[00:00] this evening we are proud to present one of these whistleblowers f CI a agent John Kerry our COO he was the first government official to confirm the use of waterboarding by Bush administration so I'm really happy here
[00:46] there are so many things that I'd like to talk about tonight but I'm going to try to keep it short because I hope we can have a conversation afterwards and some questions and answers and really get to some of the bottom or to the bottom of some of these issues but I'd like to first talk about that was a beta many of you perhaps most of you know the story of Abu Zubaydah Abu Zubaydah was supposed to have been the number three ranking person in al-qaeda and when I was stationed in Pakistan as
[01:19] the chief of counterterrorism operations for the CIA liberals are patriots right a Republican Party and the conservative movement in this country do not have a monopoly on patriotism so I was in Pakistan we received words to capture of Zubaydah he was somewhere in Pakistan we had to catch him but Pakistan was the size of Texas and it is populated by about 270 million people so to say he's somewhere
[01:49] in Pakistan go catch him and do a non-starter anyway we got it March 28th I think it was 2002 he had been shot while he was trying to escape a Pakistani policeman shot him three times with an ak-47 and he nearly bled to death about a day and a half later when he finally came out of a coma we began to talk I sat by his bedside for 56 hours
[02:20] and I thought wow this is this is kind of a unique opportunity maybe an historic opportunity so I'm gonna make the most of it and I tried to engage him in conversation and first he asked me to kill him he asked me to smother him with a pillow and once he calmed down we talked about things like poetry he said that he would he would never know the touch of a woman he would never know the joy of fatherhood he said that he didn't
[02:52] want to attack the United States on September 11th he wanted to attack Israel but he had been overruled am i funny yep then at that point and I said listen there were 50,000 people in those towers that morning what did you think we were gonna do did you think we wouldn't come after you did you know did you not think or assume that we would try to destroy your group but with that said I told him I should hate you and I don't you're pathetic I feel sorry for you and I said I'm
[03:25] gonna give you some advice and I hope you'll take it I am the nicest guy that you'll need in this experience my colleagues are not as nice as I am and you have to cooperate and he said you seem like a nice man but you're the enemy and I'll never cooperate so a day later a CIA jet flew in to pick him up in the middle of the night I wished him luck he asked me to
[03:55] hold his hand as we loaded him onto the plane and I had no idea where he was going I recounted a story in my book where we were waiting for the manifest to be accepted and an American got off the plane completely dressed in black with a black mask black hat black sweater and a bandolier and he said John and I said who are you and he lifted up his mask and he had been my last boss at headquarters and he
[04:28] said what are you doing here and I said oh I'm the I'm the chief of counterterrorism here I said what are you doing here he said oh I volunteered for the flight I'm gonna take your prisoner onward and he said who is he and I said jeez I'm sorry but you don't have a need to know who he is we haven't even told the Pakistanis who he was we just called him a big fish and they referred to him as mr. fish so I said where are you taking him and he said I'm sorry but you don't have a need to know and it wasn't until many months
[05:02] later that I started hearing these rumors about secret prisons that the CIA had I still didn't know anything about any torture program until I returned from Pakistan in the early summer of 2002 and a senior officer in the CIA's Counterterrorism Center approached me and said listen I wanted to ask you if you'd be interested in being trained in enhanced interrogation techniques I said what does that mean enhanced
[05:33] interrogation techniques he said very excitedly we're gonna start getting rough with these guys and they said what does that mean rough so he told me these ten techniques that the CIA was going to begin using on prisoners I said that sounds like a torture program I don't think I want to be involved in that but I said you know what give me an hour so I went upstairs to the executive floor the seventh floor of the CIA
[06:03] I had a friendly relationship with a very very senior CIA officer who had been my boss in the Middle East Kait earlier and i said he somebody just approached me and asked me if i wanted to do this enhanced interrogation techniques what do you think of this and he said and he denies that this conversation ever took place but he told me first let's call it what it is it's a torture program second tortures a slippery slope and you know how these guys are somebody's going to go overboard and they're gonna kill a
[06:34] 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 I said no I don't want to go to prison turn down I'm the only one that went to prison but I said no I went back down to the counterterrorism center and I said I am NOT interested in this it's a torture program well what the CIA ended up doing was really criminal in and of itself before they even laid a hand on Abu
[07:05] Zubaydah because the FBI was already at this secret location there was an FBI agent by the name of Adi su fun he was a naturalized American of Egyptian origin if he was a terrific FBI agent believe me it's like a kink in my back to compliment the FBI but this guy was actually really good his job and what he did once that was a beta began to recover was he sat across the table from him he offered him a date or an apple or an orange or whatever it was
[07:35] they had and he engaged him in conversation and over the course of the next couple of weeks Abu Zubaydah began to offer highly actionable intelligence that was used to disrupt future terrorist attacks and which probably saved American lives not by beating him not by freezing him or putting cockroaches in a box and putting him in the box with the roaches which we did because he had a terrible fear of
[08:07] cockroaches but just by engaging the man in conversation for whatever reason George Tenet the director of the CIA didn't like having the FBI charge of this operation and so he went to george w bush and he said I want primacy in this operation and I want you to remove the FBI from the country and George W Bush said ok and so Ali Soufan was pulled out of the country and was replaced not only by CIA officers and
[08:38] CIA contractors but by to contract psychologists who had been hired specifically to create a torture program on August 1st the President signed an executive order allowing the CIA to begin torturing elizabeta this was after the procurement of specious legal arguments from the notorious Jay Bybee and John you both of whom have gone on to great success in
[09:09] their chosen field of law and so Abu Zubaydah was tortured now the program was such that see CIA officers were supposed to start with the most basic so-called techniques something like a smack in the belly right makes a loud cracking sound humiliates you makes you angry you know you can't respond but then they went up the list very quickly there was
[09:41] one technique called wobbling for example that's when you grab the prisoner by the by the shirt or the lapels and slam him into a cardboard I'm sorry a plywood wall now he's supposed to have either a rolled-up towel around his neck or one of those sleep pillows so he doesn't hurt his neck and it's supposed to be we're all supposed to be plywood well they forgot to give him the pillow to protect his neck and the wall was concrete so sorry about that
[10:14] I mean that's what the cable said according to the Senate torture report it escalated quickly from there a lot has been made about waterboarding waterboarding is when a prison is is tied or shackled to a to a board or a burning his feet are slightly elevated some sort of material cloth burlap is is put either around or in the mouth and then water is poured on his face it it gives you the feeling of
[10:44] drowning and it's it's it's a horrible thing to see it's a worse thing to go through but the prisoner will convulse start to vomit you're tense your your abdominal muscles which causes extreme pain and oftentimes you faint I would posit that that was not the worst thing that I was a beta in Doherty there were other techniques but for whatever reason have not gotten as much press one was sleep deprivation now
[11:16] Donald Rumsfeld who is also will work from though as far as I'm concerned Donald Rumsfeld made a point of mocking the fact that that people were complaining about sleep deprivation as a torture technique saying I've worked in my office 48 72 hours at a time and I have a stand-up desk I don't even have a chair but we're not talking about 48 or 72 hours imagine being changed to an eyebolt in the ceiling where you can't kneel or lay
[11:48] down and you're kept like that for 14 days now psychologists will tell us that people begin losing their minds around day 9 and they begin dying around day 12 if you read the Senate torture report you'll see that the orders from the CIA were to not exceed 14 days well if you're already dead at 12 what's the point of cutting it off at 14 another technique was called the cold cellar
[12:19] where the prisoners changed that same able to the ceiling and he stripped naked and the the cell was chilled to 50 degrees and then every hour somebody comes in and throws a bucket of ice water on two people were killed by CIA Oh using that technique but those officers were never prosecuted at the very very least that has to be depraved indifference or manslaughter if there was a cable saying do this to him that
[12:52] wouldn't make it first-degree murder wouldn't it I mean at the federal level this would be a federal crime that's a death penalty case but no one was ever prosecuted Abu Zubaydah also underwent something else that has gotten very little playing the press when we captured him I noticed that one of his eyes was a very very pale blue he was blind in an MRI and it turned out that it was an old shrapnel wound from the Afghan war with the
[13:24] Soviets well Jason Leopold a reporter at vice news found through the Freedom of Information Act that I was debated up one day was sedated without ever being told what was happening to him and when he woke up his eyeball was gone we had just taken it up we didn't ask him we didn't ask him if he wanted us to we just did it that's a crime against humanity besides the fact that we have
[13:58] anti torture laws in this country we always have there's a law called the federal torture Act it specifically defines torture and specifically prohibits it and to see it simply it defines torture essentially as anything that makes somebody uncomfortable or causes them pain and it's not it doesn't have to be just carried out by someone on behalf of the government it can be carried out by someone working on behalf
[14:29] of someone working on behalf the government with the bottom line being don't do it it's illegal so we have that long books besides that the United States is a signatory to the UN Convention Against Torture not only are we a signatory and one of the one of the first signatories we wrote the doc on the United Nations Convention Against Torture and it contains the same definition of torture and the same prohibition of torture or on torture that the federal torture Act does in
[15:03] 1968 in January the Washington Post ran a picture on its front page of an American soldier waterboarding a North Vietnamese prisoner on the morning that that photo appeared then Secretary of State McNamara Robert S McNamara ordered an investigation the soldier in the picture was arrested he was tried and convicted of tortured and imprisoned well the law didn't change still the
[15:35] same law so why was torture illegal in 1968 but it wasn't illegal in 2002 or in 2015 when John McCain and Dianne Feinstein were forced to pass a bill into law that just reiterated our ban on torture I would go so far as to say that CIA aside there is still torture taking place and it's taking
[16:06] place right here in the United States the United Nations has called the u.s. prison systems use of solitary confinement confinement as a form of torture now I'm gonna tell you a story in this I know firsthand I spent two years in prison thanks to Eric Holder and Obama and I never thought that I would you know when you're somebody like me right I'm a middle middle-class white
[16:37] guy professional master's degree he finished my PhD coursework never in my worst nightmares did I ever think I'd end up in prison with pedophiles and murderers and drug dealers just the worst people in the world but you know prisons don't necessarily have the worst people in the world in them I mean there are a lot of there are a lot of people in prison that I personally felt didn't belong there so I want to tell you about one he was my last cellmate his name was James
[17:09] James was a mentally ill homeless man from Pittsburgh and he was living in a cardboard box under a bridge the Liberty Street bridge in Pittsburgh and he violated the terms of his federal parole just so that he could spend the winter indoors because it was better to be in prison through the winter Pittsburgh winters of ferocious than it was to be in this cardboard box I walked into the cell one day and I saw him sitting on the edge of the bed and I said hi are you the new guy and he said yeah I'm James he stood up and shook my
[17:40] hand and I said hi James I'm John and he said well nice to meet you John but I got to tell you something I have severe mental illness and if I don't take my medication I'm really crazy like dangerous crazy and I said Wow I appreciate you telling me I said we have a really good seller we all get along it's all good guys I think you're gonna fit in fine and you later I thought never did I think I'd be friends with him with a mentally ill homeless man but he was a
[18:12] really great guy and he had a terrific sense of humor so he went down to the medical unit on his first full day to ask for his medications remember he's only in on a violation he's only gonna be there for months and the medication for paranoid schizophrenia is very expensive and so in their infinite wisdom Eero of prisons and the and the National Health Service or where they call themselves with the uniforms Public Health Service Thank You Public Health Service officers down there they gave him Tylenol instead of his mental
[18:46] schizophrenia paranoid schizophrenia medication they gave him Tylenol so he came back up to the south he was very upset I said James you can't you can't take this you know lie down if you're not mentally ill you have to be medicated don't don't just take tylenol and then let them get away with it go back down there and raise hell and if they won't give you your medication then fire on them you know there's this administrative remedy process and while it doesn't work most of the time because you're prisoners and
[19:17] their officers remember who they get who are people gonna believe the crazy homeless guy or the uniformed officer right so I said if they don't give you your meds you're gonna file on them at least it'll go to the warden and you know maybe maybe the warden would turn out to be a decent guy he turned out to be an [ __ ] to tell you the truth but you know I thought maybe at least you know you have a chance so James went back down and they told him that he got what they were going to give him and he needed to leave so he filed a complaint
[26:02] the top of corporate structures including the CIA that's why all the lunatics are the ones in charge because they can pass the polygraph they can pass the background investigation and by god they're going to convince you that they are patriots [Music] there's no ethics training at the CIA
[26:33] none you either go in there with your own wall code or you wing it usually when they speak at colleges and universities I asked a question and I think actually I'm gonna ask the same question and I'm serious about it I'd like to see show hands let's say that you are a CIA case officer and you've recruited a major penetration of a foreign terrorist al Qaeda Hizballah Isis whatever you wanted to be this guy
[27:04] is the real deal and he's he's reporting to you every month and he's giving you this actionable intelligence it's going straight for the president you're getting promoted and everything is great right this is every officers dream so he shows up in a meeting let's say you're meeting somewhere in the Middle East maybe in a hotel you have this meeting and he says listen I've been giving you the kitchen sink and everything I say is true and I've saved American lives so now you're going to do something for me you're going to go out and you're gonna get me a prostitute and if you don't get
[27:35] me a prostitute I'm not gonna work with you anymore do you get over the prostitute who says yes yeah sure Jesus come that you know he's just come back it's your job to deal with scumbags so sure you get every prostitute what if he asks for a child prostitute yeah absolutely not absolutely not
[28:06] not in a million years but there are no rules and generally you don't really have to ask anybody for permission you just do it so if you've got no personal moral structure or ethical structure something that you've been taught as a child or something maybe that you've even had born into you what do you have
[28:37] to be not well what's happened is many of the CIA's leaders at least through the ill named war on terror didn't have that ethical background they would be the kinds of guys who won't get the child prostitute and not think twice about it people also ask me a lot how in the world could you have worked for the CIA
[29:07] one of the most murderous and and criminal organizations in the world I was born into a into a Greek immigrant family my grandparents were immigrants from Greece from the island of Rhodes and to here my grandfather tell it Franklin Roosevelt was waiting for him at Ellis Island to hand him his citizenship and a job at US Steel we had until the day he died we had a framed picture of Franklin Roosevelt on our television set I still have it I love it and so my parents raised me to believe
[29:40] that we were so fortunate to be allowed into this country and to really be given the opportunity for success that we needed to repay it and you repay it through public service so I was recruited into the CIA but before I accepted the position I asked the boyfriend of a woman I was in graduate school with about his experience in the CIA he had been in the
[30:10] CIA about three years well this is the 1980s so the Church Committee is still pretty fresh in everybody's mind and I said to him so what about you know the assassinations and masonic and Guatemala and the Dominican Republic I mean did that stuff just go away yeah yeah we don't doing that stuff anymore it's really great you're gonna be happy there and I said yeah but what about MKULTRA
[30:41] and all on the other you know love to see the world and it did went to 65 countries with the CIA so I joined and I'll tell you the truth things were actually pretty good through George HW Bush and Bill Clinton I remember Bill Clinton ordering ordering the Director of Operations to go through its files and to purge
[31:11] everybody from the the source roles who had any human rights problems in their backgrounds because we don't want to be in the business of associating with people who had poor human rights records and I thought wow okay well maybe things really are changing and and honestly even in retrospect I think they had been changing and then September 11th happened and September 11th just changed everything again permanently jesselyn
[31:42] Radack says in the film silenced that that Brad Thacker mentioned she said I want my September 10th country back because you know these things tend to be a pendulum they're cyclical they go back and forth but after September 11th they went like that and never came back down again you know we've got the the so-called Patriot Act we have NSA spying Americans now we have the CIA spying on
[32:14] Americans they're there they're building secret prisons and torturing people and artists of paramilitary fighters and that's not the CIA I signed on for and so I decided it was time to leave I'm probably the only person who when he says he resigned to spend more time with his children actually resigned to spend more time with children but I kept my mouth shut about everything for years and then one day in 2007 Brian Ross at
[32:47] ABC News called me and he said that he had a source who said that I had tortured I was a beta I said that was absolutely untrue I was the only person who was kind to have as a Vanna I've never laid a hand on I was a beta or on any other page I said your source is either misinformed or he's a liar well you're welcome to come on the show and defend yourself he said old reporters trip that I didn't know anything about I said I'd think about it so that week President Bush gave a press
[33:18] conference in which he liberated the camera and said we do not torture we do not torture and I said to my wife who was also a CIA officer that's a bald-faced lie he's just looking right into the eyes of the American people and he's lying and then a couple of days after that in response to a reporter's question he said if there is torture it's the result of a rogue CIA officer and I thought I wonder if they're gonna try to pin this on me tell you the truth
[33:50] when I walked away from the CIA I really walked away I didn't pay any attention these issues anymore I didn't follow the whole torture to me but in the back of my mind I sort of recalled hearing that Human Rights Watch had issued a report saying the CIA was torturing prisoners Amnesty International a year later came out with the same conclusion and I just in my mind thought it was it was up there so I called Brian Ross and I said on your show the intent was to defend myself and I also decided that whatever
[34:21] he asked me I was gonna tell the truth and so in response to these questions I said three things that have utterly changed the course of my life I said the CIA was torturing its prisoners I said torture was official US government policy it was not a road it was policy and I said the policy was approved by and signed by the President himself thereby calling the president a bald-faced liar to his face in fact the president said the next day it's the only time any president has ever said anything about me he said I don't know
[34:53] this man I don't know this man's motivation I don't know why this man threw me under the bus I was very proud to throw turista so the next day the very next day the CIA filed something called a crimes report against me with the Justice Department and they asked the FBI to begin investigating me that investigation began in earnest and was also leaked by the FBI to CNN I read it
[35:25] in CNN my otherwise had no idea was under this the investigation lasted a year from December 2007 to December 2008 after the 2008 elections and the bush Justice Department decided that I had not committed a crime and they closed the investigation a month later Barack Obama is inaugurated and Eric Holder becomes Attorney General the CIA goes to Eric Holder and says that case against Tyrion cou we want you to reopen that case I had no idea that this had
[35:58] happened in the meantime I'm working for John Kerry as the senior investigator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and Kerry's Intel with no idea that I'm under FBI investigation the investigation lasted for another four years three years and other three years and then finally in 2012 just after leaving senator ben senator Kerry's employ I was charged with three counts of espionage one count
[36:30] of violating the Intelligence identities Protection Act of 1981 I'm only the second American ever charged with them and making a false statement and mine treason is still to this day we're not clear exactly what the full statement was supposed to be in any event it was it was dropped but three counts of espionage now the first kind of espionage the CIA said I had revealed top secret code word information that was Declassified solely
[37:00] for the purpose of prosecuting me so what that information was I'm going to tell you was that after the September 11th attacks the CIA had a program to kill or capture members of al-qaeda talk secret that's an espionage Church this is a potential death penalty charge the other
[37:31] two espionage charges were equally insane a reporter from the New York Times called me to say he was writing an article on a CIA officer who had never been undercover ever in his life he's on Facebook CIA employer CIA works at CIA Lincoln CIA central intelligence agency never undergo he resigned anyone to work for a consultant so this reporter said can you
[38:02] introduce me to this guy I said I haven't talked to that guy in years I don't even know where he is he's probably in Virginia somewhere and then I said but you know what I have a business card I think I still have it I found it I scanned it by email the two espionage Kevin espionage charge for that but before they could charge me I actually sent it to a second the journalist one with whom I was working at the time at ABC News that's three espionage charges that they were all dropped because I hadn't
[38:32] committed espionage but after my arrest in the course of discovery we found a memo that the CIA had written to the Attorney General's Office and it said charge it with espionage and the Attorney General's Office wrote back and said but he hasn't committed espionage and the CIA said charge him and make him defend himself because that's the plan this is what they do they don't care if you've committed espionage or not I mean
[39:03] of the people I believe the numbers up to nine now under the under the Obama administration which is triple all previous presidents combined nine people charged with espionage none of whom have ever been accused of passing information to a foreign government never this is all for contact with the press so the point is several fold number one you scare the hell out of everybody else who's considering talking to the press
[39:33] it's an indirect as a second it's an indirect threat against journalists went when the Attorney General himself identifies a journalist as an unindicted co-conspirator because he's written an article that the Attorney General doesn't like that causes a chilling effect on freedom of the press and freedom of speech basic constitutional rights third they do something called stacking they'll charge you not with one crime
[40:04] they'll charge you with ten or twenty crimes and they'll make you defend yourself against those ten or twenty they're my case five crimes until you're bankrupt and then they come back and say all right we'll drop all the charges but one if you take a plea well what are you gonna do as Brett said I still have my attorneys eight hundred and eighty thousand dollars and that's after giving them a hundred and fifty thousand which was everything they had you know we had
[40:35] to move out of our house my wife my poor wife was fired from the CIA the day of my arrest just because she was married to me we had to go on welfare and when we went to the welfare office they said my god you qualify for everything but they gave us food stamps cash payment free milk and cheese Medicaid I mean we qualify for everything they had but that's the goal the goal is to bankrupt you so that you'll take complete to anything to make this go away my
[41:06] attorneys told me look you've already spent a million bucks if we go to trial it's gonna be at least another million maybe another two million and if we go to trial you risk forty five years why I'm 51 years old that's a death penalty of the high in prison there's no federal parole you have to do the whole stretch right Ronald Reagan wanted to get tough on crime there's no parole so they're offering
[41:38] two and a half years it ceases being I'm innocent they didn't do it and it becomes an economic decision we figured she finally got a job about ten months after she was fired my wife I'm unemployable but we figured through the generosity of my brother her father our friends anonymous supporters we
[42:10] could make it two years anything more than two years and were ruined for life there won't be any come back from that so we took it and I went to prison for 23 what turned out to be twenty three months but my story is not as as sad as Jeffrey sterling story Jeffrey Jeffrey literally did nothing wrong and there was no evidence against him but this is
[42:42] another thing they do and they didn't do it just to Jeffrey but they did this to that's known to the government does something called venue shopping and I'll give you these two examples Jeffrey sterling a CIA officer who blew the whistle to them to the house permanent Select Committee on Intelligence on a ill-fated in an ill thought-out operation against Iran Jeffrey was living in st. Louis and working remotely
[43:14] for a company in New York the pace of st. Louis as the Eastern District of Missouri New York as the Southern District of New York he's alleged to have passed information to Jim risin I don't think he did but Jim risin lived in Bethesda Maryland which is the southern district of Maryland and worked in Washington DC which is the federal district of the District of Columbia but they charged Jeffrey sterling with a crime actually with nine counts of well seven counts of espionage and two counts
[43:45] of theft of government property which was the information right he walked out of the building with the in his head so that staff fell me but they charged him in the Eastern District of Virginia so why because the Eastern District of Virginia is known as the espionage Court and nobody ever wins there ever there's one judge in particular judge Leonie bring him up ironically a Clinton appointee who
[44:18] deserves every national security case for herself and no one has ever won well Jeffrey said from the beginning I didn't do anything wrong all the feds had on Jeffrey was that he had made 52 phone calls over the course of five years to jim risin at the new york times well Jim risin was covering Jeffrey's civil suit against the CIA the CIA passed him over for promotions solely because he was
[44:48] black in fact his boss had told him we can't send you overseas because you'll stick out and Jeffrey said when did you realize I was black so he resigned he was passed over for promotion because he wasn't overseas but he couldn't go overseas because he couldn't fit in so he resigned and he filed a civil suit against the agency the agency argued that it could not defend itself because to do so would cause them to reveal
[45:20] national security secrets and so judge Lee any brinkema dismissed the case with prejudice on national security grounds so all the government had was that Jeffrey had spoken 52 times over the course of five years to jim ricin in the meantime in 2006 jim rising writes a book called bush it more in which he talks about this botched operation the CIA was incensed that this information leaked out and they said who could have done it that Jeffrey sterling I did it he's
[45:52] angry with us because we we passed him over promotion we got a suit thrown out it had to be him charge him with espionage and he did seven counts of espionage and then these two counts of theft now there is no proof there were no emails there were no telephone recordings there were no clandestine meetings nothing the government offered no evidence whatsoever they could have been talking about the weather I mean ten times over
[46:24] five years I mean 50 times over five years ten times a year that's less than once a month but they convicted him because in the Eastern District of Virginia as the old saying goes the jury they were convicted bologna sandwich you could appeal yes Jeffrey can appeal and he is appealing right now you can only appeal that's a great question you can only appeal if you have gone to trial and lost a trial I took a plea and whenever you take a
[46:57] plea it comes with a proviso that you cannot appeal and you cannot file a Freedom of Information Act request on yourself to see if there was any FBI wrongdoing and of course the investigation so Jeffrey's going to appeal his wife Holly on Tuesday is presenting a petition to the White House with 110,000 signatures asking the President to pardon him this president's not getting part of him just like this
[47:29] president's not going to pardon me so it's up to all of us to express our support I can't because I'm a felon and if I write to Jeffery I'll go back to prison because that would be consorting with known felons but you can certainly express your support I've used up my time thank you very much for being here this is a really important group and a really important cause we have to stick together and do the best we can it's an
[47:59] uphill battle because we have fascists running our country and I mean fascists of both parties president abolish the CIA
[48:37] I met with Oliver Stone day before yesterday for two and a half hours and he said that President Kennedy said he wanted to abolish the CIA and then ended up with two bullets in his head so technically sure the president can abolish the CIA but in the near future Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan tried to raise this in Congress in 1976 1977 he was a senator from New York and he argued quite persuasively even in those
[49:09] times that the CIA a clandestine intelligence collection could very easily be done by the Pentagon's defense human services commander and that the CIA's analytic arm the director of intelligence could very easily be folded into the State Department's Bureau of intelligence and research science and technology can be split between the Pentagon and NASA and then administration you wouldn't eat any more because there wouldn't be a CIA and he wrote a book about this that was quite well received so I think the answer is
[49:40] sure we can abolish the CIA I don't think we will but you could tell me have another one here and I'm really happy that you're here and talking about this thank you and I won't get through this without crying but my son my son was a combat medic in
[50:10] the army and his job when he got to Iraq in I'm sorry and September of 2003 was to keep prisoners alive so they could be tortured wrong and he was writing letters home so I knew this was going on and I spoke about it
[50:41] every chance I could get and everybody told me I was absolutely crazy I was out of my mind that's we don't do that the president said we don't do that peace Group said we're not really sure we can't really talk about it I said I know because I have the letters and he can't make this stuff up so he's a 100% disabled now and from not just the
[51:15] post-traumatic stress of being in Ramadi and having that job but from the moral injury and most people don't have an any idea what moral injury is moral injury cannot be healed moral injury there's no skills to learn to get through it like there is with post-traumatic stress
[51:45] and I won't call it a disorder because it's not a disorder so he's one of the guys who could be one of the 22 a day who commits suicide so right now he's doing where they cut up military uniforms and make them into paper and
[52:16] it's called combat paper project he also revealed did a short documentary with him in it his name is Eli right the documentary is called behind the mask it's on YouTube I encourage you all to look it up to really get a little vision and when you look at it and you see the
[52:48] mask that's him and the mask that's his friend who also participated in that and took his own life and you see the mask at the innocent man I know that guy's name because Rose Hulman told me we can't there's no
[53:19] yellow ribbons there's no songs there's no Flags large enough to cover what we've done and continue to do in the world and I can't tell you how appreciative I am it's hard for me to be here because that will never heal and our family it's also a wood that will never heal in the families of the people
[53:50] that we touch over there wherever over there is so I really appreciate it thank you your sacrifice I know that it's no consolation to you but we know from the Senate torture report that what your son said was true it was all true [Applause] [Music]
[54:20] [Applause]