I I want the NSA to intercept Angela merkel's cell phone that's what NSA is supposed to do every country does that to every other country
[52:03] and if it gives us a leg up in you know treaty negotiations or or business negotiations then that's great but we have to look at the bigger picture of what he did and what he did was positively patriotic we should celebrate him for it I agree I agree um now let's talk about the people out there that have done either exactly what you have done or done I know there was a movie called uh what was it dark 30 or I'm trying to remember the zero dark3 um I
[52:36] couldn't watch it I tried to watch it I just couldn't watch it but um but I understand there was some classified information leaked to the um to the uh either the producer or something of that movie to to the to the producer and to the writer Mark bow uh and Katherine Bigalow um yeah Leon Panetta Le classified information to Mark B and um Michael Morell who was the deputy uh deputy director of the CIA gave gave uh the producer and director a classified
[53:07] briefing standing over a classified mockup of the binladen compound in addition there were several CIA analysts who had briefed them and who then accepted gifts in exchange which is also a crime uh furthermore Leon Panetta then in an attaboy speech uh in the cia's auditorium revealed the name of the Navy SEAL who killed Bin Laden
[53:37] to the crowd which included people who had worked on this film this was a classified setting so why were those crimes never prosecuted David Petraeus is worse you know I was accused of confirming the name of of a former CIA officer David Petraeus passed the name the names of 10 covert CIA officers to his adulterous girlfriend to try to impress her he did it for sex and he got a misdemeanor charge 18
[54:11] months unsupervised uh probation and no jail time so where's the where's the Justice there there's another disgruntled CIA officer who gave the names of seven covert officers to the same reporter that I talked to but they didn't charge him because he didn't blow the whistle on the torture program this was all very much very much so so um you know and I understand that a a president can
[54:42] basically declassify anything that he wants to but what how do you feel about um the recent um you know talk with Russian a Russian official yeah well what president Trump did was not declassification he just blurted out classified information you can't you can't prosecute a president for that they're they have ultimate authority to do you know whatever they want to do with the information but um there's there's a a process for passing
[55:13] classified information to a foreign uh government you you take the original report you take the information that you want to pass out of it you put it on a a clean fresh piece of paper you write secret releasable to and then the name of the country at the top and the bottom you make sure that it doesn't reveal any sources and methods and then you pass it Through official channels but what the president did was he just blurted out this highly classified information that came from um a third country now when
[55:44] you pass when you pass another country's information to a third country you have to get the originating country's permission to do it in advance and he didn't do that he just blurted and that was the most d in part of it wasn't it the other country it it was not having permission um because then they're less likely to share whatever secret it is yeah they're less likely to share in the future it damages the the bilateral Lees on relationship now let's talk about um your stint in prison and first of all
[56:16] you mentioned earlier that you have five kids um I can't imagine uh being separated from your kids and you know dayt day ing their birthdays Christmas all that um how can you not be bitter or are you bitter no no I'm I'm not bitter actually I I've worked hard on this and it's because you know you come out of prison and you think you can step right back into your life again and you can't you you deal with depression you deal with
[56:47] anger issues you deal with PTSD which everybody has when they come out but I I made a I made a decision early on in this whole process that I was not going to be bitter because it wouldn't get me anything if I dwell on this and say oh poor me I've been wronged and look what they did to me that doesn't help me in any way and so I decided I was truly going to put this behind me this book was therapeutic it helped me work out
[57:18] work through a lot of issues and I think it's funny at the same time and um and I've just uh been working on on new opportunities that I've had that's what I'm doing here in Los Angeles right now that's really an amazing attitude and uh and and wonderful really I think it's great oh thanks you know Nelson Mandela did it and and Martin Luther King did it and mahat mandhi did it and these guys were all Giants and I thought when they said that they weren't bitter and that they forgave they were they were telling
[57:50] the truth and and I thought I I have to do the same thing I have to for forgive and forget and move on and so that's what I've done now when you went off to prison that day you thought you were going to have um I forget what they call it it's sort of like the white collar prison yeah it's a minimum security Work Camp Work Camp right and that's where you thought you were going but uh yeah the judge ordered that I go to a Work Camp minimum security and at a at a camp there are no bars on the Windows there's
[58:21] no barbed wire the doors are not locked you're free to come and go as you please please you're just on your honor not to abscond and so when I got to the prison I turned myself in the prison guard started walking me around to the back of the actual prison which is across the street from the camp and I said no no there's a mistake I'm supposed to be at the at the camp across the street and the guy chuckled and said not according to my paperwork you're not and so it took me 5 days before I got access to a
[58:51] phone and I called my attorney and I said hey they put me in the actual prison with the murderers and the pedophiles and the drug kingpins what do I do and he said oh my gosh well it'll take us you know we could file a motion but it'll take us two years before we get a hearing and you'll be home by then he said I'm sorry you're just going to have to tough it out and so that's when I decided I was going to use my CIA training to make sure that I was safe and to keep myself on the top of the social Heap and that's
[59:23] that's exactly what led to the writing of this book all right and I do want to talk about that I do want to talk about that but now why couldn't your attorney contact the judge and say Hey you ordered him for this you know for this uh prison this uh low uh security prison and why is he in the you know why was he put on the other side of the road why um as it turns out judges can only make recommendations to the Bureau of Prisons the Bureau of Prisons has ultimate
[59:54] Authority and so they just elected to ignore the judge's recommendation that's another thing that just doesn't seem right in any way to me yeah a lot of injustices so um and you know I think about what you mentioned earlier all these different people that actually did more of a crime than you did and it just makes me angry I got to tell you I you know that um they could just because of this torture thing that uh this is how you were treated now let's talk about
[1:00:26] what it was like um being in prison and how you did survive using your CIA skills yep y so what was that like first of all let me ask you this um because you were CIA did that was that a good thing or a bad thing when you're walking into prison well I wasn't sure in the beginning uh it turned out to be a good thing and it it it was a good thing because of the the kind of one other
[1:00:57] prisoner there was a a prisoner um an Italian um who was associated with an organized crime family who had followed my case in the New York Times and read in the times that I was being assigned to Loretto and so he took it upon himself to go to all of the Italians in prison and I mean we had the boss of the gambinos we had the under boss of the cantes we had the the top captain of the bananos these were serious organized
[1:01:28] crime uh figures so he went to each and every one of them and he explained to them the difference between an FBI agent who's a cop and a rat and a CIA officer who's a hero and is working overseas to protect us from terrorism and so once they understood the difference between the FBI and the CIA I was welcomed with open arms wow so how did you did you actually have an easy time all along or
[1:02:00] did that was it did that take a while before you know you you are constantly battling depression and boredom so you know there were challenges along the way um only once did I have a challenge from another prisoner and I took good care of him as you'll see in the book uh but it was it was the guards the the guards are sadistic bullies and um and uh much of their behavior is
[1:02:30] is Criminal and I I mean that literally which I also document in the book so it was the guards that were far far more dangerous and more of a problem than than any prisoner was yeah just like in the movies right there's always that now can you give some examples of some of the things that you would consider illegal that they were doing well I I was in prison for 5 days and I was called To Thee Lieutenant's office and when I got there uh the two cops in the uh in the special
[1:03:02] investigative service showed me a picture of another prisoner they said do you know this guy I said I don't know him but I I met him last night oh uh what'd you say to him I said uh I told him it's nice to meet you in Arabic well what did he say to you I said he told me back to you you it's nice to meet you too I shook his hand walked away and they said well after you met him he called a number in Pakistan and they
[1:03:32] told him to kill you and I said please I could kill this guy with my thumb and they said no no don't do that we've been looking for a reason to ship him to another prison he's the uncle of the Time Square bomber I said okay they said don't don't uh you know don't do anything I said okay that's fine so I walked out well every time I passed the guy in the hall we I'm giving him the stink eye and he's giving me the stink eye back but the more I thought about this the more it didn't make any sense because the Time
[1:04:04] Square bomber was Pakistani and this guy was an Iraqi kurd and they don't speak Arabic in Pakistan they they speak uru pashu Cindi Punjabi so um this didn't make any sense to me so finally I walked up to the guy outside on the yard and I I put my hands up I said hey I mean you no harm I got to ask you a question have the cops said anything to you about me and he said yeah they told
[1:04:35] me that after we met you called a number in Washington and they told you to kill me unreal so I went to the law library and researched this and this is a felony it's a Class D Felony and it's conspiracy to incite violence in a federal facility they wanted me to kill this guy or they wanted him to kill me or they wanted both of us to to hurt each other trying to kill each other for their own sick pleasure so when I reported this in in a
[1:05:06] blog and this blog of course is in the book it's a part of the book the uh the Press went wild CNN drove up to the prison 60 Minutes came to the prison everybody's beating up the warden to try to get a comment so the warden promised that there would be an investigation and as you might guess there was and it was an investigation of me and how I got that blog out and got it to the Huffington Post unreal now did you have like a constant connection to
[1:05:37] the outside as far as writing yeah my attorneys your attorneys yeah my attorneys I put everything in legal mail I sent it all out to my attorneys and they made sure it got to the right reporters wow now how about people coming to see you did you have like supporters come uh colleagues oh yeah a half a dozen CIA officers a couple of NSA people a a judge an FBI agent um I actually had
[1:12:20] heads it was everything the CIA was behind everything you know squ ing the cure for cancer faking the moon landing all that huh I got it all now yeah so what did you learn by being in prison as far as um let's talk about reform is it non-existent yeah the prison system the the whole judicial system is is utterly broken it's racist it's xenophobic um it it divides and ruins families there's no
[1:12:52] Rehabilitation uh there's no education there's no job training we have 5% of the world's population in this country and 25% of the world's prison population that's right and so you know we are we are light years behind our European allies on these on these reform issues light years and God knows it's only going to get worse with Jeff sessions as attorney general do you think the reason um that the the prison population is so high as because is because of re-entries
[1:13:24] because of not no reform things yeah I do um you know I thought that I thought that there would be some sort of training in fact I even I even joked with my wife before I went to prison that well at least I can learn Plumbing or something or electrical work or small engine repair ha and um you know they phased that out in the late 70s there there is no such
[1:13:55] training now for me it was a joke but if if you've been a drug dealer all your life and the only thing you know how to do is deal drugs and you're not being educated or trained in prison well you're going to go home eventually and what do you think you're going to do you're going to sell drugs again because it's the only thing you know how to do and that's why our recidivism rates are so high in this country you know 45% of all prisoners are re-incarcerated within three years 45% that is really I
[1:14:27] had no idea unac had no idea but um now I followed and I had um an uh a prosecutor on this show I followed making a murderer that was the Steven Avery case yeah and you know he basically um I I believe he basically wanted to go back to prison how do you feel about you think that is uh something that prison makes you want to go back let me tell you about a conversation I once heard in the TV
[1:14:58] room uh three guys playing cards middle of the day nobody else is in there I'm just standing there looking to see what the news ticker is saying and one of them kind of leans back in his chair and looks around and he says you know they give us clothes they give us medical they give us three Square meals a day we work out in the wait room We Run The we run the track he said if we had this place
[1:15:29] would be paradise wow and you and I thought wow wow a lot of people feel that way yeah I've heard that you know you mentioned PS uh the uh what is it called PSD uh P PTSD and I think you know anyone that is in prison for a long time like you said has that and you know just the adjustments so um you know back to society must be uh and I think I watched
[1:16:02] in uh maybe it was silenced or one of those films where you had to get a job uh no matter what job it was so what has that what's that struggle been like what was coming home like coming home was a lot rougher than I thought it was going to be like I said earlier I I thought I could just step back into my life again and and you can't you're dealing with uh with probation and halfway house restrictions and travel restrictions and you have to
[1:16:33] do this uh this financial report every month and then you have to request permission every time you leave the house and and then you call them the minute you get back to the house and I mean it's just it's it's onerous it's no wonder so many people get violated and go back to prison the there are so many rules the system is set up to make you fail it's not set up to help you succeed you know at this halfway house that I had to report to there were 110 guys in
[1:17:04] the halfway house they had one job listed on the job board it was it was to be a dishwasher at fud Ruckers for 110 men and if you don't get a job in 30 days you go back to prison unreal so I mean for me I had a job set up already you know before I even got home but but what does everybody else do you kill each other for this job at fud Ruckers yeah that um I think I heard you
[1:17:34] say in one of your interviews that I listened to that the average American commits um three crimes a day or something like that yeah three felonies a day and this is this is by accident mostly I mean we yeah Mo mostly by accident sure um this is a book written by Harvey silverglade a professor of law from Harvard University and he says that the country is so over legislated and so over criminalized that the average
[1:18:06] person commits three felonies every single day with the operative notion being that if they want to get you they're going to get you and you're going to end up having to take a plea to something that's something when I was uh I lived in California for 9 years and I had to go to traffic school because I had a violation you can get some points removed from your license if you go to traffic school and save on insurance and all that so I went to the traffic school and I I'll never forget the instructor said that each of you sitting in this
[1:18:36] class has violated at least 3500 uh traffic laws for the one that you got caught on you know and it's pretty amazing and I I I believe that I probably violated 3500 today driving around Los Angeles that's that's pretty easy to do um so how was the family how was it going back to like say you said your your wife was a rock how about the kids you weren't there and all of a sudden you're popped back
[1:25:24] good friends I can count on one hand the number of people who walked away from me in this whole experience well that's that's really really nice to hear Tom Drake um his story is absolutely amazing to me as well are you still in touch with him oh yeah close touch in fact I spoke with him this morning yeah Tom's been a a great great source of support for me we we do a lot of good work together oh that's that's really great and how about jesline
[1:25:56] yeah I'm in regular contact with jesselyn as well she now leads the uh it's called The Whisper program the the uh whistleblower and Source protection program at Expos facts. uhg and just for a little backstory on that um she actually um was a whistleblower yeah she was at the justice department she was the Justice Department's ethics officer and she was fired because she recommended that John Walker Lind be read her be his rights
[1:26:26] when he was arrested in uh Pakistan and I understand there was some missing uh files and all that yeah she had documented all the back and forth uh between uh herself and her superiors and the FBI saying that John Walker Lind as an American citizen had to be read his rights and had the right to counsel and the right to remain silent and um when she went back to the file uh it had been destroyed someone had gone in and just destroyed the whole file to cover it up it's unbelievable um so your book um
[1:26:59] what what uh can someone expect to read in your book well it's a combination of things it's it's it's kind of a in some places it's a serious political sciency look at at the judicial system and prison reform um but I'm I'm told it's very funny uh I I'm proud of that I think it's very funny I actually still laugh out loud on one chapter every time I read it and I've read it you know a million times and I wrote it because I
[1:27:29] experienced it and I it still makes me laugh um and it also includes the letters from Loretto blog series that that won me the uh the pen First Amendment award one of the one of the big four literary prizes in America so I think people will like it the reviews have been fantastic and not only have the reviews been great but we completely sold out of the first edition really um in in the yeah in the first five days that it was on the market and on Friday uh the publisher um ordered another 3,000
[1:28:01] copies to be printed so it's actually back ordered now on Amazon I think they're going to I think they're going to um get the copies tomorrow or the day after but but yeah it it completely sold out that is that is exciting so what do you think the future is for yourself I will never work in Washington again I'm I'm essentially Persona nrata in Washington Washington but I'm here in beautiful sunny Los Angeles because uh I do have a future in Los Angeles I I
[1:28:32] partnered with Oliver Stone we sold a TV series together to the History Channel That's in development now I partnered on another show for AMC network with Alec Baldwin and u i I pitched a third show today uh to three different um production companies I hope to sell it in the coming week or so so I think my future is in uh it's in television people are intg Ed by my case they like my writing I I have three books that I that I've published now and um I think this is where my future is well uh I
[1:29:03] think that's wonderful and if you really if you look at the big picture um this would never be if you didn't have if you never went through what you went through yeah that that's right it it's odd the way things uh work work out but yeah you're exactly right and I'm I'm almost uh wanting to ask you if you could change anything would you change it yeah I would have hired an attorney before blowing the whistle rather than after if when you hire an attorney after
[1:29:33] you let the cat out of the bag you you are reactionary you have to react to everything I wish I had had an attorney first to advise me yeah that that is uh that's a really good point well I want to thank you so much and you can you have actually a website which is your name right yeah it's uh j o n k i r i a k.com and the book is doing time like a spy excellent so everyone you can order that book on Amazon it's backordered but
[1:30:06] more copies are coming and how about Kindle will it be on Kindle yes uh kindall uh was supposed to be released last Tuesday and it's going to be uh tomorrow excellent John thank you so much it's it's been a real pleasure speaking to you thank you Martin thanks for okay take care byebye byebye all right everyone so that is it uh for the show um thanks so much for listening and um
[1:30:36] hang in there just one second next week um we have I'm just trying to Mark Stanley uh Mark Stanley is a musician um with an amazing story um he will be here next Monday say thanks so much for being here for the show today and we'll be back next [Music]
[1:31:15] week