[00:00] I said that's okay I was a beta we know who you are and he started crying he asked me to smother him with a pillow and I said nobody's gonna kill you we've been looking for you for a long time you're gonna get the best medical care that the American government can provide [Music]
[00:30] I would like to welcome John Kerry aku to our show federal prison time consulting with our dad and John Kerry aku is a man who ended up spending 23 months in federal prison for releasing information that he knew about coming to torture I'm actually gonna let John tell his story and John Kerry aku welcome to the show how are you doing today thank you whew well thanks thanks for having John tell me a little bit about what first fueled your interest in
[01:00] working for the CIA yeah I came from an immigrant family all four of my grandparents came from Greece they came at the height of the Great Depression and so I was raised to believe that we needed to we needed to do something for the country because the country had been so good to us and so I only considered careers in public service when I was in grad school I had a professor who was a CIA officer and he recruited me into the
[01:30] CIA my second year of grad school I did I spent 15 years there my first half is an analyst my second half in counterterrorism operations and loved every minute of it so tell us a little bit about the capture of Abu Zubaydah and why he was such an important target to the CIA during this point in time yeah we believed at the time that Abu Zubaydah was the number three in al-qaeda that turned out to not exactly be true he was a logistician for
[02:00] al-qaeda he set up al-qaeda's training camps in southern Afghanistan there's their safehouse in Peshawar Pakistan he would he would procure false passports travel documents tickets he would make sure everybody got paid he was a very bad guy even if he wasn't the number three but we got word in I was around the 1st of February 2002 that he was somewhere in Pakistan and we had to catch him and so um I had about a half a
[02:30] dozen guys working for me I was chief of counterterrorism operations at the CIA station in Pakistan and we just couldn't we couldn't find him Pakistan is the size of Texas it's got 200 million people in it and just to say he's in Pakistan go catch him it just doesn't work like that so I asked for what's called a targeting analyst to come and help me a targeting analyst as somebody who specializes in poring through reams of data thousands
[03:00] and thousands of pieces of data and then narrowing down a person's location based on that data so we flew out a targeting analyst and he was able to to narrow down up as bad as possible location only to one of 14 sites we had never hit more than 2 sites before in a single night so I cabled headquarters and I asked for a large team they ended up sending 36 men half CIA half FBI pallets of weapons and ammunition and night-vision goggles and
[03:30] battering rams and satellite dishes and every piece of equipment you can imagine we practiced for a little while and then in late March one lady at 200 we hit all 14 sites simultaneously and sure enough he was in the final site he was on the second floor of a safe house with a bomb maker from Syria and with his own bodyguard also from Syria when we
[04:00] started to break down the door they climbed to the roof of the house and tried to jump to the roof of the next-door house so there is a Pakistani policeman on the ground shooting each of them as they were jumping but the bomb maker was killed instantly and I was a beta jumped to second he was shot in the thigh the groin in the stomach with an ak-47 gravely wounded the bodyguard jumped third and was hit in the in the leg and the femur so when he hit the
[04:30] ground and we we didn't know if it was him or not the only picture of him we had was a sexual passport photo and and this photo was about of a handsome young man closely cropped hair beard and mustache very thin the guy that was layin in front of me on the ground was was fat he was clean-shaven he had crazy long hair going all over the place it just didn't look like him and so I called the
[05:00] targeting analyst I said what do I do he told me to get a shot of his eye so we could run a retinal scan but his eyes were rolled back in his head he was clearly bleeding to death and and so the analyst told me to get a shot of his ear and I didn't know until that night that no two people on earth have the same ears they're like fingerprints so I took we shot of his ear I sent it to the analyst he sent it to headquarters and headquarters called me back and said it's him Wow we rushed him to a hospital face labott
[05:30] hospital filthy terrible disgusting place they took him into the operating room immediately but word got around the al-qaeda community obviously we hadn't caught everybody that we'd gotten him and so they began driving by the hospital and just opening fire on the hospital now were they opening fire to get you or they opening fire because you had him captive and they wanted to kill him so he couldn't spread any information no I think they wanted to kill us and and break him out I don't
[06:00] think they had any idea how severely wounded he was I mean they wouldn't have had any way of knowing how severely wounded yet he was but I told I told the Pakistani major I was with if they realize how lightly armed we are we're dead we only had a couple of handguns on us you know all the heavier weapons were at the safehouse so so he called it a helicopter 20 minutes later the helicopter landed I went into the operating room I told the doctor wrap it up we loaded him onto the helicopter we flew to a Pakistani
[06:30] military base about an hour away and the analyst called me back said that CIA director George Tenet told him to tell me 24/7 CIA eyes on so I tore up a sheet I tied him to the bed I was afraid I was going to fall asleep and I just sat down in a chair the foot of his bed 24 hours later he finally came to he motioned for me like this emotion for me to come next to him so I I went next to him and I moved his
[07:00] oxygen mask and they said to him smack what is your name he shook his head I repeated it should this meant and he said to me in English I'm not going to speak to you in God's language I won't speak to you in God's language he said I said that's ok Abu Zubaydah we know who you are and he started crying he asked me to smother him with a pillow and I said nobody's going to kill you we've been looking for you for a long time you're gonna get the best medical care that the American government can provide
[07:30] well he cried a lot he said he would never know the touch of a woman he would never know that joy of fatherhood and I told him you're not the victim here there were 50,000 people in those towers that day what did you think we were gonna do did you think we wouldn't try to find you and kill you and kill bin Laden he said he didn't want to attack the United States he wanted to attack Israel but he had been overruled we talked a lot in the next day he he would
[08:00] recite poetry to me that he had written he talked about his family we talked about Christianity versus Islam we talked about our friends it was weird I remember thinking I should hate you I should want to kill you and I don't you're pathetic and I mother thinking this is the fearsome al Qaeda this is what we're so afraid of he's practically a child so at one point I finally said listen I'm gonna give you some advice
[08:30] I am the nicest guy that you're gonna meet in this experience my colleagues are not as nice as I am so if you do one thing it's that you have to cooperate and he said you seem like a nice man but here the enemy and I'll never cooperate I said suit yourself so later that night an unmarked private jet landed on the tarmac just outside the hospital three
[09:00] FBI agents and I loaded him onto plain we laid him across the luggage rack in the back we tied him down and I leaned over and I said remember you have to cooperate he squeezed my hand and then he took off and I never saw him again he was flown to a secret prison so I went back to headquarters about six weeks later and on the strength of that capture I got an amazing job like a career-making job I became the executive assistant to the CIA's deputy director
[09:30] for operations and in that job I had access to literally all of the CIA secrets every compartment every above top secret program because my job in part was to brief the director every morning every morning at 7:00 a.m. and so I saw beginning on August the 1st 2002 that they began torturing Abu Zubaydah now in the meantime as soon as I returned a senior officer in the counterterrorism center asked me if I
[10:00] want to be trained his words trained in the use of enhanced interrogation techniques I had never heard the term before and I asked him what it meant and he explained each one of these these techniques to me and I said man that sounds like a torture program I don't think I want to have anything to do with that no no it's not torture II said it was approved by the White House the President signed off condi signed off I said let me think about it so I went up to the seventh floor of the CIA which is the executive floor and there was a very senior CIA officer there I had worked
[10:30] for him in the Middle East ten years earlier and so I asked for his advice and he said first of all let's call it what it is it's a torture program they can use whatever euphemism they want but it's a torture program and torture is a slippery slope he said you know how these guys are somebody's going to go overboard they're gonna kill a prisoner in an interrogation there's going to be a congressional investigation then there's going to be a Justice Department investigation you want to go to prison I said no I don't want to go to prison I
[11:00] went back downstairs and told that senior officer who had approached me I said this is a torture program and I don't want any part of it so a couple of months later on August the 1st they began torturing of his Abeyta now the techniques began with the most mild was to grab him by the lapels and shake it and then it progressed to a smack on the belly a smack in the face a punch in the face slamming him against the wall and then it would up to like waterboarding where
[11:30] you're strapped to a board with your legs higher than your face cloth has put over your your mouth and your nose and water is poured on your face water gets into your mouth and your nose it makes you feel like you're drowning and the CIA almost killed him using that technique his heart stopped beating he had to be revived he had convulsions he had seizures for weeks afterwards but there were other things they did to him they we knew that he had a he had an irrational fear of insects and so they
[12:00] put him in a coffin they dumped a a box of of bugs in on him and closed the coffin they left him in there for two weeks waddle yeah two weeks they kept him in a dog cage for three weeks so that he couldn't stand he couldn't lay down he couldn't stretch his legs there their hardship positions and they literally broke this guy mentally in just a matter of weeks it's called learned helplessness and and
[12:30] they made him insane he witnessed and this was approved from President Bush signed off maybe he didn't know the actual day to day everything but this was signed off from from the president and also somebody that we've also very well become aware of Jena Haspel was also very aware of what was going on correct Geno was was my second line boss Gina was intimately involved in this in the planning in the execution in the
[13:00] management and administration Gina actually flew out to the secret site at the end of September to take over leadership there and she personally supervised the torture of the regime initially the alleged mastermind of the USS Cole bombing so yeah Gina was intimately involved in the torture program and from hearing other interviews with you is affair to say that she wasn't just following protocol she was actually possibly in
[13:30] this type of I don't want to put words in her mouth in your mouth I made that accusation on Democracy Now and I did not make it lightly the reason that I've come to that conclusion is because it's one thing to manage a secret prison where there happens to be a torture program taking place it's an entirely different thing to sit in on the sessions just to sit in on the sessions who takes who takes pleasure in watching the torture of another human
[14:00] being I don't care if the guy is an alleged terrorist if he's an alleged terrorist then put him on trial in a court of law and allow him to face his accusers right I mean that's the American Way we're supposed to be a country of laws were supposed to be a country that's governed by a constitution you can't just abide by the Constitution when it suits you the Constitution's for everybody but she she sat in on those torture sessions just because she wanted to and to me that's just not mentally
[14:30] healthy normal behavior and you stated now with her current position she had to concede that this was wrong yeah the the vote her confirmation vote in the Senate was extraordinarily close the closest that any CIA director has ever had and the only reason she won was by attracting five Democrats and she did that by promising that she would never institute such a program ever again well
[15:00] when you have to promise not to break the law again maybe you're the wrong person for the job maybe we need a person in the job who wouldn't break the law in the first place but that's that's not Gina and with living at a time day and age where a play on words can mean so much I think you're also explaining that any given moment the president could sign off on something and she could be off to the races running again can you go into a
[15:30] little detail about what you're referring to yeah we we have laws in this country that that banned torture we have the federal torture Act of 1946 which specifically bans the techniques that the CIA used in fact in 19:46 we executed japanese soldiers who had waterboarded american prisoners of war that was an executable offence in 1946 the law never changed the law was never amended we changed in the 1980s we ratified the United Nations Convention
[16:00] Against Torture we were actually the primary drafters of the UN Convention Against Torture it reiterates the the banning of exactly those techniques well in 2015 Congress passed the McCain fine stein amendment it reiterates that ban and the reason Congress had to do that was because the bush Justice Department decided that the CIA's 10 torture techniques were actually not torture that somehow they did not violate the UN
[16:30] Convention Against Torture or the federal torture act that was never litigated but that was that was the legal opinion that the Bush administration ran with and so John McCain and Dianne Feinstein wrote this amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act that reiterated the ban but what it said was that all US government interrogators or interrogators working on behalf of the US government must abide by the Army Field Manual the Army Field Manual tells
[17:00] you exactly what you can and can't do in a national security interrogation the problem is that the Army Field Manual is an executive branch document and so to be changed or amended it only takes a stroke of the president's pen in an a in an executive order Congress doesn't need to weigh in Congress doesn't even need to know about it so if this President or some subsequent president wanted to
[17:30] reinstate a torture program he could do so in five minutes and the likes of Gina hassle or somebody after Gina Haskell could implement